Posts Tagged Flash Lite 3.1

I’m here at the airport in San Francisco, shoulders breaking due to the sheer number of phones in my bag.  Today I’m carrying about 35 devices that I’ll be using over the next year.  They are from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, T-Mobile and Nokia and some of them are more special than others..

There are in fact seven devices in my bag with Flash 10 working in the browser.  There’s an Android device from HTC, four HTC Touch Diamonds and two Nokia N85s.  You will have already heard that we showed a very early demo of Flash 10 at MAX in San Francisco; its amazing to see the level of excitement from the broader community around this announcement.

Many of you have been asking questions around time lines and technology, so let’s set some expectations:

• This does not spell the end of Flash technology optimized for non-PC devices (called Flash Lite)
• We will not be bringing Flash 10 and AS3 (browser plugin only) to devices until the end of 2009
• When this happens the numbers of devices in market will be low and expensive
• There is a huge amount of work still to be done
• Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile are going to have full web parity with Flash 10.
• iPhone is a closed platform gated by Apple and its up to them.

While we’ve made great progress with Flash 10 for mobile browsing it’s still a long way off.  Even when it does arrive we’ll still need to deliver AIR and enable standalone applications, for that we need to address many more devices.  As a way to get started early, at MAX San Francisco we announced the Flash Lite Distributable Player private beta program.  On mobile devices you can now distribute your applications, games and video content to Open OS mobile devices and install Flash when necessary; just like the desktop.  The solution comes in a few pieces:

Create: To create packages effectively you’ll need to update your Adobe Device Central to 2.1.  You can then test your applications categorized by screen resolution and platform.

Package: We created the Adobe Mobile Packager Beta to enable you to trigger the download of the latest Flash player for your devices.  Using the tool you can follow a simple process and build CAB or SIS files for open distribution.

Distribute: You told us that it was hard to do deals on your own that it would be great if Adobe helped seal the deal.  Well we’ve done just that and signed deals with Thumbplay and Zed which includes a standard developer agreement.  There will be a large number of devices supported at launch (some 30 devices) and an audience of over 11m users in Italy, Spain and the US.  Importantly these are hand-picked high value consumers that browse the web and consume content.

Discover: It was also very important to allow applications to sit side by side with native apps.  Customers out there were demanding a catalogue experience, free and open.  We created the Adobe AppZone a rich interactive catalog that presents aggregator and partner content.  It manages the installation and general management of applications and Flash versions.

Of course no new product would be good without a developer kit to get you up and running.  Well this time I decided that 100s of pages of docs was getting a bit tired, so it gives  me great pleasure to point you at the all new video tutorial series by Liz Myers.  For the past five weeks we’ve been working really hard together to create this series for Adobe TV and I hope we can do more in the future.  You’ll find the series broken down into bite-size chunks and hopefully you should be setup in 30mins.

Please spread the word about the Flash Lite Distributable Player, and get signed up here for the private beta.