SkyFire Mobile Web Browser Review

When I bought my T-Mobile Wing a month ago I was disappointed when I launched the IE mobile web browser for the first time (honestly I almost took the phone back). I couldn’t see flash, silverlight and it had a hard time with Ajax. Every big website I visited made me watch tne mobile version, which in my opinion was dull.

After a few searches I came accross Opera 9.5 beta for the mobile phone. It was a huge leap because you can see the whole webpage and focus on a particular area of interest. Keep in mind Opera mobile is in beta and has a few bugs they need to work out. The Opera 9.5 mobile browser on my T-Mobile Wing would display an out of memory error, even though I used a work around that put my cache on my memory card. Every other website I visited crashed the browser and locked up my cell phone a few times.

Then there was SkyFire’s mobile web browser

The idea behind SkyFire is to bring the browser from your pc to the mobile phone. You can check out the release video on the Skyfire website. Since that was exactly what I was looking for in a mobile browser I decided to check out YouTube for SkyFire Reviews and sure enough came across a review of the SkyFire browser on the T-Mobile Wing.

I imediatley signed up for the SkyFire beta 2 preview. The only drawback is that you have to wait. It took me a good 3 weeks to finally recieve the download link via text.

SkyFire beta 2 strengths

The first website I wanted to try was hulu. The browser brought up the whole website within seconds. I had no problem watching videos, on hulu’s website. From there I went to Gmail, in which SkyFire showed me the full PC version and not the watered down mobile version. There was no lag and the zoom in and zoom out features beat out Opera hands down.

SkyFire’s weaknesses

It was impossible to control the video controls on Youtube and hulu, but the back button can control that. I did experience a lag with the videos which I can live with.

SkyFire Overall

The mobile revolution is here. I have not seen a mobile browser come close to SkyFire and hope the competition steps it up a notch. I was not only impressed by SkyFire, but excited for the future of mobile web browsing as a whole. I’ve wanted to have my laptop in a cell phone and windows mobile plus the SkyFire browser has accomplished that and then some.

Tags

browsers mobile