Skyfire mobile browser recieves $13 million in funding
For those of you who don’t yet have an iPhone (like me), and are using a phone running Windows Mobile 6 (also like me) Skyfire is currently your best bet as a mobile browser. Much like the iPhone’s Safari browser, it renders websites like you would see them on your PC. You can zoom in to a page with a double tap and navigate around in a similar method to Mobile Safari. Instead of relying on your phone’s processor to render the pages, Skyfire uses a novel idea. The skyfire uses server-based rendering of the page, which is rendered to what I’d imagine is a basic Jpeg image of a page with hotspots that you can click on. This allows for faster and better quality page rendering than you’d get with something like pocket Internet Explorer.
Unfortunately, on my T-Mobile Shadow, the beta version is slow, and takes a long time to load a page, but it does support flash. I’d imagine that on a 3g phone performance would be far better. Even with these speed problems, it has absolutely become the default browser that I use on a daily basis, as the quality of the page rendering is far superior to that of anything else on the platform.
So, when Techmeme referenced a GigaOM article that Skyfire had recieved $13 million in venture funding, I was really happy for the little browser that could. I’m hopeful that Skyfire could solve some of it’s speed issues with more and faster servers, as well as optimizing the code so that it runs faster on some of the slower Windows Mobile phones, and you could see Skyfire becoming the dominant browser on the Windows Mobile side of things. The beta versions have been getting faster as the updates come, so I’m hopeful about this.
I had also heard rumors that Skyfire would be the default browser in the non-carrier specific version of HTC’s super-sexy Touch Diamond. That phone is 3g, and has a superfast processor as well as a GPU. I’d imagine that a tailor made version for that phone would be 100% the equivalent of Apple’s Mobile Safari. Possibly even better seeing that Skyfire does support Flash and Flash Video.
If you have a Windows Mobile 6 phone, I definetly urge you to sign up for the Skyfire beta. You won’t regret it.