Los Angeles — Adobe Systems Inc. is poised to unwrap its Flash 10.1 player, which has widely earned the support of top notch mobile makers such as Google, Motorola, Nvidia, Palm, RIM, and Qualcomm that would enable Adobe Flash based contents to be accessible on smartphones, Netbooks, and other mobile devices. The company plans to announce the support today at its developer conference in Los Angeles.
Adobe’s aim is to deliver Flash Player 10.1 expedited directly on the chips in smartphones, Netbooks, and small laptops based on the ARM chip architecture, called smartbooks. To date, Flash video acceleration has not been available widely on mobile devices. This indicates that you will be able to play Flash-based games and view Flash-based videos and Web sites. And yes, that includes Hulu.
“It is vital to support in hardware because (Flash) video is really computationally intensive,” Tom Barclay, Adobe senior product marketing manager for Flash Player, said in an interview. “Putting that on the hardware provides the ability to play it back fluidly…so you are not going to drain the battery on these devices.”
A public beta of Flash for Windows Mobile and Palm WebOS will be announced later this year, the company said, to be followed in early 2010 by Google Android and Symbian versions.
Separately, Research in Motion chief executive Mike Lazaridis in a statement said that Flash “is coming” to the BlackBerry platform, without adding further details.
Adobe’s Flash technology powers many of the videos and interactive pages on the Web. So far, smartphone users have only been able to use Flash Lite, which can only show a subset of Flash pages. Many phones do not show Flash content at all, leaving big holes in Web pages. In November 2008, Adobe announced its initial plan to make Flash 10 work on phones.
Flash on Windows Mobile will require OS version 6.5, and Flash for Android will be fastened to version 2.0 of that OS, codenamed Eclair, said Anup Murarka, director for technology strategy and partner development within the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. In general, Flash will need at least a 500-MHz ARM11 processor, he said. The Palm Pre, HTC Touch Pro2, and BlackBerry Bold all meet that requirement.
Lower-tier devices will be “Flash enabled” with a subset of Flash capabilities but not a full Flash 10 plugin, according to the company.
iPhone owners, however, are not so lucky. But Adobe said that it has been working hard to make the Flash Player compatible on the iPhone OS, as well as improve performance, increasing software rendering speed by 87 percent on mobile platforms versus desktop platforms, and reducing memory consumption by 55 percent, the company says.
The mobile version of Flash will also support multi-touch, accelerometers, multiple screen orientations, and hardware graphics acceleration.
“Some developers may have to tweak their existing applications to make them truly portable,” Murarka said.
Prominent by its absence was Apple. “Flash is not available on the iPhone at this point," said Adrian Ludwig, group manager, flash platforms at Adobe. “So far, we have not received the support that we need from Apple.”
Adobe will build on mobile Flash during the second half of next year with Adobe AIR 2.0, Adobe’s system for developing standalone apps, Murarka said.
“We are going to leverage all of the 10.1 work for the browser plugin, but we then need to do all the OS integration for the various smartphones we are going to support,” he said.
At the company’s MAX conference today, Adobe made several other handheld-related announcements as well.
The company also unveiled the latest versions of their developer tools. A new version of their LiveCycle enterprise collaboration suite will support access to documents from iPhones, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile phones. And an ongoing partnership with Google will make sure Flash connects well with Google’s Web services and Chrome browser. Partnerships with Nvidia and Qualcomm will extend Adobe’s ability to make Flash perform well on those companies’ hardware, Murarka said.
Apple wishes to jump on the bandwagon soon, though; Flash Player 10.1 opens up some interesting multimedia possibilities for other platforms. The player supports all of that makes for the optimal video-watching experience.
Games are also being targeted. It also supports gesture-based controls, which is a boon for gaming. Ludwig indicated towards Flash-based games operating on social-networking sites such as Playfish and FarmVille.
Adobe stated that the player would not consume battery life. For example, the player goes to sleep when you receive an incoming call.