In some ways, Skyfire had gotten a little ahead of itself. It was based on a solid server-side optimization model, which compresses websites—including Flash and Flash video—to speed up loading over a mobile connection. As advanced as its rendering powers were, it had some glaring problems. One higher-resolution screens, which are common on Windows Mobile phones, the text looked fuzzy and pixelated. The interface was functional, but a bit small and convoluted in places, which made it a chore to use on some touchscreen phones. Scrolling was kludgy, and zooming was haphazard. Cue the version 1.5 changelog:

• Full VGA Support. Skyfire now provides native support for the VGA and wVGA resolutions as seen on many recent Windows Mobile phones.
Smooth Scrolling. Kinetic scrolling has been added to Skyfire. Flick and you will see that scrolling has become very smooth.

• Finger friendly UI. There are many UI updates to enable finger friendliness, increase the ease of use and add a bit of fun to the Skyfire experience. We updated as well the start page to be simpler-to-use with high-resolution devices.

• Full screen mode. For touch screens we have a mode that will completely remove all UI elements from the screen to provide maximum visibility onto the page. Tap the bottom right corner to bring back the toolbar.

• Auto-Move text entry. This keeps any text entry box visible when the virtual keyboard is used. This convenient feature assures that web site forms are easy to use, in case the SIP (i.e., virtual keyboard) covers it.

• Latest versions of Flash 10 and Silverlight. 1.5 has been updated to the newest and most stable versions of both rich-media formats.

• Performance enhancements. Both Skyfire's client and servers have been upgraded for faster, more responsive browsing.

The best thing about Skyfire hasn't changed: It's free. [Skyfire]

HandMarket App Store: Handmark's mobile client for their ample Windows Mobile app market has left beta, and by all counts, it was ready to: Navigation is easy, there are a fair number of free apps, and they've snagged some big names, like Skyfire and EA games. Waiting for Microsoft's official store is for chumps, I say.

Skyfire: Speaking of SkyFire (unnecessary abbreviation: "SkyFi"), they've updated their start page with new content. This may not sound like much, but anyone who's used the browser can attest to the start page's usefulness as a launch pad. Previously it featured Twitter, Facebook and others; now, there's search history, Gmail—awesome—and Facebook album previews. Free.

Terrestrica: A crowd-sourced geotagging/tourism app, Terrestrica just got a fair bit more useful with the addition of direct, location-tagged Picasa uploading and Twitter integration. The user-contributed map data is still a little slim, though.

Google Maps Layers: If you like your map overlays a little more, shall we say, filled out, Google Maps has just updated their excellent WinMo app with support for user layers, just like the desktop version has. It's had Latitude support, too, for a while now, which is more than can be said for, ahem, some other mobile platforms.

iDialer: I appreciate when my mobile apps have a sense of humor, and I can't help but think iDialer does: At first glance, it looks like an iPhone dialer ripoff—the kind of pathetic app that makes Windows Mobile users cringe, and iPhone fanboys feel warm and smug inside. But there's a minor detail that you shouldn't overlook: it's a seamless, easy to setup Google Voice client, too. Ha. It's donationware, so be generous.

SPB Radio: A tidy little radio app from a company that makes some of the more polished Windows Mobile apps out there today, SPB radio has a healthy directory (around 1,500 streams) of radio content and a slick, finger-friendly interface. The stations are free—it's a shame the app isn't. $10.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Emulator: It's a stretch for an app roundup, but everyone seems pretty curious about what Windows Mobile 6.5 is going to be like, so here you go: If you're not venturesome enough to install one of the many betas floating around to tubes onto your primary phone, have a go with Microsoft's free desktop emulator. You're in for a pleasant surprise, actually.

Office Communicator R2: Suits: Your preferred corporate communication app has been upgraded, and now you can log into your office's private branch exchange from anywhere, VPN-style. Neat, right! No? Just click next.

Bing: Microsoft has released a full, dedicated mobile app for its Bing search engine, which brings fuller phone integration, map searches and easier local listings compared to the regular mobile web interface. It's like all those Google search apps you've seen elsewhere, except decidedly Bingier.

