A better way to surf the web on your phone.

JOHANNESBURG - Video is becoming increasingly important on the internet. You need only look at the wild popularity of YouTube to see that.

But video is almost completely absent from the mobile web, due to problems with delivering it to hundreds of different types of phones with limited processing power and dozens of different operating systems and browsers. And don't mention that huge bandwidth conundrum. Imagine a few hundred users trying to stream full video in the same area at the same time.

Nearly four years ago, this column suggested that Opera Mini provided the best way to surf the internet on your mobile phone (The real internet on your cellphone ... without 3G!).

But, the world (and the web) has moved on from then. Sure, Opera Mini has evolved but there's a new kid in town. And it's blindingly fast (even on jittery 3G networks in South Africa, I'd argue).

Enter Skyfire. The premise is as simple as Opera Mini's: the PC web, real fast, and on your phone.

But, it promises to deliver proper video on your mobile phone - something Opera Mini cannot do.

Skyfire is the only mobile browser that supports full Flash and Windows Media videos, including Flash 10 and Silverlight 2.0 (this means it will allow you to playback literally any video on the web).

In a showdown test in Laptop Magazine, Skyfire beat both Opera Mini and Safari (the native browser on the iPhone) hands-down. It works on the same premise as Opera Mini: all the processing is done in the cloud (on powerful servers) and the data of any webpage (or video) is compressed and streamed to your phone.

At a pre-Mobile World Congress press event, Skyfire demoed the technology to journalists at a stand, ironically metres away from Opera's. It has over a million users.

Not bad for a startup. Skyfire staff snidely pointed out that it has a few dozen staff, compared to Opera's couple of thousand.

At that event, I saw Skyfire in action on a Nokia N-series phone running on a Spanish 3G network. To date I haven't seen a more impressive mobile browser.

There's one drawback though. Skyfire is only available for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 (on the majority of high-end Nokias) powered phones.

It's working on a version for BlackBerry, which I cannot wait for (despite BlackBerry's efforts at redeveloping its browser). And there are rumours it will have an Android version soon. That pretty much covers all the bases, seeing as Apple realistically won't allow competing browsers on the iPhone.

Obviously if you watch video all day, your data bill is going to skyrocket (with or without MTN's help), so be aware of that.

If your phone supports Skyfire (here's a full list of supported phones), get it.

You won't be disappointed. And you'll never use the default browser on your phone again.

* Hilton Tarrant travelled to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Nokia.

* Hilton Tarrant contributes to "Broadband", a column on Moneyweb covering the ICT sector in South Africa. Skyfire is the most impressive thing he's seen in ages.

Write to Hilton Tarrant: hilton@moneyweb.co.za

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