Skyfire Mobile Browser

Experience the world’s hottest mobile browser with Skyfire 2.0 (BETA) for Android. Check out the all new SkyBar™ which features: Flash Video, Explore Content, and Social Sharing of Content.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Finally play Flash Videos on mobile web browsers!
• Choose to load full desktop webpages or mobile optimized versions
• Multiple window browsing (up to 8, easy toggle)
• Pinch to zoom (on Android 2.0 and above)
• Clear session history easily upon exit to maintain anonymous browsing

Cons

• Claimed super boost in web browsing speed was not there
• Some Flash video sites show “Install Adobe Flash” versus sniffing out the Flash vid
• Voice Search gone

Features:

Skyfire Mobile Browser Android App brings full web browsing to mobile phones on many platforms and now on Android. The key feature it offers over any other Android Web Browser currently is the ability to view Flash Videos (something missing from fully capable mobile web browsers for some time now). Now you can play sports highlights from ESPN, news clips from the New York Times, high quality Vimeo vids, and music videos from Vevo (although I still found quarks in playing back some of these Flash video websites… says “Install Adobe Flash”).

Incorporated is the SkyBar along the browsers footer which entails: Video, Explore, and Share. Video sniffs out Flash video on a webpage and pops up a window when/if it finds a Flash video it can play. Explore searches trending topics based on the topics you’ve recently searched or created. Filtered are Videos, Trends, Tweets and Images. Share pops up easy sharing via other email and social apps installed on your Android phone.

A cool feature allows you to toggle browser HTTP Header types you send to a webpage; sometimes you may want to full desktop version and not be forced to view the mobile-only version. Or you may choose to view the mobile-only version for faster page load and less scrolling… either way it offers that choice by tapping the Android-slash-monitor icon in browser header.

Like other awesome browsers for Android it supports Pinch to zoom (on Android 2.0 and above), Copy and Paste, Find on Page, multiple window browsing, Bookmarks, Downloads, even a Report Broken Video feature.

Gripe Alert: Like Opera Mini for Android is supports cloud browsing, meaning webpages and assets like images are compressed on Skyfire’s servers thus sending you a smaller, faster to load page offering a boost in browsing speed; however it was not experienced in our evaluation. It was similar if not slower than the default Android browser.

Video Review: Skyfire Mobile Browser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbePzC574L4

Usefulness:

The app is very useful for its core capability of mobile web browsing and puts the icing on the cake with all the goodies like full web browsing, playable Flash videos, content exploring and social sharing features.

Frequently Used:

If used as your default web browsing it could potentially be used multiple times daily.

Android Advice™: How to Set Skyfire as my default Browser?

Easy way: when first installed, any action that requires a web browser such as web link or Google search will prompt a window asking which browser you would like to use. Check below “Set as default” then choose Skyfire.

More involved way: say you chose the default browser when presented with the popup and want to change it later. Go to Settings from home screen » Manage Applications » Browser » tap Clear defaults » visit a URL or search to get the popup to return and follow the easy way above.

Android Advice™: I’m asked which web browser to use every time I search or click on a link, how to I remove that?

When more than one application type such as a web browser is install on Android, it gives choice on which you would like as default. See above how to set default browser.

Interface & Ease of Use:

Operating the user interface is slightly clunky but an adjustment will have you mastering it.