Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon diamond from pocket now calm and in this video we're going to take a look at the new version of skyfire version 1.5 let's zoom in on the screen a little bit skyfire like opera mini uses server-side rendering to pull down pages more quickly than you would get with say opera mobile that said the rendering fidelity isn't always as good but as sky fire continues to mature the the rendering fidelity is getting better and better so it says do you want to be the default browser I'm going to say no and let's get right to it we see a cleaned-up interface that we're going to cover in more depth in a minute let's just go to a website let's go to pocketnow.com see how long that takes two to load up on the screen and here we go ok so that was about seven seconds or so I remember opera mobile on this device the hd2 took about nine or ten seconds so still significantly faster and we should be able to rotate to go into landscape here yep there we go and we can move around on the screen although with skyfire 1.5 we can remove these top and bottom bars if we go into the settings here and go into full screen mode and then you get a very opera mobile like view so we have just one button in the bottom right corner that will open up everything else very similar interface now and it's a good interface so we can move around on the screen by tapping and dragging we can double tap on a particular column by double tapping and it reflows the column quite nicely and quickly we can move down the page seems to have stopped loading here oddly we'll have to test that out with another page and see if it's just an issue with this site or if it's common to other sites let's go into this permalink alright so that was about six seconds pretty darn fast and we should have some flash video on this page of course skyfire supports flash video which is one of its claims to fame so let's press play and see what the video playback will be like Oh up there comes I muted it on you ok it's trying to come through that time is also very functional Roger I got it fine ok so it's a it's reason it was it's pretty smooth let's stop it will try going to hulu in a minute first let's try another website let's go to engadget a nice long website all right here it goes for this I think we go back into portrait fast screen rotations ok here it is that was a little bit longer at about 11 seconds let's move down the page and sort of see how the content looks looks like we need to zoom out a little bit we can tap on the zoom button down here to have more precise zoom controls though oddly it seems to be stuck in the zoomed in position and it may look better if we go into landscape and it does it probably didn't actually switch internally to to portrait when I did it so we can go down the list we can see all the content let's see what happens when we go really fast we get the checkerboard of course so it's really trying to catch up and there it goes opera mobile 10 in particular has done a really good job it's sort of eliminating or reducing the amount of times that you see the checkerboard which really helps because you want to be able to move around a webpage fast with the content just being there without having to wait for it to load so very nice the rendering fidelity is great as mentioned we can zoom in on a column and it will reflow the column to make it more clear or we can actually use these more precise zoom controls although it seems to make sense to actually double tap on the column so let's go to another website let's go to youtube and here we go alright that came up very fast about five seconds so we have a big old advertisement there at the top let's just tap on any of these videos and bring it up and see what the quality is like playing youtube video directly from youtube com rather from the embedded player all right here is the video and it should be loading it's on mute let me take off trying to go fulfill string that I don't think start to work on this browser so you so you get the idea of video is quite smooth let's try fulu which i don't think is going to work in fact it hasn't worked in sky fire at least for for me for a while now and sky fire 1.5 is a bit buggy i've been typing in hulu and trying to get the page to load and it's just not going for some reason let me try again we get this little swirl and this is the third attempt to load the site and it just keeps spinning and spinning and stand then it stops so obviously there are few bugs still skyfire 1.5 and i just loaded up amazon again so you can get a sense for how a common page looks when you're using skyfire very smooth it's a very simple front page and of course we can go into landscape and that makes it look even better double tap to zoom in refocus is quite nicely let's go back into porch and take a look at some of these menu items to see what we have here of course we can go into full screen mode which hides to the top and bottom bar we can click on history which will actually pull the history from the skyfire server and present it to you an actually a little kind of website so here we are in all my browsing history and there was a link to hulu maybe it will work now okay so here we are on hulu and there should be some video showing up here this is loading video and see what it says unfortunately this video is not available on your platform so it can't play who a video let's go back into the settings here the menu we can mute the audio we can share the page send it via SMS and so forth leave a few settings here we can show page drag controls we can set sky fires the default browser and we can search at a search bar on the home screen if you use the standard default windows mobile today screen I just tapped on advanced settings let's see what's in there and being clear cookies is clear history and hint for a mobile version of pages so nothing too extensive in there we can go to help get some information and that's really it overall skyfire has nice interface changes but it's still a little bit buggy it does some weird things sometimes it doesn't load a webpage sometimes tapping on history doesn't get you history but overall it's a step in the right direction and hopefully a few bug fixes will make this skyfire version as bug free as previous versions plus this new awesome interface that's it for now