Review: AT&T’s Pogo Browser
Posted Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 2:47 pm by 
The Pogo browser created by AT&T is built on top of the Firefox framework, but ads some significant new features. Still in limited beta it requires an invite code before you can download and try it out, sorry I don’t have any invites.
Springboard (Home screen)
Probably the most useful feature of Pogo is it’s Springboard. This is essentially a homepage dashboard where you customise your most common links, giving it a title, then inserting the URL, Pogo then goes out to the site, takes a snapshot and then uses the thumbnail for the Springboard link.
There’s no limit to the number of items you can have on your Springboard, as you add more, the current items shrink in size to accommodate the extra space required. This works quite well, however sometimes a thumbnail of the entire page may not be that useful. Pogo has a solution for this problem and lets you customise the thumbnail used for your Springboard items, a very handy feature. 
Collections
Collections are essentially your favourites grouped into categories and presented in a 3D circular space. Each collection can contain a number of links to sites about the same topic. 
History
Your browsing history is also presented graphically allowing you to see a small thumbnail preview of the site to assist you in your selection. 
Tabbed browser is something we all take for granted these days, Pogo handles this differently than most of it’s competitors. Instead of placing tabs at the top of the page, they’ve opted to call new pages “Cells” and use a bottom tray. The Cells are height adjustable and can be easily hidden, it’s certainly an interesting solution to the problem of jumping around multiple sites at once. The site-thumbnail concept follows through to the Cells, allowing the user to see what content (site) is located in each Cell, this should make the task of switching easier.
Overall
Overall Pogo’s appearance is impressive, however it’s performance is very sluggish, even on a recent machine. It’s to be expected that having things presented graphically would attract higher requirements, but I still think a lot of optimisation needs to occur before many people would even consider using Pogo.
The Pogo Browser is a good attempt at doing a different browser UI, but it feels more like Pogo tries to do things differently, just for the sake of doing things differently, rather than actually having any meaningful usability benefits while using the web.
More @ http://www.pogobrowser.com/
