Adobe Extends Full Flash To Just About Every Phone But The iPhone
Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) has secured relationships will Research In Motion, Windows Mobile, Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to roll out full Flash capabilities to the various smartphone platforms. With such a complete line-up, the only obvious phone remaining is Apple’s iPhone.
At the company’s worldwide developer conference in Los Angeles on Monday, Adobe plans to announce that its Flash technology, which is commonly used on the PC to view videos or ads, will be rolled out to browsers on Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows Mobile, Palm webOS phones later this year. In addition, public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS are expected to be available early next year. Finally, Adobe will also bring the Flash Player to Blackberry smartphones at an undisclosed date.
The new Adobe Flash Player 10.1 software will be one piece of software that work across PCs, smartphones, netbooks and other devices, which is the vision of the company’s Open Screen Project. As part of the announcements, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) and Google has joined the initiative. Adrian Ludwig, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for the Flash Platform, told mocoNews: “This is bringing the full Flash capabilities to these devices, it hasn’t been available before.”
Ludwig said: “There will be a lot of content that just works on the devices, and then some will have to be tailored. Fundamentally, right now if you are a web developer, or a mobile developer no one goes back and forth between the two. Now, if you have a great mobile idea, go ahead and build it and put it on a mobile device.”
To date, phones have been running a scaled back version of Flash, called Flash Lite. But now that phones have faster processors, the content renders more easily and has to be tweaked less, Adobe says. Phones capable of running Flash 10.1 will get updated over the air, meaning phone owners will receive Flash without having to do anything, much less buy a new phone. Palm will likely be the first to update, with other platforms coming later.
While it has been expected that Adobe was going to come out with a full version of Flash for smartphones in October, the release is still significant for the industry because Flash Player 10.1 may easily bring tons of content already developed for the web to mobile. In addition, Flash may provide developers with an alternative to building an application for each phone’s platform. Potentially, Flash will be able to interact with consumers directly through the phone’s browser, eliminating the headache of porting apps to each platform and then finding different ways to distribute them. While typically browsers don’t offer as rich of an experience as applications, Adobe is promising an app-like experience in the browser. For example, Adobe says Flash Player 10.1 will support iPhone-like features, including multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer and screen orientation.
Of course, the obvious omission to today’s announcements is the lack of support for Apple’s iPhone. In the past, Adobe executives have stated that it is working with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to make Flash work on the iPhone, but that it will come out on a separate time table.
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