Acquisition To Help Skyfire Deliver Android BrowserAcquisition To Help Skyfire Deliver Android Browser

Today Skyfire -- maker of feature-rich browsers for Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile devices -- announced that it has acquired kolbysoft for an undisclosed sum. The deal means Skyfire will be able to bring a Flash and Silverlight-toting browser to the Android platform.Kolbysoft makes the Steel browser for Android devices. Steel is based on the same Webkit code that the native Android browser uses, only it takes things a bit further. Steel is a solid browsing alternative to the Android browser. It rates a well-deserved four stars in reader reviews. As good as it is, it can surely be better.

Enter Skyfire.

Skyfire already makes a great mobile browser for the S60 and WinMo platforms. Its cloud-based model and compression technology deliver the good stuff to mobile handsets -- namely Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight video. I've watched television shows on Hulu.com over-the-air through the Skyfire browser on S60 devices. It does a pretty good job of delivering Flash video over 3G networks.

Flash, of course, is absent from the Android browser at the moment. Despite the fact that Flash 10.1 is going to be available for Android eventually, Skyfire may be able to beat it to the punch.

"By adding kolbysoft's talent to Skyfire, we'll be able to fuse the best of Skyfire's famed cloud-computing multimedia capabilities with the Webkit browser movement to create a better hybrid model for Android," explained Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire in a prepared statement. "Steel has been the most acclaimed browser in the Android Marketplace, adding features atop Webkit. Together, we'll be able to do so much more."

I certainly hope so. Delivering video content to mobile handsets has become a hot topic, with some platforms refusing to work with Adobe's Flash Player (ahem, Apple). By acquiring kolbbysoft, Skyfire has sped up its time-to-market with an Android browser.