Skyfire unveils iPhone-like browser for smartphones

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 04:52

Your IT - Mobility

Another smart feature of the Skyfire browser is that it allows users to not only bookmark pages as with any browser, but can also bookmark a specific spot on a page, allowing the user to quickly come back to the content on a page they’re most interested in, be it stock quotes, sports scores, blog messages or other information – and do it all in one click, without needing to zoom in or out, or navigate up or down.

As you’d expect, an iPhone-esque ‘zoom’ feature is also available, easily expanding part of the content on screen to fill the screen – something we’ve seen in the iPhone’s mobile Safari and with Opera Mini.

A ‘private beta’ of Skyfire has been announced, but so far, only US citizens with a US mobile phone number can sign up to the service. Skyfire are only covering the US at this stage, and only for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 smartphones.

A version for Symbian phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others) is due ‘in the next few months’, and ‘other geographical regions’ besides the US are due in that timeframe, too, although by then we will have seen just how well, or otherwise, Skyfire fares with US consumers.

So, for non US users, and for US users without a Windows Mobile smartphone, Skyfire is all still a bit ‘pie-in-the-sky’.

But it certainly holds great promise, and is undoubtedly causing Apple, Opera, Firefox and others to wonder whether the latest mobile browser company to come from out-of-the-blue truly can set the mobile browsing world on fire – or not!