SkyFire: Access full web content on a mobile web browser
While mobile web browsers have come a long way in recent years, so has the web. Today's mobile browsers like Opera Mini and Safari for the iPhone let you zoom in and out of web pages and let you scale text and images to fit on a small screen. You can even watch some web video. But mobile browsers still have a tough time handling pages that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash 9, JavaScript, and other modern technologies.
Skyfire is a new browser for Windows Mobile smartphones launching in private beta at this week's DEMO 2008 conference. The Skyfire team claims that the mobile browser is the first to support Flash 9, and as you can see in the video above, the browser seems to handle YouTube and other multimedia content much the same way a desktop browser would. You don't have to download and convert files to view them or open them in a separate video player.
According to Webware, the way Skyfire achieves this is by acting as a proxy browser. In other words, the Windows Mobile application isn't really a full web browser. Instead, Skyfire hosts an application on its servers that does all of the hard work of rendering the web content and then delivers it to the client software on your phone. On the one hand, this makes it easy to deliver full web content to the underpowered device in the palm of your hand. On the other hand, we're a bit concerned about what would happen if Skyfire actually becomes popular and the company's servers start to get hammered by users making web requests from their mobile phones.
Skyfire currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0/6 phones with full QWERTY keyboards. A Symbian client is coming soon.
