Skyfire's Symbian beta means for Opera

On Thursday, mobile browser start-up Skyfire announced the opening of a private beta for the Symbian Series 60 (S60) platform--nearly a week after a Symbian users Web site busted the news. Skyfire is positioned as a resource-light Web browser that relies on Web servers to deliver a desktop browsing experience. I covered Skyfire soon after its initial Windows Mobile release and agree that it has a nice design and good potential; however, with rendering and crashing issues, it's not nearly ready for open beta. That's too bad because adding an identical build for Symbian means that Skyfire has two platforms in private beta with some tall performance hurdles to leap.

Opera Mini, Opera Software's build for Java phones and BlackBerry, has pretty much dominated alternative browsers in Europe, but Skyfire could destabilize that position. As a direct competitor to Opera Mobile 8.65, which sells for $24, Skyfire's free beta brings a few advantages to the table. It's true that Opera Mobile 9.5 beta is also currently offered for free, but with its Symbian build also in development, there could be an interesting battle over Symbian owners. Pricing isn't the only point of comparison between Opera and Skyfire. Opera wants to bring Symbian owners the "authentic" desktop experience through a rich client and Skyfire will attempt to do so by pulling data from its servers.

In addition, Skyfire supports Flash and Ajax, two Web technologies common to desktop browsing that have not been available for mass users, though other mobile browsing companies, including Opera, plan to include at least Flash support. So far, Skyfire's choppy video rendering hasn't been as good as other third-party video solutions, such as vTap.

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