Dorothy: WebKit has become the de facto mobile browser engine—it's the heart of the iPhone, Android and Symbian browsers—but Windows Mobile has been sadly neglected. Iris browser works, strictly speaking, but it's a little slow, and awkward to use (though development seems to have picked up as of late). Hopefully Dorothy, which is still in a closed private beta but looks fantastic, can fill the void.

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend, everybody!

(Previously)

Opera plainly states in the release notes that this is an early build of the browser, which means a few features are missing, the most conspicuous being full Flash and Google Gears support. But what what about regular browsing?

With compression on, it's fast. The full NYT homepage, images and all, loaded in 10 7 seconds flat over 3G. Formatting is basically unaffected by the optimization, and the sacrifice in image quality is, while noticeable, not that bad. With compression on, though, the browser is crashy, occasionally poopin' the bed when directed to more complicated sites, like Giz.

There are other issues, like near-total lack of support for nonstandard software keyboards in Windows Mobile, and a broken rotation function. But it's a beta, and so far, so good—if 9.7 turns out as good as it sounds like—and now, looks like—it will, it'll give Skyfire a run for its money and/or debilitating kick in the junk.
[Opera]

The release notes point to a few major changes from earlier versions of the browser, emphasizing better text rendering, faster startup, easier controls and improved compatibility with complex AJAX-driven pages like Facebook and Gmail. To be honest, the changes aren't massive, but a few of them make noticeable differences.

Rendering quality was never an issue with Skyfire, and it's hard to discern any huge improvements on this front. Pages are still compressed server-side, which keeps things moving quickly. As a result, pages load extremely fast—I was able to pull down the Giz frontpage, flash ads and all, in under 20 seconds—but image (and unfortunately, text) resolution isn't as high as it would be on an uncompressed browser like Opera Mobile or Mobile Safari. Thankfully, 1.0 is optimized such that even zoomed-out, smaller text is mostly legible, and in a welcome improvement upon the betas, instantly becomes clear when zoomed.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.About that zooming: controls have been spruced up all around, especially for touch users. Previous versions of the browser suffered from awkward zooming quirks and poor text reflowing, but these issues are by and large resolved in 1.0. Double-taps behave much more predictably, and most sites are easy enough to traverse thanks to smoothed-out panning. You can also click without zooming in, which Skyfire will usually interpret correctly.

Flash video viewing has always been Skyfire's banner feature, allowing users to watch native video embeds and services like Hulu on their phones, but it's largely unchanged for version 1.0. Playback is still smooth and loading is quick enough, although taps have a tendency to misregister, meaning you're better off initiating flash video with the browsers onscreen mouse cursor and a d-pad, assuming you have that luxury.

It's not quite perfect, but in the disparate, but as far as Windows Mobile and Symbian browsers go, it's as close as you're going to get. Well, at least until Opera Mobile 9.7 comes out.

On the rumored BlackBerry version of the app, Skyfire has issued confirmation that they're "planning" one. Funny, since we've already seen it. For now, you can download Skyfire for Windows Mobile or Symbian now by navigating to get.skyfire.com on your phone's browser. You'll have to uninstall any previous versions of the browser before you can use 1.0—annoyingly, there's no direct way to upgrade. Release notes below. [Skyfire]

What's new:

Thumbnail interaction. Now you can click on links immediately after the page loads without having
to zoom in. This enhancement is especially helpful for high resolution phones, and for familiar sites
where you know right away where you want to click. It makes getting to the content you want on
the page simpler, quicker and more efficient.
Improved Zoom. Double-tap or double-click to zoom over any element, including links, images or
videos. The zoom interaction is smoother and more responsive as well. Best of all: when you zoom
in you will get readable text instantly (beforehand text was blurry and took a while to become
sharp).
Enhanced Navigation. When you navigate back or forward, you return to the last viewport (e.g.
zoom level and portion of the page). Thus eliminating the need to pan and zoom into the section
you were viewing on the previous page. We remember even the viewport when you select a page
from your history. We have also added shortcut keys, (9) for forward and (7) for backward
navigation.

