Do you own a Windows Mobile phone? Do you want to watch Hulu and youtube in your browser? Then you should be interested to hear that Skyfire is finally out of beta as of this morning. Now, I will be honest: I’m not a huge fan of Skyfire. Or, at least I wasn’t a fan of the beta. Has it improved enough to deserve space on your device? Read on for my first impressions.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of how it looked in beta, so you’ll have to believe me: it was ugly. Jagged, nasty, blurry fonts, slow rendering, constant disconnects, it was a very poor experience. So I had low expectations when I hit up get.skyfire.com for the final version.
The difference between the .9 release and 1.0 is like night and day. The jagged, blurry fonts are gone, and the rendering is much faster. Zooming in is a little bit fuzzy, but very readable. My favorite part is that I finally got Hulu.com working! Whoo hoo! Videos played fairly smoothly, though I wouldn’t want to watch a whole episode that way…on a tiny screen you can only blow it up so big, and it’s still awfully small.

Skyfire also has a (in my view) slightly gimmicky homepage that shows you twitter and facebook feeds as well as general news feeds. It is a cool idea, but there is a saturation point where finding the same information one more place just feels redundant. There’s Facebook for Windows Mobile, there’s several Twitter apps, plus mobile websites for both of them. Having all that on the homepage is nice, but is it necessary? That depends on your individual needs.

Check out the screenshots below. Skyfire is free, and I highly recommend at least seeing if you like it on your device. It works on all Windows Mobile 5/6 Standard and Professional versions, as well as Symbian (Nokia E and N series).