The Wireless Weblog

At the DEMO 08 conference in Palm Desert this week, Skyfire unveiled its new mobile browser which supports all Web technologies, including Flash, Ajax, Java, etc. — and thereby offering a much more user-friendly Web experience than any other mobile browser currently available.

InformationWeek's Eric Zeman was blown away by a demo of the software he saw last week. "The speed was incredible," he writes. "The demonstrators took it through its paces, showing me Web sites that are full of Flash animation. It displayed all of the sites quickly and without stuttering or delays."

Brighthand's Ed Hardy notes that the browser's speed is the result of caching on skyfire's part. "One of the reasons this browser is so fast and full-featured is it's server-based," he writes. "When you're opening a Web page with your smartphone, it's actually being opened on a Skyfire server, which then sends an image of the page to your device."
Or, as Crave's Rafe Needleman puts it, "The Skyfire app itself isn't a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats — like Flash, Java, and Ajax — that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can't. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays."

The browser, which can be downloaded for free, is now in beta. It's currently limited to Windows Mobile devices, though support for Symbian and others is in the works.

More here from SlipperyBrick … more here from CrunchGear … more here from IntoMobile … more here from PDAStreet … and the press release is here.

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