David Flynn31 May 2009, 9:00 AM
Finally out of beta, the fresh-baked Skyfire promises to bring desktop-class browsing – with full support for Flash and AJAX – to Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian S60.3 phones.
If you’ve cast envious glances at the iPhone’s Safari or the Webkit-based browser of HTC’s Android-powered Dream, and are tired of waiting for Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile aka
Fennec), you might want to put Skyfire through its paces.
Sure, you’ve also got the option of
Opera Mobile – and that one’s a fine browser by any standard – but the new browser on the block is worth a trot to try out features such as support for Flash 10 (so you have full access to YouTube), Javascript and AJAX, so you get compatibility with sites such as Gmail and Facebook. Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 standard is also on the checklist.
Skyfire uses server-side compression (similar to how the BlackBerry handles email and most other Internet traffic) for exceptionally fast page load times, although this takes its toll on some images and some text. However, the text is quick to resolve itself once you zoom into the page using either the keyboard or tapping your device’s touchscreen.
Users can also customise the Skyfire start page with RSS feeds, integrate their Facebook and Twitter accounts to import status updates and tweets, and easily publish their own status to those social networks.
Skyfire currently runs on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition phones – that is, Nokia N-series and E-series devices – with a BlackBerry version in the works. You can download Skyfire to your desktop and sideload it onto your mobile at
get.skyfire.com or run an over-the-air install by pointing your current mobile browser to
m.skyfire.com.