A Shot in the Dark with Flash Lite
- Filed under: Event News & Updates, Software Tools
- Date: May 9,2008
The fact that Adobe has only delivered fair to poor Flash support for any platform outside of Windows is also a significant problem. While the company likes to rattle off the number of devices and operating systems that “support Flash,” it hides the fact that few of those actually support the latest Flash 9, with many stuck at support for Flash 5, 6, or 7.
Mobile devices typically run Flash Lite, which targets a minimal subset of Flash interactivity; the existing Flash Lite 2.0 is based upon the 2003 Flash 7 runtime. The recently announced Flash Lite 3.0 will be the first version that can play Flash video, the primary attraction of Flash on the web.
Flash Lite does not run on the iPhone. At Apple’s recent shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs noted that the Lite version of Flash “is not capable of being used with the web,” meaning it can’t play back content developed for the desktop web browsers, while the full desktop runtime “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone.
While Adobe has bundled Flash Lite players for devices running Symbian, Sun’s Java ME, Qualcom’s BREW, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, it also competes against those platforms for native development attention. It should come as no surprise that once those companies discover this, they will likely react the same way Microsoft did on the Windows desktop. Certainly, once Microsoft can deliver its own mobile version of Silverlight, it will attempt to displace Flash Lite. That’s apparently not too far away; the company recently demonstrated a beta of Silverlight 2 running on Nokia’s Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile devices.
[www.appleinsider.com] By Prince McLean
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