Improved page handling. Enhancements have been made especially for AJAX-intensive sites such as
Facebook and Gmail. If larger parts of the page get updated then the client will more quickly and
accurately reflect this.

iFrame handling. We have a solution for full-width iFrames in Skyfire
Fast start. We changed both the sequence and behavior of the Skyfire launch so you get started as
quickly as possible. You can type a search or URL in the Superbar while Skyfire is connecting in the
background. You can put Skyfire to work before the start page is even loaded. Plus, we've improved
connection performance.

Reconnect to last state. When you leave Skyfire in the background Skyfire will disconnect to
preserve battery life. Once you come back to it (after minutes, hours, days) it will reload the same
page to the same zoom level and focus. Thus you can continue right where you left off.
When you exit and start again, Skyfire you will always land on the start page.

Connection helper. We have a new mechanism in place to detect when connections cannot be
established to Skyfire servers. If this is due to a network configuration (common in GSM land), then
we provide suggestions to help out. This is especially useful if you are with a carrier/data plan that
places restrictions on certain APN configurations, which interferes with Skyfire.

Enhanced search results. Google results now include video, news articles, local results all blended
on a single results page and ordered by relevance. Vertical search categories are still available.
Improved RSS feed search. Find your favorite custom RSS feeds through the improved Add-Feed
feature, found under the Customize menu on the start page. Search by site domain, feed URL, or
even topical keywords.

Easier sharing of RSS items from start page. We've exposed a simple "Share this article" link below
each RSS story displayed on your start page to make it easier to share interesting items to Twitter
and Facebook

Remember last connection (Symbian only). Skyfire can now remember the last connection for you,
so you will not have to choose a connection every single time. In addition if you want to change the
connection type while you are in Skyfire you can do so.

Known issues in this release

HTTP Authentication (e.g. the native browser dialog that asks for username and password when
going to certain sites) is not supported.
Text entry into Flash or Silverlight plug-ins is not supported.
Skyfire does not support ‘local storage' mode for plug-ins. Thus the following will be affected: Netflix
media player, Pandora media player, Rhapsody media player.

Symbian's dominance isn't evident here in the US, as it's driven by smartphones—like Nokia's N series or Sony Ericsson's P Series—that don't really have much of a market/mindshare outside of Europe. We've even gone so far as to declare it too marginal to include in our smartphone OS guide.

But there are still plenty of UIQ and S60 phones around, and they all suffer from the same sense of staleness—a stagnation that's obvious, whether it's because of Symbian's global popularity and fragmented nature or despite it. So what do you do to shake the feeling that you're toting a last-gen device? Try this:

Get a new browser
Oddly enough, lots of Symbian phones actually ship with not-so-bad browsers, like S60's, which is based on WebKit just like Mobile Safari and Mobile Chrome. Unfortunately, most of these phones also ship without touchscreens, and depend on a clunky d-pad navigation system. This makes panning around fully-rendered pages a bit of a pain—a problem not helped by the browser's often slow performance. Luckily, there are plenty of alternatives.

Opera Mobile/Mini: Opera has made an appearance in every last one of my smartphone revival stories, and with good reason. Each version offers its own advantage for Symbian: Opera Mobile brings fast-ish full-page rendering with inertial scrolling—only really a boon if you're lucky enough to have a touchscreen handset like the XpressMusic 5900. The newer 9.5 beta, complete with Google Gears support, can be had for UIQ phones, but S60 handsets will have to settle for 8.65. Opera Mini, a Java app, will work on virtually any phone. It's not the prettiest browser, but server-side data compression and clever formatting tricks make it a good fit for smaller-screened Symbian hardware. Bolt is another Java-based browser in the same lightweight, data-conscious vein, and it matches Opera's app feature for feature. You know, six of one...

Skyfire: This surprising little browser takes the Opera Mini/Bolt rationale a little further, running everything through server-side compression, including Flash video. What does that mean, in a word? Hulu. Unfortunately support is limited to Nokia N and E series phones.

Work On Your Communication Skills
Out of the box, most Symbian phones take you as far as emailing. With a few downloads, though, you'll be privy to the same range of messaging capabilities as your smug iPhone and BlackBerry-toting friends, and then some.

