Flash on mobile: Apple: “Naah”, MS: “Yes!”

Posted by on Mar 17, 2008 in Flash, Industry | 2 comments

flashLiteMobileLet’s face it, Flash is a big part of today’s internet. In fact, more than 70% of all the video on the web is Flash video and then we’re not even talking about the massive amount of games and the numerous full blown applications out there. I’m sure you’ve all read or heard about Steve Jobs saying that the desktop version of the Flash player “performs too slow to be useful” and that Flash Lite “is not capable of being used with the Web” in response to questions raised at a shareholder meeting about Apple’s plans on supporting Flash on the iPhone.

And yet half a billion (500 million) mobile devices are already shipped with Flash Lite support enabling mobile browser support for Flash content on devices like the Nokia N-series and the Sony Ericsson K800. 18 of the top 20 OEM’s are currently shipping mobile devices with Flash Lite support and today we’re adding Microsoft to that list of OEM partners.

Microsoft has licensed Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones. Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader® LE software for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents including email attachments and web content. Both Adobe products will be made available to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, who license Windows Mobile software.

The Flash Lite 3.x browser plug-in for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile will provide users with access to rich and interactive web content created using Adobe Flash® technology. As the most popular and ubiquitous format on the Internet today, Adobe Flash powers many rich and engaging web sites, applications and animations. Adobe Reader LE will allow Windows Mobile users to easily and reliably view and navigate rich PDF content using innovative features developed to improve document readability on smaller screens

More about this story:
Bill Perry: Microsoft Licenses Flash Lite 3 and Reader LE for Windows Mobile – A Developers Perspective
Ryan Stewart: Flash Player Gets Even More Reach on Mobile Devices
C|net News.com: Microsoft to license Adobe’s Flash Lite
AP: Microsoft Licenses Adobe Mobile Software

2 Comments

  1. Peter
    March 19, 2008

    According to your CEO, it’s a YES :)

    http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200803181837DOWJONESDJONLINE000849_FORTUNE5.htm

  2. admin
    March 19, 2008

    Well… That obviously depends on how you interpret what Shantanu said. Here’s our official statement as a follow up: “Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe’s millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device.”