Adobe is working to deliver full Flash Player 10 technology to smart phones, including Windows Mobile devices, Symbian OS-powered devices and Google Android phones. And the company remains hopeful regarding the iPhone and BlackBerry. Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, demonstrated Flash Player 10 running on Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android at the Adobe MAX 2008 developer conference.SAN FRANCISCOAdobe, which has been working
on Flash Player 10 for smart phones, demonstrated at its Adobe MAX
2008 conference here the technology running on a series of phones, including a
Windows Mobile device.
"The rate of Web browsing has grown significantly on phones, and we're
doing Flash Player 10 for smart phones," said Adobe CTO
Kevin Lynch, at the company's conference for its users and developers. "We're
not done yet, but we have a few different devices running Flash Player
10."
The first device Lynch demonstrated was a Nokia phone running the Symbian OS
with Flash Player 10 on it. The second device that had Flash Player 10 running
on it was an HTC phone with an Opera browser
and Windows Mobile as the operating system. Lynch demonstrated a YouTube video
running on the phone via the Flash player.
During his demonstration, Lynch picked an iPhone up out of a baking pan
that, as part of the presentation, was supposed to be hot to signify the
hotness of phones purporting support for Flash Player 10 and said: "This
one needs a little more baking. And we do need to pass the taste test of
Apple's head chef, but we're working on that."
Lynch also picked up a G1 Google phone from T-Mobile running the Android
platform and showed Flash Player 10 running on the Android OS.
"We have had very good progress on Google G1 with Flash Player
10," Lynch said.
Regarding the Flash Player 10 demo on the G1, "the performance looked
pretty good, said Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google and
founder of the Android project. "Cell phones today are as powerful as PCs
were five years ago. Google did Android to give a better Internet experience on
all phones. And seeing Flash Player 10 running across different platforms just
warms my heart. Because that's exactly what we built Android for."
Lynch said that although Adobe is moving to get the full power of Flash
Player 10 on smart phones, the company will continue to work on and deliver
Flash Lite. As its name implies, Flash Lite is a lightweight version of the
Adobe Flash Player. Yet, having the full-blown Flash Player on the device makes
it easier to display and manipulate Flash content.
What is new with Flash Lite is that Adobe is "aiming to create a system
where you can package your applications and deploy them on smart phones,"
Lynch said. "And if you don't have Flash Lite on your phone, it [a Flash
service] will detect that and install Flash Lite onto your phone," much
like Adobe does with Flash on the desktop when users try to access content from
a Web site and they do not have the Flash Player on their PC, he said.
Adobe already is ahead of schedule regarding its plans to get Flash onto
smart phones, according to Lynch. He said Adobe set a goal of reaching 100
million Flash-enabled phones by 2010, but the company is on track to meet that
goal in 2009.
"I hope someday we'll be able to get Flash Player on [Research In
Motion's] BlackBerry," added Lynch, who said the company is working on
doing just that.
Lynch said Adobe is also working on bringing its Adobe AIR
technology to mobile phones.
On the desktop, Adobe is able to update its technology from one version to
the next in nine months, according to Lynch. Adobe claims Flash has more than
90 percent penetration on PCs throughout the world, and it achieves that by
delivering more than 10 million downloads of Flash each day, he said.
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