[PaulOBrien]

Now, i'll be completely honest and say that having used an iPhone there's not a lot that I lust after on it and i'm very glad I have my Kaiser, but one of things I definitely am envious of is the browser. Pocket IE is - at best adequate - and although the 3rd party browsing solutions out there are pretty decent (Opera Mobile / Mini etc), they can't really match up to the iPhone's Safari implementation. Enter Skyfire, and their forthcoming Windows Mobile browser.

Ed Hardy over at Brighthand has been lucky enough to get his hands on a Beta version, and he has recorded a video of it in action, which I have linked below.

Recent startup Skyfire, funded by $5m of Venture Capital (so they're pretty serious about this!) describe their product as follows:

Skyfire said:

Skyfire is a free, downloadable mobile web browser that makes browsing on your phone exactly like browsing on your PC. Now, you can use the web from your mobile phone with unprecedented speed and simplicity.

For the first time ever, you can watch any web video, listen to any web music, stay connected on any social network and browse whatever you want. Anything you can browse from your PC, you can now browse from your mobile phone.

We’re talking about full-featured PC versions of your favorite web sites. Skyfire gives you speedy page loads, full audio, video, images, dynamic Flash content, advanced Ajax, Java and more – just like your PC.

I don't know about you, but it ticks all the right boxes for me... web video, web music, speedy page loads, flash, ajax, java... oh and FREE! Sounds like the holy grail, no?

Behind the scenes, the browser works differently to what we're used to. Basically, the content isn't rendered on your device. There is a bank of servers at Skyfire that receives your page request, renders the page using the Mozilla engine (as found in Firefox etc.) and then beams that rendered content down to your device in a lovely compressed format. The model isn't dissimilar to Opera Mini and Thunderhawk in that intermediary servers are used, and they are both great browsers too!

So can you get it now? Unfortunately it's not available today... but you can visit the Skyfire page and sign up for the free Beta. Skyfire seem to be opening the Beta to US users first, with a wider rollout to follow, not sure why that is...

It can't come soon enough for me... just check out the video!

P

PS Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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[furby]

Safari on the iphone is incomparably better than pocket IE, there's no contest. It's great to see another company stepping up and doing something like this and it looks great in that video.

Enough even to pay money for it... I wonder how good it would be on WM Smartphone?

[PaulOBrien]

It seems that the experience is going to be exactly the same (UI quirks aside) between PPC and SP

P

[Boinng]

Dissapointed that it's all going to be sifted through servers - there's something about that I just don't trust. $5m venture capital, for what profit? The browser's free, there's no sister product like Opera to promote, so what are they selling? Subscriptions? User data? Browsing history? Inserted advertising?

The holy grail for me continues to be a "proper" browser like Safari, that can deliver a PC-like web experience using the phone's own resources. The processing power etc is there, so there's no good reason why someone else's servers should be necessary.

[PaulOBrien]

Inserted advertising is the future model I believe...

P

[chucky.egg]

Over on XDA they were talking about the T&Cs - it basically says that will capture any and all info they can from your browsing habits. The assumption being that they are going to sell that "anonymous" info on.

Not sure that bothers me TBH - BBC News isn't going to raise many eyebrows

[PaulOBrien]

Ditto, that's a small price to pay IMHO (of course your opinion may vary).

P

[ScrewlooseAZ]

Well I signed up for the Beta. Has anyone been given acess to it yet? Since I'm in the US hopefully I can get a hold of it soon. I'll post my impressions when and if I get a chance.

[S710demon]

Too bad it is only available in the US atm. Would really like to try this one.

[rameses]

I've signed up for the Beta anyway, hopefully it won't be too long before it's rolled out outside the US

[Swampie]

chucky.egg, on Jan 30 2008, 20:26, said:

Over on XDA they were talking about the T&Cs - it basically says that will capture any and all info they can from your browsing habits. The assumption being that they are going to sell that "anonymous" info on.

Does that include your internet banking details?

[PaulOBrien]

I understand invites are going out to selected US peeps... anyone?

P

[rabbivj]

Paul (MVP), on Feb 9 2008, 03:55, said:

I understand invites are going out to selected US peeps... anyone?

P

yeah that is correct, i was able to get access to it. How they are gathering info im assuming is that the browser is proxied. When I went to www.ipchicken.com it came up as an IP owned by hurricane electric which is a backbone provider...

[PaulOBrien]

So what's it like?

P

[encece]

Application filled out. They sent an immediate text confirmation. Then the site read "Full to capicity" and they will let me know when there "is room"

[hotphil]

I got my mail saying they couldn't send my UK number an SMS and that I can now download it. It looks pretty, but at the moment, it won't start - simply says "network connection unavailable please try later". Anyone in the UK got it working? Does it perform as good as it looks?

[PaulOBrien]

/me wants!

P

[hotphil]

Well I worked out that it will only work on my UK Vodafone Kaiser over a WiFi connection - not over the cell network. It's pretty good when it's running. I wonder if Skyfire's servers block UK-based cell carriers' networks somehow?

[ScrewlooseAZ]

I got my Beta invite today and got it loaded up.

It's okay. Like the above post states, I too could only use it over wifi. It gives an error message that it lost network connection when you try it over GPRS. I guess it wont replace Opera or PIE any time soon.

As for usefulness. Yeah you can look at desktop style web pages. But scrolling is slow unless you zoom out, go to wherever you want to look at and then zoom back in. If you try to scroll over a web page at a size that you can actually read the text, it is slow going. For some reason even when you scroll between 2 areas you previously looked at, it still reloads that area and takes time.

Also there is no place to adjust settings, like prefered home page, cache size. Things like that.

I have not tried out YouTube yet, but on CNN I clicked on a video. It was unwatchable. Stuttered so bad you couldnt really enjoy it. Also I could not get //mobile.msn.com to work at all. Not sure why.

I'm using a HTC Kaiser with 6.1rom. Maybe PPC's with better graphics would do better. . .

[hotphil]

I did query the "network connection lost" error with Skyfire and got the response below:
"Sorry it's taken us a while to get back to you. I was checking why you are experiencing timeouts, since we haven't launched in Europe it was a little harder to troubleshoot this issue. In answer to your question, Skyfire is not blocking non-US carriers, however, you may experience more latency depending on the data connection that your carrier is giving you. We also don't know if they are allowing all web traffic to go through, some carriers only allow traffic on port 80 or 8080 which means that Skyfire may not work on those data plans. If you hard reset the device, you will need to reinstall Skyfire using the following instructions. When you do a hard reset, it erases the authentication file stored on your device. To reinstall Skyfire, it's best to take the following steps so that our system recognizes your phone. Login http://www.skyfire.c...port/loginEnter your email address and passwordClick on My ProfileClick on the checkbox for "Switch my Skyfire account to a different mobile device" (this is the step which will associate the phone with your Skyfire account)Click on Update To install Skyfire:Perform a soft reset for your phoneClick on Download- From here you can choose to "Send SMS with Link" or "Download to PC". - If you choose download to PC, you will need to select if you have a touchscreen or non-touchscreen device- Click on Download Note: Skyfire will only be active on one phone per account at a time, so if you decide to send it to another phone, it will stop working on the previous phone."
I'd already hard reset several times (other issues) and it still didn't work. I've not tried it again recently. Anyone (especially in the UK on Vodafone) actually got this working? I wonder why they mention non-standard ports? Do Vodafone block anything non-standard - I'm guessing so?

This post has been edited by hotphil: 09 May 2008 - 07:48 AM

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