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

I don't blog very often about toys but I am a gadget geek.  My Sprint PPC 6700 wouldn't work anymore.  I think it lost too many battle to gravity.  So I upgrated to the new Sprint HTC Mogul phone.  It is really cool phone. 

Here's the coolest features

• EVDOa - In Omaha I am getting 700k to 1Mb per second.  I compared it to the WIFI on it, I was only getting 500k to 700k.  No reason to use WIFI with unlimited data plan!
• Email - This is the main reason for the PDA phone. 
• Built in GPS - I used to have to carry an extra gps on my bat utility belt for this. 
• Voice Dial - Great when driving.
• Keyboard - I guess I'm too old to understand how the kids today can send text messages so fast without a keyboard.  I like my keyboard.
• Camera - Actually works pretty good on this phone.  The 6700 was bad
• HTML Email - I'm sure iPhone users don't think aout this much but the 6700 was just text email. 

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 phone make sure you download these!

• Spb Mobile Shell - Turn your Windows Mobile 6 phone into an iPhone like interface.  It makes it a completely different phone.  Check it out.  Only $30
• MS Live Search - Use GPS, maps, directions, find businesses, etc.   Voice activated too! FREE!
• Orb - Stream any media from your PC to your phone.  You can watch videos, photos, and open documents.  Finally I can watch YouTube videos on my phone.  FREE!

Sprint has also said that it is going to release the Windows Mobile 6.1 update for the Mogul!  This will give us a bunch of little features, but my favorite is a better web browser. 

Gadget Smart Not Hard

Mike