Fring: This isn't your locked down, Wi-Fi tethered iPhone Fring. No, this is the real deal: Multiprotocol IMing, VoIP over 3G and Wi-Fi and most importantly, background processing. Skype is supported, sans video.

Truphone: A dedicated VoIP app that integrates rather seamlessly with your S60 handset, Truphone can save you a pretty penny on international, long-distance and even in-plan calls. By routing calls through Truphone's network over Wi-Fi or a cell data connection, Truphone can connect you to other users for free, and connect international calls for a few cents a minute. Other perks include voicemail-to-email forwarding and Google Talk support, but discounted calls are the star of the show here.

Agile Messenger: It may lack the VoIP accouterments of the previously mentioned apps, but for straight up instant messaging you really can't beat it. All the big protocols are here, accessible through the same simple interface. You can send videos and voice messages, but not engage in full conversations—this app is about messaging, and message it does.

And All The Rest
Once you've updated your browser and messaging software, you've edged much closer to a modern smartphone experience. Now to fill in the blanks:

Google Maps: Google's superb maps app is as good here as it is anywhere else, with GPS integration, local search and a clean, intuitive interface. Perhaps most importantly, it's not just for fingers; Google Maps is well-suited to d-pad navigation.

JoikuSpot Lite: It's tethering+1: Any Wi-Fi-equipped S60 3rd Edition phone can operate as an access point with JoikuSpot. The Lite version is free, and adequate.

Qik: Qik is a cool app that can only be described in ways that sound utterly stupid. Lifecasting? Live vlogging? Either way, with the right phone, Symbian can do it well.

Nokia has some ongoing beta projects to check out, and a few of them are worthwhile. SportsTracker feeds a GPS-tracked record of your run or bike rides to a handy web interface. WidSets is a widget dashboard for a rich variety of web apps. ShareOnline provides basic portals for media uploads, whether it be photo, video or audio content.

And finally, we have Mobbler. A lovely little Last.fm radio client, Mobbler is an iffy addition to this list because Last.fm is cutting off third-party radio support at some point in the near future, so it probably won't work for long. But it's good, so use it while you still can.

If what you see so far isn't overly heartening, hold on: The Ovi App Store for S40 and S60 is on its way, hopefully in May. Symbian's laissez-faire take on the App Store, it promises a slew of applications and media downloads, installable through a handset client. This could end up two ways: As a consolidated Symbian app aggregator, collecting the above apps and others into an easy interface, or as an attraction for new developers, who'll be drawn by the large audience and easy publishing features of the store. That latter scenario may be better, but neither is bad.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Work rules, lame carriers, prohibitive contracts—whatever the reason you're shacked up with a WinMo phone, you've been through the same experience. You toil with the layers of menus, hidden device settings, poor browsing and crashy, inconsistent performance. Surrounded by fancy, shiny phones with even fancier, shinier OSes, you're even getting a bit jealous, and feel like you have a genuinely last-gen device. Well, as Windows Mobile enthusiasts (who are out there in droves) will tell you, it's not that terrible. With the right apps you can get quite a lot of utility and—yes—enjoyment out of your aging phone.

For God's sake, get a new browser
Internet Explorer Mobile, even in its latest incarnation, has rarely been described as "good." In fact, it's pretty much the complete opposite. No worries though—Windows Mobile, through third parties, has the broadest and most versatile collection of browsers of any of its competitors.

Opera Mini/Mobile: A Java-based browser, Opera Mini is a free download that will immediately give your phone a new lease on life. Fancy this: Now, with your phone, you can visit actual websites, rendered to a reasonable degree of accuracy! OH MY GOD!

There's also Opera Mobile, a native app with a few more advanced features, which has recently shifted its emphasis to a relatively narrow set of touchscreen devices (mostly from HTC and Samsung), on which it performs as a reasonable counterpart to Safari Mobile or Chrome Mobile. It's free when it's in beta, but will cost you for long term use.

Both browsers Opera Mini routes content through Opera's servers for optimization and compression, which can occasionally break formatting. Update: Opera Mobile runs independently of Opera's servers, though there is noticeable compression performed—presumably locally—on some images.

