Skyfire, a mobile browser for Windows Mobile and S60 which quickly became a favorite around these parts for its abilities to playback Flash video and a number of other rich media formats, has just gotten the update treatment.
While it brings the obligatory bug fixes and optimizations that any pre-1.0 release should, the biggest new feature is what they’re calling the “real-time activity wall”, which is essentially an aggregator for RSS feeds, Facebook, and Twitter. It comes preloaded with Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo! News, but adding in new feeds is a matter of 3 or 4 clicks. Once you’ve plugged in your Facebook/Twitter account info, you can change your status directly from this aggregation screen.
Facebook and Twitter clients are nothing new – especially in the mobile realm. There are countless varieties. The primary benefit of it being in the browser, however, is sharing: if you’ve stumbled across a new page you want to tweet about, you can do so directly from the “Share” menu. No copying and pasting URLs or, worse yet, retyping them.
Also new in this release is WVGA and WQVGA support – so if you’re toting around a Samsung Omnia or an Xperia X1, Skyfire now plays friendly with your handset.
Does it still leave out basic features that all other mobile browsers have which make it impossible to work without a lot of manual manipulation of connection settings? Does it still require a connection to their servers before browsing anything? Does it still only install correctly about 25% of the time?
If you answered yes to any of these questions then I’ll continue to pass.
what the hell? did they remove the smart fit thing for reading text? its not in the settings anymore and i have to keep moving left and right. damn it
Miki –
You should not need to move left and right to read text.
The browser has been designed to fit blocks of text to the width of your screen after you’ve zoomed in. Coupled with updates to text size rendering, this should remove the need for you to use smartfit.
-omar
when you first tap on the section that has text, the square thing comes up and you click again and it reformats the screen, however if the text is too small what am i to do? i zoom again using the plus minus thing and it won’t reformat the screen and i am forced to scroll left and right. maybe its just on my phone or something; i have htc touch
Miki –
The goal was to resize the text large enough so that it’s big enough to read. This seemed to test fine on high-resolution devices such as the treo pro and HTC touch (not touch HD).
Of course, different users have different ideas of what is readable text and what is not. Can you give me the name of the site you were trying to read text on?
-o
I’m still sticking with Opera Mini. The fastest and most popular mobile browser out there.
Hi! I’ve been a fan of Skyfire and I’ve been using v0.85 for the past two months on my Nokia E63. When I heard about the v0.90 release I immediately went to the Skyfire website and downloaded the app installer. Unfortunately it refused to start up – I could only go up to the startup screen and then after a while the app would close itself. Anybody else having the same problem? In the meantime, I’ll have to continue using v.0.85, which I immediately reinstalled on my mobile. Shame.. I was looking forward to the auto-fit feature.
Skyfire has some appealing elements, I’ll check out the updated version of the OS. For regular activities I found it to be a little “crude” though. Anything that won’t even download and install correctly half the time makes me second guess it’s security attributes. Wonder what justaskgemalto thinks about this security wise.
S’fire is not 100% !!!
Salaam!
God iz the Friend of thinkers,
I m thinking nd soon will be
a 100% efficient human.
I trust in God,
nd skyfire ?
Aliabbas110@ymail.com
omar,
a site i frequently visit is baltimoresun.com. it was far more readable in the previous version but now you have to zoom in once or twice to make the text big enough and scroll left and right to be able to read it
miki –
What device are you using, and what version are you using?
I was able to read baltimoresun after 1 initial zoom-in, just fine.
omar
I only have one thing to say, it works very well with my E66.
Now I can see the web pages with flash.
Installed without problem, and works fine.
sometimes even at justintv.
I can tell that skyfire is the fastest out there, i got e71 and neither the built-in browser nor the opera mini loads faster than skyfire, if u dont believe me just try!!! but still, either one of the browsers has its pros and cons, im looking forward to Mozila Mobile(fenex if im right), which looks very promising.
Skyfire is easy to use, navigate and search stuff on the web, keep up with the good work Skyfire TEam
When I try to play there concerts it will not work? However when I play there radio it works fine? Did anyone else try this site
and having problem streaming there concerts?
The site is wolfgangsvault there concerts
will not stream using skyfire 9.0 or 85.0
Are you working on a Blackberry version?