Gadgetory

what's going on everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here day by day android games market share more devices are released there's more carriers important with that comes more developers and today I am very proud and happy to show you probably the best application for Android it's been available it's called skyfire and it's a new browser I've closed you that are maybe you've used windows mobile device in the past or a few other mobile platforms you're very familiar with skyfire it was the first mobile browser that brought actually a real internet to windows mobile devices previously they can suck with a very antiquated mobile internet explorer and skyfire really brought the reel web to windows mobile and they serve carried that tradition through to android so we've got a demonstration of skyfire two point oh i'm going to show you a little bit of how it worked and do a comparison i was probably the biggest competition to see how it stacks up skyfire the way it works is actually takes the content caches and stores it on the server side and pushes it out to the device so generally that translates to a faster load time as opposed to mobile safari or the default browser that's built into android which actually builds up the content right on your phone so enough of me yapping let me show you what it looks like we'll go ahead and the launch skyfire instance got a brand new icon right there and here it is i'm fat technobuffalo already queued up so you're going to notice a few things probably right off the bat so the first thing that you're going to notice is this big navigation bar across the top and let me show you what that does so first obviously you've got your address bar back button you can go ahead and add to favorites right there you can tap it or favorites you'd like this is your tab switcher handles tab sort of interesting in a very graphically friendly way so you go ahead tabs you want find one that you like close it obviously by the X and go ahead and just keep tapping I'm one of the many really cool features about skyfire probably one of the ones that I find most useful is this next button here it looks sort of like half an android guy and half of a desktop computer and there's a reason for that those of you guys that use your mobile phone for a lot of web browsing like I do often times you're stuck looking at mobile content you have to navigate the bottom to say the view standard page button skyfire actually makes it pretty easy you can have it select mr. which way the website and the servers are going to view your device to either view it adds Android device desktop or an iPhone let me give you a quick demonstration of how that works so let me go ahead and go back to the tab switcher here go ahead and jump over to espn.com I'll go ahead and just run a will refresh it so put the X right there hit refresh I'm just going to load up espn.com the desktop version as you're familiar and as you've seen on really other devices I'll show you what that pop up was in just a minute can I go ahead and select that again and let's go to have it view as Android and will stop the load and go ahead and hit refresh and it's going to load the mobile version so immediately you see em espn.com and he gets her the mobile optimized version it's very neat all right so let me show you something other cool stuff that skyfire does we'll continue the tour odds last button here at the top is going to load all your settings forward find on page the settings are pretty similar to what you'd find on most mobile browsers it looks sort of natively Android but there's something other kind of cool and hidden as well I know your eyes are probably thinking all right good browser how does it handle Flash content that seems to be the buzz word on everybody's lips now it doesn't sort of interestingly I'm testing it here on the HTC droid incredible which natively has flash support but for using another Android device like the nexus one or the droid a stock android 2.1 phone that doesn't have flash support your sort of out of luck however skyfire has a pretty cool word around let me scroll down here we'll go to what would be a youtube video YouTube embeds obviously in flash so here it is what goes well with blackberry is dancing article post early today on nothing there to hit the menu button however you get a little icon that says video what that's going to do it's actually going to work around the Flash content and lets you load up flash a video now you can't play flash games or anything but you will be able to view really all the flash video there which is kind of neat oq it upload it play it in full screen so you can few sort of Flash content that you get with on you know MSNBC com or other sites that rely on flash for streaming video it's very neat and sort of a ingenious work around i'd say so continuing the tour down here I've gotten explorer button you can sort of explore things or people are talking about and sharing is very easy here with skyfire as well I can go ahead and send it to french stream facebook peep which is the built-in Twitter client on the droid incredible messages mail or gmail and send it off to whomever you'd like really works very well so I talked earlier about how it loads web pages and how accused things up just very very quickly and let's put that to the test so we've got probably as big as competitors sort of here and we'll line them up so you guys can see we've got the Nexus One and we've got the iphone 3gs these are all running on the same Wi-Fi network we're not relying on any sort of mobile network speeds or not going to test verizon eighteen t or t mobile we're just testing the same network speed on all devices these two here are running pretty much the same hardware a snapdragon 1 gigahertz processor the iphone 3gs is a bit older probably about a year older now and it is of course running about a 600 megahertz processor so it is a bit slower so the real test is going to be between the native browser on android and skyfire here from the droid incredible so I'm go ahead and try and refresh it at the same time or at least close the same times you can get a sort of a fair comparison we'll go ahead and launch up the menu here and we'll do the same thing on top see we can lease hit refresh here and then I'll hit refresh on the iphone to the second afterwards you can see how how that works so I hit this just about a second earlier this is off to the races and we'll hit you here on the iPhone about two or three seconds later we can see if that's were that same speed translates through so we're sort of first to see the content cued up right here you can see that video pop up like you know that there is indeed Flash content and I can already see the content on skyfire sorry load through and start scrolling and the sky fire is just about done you can view the whole site here and scroll through Android is still loading iphone still loading they're all so the going sky fire is just about done and the rest of them are still loading which is pretty true for a real world experience no sky fires down the rest when we're all done very quick as far as loading websites now how do you zoom in certainly this supports multi-touch so you've got your zoom in zoom out you don't have sore your double tap but if you want to zoom in you've got sort of your stock Android way with the plus and minus magnifying glass of there that we've seen on other Android browsers the other phone certainly if you want to zoom in and out you have multitouch and you can double tap to zoom in certainly the same thing is true with the iphone sort of pioneered that you can see sort of the same thing on skyfire so all in all in real world testing up and using skyfire for a little while it is noticeably quicker for browsing and you're getting sore that full immersive browsing experience I really like that I can set it to view my phone as a mobile or a desktop or even an iphone lot of sites hit by specific content it's just a very neat feature and something that I think sky fires did a fantastic job of implementing overall which is definitely going to be my default browser for Android and take the features that it offers are really incredible and just a very nice package for a mobile browser so what do you guys think skyfire something that you want to check out not check out sure it curious what you guys have to say anyway jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo for all of your tech news of course check out technobuffalo for exclusive content make sure to check me out of twitter twitter com / john for lakers or give TechnoBuffalo follow at quit obviously technobuffalo anyway I will see you in the next video bye bye