Skyfire: This upstart company has produced a phenomenal browser, dedicated to bringing a full desktop browsing experience to Windows Mobile phones. This powerhouse app is now available to the public, and lives up to most of its claims.

Skyfire routes web content through its servers like Opera Mini does, but with a greater emphasis on exact page reproduction. For the end user, that means fully optimized streaming Flash video, which will allow you to watch everything from Hulu to Megaporn—all automatically transcoded into a lower, EDGE or 3G-appropriate bitrate. Skyfire works wonderfully on most WinMo phones, touchscreen or not, but its version for VGA-resolution phones needs better visuals.

TorchMobile Iris: This is another browser that claims to bring the "desktop experience" to your phone, and for the most part it does, assuming your phone has a touchscreen. It got its start on the LG Dare, where it performed relatively well. In short, this WebKit-based browser render quite well, but it's not terribly fast and the navigation paradigm isn't the most intuitive of the lot. But! It's free and it's not Mobile IE, and for this I am grateful.

Give your old phone a new look
This is where Windows Mobile feels the most out of date; its interface is a classic example of design by committee, only this time the committee was made up primarily of the visionaries responsible for Windows Bob, Windows ME, Windows Vista and possibly the Pontiac Aztec. The solution? Skin it.

PointUI: About a year ago, our own Jason Chen raved about PointUI, and not much has changed—it's still fantastic. This layer, not unlike those designed by HTC, Samsung and Sony to mask WinMo, will provide pretty, finger-friendly navigation to a touchscreen Windows Mobile phone. It looks like the project is on temporary hiatus, but the app is still available here.

SPB Mobile Shell: This one isn't free ($30, actually) but does provide a fairly complete conversion. It reaches deeper into layers of the interface than PointUI does, is a bit more friendly for QWERTY-based phones and offers a load of user skins.

ThrottleLauncher: HTC's TouchFlo 3D is a wonderful Windows Mobile shell, but unfortunately can be difficult to port due to its 3D acceleration requirement. ThrottleLauncher is a TF3D replacement, which works on most Windows Mobile touchscreen phones. It looks like TF3D, and offers skins to look like Android, iPhone OS and others. There are a fair number of bugs present, but they're tolerable.

Fill out your app list:
Most of those things that modern smartphones have—the swank maps, the messaging services, the productivity apps—you can have too. They may not be as polished, but they work very, very well.

Google Apps: Aside from plethora of mobile web apps offered by Google, there are a few native ones as well. Google Maps is a must-download, and provides almost all of the functionality of its iPhone/G1 brother, including GPS integration. Google Mail provides a nice, speedy interface for your Gmail account, offering relief from Windows Mobile's occasionally frustrating mail app, and allowing for relatively easy switching between accounts.

Skype: Here's an area where Windows Mobile generally trumps all others OSes—voice over IP. The native Skype app is lovely, functioning well over Wi-Fi and cellular data connections, provided your carrier allows the latter.

Palringo: Palringo is a multiprotocol IM app, which enables messaging on many networks at once in a single program. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ—they're all there. Like any decent IM app it works with the WinMo notification system and runs in the background, so you can be constantly apprised of your new messages, just like those smug BlackBerry users. In fact, I think it's fair to say that in the area of messaging, Windows Mobile shines. Similar, also good: Fring.

TCPMP Media Player: Its development has been discontinued, but the app is perfectly usable as is. What is it? It's a barebones media player that'll handle almost any codec, audio or video, that you throw at it. In other words, you can encode video for mobile consumption however you like, something that can't be said of most other OSes (cough*Apple*cough).

Pocket Scrobbler: An unofficial client for the fantastic Last.fm internet radio/social network service, this app will handily stream endless, personally catered internet radio over a cellular data connection or Wi-Fi. Windows Mobile actually has a distinct advantage with this type of programs: the ability to run apps in the background!

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

As you can see on the left, page rendering still isn't quite at Mobile Safari or Opera levels, but it's a massive improvement over IE5. Inertial scrolling is solid, and the (limited) flash support is a pleasant surprise. Text wrap and zooming haven't been fully sorted out yet, so pulling out on a page often leaves paragraphs wrapped for a higher zoom level.

