Adobe Promoting Flash for Mobile Platforms

Marin Perez, reporting for InformationWeek:

Flash technology is nearly ubiquitous around the Web and it is used by popular sites such as YouTube, Hulu, and MLB.com. But one of the main criticisms of Flash on smartphones is that it is too resource-intensive and can slow down a device or drain its battery.

This is actually one of the main criticisms of Flash on Mac OS X, too. The other, of course, is that it’s crashy. Other than poor performance, memory consumption, and crashiness, though, Flash is well-regarded.

Adobe will be releasing a public developer beta for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Windows, Macintosh, and Linux later this year. The company also said public betas for Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian mobile devices will hit in early 2010. Adobe expects mobile devices to be released with full Flash support in the first half of next year.

The only major smartphone platform missing from Adobe’s roadmap is the iPhone.

Missing it will remain, I think. I don’t see how anything has changed since I wrote “Flash on iPhone Political Calculus” back in February 2008.

★ Monday, 5 October 2009