Today marks the release of the official Skyfire Beta for Android. As a reminder, we found Skyfire for Windows Phone to be the fastest web browser available for the platform. This is because Skyfire (like Opera Mini) uses server-side rendering to do the heavy lifting, sending compressed (already-rendered) information to your device. The Android version of Skyfire adds some unique features like an embedded video player (but it doesn’t do flash, sadly), mobile-view quick toggle, and a way to get a full screen view without the Android notifications bar. While we found the browser to indeed be very fast, it also feels very much beta. The pinch to zoom worked, but not as well as the stock Android browser, and the text-reflow functionality also wasn’t up to par. That said, you can grab the Skyfire beta for free from get.skyfire.com through your Android phone. Be sure you check off “Allow non-Market apps” in your settings!

Also, if you want to see Skyfire compared to the stock Android browser and Safari on the iPhone 3GS, fast forward to 5:25 in this video from TechnoBuffalo: