Skyfire For Symbian Brought Up To Speed

Screen shot 2010-01-20 at [ January 20 ] 8.42.16 AM

Between UI enhancements, bug fixes, and neat new features like smooth scrolling, Skyfire has been slamming out the updates as of late — but only for one platform. While the Flash/Silverlight-capable mobile browser is available for both Windows Mobile and Symbian, the latter edition hasn’t seen any updates in months… until today.

Just minutes ago, Skyfire pushed version 1.5 of their browser out for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition phones. This update makes Skyfire for Symbian a feature-for-feature match with its WinMo counterpart.

So what’s new? Two things, primarily: the UI has been tweaked dramatically to be less stylus-centric and more finger-friendly, and they’ve added “Kinetic scrolling” (a fancy way of saying “it scrolls like the iPhone”) to both the S60 3rd and 5th edition releases. The S60 5th edition release, however, gets a few bonus tricks: full screen browsing mode, and accelerometer-based auto-rotation.

If you’ve never checked Skyfire out, it’s absolutely worth a look. It pipes the web through a remote proxy before sending it to your handset, shrinking everything down to a more mobile-friendly size. In the end, that works out to faster page loads than you might see elsewhere – oh yeah, and a little something called Flash/Silverlight playback support, which is still a mostly mythical beast in the mobile world.

You can get skyfire at get.skyfire.com