Move Over iPhone, Skyfire is Coming

Monday May 12, 2008

I was recently able to take a tour of the Skyfire mobile web browser, and I must admit, I was very impressed. In fact, even though it is still in beta, it may very well become the primary browser on my AT&T Tilt.

The goal of the Skyfire browser is to rid us of the "mobile internet" and bring the rich, interactive websites we are all used to seeing on our desktop computers to our mobile devices. And it does an excellent job of doing just that. Within minutes of installing the beta on my mobile device, I was watching videos on the YouTube website (the real one, not the mobile one).

Suitably impressed, I rushed over to Widgetbox to check out some arcade widgets. To my delight, Skyfire had no problem displaying the Asteroids widget. Unfortunately, the browser was unable to send the keyboard commands to the widget, so I was unable to play it. According to the people at Skyfire, this will be addressed in a future release, and even just seeing the widget on the page is a big jump forward. I was also able to successfully interact with some widgets that only required mouse clicks.

As for web browsing, Skyfire already does a great job. Other than a rare bug where it allowed me to scroll past the bottom of a website, browsing was amazingly stable. I really liked the zoom in feature where I could tap the screen once, see the box where I am going to zoom in to, and even move this box around before zooming into the website. I could even adjust how much I was going to zoom in by dragging the corner of this box to make it longer or shorter. Alternatively, I could double click and immediately zoom into the page.

From streaming video to Flash applications, Skyfire is shaping up to be just what it promised -- to give mobile users the ability to browse the same rich websites that they browse on their desktop machines.

In other mobile news, Nvidia announced that they will be developing high-powered video chipsets for mobile devices. This spells extra good news on the mobile front as Nvidia plans to make great strides in improving the graphical performance of our mobile devices.

With the introduction of sophisticated browsers like the Skyfire browser and more advanced graphical power, we'll soon be doing away with the idea of a scaled-down mobile Internet and welcoming in the age of Mobile 2.0.