Skyfire Kicks Ass

The mobile browser Skyfire has just been put into public beta. It kicks ass in my opinion. I'm going to keep messing around with it and have a follow up post later, but if you want more information on it check out this TechCrunch article. The number 1 feature is that it can play all Flash content, which as far as I know is a first for a mobile browser. You can download here.

Update on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 4:56PM by Rob Steenwyk

My first impression still holds... Skyfire definitely kicks ass. It may not be quite as quick as Opera Mini once browsing, but having access to Youtube on my HTC 6800 is awesome. And this is anecdotal, but for me it is starts up faster than Opera Mini. Especially considering that Opera Mini requires Java to be started up first. 

My only complaint so far is that it takes a second or two to zoom in closer on the page. When watching flash content it can take 2 or 3 seconds to zoom in and update the screen, at times the video will freeze while the sound continues. But all of a sudden the video will pop back in and in-sync with the audio. Really, I shouldn't be complaining about this as I am running the resource intensive Windows Mobile 6 and playing flash video on a 400 MHz processor with almost no RAM to speak of... pretty amazing.

You can take a look at a video of the browser here, although it is an older version. I couldn't find a video of the newest release, but the interface is more or less the same. The biggest improvements in the new release are in the performance gains, so keep that in mind while watching.