I wrote a small post before about getting Opera Mini to run on a Verizon SMT5800. Although Opera was working okay, and does a far better job than pocket internet explorer, it still is not the ideal solution. It often renders text poorly even when zoomed in, and sometime has a clipping problem where part of the page does not render at all. On top of that, it is difficult to install for an average user. So, I sought out a better alternative to Opera mini or Pocket Internet Explorer, and found SkyFire
I had signed up for skyfire months ago for the beta, but was just recently included. Now it seems it is much easier to get the beta, just sign up and go.
Impressions:
1.) Very easy to install, you sign up, they sms (text) you a link. You access the link from your mobile, answer a couple of things, and boom it installs.
2.) So far, for me, this browser is the best thing for a windows mobile phone. It renders pages way faster than opera or pocket ie, and does a fantastic job of making it look like it would on a desktop. This of course means you will do a ton of zooming in since everything is so small, but it works well.
3.) Besides navigating text and images easily, it does an amazing job of rendering flash content. You can even access sites like hulu and youtube with no problems! Of course it is still choppy and I would not recommend watching a whole show, but for watching a clip, it works great, and opens way more formats that pocket ie and opera can do.
The only negative is actually how it works. Basically, you connect to skyfire's servers, they process your page views on their server and send them to your phone. So, it makes the experience excellent, but if privacy (on your mobile browser) is a huge concern for you, I would not use their product.
No comments:
Post a Comment