Barcelona — Adobe Systems Inc., which widely distributed the use of video and animation on the Web, clutched the opportunity at the Mobile World Congress event on Monday to make a raft of announcements aimed at promoting its new full-fledged version of Flash software that runs not only on computers but also on the latest high-end smartphones by year’s end.
Adobe, which makes Acrobat, Flash and Photoshop software, announced at the Mobile World Congress here Monday that Flash Player 10, which is the full version of Flash that runs on PCs, will be available on smartphones running Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, Nokia S60/Symbian, and the new Palm operating systems.
Devices with Flash Player 10 are expected to hit the market starting in early 2010, according to Zeke Koch, director of product management, platform strategy at Adobe.
“We realised that, with smartphones, people want to browse the whole of the internet, so they need every feature in the full desktop Flash Player,” he said. “So we have decided to have a single code base going from phones to desktops.”
With such a move, Adobe will enable developers to create visually rich software that smoothly works on smartphones just as it does on computers — eliminating the common and frustrating experience of files appearing in garbled form on phones.
But Adobe said that it still lacks to deliver Flash players that would work with Apple Inc.’s iPhone or Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry.
And analysts are divided on whether that will ever happen.
Adobe has been experimenting on a Flash player customized for the iPhone for almost a year, after Apple CEO Steve Jobs complained about Flash’s performance on the iPhone.
“We have made a lot of progress, but there is still a lot of technical work left,” said Anup Murarka, director of partner development and technology strategy for Adobe’s platform business unit.
Adobe has optimized Flash’s performance on the ARM v6 CPU used by the iPhone, and the Arm v7 to be used by the upcoming Palm Pre.
“We are working with Apple on what we have,” Murarka said. “We are committed to make the Flash plug-in work on the iPhone.”
The company has carried out tests for years on a lightweight version of its Flash technology for mobile phones. Adobe executives said that about 40 percent of all phones that are in the market today use this version of its technology. But because Flash Lite does not allow for the same functionality as what is available on the Flash 10 desktop version of the technology, mobile users are missing out.
In November, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch told the participants at Adobe’s Max conference in San Francisco that the company would bring the full-fledged Flash Player 10 to smartphones.
Adobe announced a new $10m fund in association with Nokia aimed at encouraging developers to build applications and services for mobile phones, desktop devices and consumer devices such as set-top boxes.
The fund is tied to the Open Screen Project, an initiative launched in May 2008 aimed at creating a consistent runtime environment across screens using the extensive reach and capabilities of Adobe AIR and the Flash platform, said the firm.
Adobe, which transformed the way video, pictures and documents could be viewed and edited on the Web — helping the rise of sites like YouTube — has already shipped its pared-down Flash Lite video player in almost 1 billion mobile phones.
Adobe also introduced its Adobe Reader Mobile SDK at the Barcelona event, which is designed to enable handset manufacturers to deliver devices that can easily download, manage and display PDF content and e-books. The new software engine delivers support for Adobe’s “re-flowable PDF” content protection technology, as well as the EPUB file format, an XML-based e-book standard with broad support from the publishing industry.
With Adobe bringing out more full-fledge applications, Flash existence may become more and more attractive to holdouts such as RIM and Apple.