Adobe CEO Shantanu Naraye says a beta version of Flash Player 10 for mobiles will be released in October. The new Flash player will support Android, Nokia Symbian, Palm Web OS, and Windows Mobile. The iPhone Flash implementation is problematic in that it competes with Apple. The mobile Flash player is expected to be unveiled at the Adobe MAX conference this October.
“We are bringing Flash Player 10 to smartphone class devices to enable the latest web browsing experience. Multiple partners have already received early version of this release and we expect to release a beta version for developers at our Max conference in October. Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and the new Palm Web OS will be the first devices to support web browsing with the new Flash player…”
Adobe announced in February that they planned to bring Flash 10 to the Android platform by the end of 2009. Adobe says they have optimized Flash’s performance on the ARM processor. A 2.0 version of the Android OS (aka Donut) is expected around the same time as the launch of Adobe Flash Player 10 mobile.
Although betas of Flash Player 10 will be released for developers this October, users are unlikely see many applications until 2010.
Adobe has long developed a cut-down version of Flash, called Flash Lite, a simplified version of Flash 8 for regular cellphones. Flash Lite, however, lacks the multimedia streaming features of the full Flash application.
Flash applications don’t need to be submitted to the Apple App Store. In the app store, you download native or native-like apps directly to your iPhone. With Flash, a developer can build an app, put it onto any web server, and launch the app from the web server.
Adobe Flash has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and to integrate video into web pages. Many popular video sites, including YouTube and Google Video, encode actual video files as either an FLV (Flash Video) or H.264 file; and both can easily be played by generic videoplayer software.
Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is a cross-platform runtime environment which can be used to build, using Adobe Flash, rich Internet applications that can be deployed as a desktop application.
