I’ve been using Skyfire for a while now and I’ve been pretty impressed so far (especially as they added Silverlight support for the Olympics) – although I’d used it initially on a 3G Touch device I’ve been using it a lot recently on my trusty 2.5G non-touch Shadow smartphone and for most things it’s become my browser of choice.

The good news is that there’s now a new release (with no waiting list for folks in the US if you’re not already on the beta program).

As well as the Silverlight support (I can now show people the Silverlight powered slideshow of my car on my phone!) it has improved performance and stability (as any new release should) and has added a really handy combined search/address bar (similar to what appears on Chrome or in Internet Explorer if you type a “?” followed by the words you want to search) to get you where you want to go quickly.

It still has some small hiccups with sites requiring text entry (though again that has improved significantly in this release) and performance with really interactive / Ajax heavy sites suffers because of the network and translation lag – but it does a better job than any other browser I’ve tried on a Windows Mobile phone up to this point.

They set out to bring the PC web experience to the constrained mobile platform and while the iPhone may get a lot of credit for their WebKit implementation Skyfire opens up options for plugins such as Flash and Silverlight that may be slow in coming to other platforms.