The Flash video drought has come to an end thanks to the excellent new SkyFire app, but as we found out, there is far more to this app than internet video.
By Leo Stiles
The web went bananas the other day when the news broke that a Flash playing app was going to be released for the iPhone; after all, the fact that it was going to be approved by the Flash-averse Apple was something of a minor miracle. The app called SkyFire was finally released and naturally we downloaded a copy to see if it delivers on its promise.
The first thing that must be said is that this app is no mere video viewer; it’s actually a fully fledged web browser that is both easy to use and makes Safari look like the tired and underdeveloped application that it is. All the standard features are there: you can bookmark pages, open a number of different pages at a time and all the regular touch-screen gestures work just fine. The overall surfing experience when using SkyFire was very quick and not only did it perform better than Safari but it also outperformed every other other iPhone web browser we’ve tried, including the pretty speedy Opera.
The feature set of SkyFire is bursting at the seams and one of the best examples of this is that not only can you run the browser in mobile mode (which is standard for Safari) but you can also choose to load sites as they would appear on a desktop browser. We loved this feature as the mobile versions of sites are often stripped down affairs which sometimes lose a large amount of the content and flexibility offered by their desktop cousins.
Facebook and Twitter are also integrated into the browser and you can finally shout about your latest internet discovery from your phone using your preferred social network. The Twitter integration is especially good as it shortens URLs for you automatically, so tweeting using SkyFire is a real pleasure. Facebook has been given a lot of love here too with the button that allows you to launch your Facebook page with one tap of your finger.
The search functions of the browser are also a step ahead of the competition and give you a choice of Google, Wikipedia and a video only search. The video search is limited and only seems to show about eight videos per search. Much more impressive is SkyFire’s keyword search which searches the web and breaks down results into websites, images, trends, tweets and video. This keyword feature also analyses the web page you are looking at and comes up with suggested keywords to find more content related to what you are looking at.
Now that we’ve shared our love of SkyFires’s browsing, you might be wondering about the app’s headline feature; its ability to play Flash video.
Whenever you view a page that has a Flash video embedded, the app will display a little screen icon down at the bottom of the window. Tapping this button brings you into a loading screen where the video is converted and buffered.
Naturally there is a pause while the conversion is done on SkyFire’s servers before being streamed back to you in iPhone friendly HTML5 video.
When we first played a video there was only a short pause and then everything went fine but as the day wore on the pauses became longer and the playback suffered crashes and we thought it was our internet connection playing up again.
It turns out that SkyFire has been something of a runaway success already and the amount of people viewing videos has put their conversion servers under some fairly crushing strain. The result is that video playback will be pretty hit and miss for the next few days as they upgrade their service.
So is SkyFire worth the €2.39 asking price? Yes, with bells on, we’d say, and even if the app did not allow you to watch Flash videos, we would be happy to pay twice the price for the best web browser available for the iPhone. Now where is the iPad version?
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