Flex on a mobile is closer than we thought!
Jan 30th, 2008 by Tom Cornilliac
I was reviewing Engadget’s coverage of Demo 08 this morning and I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw skyfire. skyfire is a mobile browser that claims to bring a PC browsing experience to the mobile phone for the first time.
From the skyfire site product page:
We’re talking about full-featured PC versions of your favorite web sites. Skyfire gives you speedy page loads, full audio, video, images, dynamic Flash content, advanced Ajax, Java and more – just like your PC.
Of course you know where I’m going with this, if skyfire supports Flash 9 then skyfire also supports Flex. We could be on the verge of taking our Flex apps mobile. To me this news is beyond huge! Imagine the new opportunities that would be created by full Flash/Flex in the mobile space.
At the time of writing, skyfire is in private beta and is only available for Windows mobile 5 & 6 and that only on phones with a full Qwerty keyboard. Their site says that Symbian support is coming soon. I use a Nokia E61i so I’ll have to wait for Symbian support.
You can sign-up for the private beta on the skyfire site.
Here’s a demo of skyfire in action, impressive!
I did some scanning of Skyfire last week, and it seemed to be serverside processing of an application, delivered to the device as an image stream. But I didn’t get a lot of time to check in, and am pressed now. Do you have a clear citation for where the processing occurs, whether it’s serverside or clientside? tx, jd
I recall reading that the processing is serverside. I’ll see if a quick search can dig something up. ~tom
This entry on Mahalo has a couple of interesting quotes that help explain the architecture behind Skyfire.
http://www.mahalo.com/Skyfire_Browser
It looks like they are cutting the frame rate of the Flash in the demos.