Stop whatever you’re doing right now and download the Skyfire browser to your Nokia. Seriously, don’t even finish reading this review.
Skyfire is not just a new web browser, it’s a transformational experience, bringing virtually every single web page – however crammed with Flash, Java (or even Silverlight) – to your mobile phone in glorious, functional detail.
That means Facebook updates, Flicker photostreams, YouTube videos, iPlayer radio or TV, Gmail, mobile banking and more, at your fingertips, just as they look on a PC. The trick is that your phone is not actually doing the surfing. Skyfire’s servers are visiting the pages you request, rendering them using Mozilla’s Gecko engine, then compressing and firing the pages over to the Skyfire application on your phone.
Because your phone isn’t doing the hard work of crunching data or running plug-ins, you can breeze through sites that would tax even the fastest mobile processors. Searching (via Skyfire’s homepage and Google) is a joy, with results flashing up in seconds. But it’s when you navigate to media-rich pages that you really appreciate the power of Skyfire. Load up YouTube, for instance, and you’ll see the entire homepage in moments, with a zoom window overlaid.
Move this around the page, then click to zoom in, which takes just a second or two. You can now watch videos and leave comments, or add bookmarks and explore your surfing history via the left soft key.
It’s not completely perfect, of course. Squeezing a full webpage on to a mobile screen, however sharp, will always mean compromises, and don’t expect to surf as quickly as you would at home. Some pages take longer to load than you might be used to (although I never had one take longer than 10 seconds on a Wi-Fi) link, and, obviously, you’ll need an unlimited data tariff to make the most of what Skyfire has to offer.
More annoying is that Skyfire doesn’t (yet) offer the option of landscape browsing. But use Skyfire even once and I doubt you’ll ever go back to any other mobile browser.
Details
Size: 0.7MB
Price: Free
Check out our Skyfire review image gallery:
