Earlier this week I [finally] received a beta invite to try the skyfire browser beta. There are two betas going right now: one for Symbian and one for Windows Mobile. I’m trying the Windows Mobile variant on my HTC Mogul phone.
skyfire rocks video
Skyfire is an alternative mobile browser that does an incredible job displaying just about any website that I’ve tried – including the streaming video from NBC’s Olympic coverage. It leaves the default Pocket IE in the dust
It can even play videos from Hulu.com. The sound and video do get a bit out of sync though… but this could be an interesting way to watch videos/movies on my phone.
But wait, there’s more
As far as browsing goes, there are some nice touches. Launch a page and you’ll get a very condensed or high level overview of the page. Need to zoom in to actually see something? Just tap anywhere on the page and a “zoom box” is displayed. Tap in it or re-size and your next view will be of what was in the box but now full screen. Double-tapping an area is a short cut to zoom in on it.
Use the stylus to pan around the display to see what’s off the screen. Sounds a little kludgy, but it is very easy to adapt to. When ready to see the entire page just double-tap and you’ll zoom out.
I’m a bit fuzzy on how it all works, but it seems to have some server side processes going on. At a guess, it appears to render the page as a sort of image that is then sent to your mobile device. At least, that’s my guess about what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to be “pure” HTML, but there’s no “view source” option to see … and I’m too tired to try and figure out how to get a sniffer in front of this thing! (ooooh, but I could if I had it on my wifi network… hmm…).
I like it. A lot. I’ve yet to find a site that it can’t handle. Boy, that’s a pleasant change from pocket IE.
A bit about Opera Mobile (beta)
I need to spend a bit more time comparing and contrasting skyfire to the currently free beta of Opera Mobile 9.5 though. I think Opera might have some even nicer little touches as far as zooming and panning (and speed?), but it also has a disturbing habit of throwing “out of memory errors” – frequently – when running on my phone. Which would be why I haven’t mentioned it here yet.
Opera Mobile is a lot easier to tap links without having to zoom in on them for one big benefit. However, without Flash, there’s no love at the streaming video sites such as Hulu.
Perhaps more on both soon… certainly either option takes mobile browsing on the Windows Mobile platform to a completely new level!
Possibly Related Posts
- Toying with Mobile Sites (8)
- Spreadsheet on the Move (3)
- Opera Mobile Beta (0)
- Got My Gmail IMAP Access, But… (2)
