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Skyfire does it, too.

So... it does what Slyfire has been doing for... what? 2 years now?

There's an App for That.

("There's an App for That" is a registered trademark of Apple Corporation.)

yep. their infrastructure was overwhelmed. they're not selling any more copies for the time being.

http://www.skyfire.com/press/blog/68-skyfire-reaches-top-grossing-app-on-iphone-app-store-within-5-hours-sold-out

How's Nokia closed? They don't lock down their OS the way Apple does, anyone can download the S60 SDK and write applications for it, or even just use J2ME.
Nokia phones have been customizable for ages, even the antediluvian ones like the 3300 or 5100 from around 12-15 years ago allowed you to change ringtones and wallpapers!
More hardcore hackers change the region product code in the firmware when they're impatient for a new firmware update that's not yet available for their country/region.

If you ask me, Nokia shows how you can provide a consistent and easy user interface (across all their handsets, not just smartphones) for the technically challenged, yet leave the platform open enough for the power users/hackers/modders etc.

Case in point- I have both Opera Mobile and Skyfire on my N82, even though the built in S60 browser is pretty decent. Whereas Apple blocks any application that competes with or duplicates features they provide, so you can't have a separate browser application written for the iPhone.

So according to Mozilla.org:

Firefox for iPhone
We do not have plans to build an iPhone browser due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution.

Firefox for Blackberry
Sorry, no plans. Due to its Java-based operating system and the inability to build native components, Firefox is not compatible on the Blackberry OS.

Firefox for Symbian
We currently have no plans to develop Firefox for the Symbian platform.

So, not available for iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian? Thats what, 3/4 of the smartphone market?

Its a shame as the Blackberry needs a decent browser. Opera Mini 5 is ok but I guess I will have to wait for Skyfire for flash support.

what CE web browser can display SWF objects?

There are around half a dozen such browsers/apps with varying degrees of support for different levels and profiles of Flash. Skyfire is a recent entrant that has become popular. Some use server-side presentation/deployment, others use on-device rendering. The fact that you are apparently unaware of the existence of such apps compels me to doubt the rest of the content of your comment.

> Maybe they have a new version of their web browser ... but who cares? they won't provide upgrades if you have an "ancient" model from 6 months ago!

[0]

Who cares? Use one of the several third party ones[1] that's available. Try that on the iPhone...it's far from certain to me that Apple will allow you to install another web browser on *their* phone. If you like they way they do it, then great, but if you don't, you're (from what I've been told) screwed - because Apple think they know better than you do.

With Nokia phones, you can install whatever you want. "Jail break"...what's that?

[0] You're exaggerating. They just pick where to spend their effort. I just upgraded the firmware on my E90 about a month ago, and the E90 is year's old.
[1] http://get.skyfire.com/ for example. I just loaded that on my E90.

Ever heard of skyfire? Technically it's a horrible hack, but it does work fairly well for a lot of things, and it does allow full flash support in a mobile phone browser.

As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.

This model is already proven in the case of my Win Mobile phone. See, IE mobile takes suck to whole new levels. There's Opera, which does much better, but is still slow as sin, even with a dual-core 400 Mhz ARM chip powering the unit. It honestly feels like Navigator 4 back on my Windows 95 Pentium 90 way back when...

Enter Sky Fire. They have a Linux rendering farm of (get this!) instances of the Mozilla rendering engine that pre-render websites for you, and you download the rendered result, much like Google Maps - in square sections, ajaxy-style.

It's fast enough for me to watch YT and Hulu video meaningfully if I'm connected via a decent Wifi. Now, it's not FPS games, but if it's good enough for a video, it's probably good enough for pre-rendering and/or AI computation.

No ball dropped, just optimized for your platform. Really now - that 300 MB of RAM apparently sets you back about $6. Is that exorbitant? Firefox USES that RAM to speed up performance, and this can be fairly easily tweaked if the $6 is more than you can stomach.

For example, Skyfire is Mozilla based, and is quite usable on my 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Windows Mobile Pocket-PC phone.