Skyfire

The mobile Internet Explorer Web browser you get on Windows Mobile smart phones is less than desirable. It usually directs you to a mobile Web site instead of the full-blown interactive ones that we access on our computers. Sure, Microsoft has announced support for Silverlight and Flash in a new version of mobile IE by the end of the year, but we’re in the heat of the summer and December still seems light years away. Fret not, there are other options.

If you grabbed the new iPhone, you may be impressed with its 3G data speeds. But is Safari better than other free smart phone Web browsers out on the market? We put the Apple Safari browser running on the 3G iPhone head to head with Opera 9.5.1 Beta and Skyfire Beta (free for Windows Mobile phone users), to see which browser is fastest, and which offers the richest browsing experience.

We used an AT&T Tilt for both Windows Mobile browsers, and put it head to head against the iPhone while both had full 3G signals. Read on to see a video of the race head to head, results from our Web site tests, and our thoughts on each browser.

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Adobe announced this morning that Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite 3.x for future versions of its Internet Explorer mobile browser as well as Reader LE for viewing Adobe PDF documents on your mobile handset without needing third-party software to do so.

In the past, Flash Lite 3 support has been limited to handsets running Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 and Qualcomm BREW. Users with Windows Mobile 5 may have had experience playing Flash Lite 2.1 on their phones, but it wasn’t an optimal experience because it didn’t support FLV files on Web sites. Flash Lite 3 was launched in October 2007, adding FLV support, as well as a 15-20 percent increase in ActionScript performance, and a 20-30 percent increase in rendering performance. It now supports most Flash 8 content available on the Web. For more changes between the versions, check out Adobe’s version comparison Web site.

The announcement means that consumers will have a richer out-of-the-box browsing experience, although Adobe wasn’t clear in naming which version of Windows Mobile Microsoft would include Adobe Flash Lite. If you’re antsy to view Flash Web sites on your mobile phone sooner, we suggest signing up for the second Skyfire beta, a browser that already supports Flash and provides much faster browsing speeds than IE mobile does.