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skyfire

I’ve never previously used Skyfire, I owned an N70 earlier and Skyfire didn’t used to work in it. Now I’m using the Nokia N97 but Skyfire didn’t support S60 V5 smartphones…. So I jumped at the opportunity when I came to know that Skyfire team was looking for alpha testers. I installed Skyfire on my N97 and was amazed at the speed of the browser.  How can a mobile browser that can display flash, silverlight etc. be so fast. it’s awesome.

Fast forward to today – Skyfire team has released the browser in beta for everyone to test. So what has improved and what has not –

Flash Videos – In alpha state audio and video were out of sync, and the experience was terrible… But in this beta I was amazed at the flash video playback, it was very smooth and even on the edge connection the video played without a hitch. awesome.

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              even the player is controllable (I’m thinking about flash games) –

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              The website rendering is surprisingly accurate -

              Scr000045  of course it is going through some external server which compressed the data and makes Skyfire more faster, but streaming videos?

              The controls are minimal and simple -

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              and it still has the sharable, all customized homescreen which greets you with your mail, twitter, facebook, digg, YouTube feeds etc.

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              This beta version of Skyfire has got problems too –

              the frustrating checker board -

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              sometimes Skyfire does not connect to web at all, you’ve got to restart Skyfire for that. Interacting with some flash websites is difficult and the flash games are not playable.

              So, how does Skyfire line up against it’s biggest competitor – Opera Mini/ Opera Mobile?

              opera mini

              Skyfire beta is better than Opera mini 4 ….. but Opera mini / mobile 5 brought in many desktop like features which makes surfing the web on mobile so much simpler like saving passwords, multiple tabs, more speed, less data usage, a download manager etc. which makes Opera mini / Opera mobile better than Skyfire. I really like Skyfire and I hope the final version has password manager, multiple tab etc.

              opera mobile

              You can download Skyfire from here

              or type get.skyfire.com in your mobile browser.

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