iPhone is a regular member of our chat room, and sent me a surprising email the other day. He has apparently found something from AOL that he is happy with. Take a look:

I wanted to share something GOOD AOL made. No I’m not kidding, I actually like the app really well. It’s called AOL Desktop. It’s available for the Mac and PC both. Yes, it may be AOL, but it actually has been very reliable. When you first open AOL Desktop, it will give you a toolbar at the top which you can customize. It kinda reminds me of Webkit, except it has a better User Interface, and crashes a few times. But remember, we’re talking about AOL. The best thing is the browser. They fully changed the browser… and at some points it was actually faster than Safari. I went to Chris’ site from my AOL browser and my Safari browser at the same time (have them both as my home page). AOL desktop browser beat Safari by 7.62 seconds. I also tried websites like Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Friendfeed. AOL Desktop beat Safari by about 1-2 seconds every time when loading pages fully. That may not seem like that big of a difference, but it really is when you add up all the pages you load in a normal day.

Also, you can have AIM, E-mail, and your browser all in one app. Of course… Apple mail is MUCH better than AOL’s e-mail app. I wouldn’t recommend using the e-mail app. But, I definitely recommend you try out the browser.

Thanks, iPhone for passing this along. I’m sure several people will be checking this out in the near future. What other apps do all of you recommend that we may be skeptical about the quality of? Let’s hear what you’re using.

Have You Tried the New AOL Desktop?