Skyfire Windows Mobile Browser 0.8 Improves Video Quality, Speed and Text Entry

Skyfire, the third-party Windows Mobile browser that does much of the desktop-class page rendering server side to spit out to your phone, has just gotten an upgrade to version 0.8. Among the list of features that get bumped or added are video quality, launch speed and auto-reconnect, zooming, downloading of content and in-line text entry.

The browser still supports dynamic AJAX content, Flash, Quicktime, and Windows Media, but our hands-on attempt in watching a YouTube video started well but ended poorly. Skyfire is still (and will always) render stuff on the server side, which will lead to good compatibility but poor speeds, if your phone isn’t pulling and rendering down the images fast enough. On the whole, we like 0.8 a lot and things are improved all around, but there’s a reason why it’s still in beta. [Skyfire]