Thursday, August 28, 2008

My only complaint about my Sprint HTC Mogul has been the web browser.  I upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.1 and the browser is basically the same.  I saw a blog post a few weeks ago about a new web browser in private beta called Skyfire.  In the post was a link to a video of a phone playing some Silverlight video of the Olympics on it.  I couldn't believe that it was on a smart phone!  I signed up and actually forgot about it.  Tonight I received the text message from them to sign up.  Once I ran it, I was blown away by the clean interface, speed of the rendering of the pages, and navigation options.  I watched some Flash videos and some live video from Fox News.  It was amazing.  It only took me a few minutes to get the hang of the zooming and moving.  I could tell the pages were loading fast but I didn't realize how much faster they load then the other mobile browsers.  Take a look at the head to head review of Safari, Opera, and Skyfire.  The load time of the pages are 1/10th of the other browsers!  Now you can watch YouTube videos, sign in to Exchange Webmail, watch live TV, and basically anything else you can do with your computer's browser.   The only two downsides I have found are not Skyfire's fault.  One the screen is small.  Not much you can do about that on a smart phone.  The other is the battery won't last forever.  Between watching some Sprint TV and this I was able to drain my battery.  My final test was to see how a some 2.5d Silverlight would look.  Microsoft's Mojave Experiment was just redone in Silverlight.  It was funny that it was originally done in Flash.  If you haven't seen it yet, it is a cool looking Silverlight page.  In addition it is a funny concept.  Microsoft told a bunch of Vista haters that they were about to see the new version of Windows.  Then when they turned out to love it, they told them that it was really Vista.  Anyway, back to my test.  I pulled it up on my phone in Skyfire and it worked perfectly.  The animation was smooth.  The videos were crisp and loaded fast.  The only thing I couldn't really do was the forward and backward zooming through the website.  I could click on the zoom button on the page and it worked but not as smooth as the scroll wheel on my mouse.  

Skyfire is not only the best web browser for mobile phones, it is the best application I have seen.  Up until now, I thought Orb was the best.  Signup for the private beta.  Hopefully you won't have to wait as long as I did.

Mike

Thursday, August 28, 2008 10:09:21 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
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