Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon benetton from pocket now calm skyfire is finally out of alpha and now into beta and ready for you to download let's take a look at how it works so for those of you that don't know skyfire is a browser like opera mini that uses server-side rendering to do all the heavy lifting on their computers rather than on your mobile device which is kind of limited in processing power um so what that means is that page load times are dramatically quicker so if I tap on a link here and i'm using the hd2 just to show an example let's see how fast it was and it's done usually paid look page load times come in under seven seconds on the Windows Phone version so we are really curious to see how skyfire did with our Android implementation which just today came out of alpha so I'm going to unlock the screen and let's zoom in here now sky fires change the logo for their program it's kind of nice over here all right and here we are in sky fire so the first thing I'm going to do is load pocketnow.com see how long that takes okay and it's it's done that was almost as fast as the hd2 a little bit slower so we're starting out in a very zoomed out view I haven't set that way and then of course we can zoom in if you're using an Android to point out or above device you can use the multi-touch to get more precise when you're zooming or there's a little zoom tool you can use that I have hidden right now if you do not have an android 2.2 bucks so rendering fidelity is quite fantastic let's get in on a headline and see how fast it loads the next page okay there we go okay good again that was about seven seconds now unfortunately skyfire did not come out of the gate with flash support in some of their windows mobile builds they did a flash support but it has a really cool video function let me show you what that looks like so I'm going to zoom in and go to this HTC Desire review which I know has some flash video and by the way it does have a support for the accelerometer so we can go into landscape and we keep it in portrait so now the browser is going to detect that I've got some flash video embedded within this page I should see a pop-up within a few seconds maybe not so I'm going to press the menu button down here and it's actually not working what it should be doing and it's done this in the past is that you get a little video pop up here and you can actually play the flash video in a dedicated skyfire flash video player so let's go to youtube.com and probably demonstrate that a little bit better there okay then here we are loading up YouTube and by the way there's a really cool toggle up here that will let you switch between the desktop Android and iPhone version of a particular website and lots of websites have mobile-friendly pages that you can that you can load so let's zoom in and go to a video I'll just choose this one okay see I got a pop-up right there and it's telling me that there's a video on the page I cannot play the video within the page but I can play it within the special skyfire video loader so it's going to download the video all right and here comes the video oddly it doesn't show up so maybe dance a video that doesn't work very well let's go back to the previous page and click on another video maybe there was a problem with that video or maybe that's just a bug here in skyfire beta again we get the video pop up so I'm going to tap play to go into landscape okay so perhaps that was a problem with just that video as you can see the video is coming in quite nicely so a pretty cool feature a way that skyfire actually strips out the video from the page makes it accessible simultaneously while I'm down here you can tap on the share button and share any of these right to Twitter or to peep it really pulls from your device and it knows that I've tweed Royd installed I Facebook installed i peep installed so you don't have to actually go to the websites you can use the native applications that are built into your device there's also an explorer button down here which I don't find myself using too much it'll search the internet for a similar content to what you're looking at right now so I'm going to hide this bottom bar just by pressing the menu button and let's go back up here to some of the settings so if I tap on the arrow I can go to forward find on the page select text let's go into settings so from here we can disable that little toolbar that you saw earlier so I can check or uncheck that I can show the status bar at the top this is really cool so you can get a little bit more screen real estate you can't do this in other browser applications on Android so I'm going to leave the status bar turned on shows you the skyfire version you can tap on browser settings to determine how your initial zoom is so I haven't set on far I like to have an overview of the page before I get started with it standard zoom controls which will show you the plus and the minus on the page you can change your start page that change the default of how it should load whether you should see the desktop version first or the mobile version and some other stuff for loading images and JavaScript let's see how it does with multiple tabs so I'm going to tap on the tab button click on new tab and I'm going to open up pocketnow.com another thing I want to mention is that the bookmark tab over here inherits your bookmarks from your device so I've already set up a few bookmarks in the stock android browser skyfire is inheriting those which is nice so here we are on pocket now calm it's a second tab we have opened and I can tap on this tab go back to YouTube they say you can have up to eight tabs open but I'm going to say that if you do that the performance of the browser is going to degrade pretty quickly so I'm going to open up a third let's go back to engadget again really really fast page load times and I'm going to go back to pocket now and as you can see it's already getting very very choppy in fact I'm going to exit out of one of those and only have to open so overall I think the beta for skyfire on Android is quite good it lives up to the expectation that skyfire should be fast that said navigation the multi-touch support and the reef lowing of text columns still needs a lot of work I don't think it's good enough yet to be my daily browser I'm still going to stick with the standard Android browser which you know just does a tremendous job both in speed and navigation here's here's pocket now calm I can just be so much more precise but that said if you want something fast especially over cellular network then the sky fire is the way to go you can go to get that skyfire com to get it and we'll post a link on pocket now calm on other resources relating to sky fire that's it for now