Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon miniman from pocketnow.com the skyfire mobile browser is now available for your iphone and ipod touch it allows you to play flash video in the browser there's a lot of caveats to it though and we're going to cover all of that in this video so let's take a look so starting off skyfire will cost you two dollars and ninety-nine cents of the sky fire caused us the early adopter discount implying that the price is going to go up in the near future maybe 25 dollars or so by the end of this video you'll know if you should be spending your money on sky fire or waiting until it gets a little bit better so sky fires main claim to fame is that it can do flash video it can't do any other kind of flash so you can't play flash games or interact with flash sites that have any level of interactivity it's video only and we're going to talk about that in this video so first let's talk about how skyfire fares as just a general-purpose browser here we on here we are on pocket now I'm going to go to the main page we're to see how long it takes to load I'm on a very fast Wi-Fi network here usually this page takes about five or six seconds to load in Safari let's see how it does in sky fire voice that was about 15 seconds so about two times longer maybe three times longer than safari we can flick down the page performance is usually good when flicking down the page once in a while it gets stuck and you may see what I mean now let's go to a page that has flash content we can double click to zoom in and it nicely reflows the column we can also use a multi-touch sometimes if it wants to behave so let's zoom in on this headline and take a look at some of the Flash content that is included in this particular post so we're gonna tap on that it's going to load the permalink there now let me talk about the buttons along the bottom while that's loading so we have a button + button here just like you get in Safari you can add a bookmark you can share it use Facebook quick view this one over here is pretty cool it's kind of like a rate related content tool and if I tap on it the button will intelligently look at terms on the page and within this page we had some content about the droid two so it picked that out and if we tap on droid two it will take you to another page that will try to query the web Twitter and YouTube and all kinds of places for information about this term kind of a cool way to get more information about something so here we have a video of the droid to some pictures of the droid to some news swipe to the right to filter it out by videos or trends tweets or images so just a cool feature if you want to find more information about a particular topic so we're going to dial back here and see how the page has progressed so here we are on the page and when you get flash video on a particular page the way that skyfire tells you is that there's a little picture of a video down here if you tap on that it will bring up a preview of the video and when you press play it's going to play it in the sort of skyfire video player and we're going to cover video with another site one that has more action because this particular video doesn't have much action so let's go to the tab management and we're going to open up a new page and the new page defaults to my dot skyfire com which will show you some well optimized sites that you should use when you're using skyfire so if you're south park studios which is a place where you can go to get all episodes of south park is optimized so we can go into landscape although sometimes it takes a good three or four seconds for skyfire to respond and let's try to watch an episode of south park here so i'm going to press play looks like i missed that that's on a carousel zoom in go down to any old episode here and let it load up now again we see an hourglass down here it's going to turn into a video sign implying that we can actually play some of the video on the page here still thinking I guess I'll continue along the bottom since we stopped with the related video there's the pop-up we also the tab management this is your bookmark manager and of course the back button so here we are will click press play and try to play this this video of South Park rendering video on the skyfire player for the Flash content takes a long time sometimes up to 30 45 seconds in fact sometimes I wish I would just stick to the Safari browser because that uses the dedicated YouTube player it takes you out of Safari but it's still a lot faster than this is so I'm going to I'm going to come back when this is ready to go so you can get a sense for the video quality of this flash player in sky fire and about 30 seconds later it says unable to play video now this has been happening all day with South Park's to do so we're gonna have to go to another site to show you what the video capability looks like so again we're going to open up my sky fire calm and scroll down to one of these let's go to say mtv music videos those are flash base so we can presumably watch a music video here on the iphone so it's a loading and we've got some things going on let's try to find some music videos so then zoom in over here I see it says full episodes maybe we can see an episode of the jersey shore or something like that so nice you're going to stop it because it's taking a little bit too long so we're in tap on full episodes see where that takes us there's a little Settings button up here and from here you get a little drop-down you can load the page as desktop or iPhone view turn on and off private browsing and go into some basic browser settings so here we are full episodes let's zoom in world of jenks and let's try to play this video right here on the iphone so it says video requires latest flash player and it looks like the Moodle video icon is going to pop up because you get the hourglass so that's good okay so here it is video we're going to press play and see if we can watch this episode of world of jenks it's flash video on the iphone here's another instance of where the video is not playing so it looks like we're not going to have good luck today and getting this to work although this is probably indicative of sort of the the beta likeness of this program it's not really ready for prime time we'll give it one more attempt at another website will go to abc.com which has some video of course here we go we're going to watch episodes again so try to zoom in a little bit and tap on that let's see what we can do here Dancing with the Stars sure why not all right it says you know back here it says download the free ABC Claire to watch the ABC shows on your on your iPad I don't have an iPad here so I want to actually dive into this video although usually when you see this screen it means it's not going to play so I'll cut back in a second and maybe it'll play but probably not okay good we're going to get some video here finally Dancing with the Stars it is buffering and loading hopefully the focus clears up a little bit and let's see what the quality is like with Dancing with the Stars flash video through sky fire let's take a look following episode is presented with little diversions by North America's number one rated ski resort okay so here is a commercial which should give you a sense of the video quality the quality got to tell you is very poor it's very pixelated in fact looking at youtube videos through safari is a far superior experience to looking at flash video here on skyfire screen rotation is slow overall we can't recommend that you pay money for skyfire right now its buggy it's slow it doesn't play flash video that well it doesn't let you interact with Flash content you're better off sticking with safari for now and waiting until this gets better because right now it's just not ready for primetime so unfortunately we can't recommend skyfire please thumbs up to this video if you liked the idea of flash video in an iOS device and thanks for watching that's it for now