Looks like the legions of iPhone users are pretty keen to get Flash video on their device with news that Skyfire 2.0 mobile web browser has effectively “sold out.” Within five hours of being released on iTunes, the Skyfire Flash video solution shot to the head of the top grossing app list and third highest paid app overall and overloaded the Skyfire servers, leaving potential buyers staring at the “Please Upgrade Flash” message while the folks at Skyfire Labs scramble to increase capacity.
The browser was able to get approval from Apple since it doesn’t actually process the Flash video on the device. Rather, the video is rendered at Skyfire’s servers and re-encoded in a HTML 5-compatible format before being relayed to the phone. For this reason, although they’ll be able to view Flash video, iPhone users still won’t be able to play Flash games or view any other type of Flash content.
Skyfire is a fully-fledged Webkit browser built on top of Safari. The browser also includes a couple of other nifty features including multi-tab browsing and an “explore” feature that analyzes a webpage for key search terms to make it easy to search for related content. Returned searches can then be filtered by content such as videos, images or tweets. Users can also share content via email, Facebook and twitter at the touch of a button, while a Facebook Quickview mode lets users check their Facebook Wall without opening another app or page.
Skyfire 2.0 is also available for Android, while Skyfire 1.5 is available for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. When Skyfire 2.0 for iPhone is once again available, it can be downloaded from the iTunes store for US$2.99.
