Skyfire Web Browser for iPhone review

Skyfire, is a web browser app for the iPhone which has amongst other features has the capability to playback Flash videos (see below for limitations) on your iPhone, which has been a highly requested feature and not doable without some form of jailbreak until now. The Skyfire iPhone app has been submitted and been “approved” by Apple and is now in the App Store. The Skyfire team has developed the iPhone version of the app using Apple’s requirements to ensure it gets approved, mainly by using h.264 adaptive streaming and the Safari WebKit browser core.

Flash videos in Skyfire are converted to HTML5 videos in real time which helps reduce the data sent through by about 75 percent on average. Skyfire uses cloud-computing technology which routes you matching video quality feeds based on your connection speed (WiFi/3G/Edge) for the best user experience.

Watch flash videos that normally aren’t available on a webpage. To use, navigate to a page with a video, wait for the popup to appear, then touch the play icon to watch it.

Keep in mind that the browser from Skyfire isn’t able to play Hulu videos, flash games, nor is it be able to render Flash files used in websites for navigation. Other notable Skyfire features include a related content icon for discovering matching news, tweets and videos, sharing for posting stuff you like to Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Skyfire uses a black color theme with an array of buttons and navigation items for searching the web, bookmarks, multiple windows, videos, history and navigation. A user-agent switching feature in Skyfire lets you browse pages optimized for the iPhone or full-websites, great for users of MySpace or Hotmail for example. A private browsing feature automatically wipes out all your history and trails while you browse.

Update: Skyfire is now available for download in the App Store, sells for $2.99 and early reports are coming in that it may be pulled from the App Store. Be sure to grab your copy today.

Update 2: “Sold out” Skyfire has decided to remove the app from the App Store temporarily while they add more servers to their system. So here’s the case of too much success, within 5 hours, “Skyfire for iPhone became a top grossing app, third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category.” You can read more about the issues they are facing.

Here is a video demo of the Skyfire for iPhone app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Skyfire Web Browser for iPhone was written by Joe Seifi on November 3rd, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Productivity, Utilities, Video. Page viewed 7420 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.