Hands on: Skyfire review

The new Skyfire browser brings “the real Web” to smartphones

Skyfire shows more of the page than Opera Mini, lays it out more accurately and loads it faster.

The mobile web isn’t text-only pages or transcoded pages that arrive a slice at a time; mobile users want the same web they get on a desktop browser, complete with YouTube videos and JavaScript menus.

That’s what Skyfire promises, according to UK Business Development Manager Mike Fletcher:

“It’s the full PC experience; you get pages as you would see them on a PC. When you go to YouTube, it’s the full page, not the mobile version. It’s not the dumbed-down version of Facebook or MySpace: it’s the full site.”

And when we tested it, on a Nokia N96 and various Windows Mobile handsets, Skyfire did load full web pages – from YouTube to the BBC iPlayer site, from Flickr to Google Maps and of course TechRadar – with the correct layout, and in only a few seconds.

Super fast

That’s because it’s not actually the page that’s loading; Skyfire renders web pages on servers in its data centres and sends a zoomable, clickable image of the page to the phone, but that image is complete with streaming video, audio and menus.

And rather than just scrolling and zooming in and out by a fixed amount each time, the Skyfire browser detects logical chunks of the page, so you jump across and zoom in to a list of headlines, a story or a single image, depending on what you select.

That means you can quickly get a YouTube or BBC iPlayer video playing full screen. With a good 3G connection, video plays smoothly, the sound is clear and you can see plenty of detail.

Compared to Opera Mini, which also renders pages on a back-end server, Skyfire loads your home page on Facebook in half the time and renders the page more accurately and with more stories visible.

Better than Opera Mini?

Opera Mini loads the mobile version of Flickr and even when you ask for the full PC version, you only see one and a half photos on the page: on the same Samsung BlackJack screen, Skyfire shows five images and the items in the right-hand column are readable text rather than greeked characters.

All the menus and buttons on the Flickr page work correctly in Skyfire (you can even download photos); it does take a few seconds for a menu to load when you click on it because it’s a round trip, but you can scroll through images in the photostream control almost as fast as on a PC with broadband.

We were able to plan a route on Google Maps, shop on Ocado and Amazon – including listening to sample MP3s – and use the Virgin Atlantic site to pick a better seat.

It helps that Skyfire hides its own interface; you can even see the bottom of the web page between the two soft buttons on a Windows Mobile smartphone.

Scroll to the top of the page and you get a combined search and address bar which offers predictive matches as you type; handy on a phone where the keyboard is as limited as the screen. You don’t have to create a Skyfire account, but if you do you can save your bookmarks to use on another handset.

There are some hiccups. Although we were able to create and edit documents in Google Docs, we did manage to accidentally delete the contents of an existing document by editing it. Cookies work intermittently: we kept having to log in to Facebook and Flickr even after telling the sites to remember us.

Source: techradar

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