Hands-on with the Blump.it Firefox plug-in on a Viliv X70

The Blump.it Firefox plug-in just hit the blogosphere today and I had to try it. So I loaded it up on the Viliv X70 with the hope that it will improve the functionality of the small-ish touchscreen and turn it into a certain tablet computer clone. In short, it does both very well. Check out the video after the jump to see it in action.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8088120&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

It’s just what touchscreen mobile devices need, in fact. It’s fast, designed just for a touchscreen, and surprisingly stable for an alpha release. There are some bugs, but if the developers keep coding away on it, the plug-in might just satisfy those looking for a dedicated web-browsing touchscreen device.

The home page is just a bunch of large shortcut icons. There can be multiple pages and the icons can be dragged around for organization. It’s as easy as clicking the shortcut button on the top menu bar to give any website it’s own shortcut, although it’s a generic icon. Since it’s using Firefox, it loads each page just fine and handles flash like a champ. It needs tabs though.

Really the only major bugs I found are that the keyboard is missing key characters like the period and dash. It makes it somewhat difficult to navigate to certain sites without those. But you can always use the device’s on-board keyboard so it’s not totally impossible.

If you have a MID or UMPC laying around, give this Firefox plug-in a go. Just make sure you have the Firefox Grab & Drag plug-in also installed so you can scroll on webpages a bit easier. The company also stated in a recent video that they are working on a Chrome release now that the browser supports plug-ins too. The future is looking up for small touchscreen computers.