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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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Oct 4, 2009 9:17 PM ET

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Posted In: Mobile, Technologies / Formats, Browsers, Companies, Adobe, Apple, iPhone, Google, Android, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, RIM, Blackberry

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  • bob

    Yes ed you are so right. You deserve a cookie. JS doesn't have the ability to compete with desktop applications like Flash or Silverlight does.

  • ed

    bob,

    You are right - we aren't creative enough to hack up cross browser UIs using JS/HTML/AJAX so we have to reduce ourselves to working with C++ style object-orientated event driven UI platforms..yeah, we really not good enough for that MooTools,  HTML and CSS stuff…

  • bob

    ed dunn,

    I guess you and future developers aren't creative enough to develop a nice and unique UI using JS/HTML/AJAX. If you've visited CSS Zen Garden, you should know "generic" only applies to UI's that didn't have creativity as an objective.

  • beetbe

    I totally love blackberry :D

  • ed dunn

    Amanda,

    Keep wishing on HTML 5 - sounds like Netscape 8 to me, overbloated on an old framework.

    Me and future developers are pushing towards better UI presentation using complied Flash or Silverlight in embedded devices - I'm tired of generic looknig UI crap like Javascript/HTML/AJAX, etc.

    Sorry but after that WAP BS and if I want to provide competitive UI on iPhone and Palm Pre, ain't no way I'm going with html tags….

  • PXLated

    Will be interesting to see if Adobe can actually deliver. They've hyped this before. My bet - It will still be a resource hog.

  • Betard

    @Amanda - just around the corner?  It will be years before full support for HTML5 is in place.

  • MKR

    @Amanda: Lots of legacy software. Video is easy enough to convert, but what about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of games and applications built in flash?

  • Amanda im Netz

    That means Flash will not only crash all desktop browsers but also nearly all mobile browsers!!! Really great!!!

    Who needs Flash when there is HTML5 around the corner!!??

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