Skyfire Out of Beta!

Skyfire 1.0 was finally released today and it is still FREE. I have been playing with it for a while and I have to say I am  fairly impressed by the improvement I have seen from the beta versions. I mainly use skyfire to watch video streams of sports events when i am not at home. Skyfire is the only mobile browser that supports Windows Media videos, full Flash, including Flash 10 and Silverlight 2.0. This allows people to watch YouTube, Hulu, Justin.tv and any other stream directly on their phone.

Here are some of the differences I noticed in Skyfire 1.0

Faster Start up: Skyfire 1.0 only took about 5seconds to start up were as other the beta version took a lot longer and Opera took about 7seconds.

Faster loading: Skyfire 1.0 loaded fuzemobility.com completely in about 10 seconds where as Opera took about 21s.

Navigation: You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate around the page and use the enter key to zoom or you can use the dpad to navigate and the center button to zoom i don’t think these features were available in the beta version.

Interaction: You no longer have to zoom in close in order to click on a link. You can directly click a link without zooming in and this is beneficial for phones such as a the Fuze which have high resolution screens.

Better browsing experience: With Skyfire 1.0 when you go back and forth between pages it will automatically recall your previous zoom and position settings instead of reloading the page again and having to zoom into the location that you were at previously. Also when you let Skyfire run the background it is disconnected to save battery and then when you resume connection your zoom and position settings are retained.   Some problems with Skyfire 1.0:

• It still does not seem like there is a VGA version only QVGA so the screen appears a little stretched and graphics are not as sharp as we would like.
• Also there seems to be slight lag when you are trying to type in search boxes, username and password boxes and things like that.

Overall I am pretty impressed with the browser. It also works with WM 6.5 ROMs incase you are wondering. Although I don’t use it much other than for watching live streams of sporting events but with the improvements i have seen i might start using it more. Also the beta version no longer works and you have to get the 1.0 release. So to get the new Skyfire 1.0 go here. Thanks to David K for bringing this to my attention.