Skyfire beta updated to 0.9 with added features

Today, Skyfire have released the 0.9 Beta for Windows Mobile and Symbian. The most noticeable change is a real-time activity wall that aggregates customized feeds from news, media, Facebook and Twitter. It’s preconfigured with feeds from Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo! News – all displaying real-time updates on the start page. You can easily customize it and add feeds from your favorite websites. Just launch Skyfire, and at a glance you’re connected with fresh content that’s relevant to you.

If you have a Facebook and Twitter account, you can import your news feeds and Twitter streams into Skyfire and easily publish your status to your friends. You can also share and publish any web page to your Facebook and Twitter streams by simply going to the share menu in the Skyfire browser. This means that now you can share any web content from Skyfire either one-to-one via SMS or share one-to-many via your social network.

We’re enabling interactive social browsing – videos not just plain text – just like you do on your PC. Mobile browsing has been about viewing web pages. Now, for the first time, with Skyfire, it’s about staying connected with your friends in real time – both share and receive.

In this release, we implemented a great solution for reading large text areas like blogs and news articles. Now, Skyfire automatically adapts the font size in large copy blocks so once you zoom into the copy you can read it without the need to horizontal scroll. This is a major boon for usability because we are solving the challenge of rendering web text designed to be viewed on the PC to be easily read on the phone. It solves the complexity of supporting a multitude of screen resolutions across various phone models. Skyfire gives you the best of both experiences – video and text – whether you are watching a show on Hulu or reading an article in the New York Times.

Skyfire 0.9 supports Windows Mobile WVGA and WQVGA screen resolutions so that means Skyfire runs on many new popular phones such as the Samsung Omina and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

In addition, the Skyfire Symbian client for Nokia E and N Series phones has been much improved. We significantly reduced the files size and improved installation so it makes for a much simplified experience.

Go to get.skyfire.com from your phone or PC, to download Skyfire Beta 0.9. Please keep your valuable feedback coming to us in the forums or to [email protected].

To read more about Skyfire Beta 0.9, please see the release notes.