If these problems are addressed — and I fully expect them to be — Microsoft could have a winner on its hands. Even as is, it's a colossal step forward for Mobile IE, and one that will at minimum bring it into the same generation as its competitors. [MSDN via Slashphone]

* Improved fidelity (support for full fidelity desktop rendering)
* Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen (text wrap)
* Enhanced Script and AJAX support (Jscript v5.7 from Internet Explorer 8)
* Improved multimedia experience (Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 for Adobe Flash content)
* Deeper integration with search
* Enhanced cursor navigation model
* Touch and gesture support – pan support
* Multiple zoom levels
* Easy switching between mobile / desktop versions of sites by specifying UA strings.

The browser still supports dynamic AJAX content, Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media, but our hands-on attempt in watching a YouTube video started well but ended poorly. Skyfire is still (and will always) render stuff on the server side, which will lead to good compatibility but poor speeds, if your phone isn't pulling and rendering down the images fast enough. On the whole, we like 0.8 a lot and things are improved all around, but there's a reason why it's still in beta. [Skyfire]

Click here and drop in the code GizmodoAUG. Let us know how it goes, 'specially the NBC Olympics stuff since Skyfire is pimping it pretty hard.

Skyfire Mobile Browser Satisfying Hunger for the Olympics with Live Access to Olympic Footage from NBC's PC Website

NBC-Universal is offering an unprecedented amount of video footage of the summer Olympics from Beijing on its website NBColympics.com. While Google, Yahoo and even NBC have limited mobile offerings, the Skyfire mobile browser, currently in private beta, has full access to all of NBC's full-PC site including access to full video. Skyfire users can not only see highlights of Michael Phelps' first medal-garnering performances, they can watch live as he swims toward his next gold.

In addition to being the only mobile browser that allows full access to the NBColympics.com site, Skyfire has also added a widget on its launching page, linking to video and picture slideshows of the latest from Beijing. This custom blend of images and video is updated through RSS several times a day, making Skyfire the best way to follow the Olympics from a mobile device.

Skyfire is the only mobile browser which supports full Flash, which is the most popular online video codec. Fans of the Olympics who watch the games at home on their desktop PCs, probably had to download the Silverlight plug-in in order to view the video. Skyfire added Silverlight support seamlessly, without its users having to install a new plug-in or even update the browser version.

The Skyfire browser is currently in private beta on the WindowsMobile and Symbian platforms.

[Skyfire]

US readers only (sorry), click here to sign up and enter the beta code: gizmodo, all lower case. You'll get a text message with a download link. Let us know how it goes! [Skyfire]

Unmentioned in Laptop's piece is that the Skyfire browser actually shows you a page that has been pre-crunched by Skyfire's servers, so it's essentially showing you an image. And yeah, since the browser itself isn't doing any heavy lifting, it's going to fly. But stuff like text entry is annoying, since you have to input text, send that back to Skyfire, and then it comes back to you. Flash works the same way, but hey, at least it does flash. We're not really sure what's up with Opera Mobile 9.5 taking twice as long as Safari to render a page, but maybe that's 'cause it's big boned feature packed. [Laptop Mag]

Because the page is like an image, you can pan and scroll around fast and easily, but zooming in and out is a bit clunkier. Typing in a text field requires you to type something on Skyfire's text input, then sending that to Skyfire, then sending the resulting image back to your phone.

Although it touts Flash video, support, watching YouTube videos is still more like a fast slideshow than an actual video—though most of the video quality depends on your connection type and speed. It's no iPhone Safari browser—and probably will never be because of the fact that rendering is done off-phone—but it's a reasonably close approximation for now.

* Multi-line text entry (2,000 character limit)
* Auto-complete text entry
* Paste into URL or search
* Ability to delete bookmarks
* Multiple zoom modes for touch screen phones
* Double tap to Zoom In and Zoom Out
* Support for custom virtual keyboards (SIP)
* Web search shortcut in softkey menu
* Access to the Windows Mobile Taskbar in softkey menu
* Persistent settings for SmartFit, Mute and Zoom size
* Support for 12-key and ½ QWERTY devices
* Password masking
* Backlight usage based on system settings
* OK button sends Skyfire to the background

[Skyfire]