By the time I got wind that Skyfire was looking for Alpha testers, the sign-up sheet had already been filled to the brim. Bummer, right?
Fear not! As luck may have (the “luck” here being for early adopters, if not necessarily Skyfire), a Beta copy just leaked out for all to enjoy.
The bad news: it looks like Skyfire might be sending takedown requests to anyone distributing the Beta. We were able to get our hands on it before the first links started going down, but we’re not going to be able to host a download of it. Google the relevant keywords – you’ll find a download link in no time flat.
I was hoping to do a full hands-on with the leaked Beta – but at this point, it wouldn’t really be fair. To sum up everything I would have said: Skyfire for Android needs work. There’s no multi-touch or double-tap-to-zoom support yet, so the only zooming mechanism is a little -/+ button in the bottom right (and boy, is it sloooow.) There also doesn’t seem to be any support for rich media like Flash and Silverlight yet, which, given that that’s Skyfire’s flagship feature, really lops the experience off at the knees.
Update: Looks like this version was purposely lopped off at the knees. Check down in the comments below: according to Skyfire’s CEO Jeff Glueck, a handful of the cloud-based features that would have been found in this leaked beta were disabled immediately following the leak. We’ve confirmed with Skyfire that this comment is legitimate.
With that said, remember: this is early, early stuff. We’ll check back in with Skyfire for a proper hands on a bit further along in the development process. In the mean time, enjoy some screenshots of the current state of things:
Looks like a reskinned Steel browser, to me.
Reason it looks like steel is because skyfire owns steel. It says so on their blog!
That would be because Skyfire own the company that made steel
I had the thing days ago and deleted it. I was expecting flash support and it didn’t do a darn thing. I at least have some flash with my Hero, this had none.
FC on my Nexus One, uninstalled
Quote from xda member amd_203:
“Re: Skyfire for Android (Beta)
Hello to those on this thread. We appreciate the interest in our latest product for Android.
The early alpha version of our product that is being circulated is unauthorized and has been purposely disabled from connecting to our cloud service. Hence the controls are there, but without our server-side connection, the video and other functionality won’t work. So if you think you have it working, you surely do not as all the key functionality that defines it as a Skyfire product has been disconnected.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long as we will soon be launching the product for the public.
Jeff Glueck
CEO, Skyfire
Sent from my Nexus One using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk”
Can’t tell you if it’s genuine or not, but sounds convincing enough to me. It makes sense that they would pull the server-side cloud connection once the Alpha testing had been completed, and that would disable any kind of flash support.
Quote from “CEO of Skyfire”:
Re: Skyfire for Android (Beta)
Hello to those on this thread. We appreciate the interest in our latest product for Android.
The early alpha version of our product that is being circulated is unauthorized and has been purposely disabled from connecting to our cloud service. Hence the controls are there, but without our server-side connection, the video and other functionality won’t work. So if you think you have it working, you surely do not as all the key functionality that defines it as a Skyfire product has been disconnected.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long as we will soon be launching the product for the public.
Jeff Glueck
CEO, Skyfire
Sent from my Nexus One using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
Sorry, double post :S
that clearly would explain why i had no flash video. i can’t wait till this thing is on the market! won’t need to worry about the Hero not being offered flash 10 because of hardware restrictions.