New York — Skyfire, the first mobile browser that rose to fame last year for devising an app that brings Flash to Android, has just unveiled an enhanced version for the iPhone browser that tightly integrates the Facebook experience into the app and content recommendations and more.
If you enjoy watching Flash video on your iPhone browser, then you will surely want to check out Skyfire 3.0 for iPhone, which includes many of the social-networking components for Android and iPad apps with single touch search.
Last November, Skyfire 2.0 enabled streaking Flash-based videos on the iPhone and iPod touch. The most notable alteration, is that Skyfire now compatible with more sites, and transcoded video has been further optimized to save your bandwidth, and thus money.
Skyfire for iPhone gets deeper Facebook hooks. (Credit: Skyfire)
In addition to the video transcoder which is pretty handy, Skyfire now sports Facebook, fireplace, Twitter, popular and “like” in the dock. The newly released Skyfire 3.0 specifically incorporates Facebook’s “Like” or “Unlike” button into every webpage. With a single click, users can “Like” something or distribute throug their Facebook newsfeed.
The “popular content” feature lets users see what content on a given site is most popular with their Facebook friends. The fireplace feature delivers a stream of content that your Facebook friends are sharing such as; pictures, articles, videos, etc. There is also access to the full Facebook feed.
“Skyfire 3.0 for iPhone makes for the most compelling mobile browsing experience to date,” Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire, said in a statement. “This latest iteration leverages the cloud to not only streamline playback of rich multimedia — including Flash video – but also to seamlessly integrate your social graph into the browser.”
All these Facebook applications have been added to the “Skybar” — the toolbar along the bottom of the Skyfire app. Moreover, it also includes access to Twitter and a “video” button that will empower users to play Flash content via iOS. There is also a search option that lets users choose between Google and Wikipedia for searching needs.
The Skyfire iPhone app made its entry in to the App Store in the U.S. in early November, but the initial demand quickly flooded the company. With this new version, Skyfire will bring support for more videos based on Flash across different websites. Skyfire now has added some interesting social media features and made it more Facebook friendly mobile browser app.
The Skyfire application is available for $2.99 in the app store, which was temporarily pulled from the store, but resumed the service after Skyfire made some capacity adjustments. Skyfire extended support for its iPhone version to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Armenia, Malaysia, Mali, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is also available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Europe.
Skyfire certainly captured the attention of many with the Flash streaming feature for the iPhone that does not have Flash support in mobile Safari. Skyfire is a WebKit-based substitute to the iPhone’s default Safari browser that uses Skyfire Labs’ servers to deliver pages more swiftly by first compressing data before delivering it–up to 85 percent, the company claims.
This Facebook friendly app can be downloaded from the App Store from your iPhone or you can get it from here. iPad users can also download the new version, but it is probably wiser to hold on for the iPad-specific app, which should be updated to version 3 in due course.