News Tags : "flash-video"

Launched in 2008, the fantastic Skyfire web browser was the first to offer Flash video playback on smartphones. It used proprietary tech to compress online video up to 75% for smoother loading and playback while making a saving on your data plan. Since then, it has become one of the slickest and most popular mobile web browsers on Android. Before now the whole app video shebang cost nada, but on its latest 4.0 instalment Skyfire has adopted the Freemium pricing model, charging new Android users a £1.81 ($2.99) one time fee to access its superb premium video feature.

To reward loyalty, existing users will get the video functionality for gratis and although the Skyfire 4.0 web browser app is still free to download from the Android Market, Skyfire virgins will, after an initial free 3 day trial period, have to make an in-app purchase of a video license key to continue accessing and watching online clips – it’s optional but surely worth the a small outlay. read more

Last Friday Life of Android gave you a heads up that Opera’s new Mini 6 and Mobile 11 web browsers were due to drop this week. At the time we didn’t have any news on features and only a rumour of an optimised tablet version to hang on. Well, now these apps are available to download from the Android Market we can give you a quick run through of what’s new in the world of Opera.

Firstly, as the grapevine predicted, both versions have been tweaked for Android Honeycomb 3.0 slates and given an overall retune with pesky bugs and glitches fixed. The overall UI design remains largely the same from the previous iterations but it’s more streamlined and modernised.

The major new feature of Android users is support for Flash video. Rivals like Skyfire and Dolphin HD have been peddling this for a while but it’s good to see Opera finally catching up. read more