Ever since the Apple
INTRODUCTION
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!
The coolest part of Skyfire is that it
WHAT’S HOT
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.
While the version of Skyfire I'm using
SETUP
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.
While this is still a beta
HELP SUPPORT
product, there is understandably not a whole lot of
support available. However there is some online Help
accessible via the application's menu.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
currently requires Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6 Standard or Professional. It
also requires the mobile phone number of the device you intend to use it
on. This may change for the final version however. This review showed the version of Skyfire for touchscreen’ed devices. If you’d like to see Skyfire in action on a non-touchscreen device, check out the video at AllShadow.com.
BUGS AND WISHES
major frustrations with getting the program
installed and functional, the next most annoying
thing was how the Start menu and Minimize buttons
were not available and the ability to access those
functions was completely disabled. You also can't
see any notification icons for text messages,
emails, appointments, etc. I can understand why
video games would do this, but this is a web
browser. I need to be able to access other
applications while browsing the web. The best way to
do this is to leave the Start menu and title bar
where it belongs, but add a "Full screen" option
that users can invoke when desired.
The power button is also disabled as are the
automatic sleep mode timers in the system
preferences. That means if you leave Skyfire on, it
will stay on and kill your battery pretty quickly. I
was told by the senior engineer that this is by
design because (according to their industry
insiders) if you're watching a video, you don't want
the screen to go off in the middle of the video. My
response to this, is that not everybody is going to
be watching videos with this web browser all the
time. The application should behave like a normal
application and not override my system settings.
The next problem is typing URLs. Since the
input field does not accept paste commands,
predictive input panels can't enter entire words or
phrases. Since Skyfire does not use the standard
Windows Mobile menu bar, there is no way to switch
between software input panels. Not having
copy/paste capabilities is also a problem, since
that means I actually have to remember and retype
URLs in order to view them in Skyfire.
Furthermore, I can't copy text or URLs out of
Skyfire to paste them into an email or instant
message. These are pretty important functions
for people who use the internet instead of just
looking at it.
It's cool that Skyfire plays Flash videos, but I
think this is more appealing in concept than in
actual use. The small screen makes the video
difficult to see, they often play automatically thus
taking up valuable CPU resources, and there's no way
to block or shut off Flash videos.
I actually prefer using mobile formatted websites
since they're so much easier to navigate. Loading
such sites on Skyfire still shows them zoomed out
which means I have another step to do before being
able to use the site. So in reality it makes using
mobile designed websites more difficult.
PURCHASING
however you can sign up for their beta program from their
website.
PROS
Full web
page rendering
Plays Flash
videos/animations
Zooming and panning
capabilities
CONS
Non-standard interface design is obtrusive and
limiting
Can't access Start menu
Can't minimize application
Start
menu, Power, and OK hardware buttons are disabled
Can't
block flash videos
Can't
copy/paste content or URLs
| Value |  |
| Ease of Use |
 |
| Features |  |
Overall |
|
It is pretty impressive to have a Windows
OVERALL IMPRESSION
Mobile browser that renders full sized web pages in
a manner that you can jump to and zoom in on
specific sections of the page. The in-page Flash
implementation is also very impressive. Skyfire
certainly makes browsing desktop-designed web pages
easier than it is with Internet Explorer Mobile.
disables a lot of standard Windows Mobile features
and thusly makes using your device in general much
more difficult and frustrating. Hopefully,
Skyfire can fix these problems before releasing
the first non-beta version, which will be 1.0.
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