There’s been a lot of buzz about Flash on mobile devices the last couple of days and today HTC announces the release of the first Flash enabled Android phone. This HTC Hero delivers a more complete Web browsing experience and provides access to a broad variety of Flash technology based content available on the Web today. Users can browse and discover a broad set of Web content and applications not supported by mobile phones in the past. People can also view YouTube videos using Flash technology, and enable full screen viewing mode by simply double tapping the screen.
The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content.
This is also a very important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future.
Check out a demo of the HTC Hero on http://adobe.com/go/htchero. I can’t wait to get my hands on one!
Read more on Mark Doherty’s blog.
Flash on!
So what flash player does it target ? a slightly enhanced Flash Lite 3 player ?
It’s Flash Lite 3.1 which plays the majority of Flash 9 based content built with AS2.0
It doesn’t have a hardware keyboard and the software keyboard is imho not very practical.
Waiting for the Lancaster which is supposed to be the Hero with keybaord.
Or perhaps someone over at XDA developers will make an Android rom for the Touch Pro2. That would rock.
Greets
ps: Thanks for the nice article!
I’m assuming this is the same flash player being utilized by Nokia. Any info on who is going to get the first full blown flash player 10 incorporated into their browser and OS? Will AIR support be released at the same time?
The same functionality is also available on the Symbian and WinMo platforms. We haven’t announced anything with regards to your other questions.
“This is also a very important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future.”
There’s no specific mention of Distributable Player, but if it were on board, I imagine it would be possible to bring down a Flash 10 player sometime in the future … that is, if device hardware were up to snuff (memory, cpu). This is purely speculation. however … but if I were Adobe, that’s what I’d do, launch with what’s available now, and prepare for the future. Of course, maybe this could be just training ground for the first Android device with Flash … and a new device will emerge that will have the FP10.
Again, all this is mere speculation, and I won’t call for Adobe to comment, at all. :)
Hey Serge
Interesting post… The only thing stopping me from checking out the mobile paradigm is the fact that it’s all still written in AS2… Any idea as to when the move to AS3 will be made?
nice to find this article.
Does anyone -have the scoop at all on which the next (or two)HTC phones with Flash are??