Flash Everywere - Except iPhone

Flash Everywhere – Except iPhone

Posted by Sam Churchill on October 5th, 2009

At Adobe’s worldwide developer conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced its new Adobe Flash Player 10.1 software, which is commonly used on the PC to view videos or ads, will be available on virtually all mobile browsers, including Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Google Android and Symbian OS. The first two will be available later this year, the later two expected early next year.

Microsoft officially rolls out Windows Mobile 6.5 tomorrow, October 6. Older Windows Mobile phones will be Flash-enabled but not run full-fledged Flash, PCMag.com added. Motorola’s Google Android phones with Flash Player support will ship “early next year,” according to Motorola. Adobe will also bring the Flash Player to the Blackberry at an undisclosed date.

The new Flash player will run on virtually every major smartphone — except Apple’s iPhone.

Apple, which has consistently said it doesn’t support Flash because it’s a resource hog, may be more concerned about its impact on the App store. With Flash, developers could potentially create standalone programs and enable them to be downloaded from a developer’s own website — cutting out the App Store monopoly.

Flash enables interaction directly through the phone’s browser, eliminating the headache of porting apps to each platform and then finding different ways to distribute them.

The mobile version of Flash will support multi-touch, accelerometers, multiple screen orientations, and hardware graphics acceleration. Flash will require at least a 500-MHz ARM11 processor. The Palm Pre, HTC Touch Pro2, and BlackBerry Bold all meet that requirement. Flash 10.1 will take advantage of GPU acceleration, including both nVidia’s Tegra, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, and ION.

Adobe and Nokia are jointly announcing the funding of more than 35 multi-screen applications as part of the Open Screen Project Fund. Several apps will be demonstrated at the show, including Twitter client Twittle, interactive map MyFestivalGuide, entertainment app SmartGrooves, frequent flyer app MileBlaster, real-time audience feedback app Live TalkBack, and many more.

Adobe’s Flash works across PCs, smartphones, netbooks and other devices — at least that’s the vision of the company’s Open Screen Project.

Adrian Ludwig, Adobe’s marketing manager for the Flash Platform, told mocoNews; “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. Palm will likely be the first to update, with other platforms coming later.

Apple has set its eyes on HTML 5, notes PC World, with the introduction of the iPhone 3.0 OS. HTML 5 makes obsolete plug-in-based technologies such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, because it’s open source and has similar multimedia capabilities to Adobe’s and Microsoft’s solutions.