Yes! Skyfire’s Awesome Mobile Browser Goes 1.0

I first reviewed the Skyfire mobile browser back last summer (check out the video demo below) and thought it was quite good. Many of you know that I use a Samsung Ace with Windows Mobile. I paid $25 for the Opera Mobile browser but frankly I rarely use Opera and have been using Skyfire nearly 100% of the time.

To be honest, the Skyfire browser freaking rocks. Last week I had a family pickup at the airport and while waiting for them to arrive, I opened Skyfire, loaded up YouTube and Hulu and watched all the videos I wanted in perfect streaming. I’ve written full blog posts in Drupal on Amtrak using Skyfire.  Oddly, I can’t seem to activate the Javascript functionality in WordPress from Skyfire.

Today the company has announced the 1.0 release of the Skyfire browser. The company notes 1 million installed browsers to-date.

The only gripe I had with the browser was that each time you loaded it, it seemed to call home and “authenticate” which meant I lost where I was. This appears to be corrected in the current release.

I still believe that Microsoft would be smart to acquire or partner with Skyfire and replace the nasty IE mobile browser with Skyfire or Skyfire-like browsing. It really makes the Windows Mobile OS much more powerful.

Here’s my video demo from last summer: