Today, we learned that Torch Mobile has been acquired by RIM, meaning development for Windows Mobile has been halted. This is disappointing news for many people who were looking forward to the next Iris Browser update, which was said to introduce graphical and performance enhancements. Fortunately, there are plenty of other browsers to turn to and one of them just received an update.

Skyfire has been updated to 1.1 for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. This update concentrates on performance updates regarding page load times, reconnecting, website support and plug-ins. If you haven’t used Skyfire in a while, you’ll also notice changes in the Start Page. Check out what’s new below and download the latest version from Skyfire.

New in 1.1:

• Improved page load times. For sites that take a long time to load, we updated our algorithm to bring you the content much quicker.

• Improved scrolling and zooming on Symbian. This is a much faster and smoother experience now.

• Improved reconnect. Skyfire will show clearly when you can start interacting with the web page in case it previously timed out and disconnected (to save battery life).

• WML support. If you are browsing to mobile sites that use the old mobile WML markup, you can now view the content.

• Improved mobile website support. Mobile.* websites are now rendered automatically as mobile with the exception of mobile.yahoo.com since it is a PC site.

• Page up/down navigation via short-key: You can use now ‘2′ and ‘8′ to easily navigate one page up or down. Great for reading articles. Now the short-key for invoking the Superbar is ‘*’. Please note that on some devices with a non-standard keyboard layout, short-keys may behave differently since this is phone specific.

• Updated Plug-ins: For Flash, Silverlight and QuickTime we have the newest versions to give you more compatibility with more sites.