SkyFire: Full-Blown Browsing on Phones?

It's still early on the first morning here at Demo 08, but so far, the product that's intrigued me most is Skyfire, a browser for Windows Mobile phones that promises to bring real PC-based browsing with all the trimmings to the phone.

I say "promises" because it would be a mistake to come to any firm conclusions about it based on a demo. But it does look pretty cool. In the demo, Skyfire execs went to ESPN.com, Facebook, and YouTube, and everything they showed worked. The experience looks a little like the iPhone's version of Safari--you see shrunken versions of full Web pages, then zoom in on sections of the page until you can read the type--but unlike Safari, Skyfire claims to support any sort of rich media and any sort of interactivity you might come across on the Web.

The DEMO demo didn't touch on how Skyfire accomplishes this. But this Webware post by Rafe Needleman talks about how Skyfire does what it does. It's a proxy browser: When you go to a site, Skyfire grabs it on a server, crunches it down, then sends a miniaturized version to your phone. Done well, that would mean that big fat Web sites might perform adequately over a wireless connection, and that the phone browser could replicate media experiences without having to explicitly support every plug-in out there. But it's not a given that Skyfire will be able to do it well (Rafe rightly points out that if the service gets a lot of subscribers, it won't be a cakewalk to make it work well for all of them, since it'll involve intensive server-side work.)

Proxy browsing is an old idea--the original version of the Palm Blazer browser did it years ago--but Skyfire is the first attempt I've seen to do it in a way that's built for modern phones with good screens and reasonably high-speed connections. Even in the demo, it wasn't flawless--YouTube video was much choppier than on an iPhone. And I'm curious whether something like Google Apps would be even remotely usable. So I'm very curious about trying Skyfire out for myself. (And asking its inventors how they plan to make money and when the software will go into public beta--other topics which they didn't address in their demonstration.)

More details once I have them...