Android gets Flash (sort of) via SkyFire

[QuadCityImages]

Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android video preview -engadget

This is one hell of a browser from what I've seen so far after downloading a couple hours ago. It allows you to switch your user agent on the fly between Desktop, Android, and iPhone, so you can find which version of a site works best for what you're trying to do. As someone that hates when a site (Facebook) tries to load the Mobile or iPhone version instead of the full desktop version, this is great news for me.

The other big news is that Flash video is somewhat supported. Hulu doesn't seem to work, but if you go to the Daily Show website, you can now watch full episodes. Skyfire uses a workaround kind of like Opera Mini to convert the flash videos to HTML5 server-side, and with surprisingly little lag. Obviously this does nothing for Flash websites or games, but supposedly that's coming with Android 2.2 anyway, possibly as soon as next month.

[photon]

Switching the user agent is a good idea, sometimes I like having the mobile site (the other day I wanted to see Dell's price for something and instead of 5 minutes navigating the normal site and waiting for pages to load, I got what I wanted in 15 seconds!), but other times it's a pain.