During our brief hands on with the Skyfire mobile browser at CTIA, it actually lived up to most of its claims, and we walked away fairly impressed. We saw it on two different devices, though most of our time was on a Sprint HTC Mogul. Besides rendering media-heavy Giz with surprising snap (a feat that made the Instinct’s browser cry), it churned out YouTube and Hulu videos like a champ. Zooming isn’t quite as intuitive as Safari—you touch, a box pops up which you can drag around, then you touch again—but I was told they’re working on making it more natural. Overall, it’s definitely one for Windows Mobile users to watch, and we’ll be getting some more time with it soon.
Adam
April 7, 2008 at 12:54 AM
Here’s another opinion with a bit more detail: http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=reviews&id=1037
Note the “Bugs & Wishes” section on the second page.
“However, Skyfire also disables a lot of standard Windows Mobile features and thusly makes using your device in general much more difficult and frustrating.”
Also, for y’all that are wishing for video playing within the browser, it is pretty bad just as a concept. While Skyfire does do it, it’s just not a good way to view videos at all. The TCPMP & Flash bundle way is much better since you can play the video full screen and you can easily SEE THE WHOLE VIDEO. With the embedded-in-a-webpage method, you’ve got to scroll around and zoom every so slightly just to get the video to fit within the window. It’s a huge amount of work to get the video to be viewable. Not fun at all.
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