Skyfire for Symbian gets less attention?

When the news about Skyfire is now available for Symbian platform broke out about a week ago, I thought that somebody at PalmAddict will post the news up, but it went by silently. And even Skyfire posted up the news in their website nearly a week after a Symbian users website posted it.

What does this mean? Does the Symbian platform is not as interesting as other more popular platforms like Windows Mobile, Mac OS X Mobile (iPhone), Palm OS, etc.?

But that doesn't make any sense, with Nokia as the major adopter of Symbian platform, Symbian is practically one of the most used mobile platform in the whole world. With the enthusiasm from PalmAddict's readers that have been posted by Sammy ever since Skyfire first released, I thought when Skyfire made available of its private beta for Symbian S60, many will talk about it.

On the contrary, I found it the other way around. Yes of course, the Symbian users websites and forums are swarmed with the beta testers' opinion & reviews. But on other non-Symbian users sites or weblogs that I've visited, I don't see any mentioning of the new popular web browser that runs on Symbian phones.

At first, I thought maybe that's because the Skyfire web browser for Symbian is not that different from the one that's designated for other platforms. In fact, it's sharing the same v0.6 beta number with the one for Windows Mobile. So maybe that's why there isn't much to talk about anymore... But upon deeper examination, I see another factor that might be the reason for the silent exposure:

Skyfire is an alternate mobile web browser, a second choice from the already embedded mobile browser of your mobile phones. It's like Firefox in desktop, where you usually install and use it seperately. So for Symbian-based mobile phone owners, like Nokia, Skyfire is an alternative choice from the Opera web browsers (Opera Mobile & Mini). Which Opera is the most dominating mobile web browser in Europe & Asia, where Nokia's influence is more widespread there.

Can Skyfire manage a strong foot-hold in the Symbian platform land? With the free beta version, Skyfire is gaining fast popularity, but what if the final version is a pay per license web browser like Opera Mobile 8.65? Even Opera is seeing Skyfire's free beta tactic as a threat, and so far the Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta is also offered free.

No words yet from Skyfire about the future release after this beta version, all we know for sure is that Skyfire still has a long way to go until the final version (v1.0) reached. Like what Tracy Demiroz (Skyfire's Marketing - VSC Consulting) has mentioned in a quick interview with me, in my previous post here at PalmAddict.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]