Skyfire has been an up-and-coming mobile browser for a while now, with solid & innovative versions for Windows Mobile and S60 3rd Edition phones. The lack of support for S60 5th Edition (e.g. the N97, X6, etc.) has been maddening, particularly given the large touch screens of those devices, which are crying out for a better web experience than that offered by the standard browser app. Thankfully, Skyfire's programming team have been hard at work and recently released a beta version (v1.5) of Skyfire for S60 5th Edition.
Like rival alt-browser Opera Mobile, Skyfire uses server-side processing to actually do the legwork of fetching web pages and then compresses them so you get the fastest download speed possible. Skyfire can even package up flash video for a speedy download - not just YouTube, mind you, but any Flash video. None of your rubbish mobile versions of websites, either - Skyfire will render pages in full as though you were using a real desktop browser. It's probably the closest we have come to a 'PC style' browsing experience on a mobile phone, supporting Javascript, Silverlight, Java, Ajax and more.
The above is true of any version of Skyfire, but how does the 5th Edition version shape up? In our opinion, its the best yet. The large touchscreen of most 5th Edition phones is ideal for browsing with your fingertips and Skyfire has implemented a pretty decent kinetic scrolling engine to complement some simple, clearly laid out controls.
Your Nokia doesn't yet support multi-touch, so there is no pinch-zooming to be had, but Skyfire does provide the choice of double-tapping to zoom (this only seemed to work when we had the hardware keyboard out on our N97) or tapping a magnifier icon to access a simple but responsive zoom control. Not perfect, but this is ultimately a hardware problem and the app does the best it can in the circumstances. About that N97 keyboard - we found that Skyfire lends itself particularly well to running in landscape mode using the keyboard, particularly if you use the full-screen browsing option.
We do have some quibbles. You are limited to one browser screen and there is no support for multiple tabs. You are also out of luck if you want to copy and paste any text from a webpage (you don't seem to be able to select text) or even enter text into a Flash app. Despite these problems, we find ourselves coming back to Skyfire again and again. Its not 100% perfect, but it is the best browsing experience currently available on your Nokia.
Details
Price: Free
Size: 0.888 MB
DOWNLOAD: Skyfire 1.5 for S60 5th Edition
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