Alternative mobile browsers tested: Skyfire vs Opera Mobile vs Fennec vs Safari vs Internet Explorer vs BlackBerry

OS: Windows Mobile and Symbian S60
Version tested: 1.1.0.13052 on WinMo
JavaScript benchmark: 14,659ms
Acid3 result: 52/100
Get it from: m.skyfire.com

Skyfire renders pages on its own servers, and then displays them on the phone, so it can bring full versions of Web sites to your phone's screen insanely fast. Although it did poorly on the Acid3 test, Skyfire is one of the few browsers that will render complicated Web sites on your phone so they look just as they would on your PC.

In our tests, Web sites looked accurate, but heavily compressed. Text and images both looked like over-squished JPEG images, which made small text hard to read.  We were able to interact with Flash banners and movies -- Flash reported our version of Flash Player as 10.0.12.36 for Windows Server. Videos, however, were jerky and very heavily squished, often out of sync with the sound, and we couldn't open them in full screen.

On our test phone, the Toshiba TG01, Skyfire itself wasn't attractive -- icons were grey and compressed looking, not shiny and smooth. But we appreciated how the user interface stayed out of the way -- menu buttons were compact, and it was easy to hide the address bar away and get it back again.