Android phones are in for a treat now that Skyfire 4.0 is out of the beta frying pan and into the Android Market fire. The free-to-use browser has been enhanced with eight new killer social feature that include one premium-accessible video acceleration element. They’ve updated their Skybar into a sleek toolbar displayed beneath the browser that hooks in a multitude of the features from Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and even a Finance feature—for people who just cannot escape from the business section of the newspaper.

To access Flash video via the browser, users will be asked to pay a $2.99 one-time fee to enable it. This does more than just allow Skyfire to play Flash video, but it also gives users access to a cloud-enabled service that optimizes and compresses web video before streaming it to the user. The browser’s marketing suggests that this could save a lot of data costs for users who watch videos online.

“With Skyfire 4.0 for Android, we’re enabling users to customize their browser toolbar to fit their interests, from sports, to social networks, to finance, news, and local deals,” said Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire. “While the basic browser will remain free, with the launch of Google’s Android In-App purchase platform, the time has come to make our video cloud acceleration service a premium feature that reflects the investment we make to support each user in our cloud. We deliver state-of-the art web video tuned to your current mobile connection speed, saving 75% on average data loads. For users who enjoy web video, or who are on metered data, the service can pay for itself in the first month of use.”

As we saw with Skyfire 2.0 for iPhone, it brought video around Apple’s lack of Flash on their iOS devices; but the ever-popular browser is more than just a video experience but also a powerful layout coupled with excellent features. Already existing users can expect to be grandfathered in with the freemium model and retain their access to the cloud-enabled services; but new users will have to pay.

Perhaps this could be a workable model for free browsers like Skyfire to continue to maintain cloud-based services, which will become more expensive as more users sign on and use it. The one-time in-app purchase verses a more standard subscription model suggests that they have found extremely low costs per user per app lifetime and it could greatly boost the adoption (and payments for) their video optimization service.

With the total data costs that saving 75% on average for video streaming, $2.99 doesn’t seem that bad.