Adobe at Mobile World Congress: Booth photo tour
Lots of excitement at the Adobe booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Our announcement about Flash Player 10.1 and AIR for mobile devices is definitely buzzing!
Photos shot with a Google Nexus One.
Adobe AIR for Mobile Devices at Mobile World Congress
Today Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona. If you follow my Tweets or are a regular reader of my blog, you already knew we had some big announcements coming to the show. I’m so happy we can finally talk about this ;-)
Adobe AIR for mobile devices
If you are in Barcelona for MWC, make sure you drop by our booth! We are demoing AIR applications running on Android devices. This is fantastic news for Flash Platform developers who can now build applications that not only run across different desktop operating systems but can now also be deployed to Android devices. It’s obvious that AIR for Android takes full advantage of the improvements and new features we added to Flash Player 10.1. Those include multi-touch, gesture inputs, accelerometer input, GPS and screen rotation. My fellow evangelist Kevin Hoyt recently recorded a demo showing a couple of AIR mobile apps (Tweetbox, Southpark, Acrobat Connect) on the Motorola Droid. For more information, visit www.adobe.com/go/airmobile.
Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices
I’ve been using Google’s Nexus One for a week now. One of the perks of working for Adobe is having access to the prerelease bits of new technology we are working on. The Nexus One I’m using actually has Flash Player 10.1 installed on it. It is extremely refreshing to be able to use the full web on your mobile device! Just the other day I wanted to view a video on Qik.com. While Qik has a mobile HTML5 site, the Nexus One didn’t seem to have the correct video codec. So I opened the normal Qik site which uses Flash Player to play the video… I pressed play and the video played. No blue Lego blocks, no missing plugin headaches. It just worked and that’s the way it should be. So far, I haven’t seen any Flash content that didn’t work on my Nexus One. I think that’s pretty impressive seeing as this is still a prerelease version. So yes… We are still working on it and no… you can’t download it today. But it’s coming soon and it truly is the missing piece in the mobile web puzzle. Whether you are addicted to Farmville or Bejeweled or if you’re like me and don’t want to install an app for every single news site you visit, you’ll be able to use those games and watch those videos in your mobile browser soon!
While most of the content just works, you should really think about tailoring your content to deliver the best possible user experience on mobile devices. Get a head start and learn how to do just that on Adobe Devnet.
I’m also really excited to see the Dell Mini 5 Tablet in action. In the video below Alan Tam shows a sneak peek of Flash content running on Dell’s upcoming touch-based tablet.
We’re demoing Flash and AIR content on a number of different devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week but if you can’t make it, make sure you don’t miss these demo videos. I’ll also record a few demos at the booth today and post them to my blog later… If there’s anything specific you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Stay tuned!
It’s a great time to be a Flash Platform developer! Flash on!
Preparing for Mobile World Congress
Believe me when I say that Adobe is going to rock at Mobile World Congress next week! I wish I could tell you about all of our announcements today but you’re gonna have to wait a little longer…
If you are in Barcelona for MWC, please come and say hi! The Adobe booth is located in hall 1 (stand 1D45). We’ve teamed up with lots of content and device partners and we will be showing lots of cool stuff at the booth!
Keep an eye on my blog and the Flash Platform blog for more info throughout the week!
Hope to see you there!
HP’s CTO talks about the HP slate. Can I have one now please?
As I already mentioned before, I won’t be standing in line to get an Apple tablet. If it was running the full OS X, I probably would have but the limited OS they’re putting on the device is just too restricted and not flexible enough.
I recently bought an HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet/notebook to replace my EEE PC netbook. I wanted something small (-ish) to browse the web and watch video on while being on vacation or traveling. While Windows 7 does take some getting used to (especially after using a Mac for the last 7 years or so) I am really impressed by the performance and even more by the price. A lot of people seem to like the pricing of Apple’s tablet but I wonder if these people looked at what is out there today? I paid around $800 for the HP TX2. So the price is similar to Apple’s 64GB 3G/WIFI tablet but my HP has a 12’1 inch screen, 320GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 4GB RAM, DVD drive, 3 USB ports, 1 4 cell and 1 8 cell battery and an AMD chipset powerful enough to even do hardware accelerated Flash Video up to 1080p! And since the TX2 has Windows 7 on it, I can also install every single app and/or plugin I want. I can run my Twitter client when I’m watching a video and most of all I’m not tied to one single store to buy my music, apps and video content. The only problem is its form factor. It’s still a bit bulky but that’s just a minor issue.
Enter the HP slate. While there’s no news yet on how much memory it’ll have, how fast the processor is or how much disk space it’ll have, it does run a full Windows 7! In the video below, HP’s CTO Phil McKinney talks about their slate device. The video also shows the New York Times Reader AIR application (as shown in the screenshot above) and HD video on YouTube using Flash Player. Now that’s a real magical experience! Can I have one now please?
Europe needs a European wide network carrier
Here’s a thought: For this mobile web to really work, we need a European wide network carrier.
If I was living in the US, I could pick one of the big carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon and use their service across all states. In Europe… No such thing. There are some alliances between some carriers but there is no such thing as a European wide carrier and frankly they don’t do a very good job at promoting these alliances.
I travel all over Europe and thus I always need to be aware of the fact that I am always roaming. And roaming is still freaking expensive. Sure, Adobe does pay my mobile bill but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about how much it costs.
Most of the European carriers are owned by only a handful of big telcos (like France Telecom, Vodafone, …). It is definitely possible to make this happen. I honestly don’t know why we don’t already have a European wide carrier… But then… I guess that these big telcos don’t mind making truckloads of money from frequent travelers like myself… *sigh*
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