Skyfire Supports MS Silverlight
cellphones.ca is reporting that Skyfire supports Microsoft Silverlight, which, for all you Olympics fans, means you can watch streaming video of the Olympics on your mobile phone! And yes, I was actually watching the .01 second victory by Michael Phelps on my mobile phone, as pictured.
While it did play as well as could be expected, the browser did not complete playing the video–it unceremoniously crashed after a few minutes. Screen rotation along with slightly tighter zooming would make the video much easier to watch.
I also ran into some “activation” niggles as well, since I recently swapped SIMs in my Nokia N95 8GB. I had to “reactivate” the phone and was reminded that I could only have one device at a time using Skyfire. Why, exactly?
Anyway, clearly the browser has some promise if it can play Silverlight.
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Tags: browser, nokia, Olympics, skyfire Fnord
Comment by Jared Eldredge
“it unceremoniously crashed after a few minutes. Screen rotation along with slightly tighter zooming would make the video much easier to watch.”
1. mine crashes sometimes too - i find it does so when using wifi much more than when using 3G/EDGE. you should try using 3G/EDGE instead, for me even EDGE streams video nicely (i watch hulu with great audio and 10-15 fps video over edge all the time)
2. want screen rotation? then rotate your screen! you’ve got an n95 right? slide the screen into landscape more and the browser follows suite. personally i installed rotateMe to take care of this (i actually opted for the 1.5 version, without the automatic feature using the accelerometer - i like to explicitly press the rotate buttons) - but you don’t NEED anything special for screen rotation, it skyfire uses the system APIs for orientation.
3. tighter zooming? you mean more zoom levels? ‘tighter’ wouldn’t suite me well, since hte ‘tightest’ zoom level would show only half the video. i find the 4 zoom levels they give us to be more than adequate, i just wish it was easier to control where the center point of the view would be: sometimes i scroll that zoom-box around haplessly trying to get it centered on a video, only to end up with a little bar of web-page visible on the top or bottom of my screen.
“Anyway, clearly the browser has some promise if it can play Silverlight.”
err… ok? i’m glad there is competition to flash, but i hardly ever see silverlight content online. do you really rely on it so heavily that this feature makes/breaks the browser for you? sure, i see WMV (gag me) and Flash content all over the place - and Quicktime too… and skyfire handles all of these formats perfectly…. well, so that’s what i would have said in your article - “WMV, Quicktime, Flash and even the seldom seen eclectic little Sliverlight as used to stream the olympic games”.
-bit
Comment by PhoneBoy
Silverlight is not a make-or-break feature for me, but it does show that it can handle streaming media well.
For me, a “tighter zoom” would mean making sure as much of the screen as possible was the streaming video. 320×240 screen doesn’t have a lot of pixels and I’d rather not waste them, thanks
It’d also be nice to see better handling of the network conditions. I’d rather not use EDGE if I’ve got WiFi. Ideally, it should be able to cope with switches like most other S60 apps do.
The app should have a screen rotate built-in. This isn’t that difficult precisely because it can be done by other things in the OS (or third party apps).