Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Update In Hands Of Hackers [Video]

The world of Windows Phone 7 is starting to hot up these days, with the infamous NoDo update starting to roll out to lucky handset owners. Now the fledgling OS is in the headlines once again thanks to ‘The Dark Force Team’, a group of hackers who sprung to fame when they managed to get WP7 onto the popular HTC HD2 hardware.

The hackers today released a video of the NoDo update running on, unsurprisingly, another HD2 handset – but that’s not the interesting thing here.

In a shot toward the end of the video another handset ‘accidentally’ finds its way on-camera. Looking closely it appears the extra handset is sporting a new search button, prompting Pocketnow (amongst others) to speculate that the hackers have managed to get their hands on what many are calling Windows Phone 7.5, dubbed Mango.

The fact that a new, major update to WP7 is already floating around the internet and in the hands of hackers will be embarrassing to Microsoft, though it’s great news for the growing WP7 fan case.

Check out the video to get a glimpse of the future WP7 update. Watch The Video Here

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Flash comes to the iPhone via Skyfire, Android gets it for free

Despite Steve Jobs’ insistence that Flash in an unnecessary evil, the inability to view Flash content has remained one of the major inconveniences for iPhone users. It’s true that Flash itself is often slow, buggy, and a drain on the battery. However, faced with degraded performance or the inability to view certain content at all, many users would still opt for the ability to view the content rather than not at all.

 Skyfire became the first iPhone browser capable of delivering Flash-based video to the user and demand for the app was so great back in November 2010 that it was withdrawn from sale within 5 hours of its launch.

What is the reason for that? The web browser, which is also available on other smartphone platforms – including Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile – does not play Flash natively, but still enables iPhone users to view the content on their devices by converting it to the iPhone-compatible H.264 video codec prior to downloading. However, this on-the-fly encoding does not come without serious overheads on the Skyfire servers, and just five hours after the app had shot to number one in the iTunes store, it was withdrawn as the company attempted to increase its bandwidth.

To prove the necessity and demand for Flash support in Apple devices, we will just have to look at the sales revenue of Skyfire back in November 2010 when it was first released. The company earned a whooping US$1 million in its first weekend on sale with a retail price of US$2.99 per download. Looking at the positive side, Android users will not need to go through the same inconveniences to view Flash content and Skyfire is free for Android.

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