There are also no hotkeys to go to the start page or to your bookmarks. I realize that there are only 10 keys available, but surely page up and down and returning to the start page and bookmarks are more common actions than saving a new bookmark or entering a URL. I'd really like to see SkyFire do something like Opera Mini which has both one key shortcuts and two key ones invoked by pressing * or # followed by another key. I hardly ever use the menus in Opera Mini because everything is just a click or two away.
Battery Life
The technology that is so good at rendering complex animation and video, also seems to require a constant connection and generates constant traffic between server and client. This obviously increases power consumption. My N95 gets noticeably warm just browsing the web with Skyfire without even viewing any videos. That doesn't happen with Webkit or Opera Mini. I didn't do a formal battery run down test but my battery lost about 25% of it's charge in just 30 minutes of surfing. Skyfire has made reducing power consumption a major goal in the development process. Starting with this release the browser drops the connection after the user is idle for five minutes and reconnects when a key is pressed. Further optimizations will be needed before my phone's battery will get through my typical day of a couple hours of browsing while simultaneously using the music player plus the odd phone call or text.
Connection Issues
SkyFire doesn't manage connections very well on S60 phones. There is no way to set a default access point for native applications within the OS and SkyFire doesn't have an access point setting either. So SkyFire prompts for an access point on startup. Lots of apps do that and I actually like it as it makes it easy to use a faster WiFi connection when available. The problem is that SkyFire prompts three times during startup while other apps only prompt once. Plus, SkyFire closes the connection after five minutes of inactivity to conserve battery power. When you wake SkyFire up it tries to reconnect and again prompts you to choose an access point three times. And when using WiFi, reconnection almost always fails for me, prompting indefinitely for an access point without ever reconnecting.
Another connection related issue is that SkyFire uses non-standard http ports (reportedly 1321 and 4243) so it won't work on many mobile networks that require traffic to pass through a proxy, including Spain's Yoigo and the lower priced data plan from T-Mobile USA. These proxies only pass traffic to "well-known" ports like 80 and 8080. The nonstandard ports also keep SkyFire from working with some public hotspots.
Conclusions
SkyFire is in many ways the most exciting new mobile browser I've seen this year. The ability to watch just about any web video simply doesn't exist with any other mobile browser, not even Safari on the iPhone. But at this point, SkyFire is quite immature and needs a bit of work before I can recommend it as a general purpose browser. Of course that's why it's in Beta. In fact, most of the issues I've mentioned above are acknowledged by the SkyFire team and are being worked on. Download SkyFire and use it. You will enjoy the experience, especially with video. If you find something that doesn't work right or is harder to use than it should be, do SkyFire and future users a favor and report it on the SkyFire Beta Forum . You can log into the forum with the email address and password that you registered SkyFire with. If you haven't registered, you should. Your bookmarks are stored on the SkyFire servers and will be lost when you upgrade to the next Beta release if unless you are registered.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 23, 2008 @ 8:15 pm
7 View Comments
