News Skyfire brings Flash video to Android

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/04/30/skyfire-brings-flash-video-to-android/1

 

Can you upgrade current Android 2.1 phones to Android 2.2?

 

I just want a htc hero firmware upgrade

 

Well, obviously the upcoming native flash support should provide a better experience when it comes to Flash based content. And I'm sure Skyfire will provide full Flash support when the flash plugin is avaiable on the android platform. But as you put it, the interesting thing in Skyfire browser is the ability to detect and transcode video on a web page to a device supported format. And this opens the window to video that would otherwise be unavailable on the platform. Unfortunatly the mobile world is still fragmented with no device that can provide the full desktop browser experience on the phone. Add to the fact that unfortunatly there is in my opinion a stupid format war on mobile devices with Apple closing support for almost any kind of outside format and also that competitors usualy delay plugin support for competitive platforms for ages, thus surfing the web ends up becoming like walking in a labyrith with dead-ends everywhere. "sorry no flash. sorry no quicktime or no silverlight, or no xvid or ogg" and so on.
And sorry but no. HTML5 is not the solution to all problems. Why? Because it takes ages to add a format to the list of supported video formats in HTML5 vide tag. Imagine if companies had to wait for the W3C to aprove the release of a new and better video codec. And thats the thing.
HTML5 video support is great because it allows content builders to have a baseline on what a user can run. But obviously some companies will want to grab user attention by using new technologies. Thats where Skyfire method may be useful. In worst case scenarios (like we have today) where there is no support for a certain video content on your platform, they'll do the job and give you at least a close version of the content.

 

Does this work with hulu? If there is a phone that plays hulu videos, that's reason enough to get one over the iphone.

 

I just rooted my Hero on UK Orange, sick of HTC not publishing proper dates and now using one of the many custom roms with 2.1 (and 2.2 once I've read into it).

 

Yawn. Had this on WinMo for months (years maybe). Works fairly well esp. for Flash but the UI is not great and looking at web pages looks like a highly compressed JPEG photo.

 

its a bit fiddly on my htc desire, not as good as skyfire on my old N96
bbc news live wont work, and all videos seem to want to load in a "new window" rather than on the web page itself.
uninstalled, ill wait for native support in 2.2

 

Seriously, the N900. It can run a (full desktop) Linux distro (Easy Debian) smoothly (Even GIMP runs fine), which implies very good things.

 

Good news !

 

You can turn them off in the options

Skyfire is better in Android than the one I used on WinMo. On WinMo, the page it rendered on their servers then shipped to you, so embedded Flash works but the whole thing is a bit crap.

Skyfire on Android feels like a native browser on the device but when they detect a video, they transcode it and push it to you.

edit: oh, and yes the N900 is pretty awesome. But there are some cool Googley things it can't do

 

Indeed, yes, but that's because which company will support the competition?

However, I DO question how these companies manage to stay afloat. Computational time and server bandwidth is certainly not free - how in the blue blazes are they surviving? Hopefully Skyfire will survive long enough to see all handhelds possessing sufficient hardware grunt to render ALL flash videos and ALL games, though!

Or when Duke Flash 10.1 Forever is released.

 

put this on my HTC Desire and it really looked good.
But then it just didn't seem slick enough and videos didn't want to load
Back to standard browser.. which is very good anyway

 

Good News. And I've N1.. will get the native flash update and froyo soon..

 

ya when I tried this on my coworkers phone it took forever to load a video and we had full 3g bars and everything, just to make sure it wasnt the network I took my palm pre plus turned on its mobile router feature and used a desktop to pull the same video over the same network and it loaded in a snap but still a cool idea but I dont think it will be to much longer before 10.1 is released anyways.