Skyfire Promises a PC-like Browsing Experience on a Smartphone

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Despite how users drool over the iPhone’s version of Safari, mobile browsers still have a tough time rendering pages that with lots of Ajax, Flash, Java, JavaScript, QuickTime, and on and on. For one thing you don’t have a Core 2 Duo in that smartphone, now do you?

Today at Demo ‘08, Skyfire unveiled a new mobile browser that promises PC-like browsing on a smartphone. Skyfire is a free (for now, at least) downloadable browser. It currently works on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (PPC and Smartphone editions). Symbian, according to Skyfire, is coming soon as well as “other platforms and geographies” (PalmOS?).

In their accompanying press release, Skyfire CEO Nitin Bhanari said,

“For too long consumers have been promised the ‘real Web’ on their phone, only to be disappointed by slow rendering, error messages, no Flash support, watered down WAP pages or second-rate mobile versions of their favorite site. Skyfire has remedied those ills at a speed not seen before on the mobile platform. By extending the PC Web experience to smartphones, we fully expect Skyfire to fundamentally change the way people use their phones.”

Wait, wasn’t that Safari’s aim?

How does it work? It’s what’s known as a “proxy browser.” That means that all the heavy work is done on the server, rendered and then sent to the device. Concerns would be that you’ll see some lag problems. I didn’t see any issues in the demo (below), but that was without a large number of users that might bog down the servers.

Of course, that might be something that shows up in a beta. And Skyfire is launching a private beta soon (TBD), and you can sign up for it here. Yes, I signed up for it. Oh, Smartphones with QWERTY keyboards only in the initial beta, BTW.

Still unclear how they are going to make money off of this, but subscriptions and / or ads come to mind.

Watch the Demo (pretty cool). I was particularly impressed by ESPN as I’ve seen it crash browsers on more than one platform.