INTRODUCTION
Ever since the Apple
iPhone was announced with it's Safari browser,
people have been bad-mouthing the Windows Mobile
version of Internet Explorer. It's slow rendering
pages, it doesn't render pages like they look on
your desktop, and everything is zoomed in so close
you can't see the whole thing all at once. Skyfire
is here to try to make the browsing experience on Windows
Mobile much more user friendly. It is one among several new Windows Mobile browsers that have recently been announced. Let's see how the Skyfire beta performs!
WHAT'S HOT
The coolest part of Skyfire is that it
can render and play Flash videos and animations
right within the web pages just as you would see on
your desktop computer. You can also zoom and pan
around on fully rendered web pages.
SETUP
While the version of Skyfire I'm using
is very much a beta product, set-up was not exactly smooth sailing.
First of all, the product requires a mobile phone number to identify you
by. The text message that was sent in order to link me to the CAB files
for the software installation never arrived. So I was emailed the CAB
file, and after installation the software would not recognize my phone
number and therefore wouldn't run. Skyfire will likely and hopefully
change their authentication method to a less problematic
username/password method.
PRODUCT FEATURES
You can get an idea about how the Skyfire browser works from the video above.
Skyfire takes about 10 seconds to start up before you can use it. Notice how it completely takes over your screen.
Next you're presented with this screen. There's no Start menu, volume control, signal strength indicator, clock, connection status, or smart minimize button. You also can't see any notifications from text messages, emails, appointments, instant messages, etc. You do see a bunch of unlabelled icons at the top and a little grey "Menu" button at the bottom.
The "Menu" button does respond to the right softkey button even though it has a non-standard look to it.
Selecting the "Enter Web Address" command brings you to this screen. It's hard to notice that anything has changed, but if you look closely there is a very light input field at the bottom now. Normally you would expect the address bar to appear at the top of the browser. The SIP keyboard does not automatically appear as it would in normal input fields on Windows Mobile (this is a keyboard-less device).
You have to tap the keyboard icon at the bottom center in order to open your currently selected software input panel. Unfortunately, the input field does not support Copy/Pasting so predictive keyboards like Cootek's Touchpal will not work. A further frustration is that the non-standard input panel selector (at the bottom center) does not allow you to choose a different type of input panel. So if you have one selected that doesn't work with SkyFire's input field, then you're not going to be typing anything at all.
Once you get an alternate software input panel working and load a web page, it shows a zoomed-out version of the page. The text is unreadable at this point, so you'll have to figure out a way to zoom in. No indication of scrolling capabilities is available either, so you'll have to learn how to do that as well.
If you tap the screen once, the above gray rectangle with a magnifying glass icon appears. You can drag to move it over certain sections of the web page.
Dragging it beyond the borders will scroll the page if scrolling is possible and barely-noticable dark grey scroll-length indicators will appear on the right and bottom edges.
Tapping the magnifying glass icon again will zoom the page to that area. Now the text is large enough to read, but it gets cut off on the edge and is still unreadable.
Tapping and dragging on the screen will pan around the web page view. The software loads the low-resolution proxy of the area of the screen you're panning to before loading the full resolution. This allows for fast panning. Also note the dark grey scroll-distance-indicators appear only while you're dragging.
There's no "Stop" command when loading a new web page.
The "SmartFit" option is not turned on by default, but it is very important for making this program usable.
After you turn "SmartFit" on, the zoomed-out display will re-rag the text in each column to the default width of the zoom tool. Sometimes it takes a long time for the SmartFit effect to be applied to a site.
Now, when you zoom in, the text fits to the width of your screen and you only have to scroll in one direction as you read. Skyfire is hoping to make this re-ragging Smartfit feature happen automatically just like the Nokia S60 and iPhone web browsers.
If you go to Menu>Actions>Zoom, the above dialog appears. After you click OK, nothing happens, and there are no onscreen zoom in and zoom out buttons.
It turns out, you have to press the +/- bubbles icon in the top toolbar in order to show the +/- onscreen zooming icons. They're hard to see and not very recognizable, but you can make them out at the bottom center area. Making these visible should be a setting and it should stay selected between sessions (it doesn't).
Another option in the Menu>Actions menu is "Drag Controls." If you turn that on, when you tap and drag on the screen, two tools will appear in the top right corner. The hand tool will let you pan the view, while the arrow tool will let you drag to select text. Unfortunately there is no tap-and-hold menu and no way to copy the text or do anything with it in Skyfire's current beta form.
When you choose Menu>Actions>View History, Skyfire loads links to your history within the Skyfire website. That means your browsing history is not saved locally, but rather kept track of on the server through your associated account information.
Choosing Menu>Bookmarks>View Bookmarks does the same type of thing. Skyfire does not synchronize your bookmarks with your desktop, so it seems you'll have to add them manually via your device.
The icons at the top are mostly redundant and considered by me to be a waste of space.
The first icon collapses the toolbar. The second one is a back button, which is also found at the bottom left. The third is the forward icon, which is barely ever used. The 4th is a refresh button, which is also barely necessary on a mobile device although it does have the added effect of zooming out the web page on Skyfire. The 5th icon is a house which represents the home page. Again, this is often unnecessary since the browser will start on the home page and it is also accessible in the Menu. The 6th icon will show/hide the -/+ zoom icons in the lower middle part of the web page. The 7th and last icon will show the enter address bar at the bottom of the screen. It does NOT show the current URL of the page you're on. In fact, there's no way to figure that out. So if you wanted to copy/paste a link to a web page and send it to some one else, it wouldn't be possible. I would much rather see this toolbar replaced by the standard Windows Mobile title bar so that I can access the Start menu in order to multitask.
I often prefer to surf sites that are designed for mobile devices (even on the desktop) since they're faster, small, and easy to use. Skyfire still renders these sites in a zoomed-out difficult-to-read manner.
Pop-up menus are also difficult to use. There's no scroll bar, so selecting items beyond the fold in the menu is very difficult. You have to use the arrows on the d-pad in order to do that.
It's also pretty much impossible to use pages that are contained within iFrames. You can click on those scroll bars as much as you want, but you won't be able to move them.
Skyfire does support Flash and Flash video though! So you can watch Flash videos just like you would on the desktop. I'm not sure if this is a good thing because once you're zoomed in you can only see a fraction of the video and it becomes very difficult to access the Pause button.
