Skyfire Labs is serious about mobile browsing. Skyfire 1.0 was already good at displaying desktop Web pages and streaming video. The new Skyfire 1.5 is a significant upgrade that remedies nearly all of the original version's flaws. It's a godsend for Windows Mobile device owners and even superior to Opera Mobile 9.7 Turbo.

Features and User Interface
Plenty of new features grace the new version. First up is VGA (640-by-480) and WVGA (800-by-480) screen support. Skyfire 1.5 can now take full advantage of the high-resolution screens on devices like the HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC Pure. There's a whole new rendering engine under the hood. Skyfire Labs also revamped the user interface. The company added more finger-friendly buttons, a full-screen mode, and the ability to pan or flick the screen to move in multiple directions.

Skyfire 1.5 works on Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x devices. It comes in touch screen and non-touch screen versions for Windows Mobile, as well as for Symbian smartphones like the Nokia E71. To download Skyfire 1.5, head to get.skyfire.com from your phone's current browser. I tested Skyfire 1.5 primarily on an HP iPAQ Glisten—ick—on AT&T's network; the Glisten features a 2.5-inch, 320-by-240-pixel AMOLED resistive touch screen. But we also used it on an HTC Imagio and an HD2, showing it works on high-resolution, large-screen phones. Fire up Skyfire 1.5 for the first time and you'll see a revised Start page. It offers quick access to bookmarks, history, and e-mail and social networking accounts. Interestingly, you can post status updates directly to Facebook and Twitter from here, without logging into the mobile sites or running local apps. A top address bar does double duty for URL entry and search, along with a Refresh icon. The bottom toolbar features five additional icons: Back, Home, Zoom, Bookmarks, and Full Menu. Overall, the UI looks good. The chrome disappears whenever you load a page, letting you utilize the entire screen for browsing.

You can flick pages around for easy scrolling. Pages have inertia, so they roll to a stop once you let go. The zoom controls are basic plus and minus signs, which make it easy to get just the right text size. Skyfire is smart enough to move a text entry box so that you can still see it, even after you pop up a virtual on-screen keyboard and accidentally cover it. The Settings page is fairly sparse. It lets you display drag controls when viewing a page. It also lets you set Skyfire 1.5 as your device's default browser, toggles a search bar on the Skyfire home page, and clears stored cookies and history with single clicks.

Performance and Conclusions
In a series of performance tests on the Glisten, Skyfire 1.5 simply flattened Internet Explorer 6 Mobile, Windows Mobile 6.5's stock browser. Skyfire Labs optimized Skyfire 1.5's server connections to speed up page rendering and overall response times, and it shows. Over a Wi-Fi connection, Skyfire loaded the desktop USA Today home page in 10 seconds, the PCMag home page in 15 seconds, and the New York Times home page in 16 seconds. Compare that to IE 6 Mobile, which took 13 seconds just to return cursor control on the USA Today home page (on the way to a 72-second total load time), and 50 seconds to return cursor control while loading the PCMag.com home page (on the way to 118 seconds of total load time).

Skyfire uses a sort of optical illusion to appear to load pages quickly: it only loads what you can see. So screens appear to render very snappily, but as you scroll around, the browser has to head back to the network to grab other parts of the page. On the Glisten's fast Internet connection that wasn't a problem, but there can be a noticeable delay over EDGE, as we found on our HD2.

Note that just during those quick tests, IE6 crashed once. It also hung up on a dialog about sending information to the Internet, which required three attempts to click through. And it never did finish loading the desktop New York Times and Hulu.com home pages, even though I tried clearing cookies and restarting the device.

Desktop HTML pages looked accurate; Skyfire 1.5 handled complex rendering tasks with aplomb. YouTube videos played smoothly; with a little fiddling, the app figured out I wanted a full screen view and delivered it. Hulu videos still wouldn't play, though.

Skyfire isn't perfect. Most notably, it's dependent on access to Skyfire's own servers. If you can't get through to the mothership, you can't browse. That happened several times during this review. (Skyfire Labs is aware of the problem and working on it.) There's also still no tabbed browsing or multiple window support; Skyfire 1.5 remains a single-tasking browser.

Windows Mobile device owners now have several options. Opera Mobile 10 Turbo (Beta) is still free, even though the old 8.65 app used to cost $24. Opera offers industry-leading page rendering and a tabbed interface, though it lacks Skyfire 1.5's Flash, Silverlight, and streaming video support. Internet Explorer 6 Mobile supports basic Flash, but it's plain slow and still chokes on complex desktop HTML elements. Both Opera and IE6 render pages locally rather than relying on a central server, which helps when scrolling around long pages. But we're willing to accept Skyfire's illusionary tricks in exchange for its excellent page rendering and streaming media skills. If you have a Windows Mobile device, you need this browser.

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