Sabkush Headlines: Adobe moves mobile Flash from rhetoric to reality

Sabkush Headlines: Adobe moves mobile Flash from rhetoric to realityAdobe moves mobile Flash from rhetoric to reality

After enduring months of scorn from Apple, Adobe Systems is set to begin a major effort to claim some of the mobile computing initiative for itself starting Monday night. Thats when the company plans to issue an all-but-finished beta of Flash Player 10.1, moving from demos and rhetoric to a more concrete answer to those who question the technologys relevance. Flash for Android phones will become final with Googles imminent release of Android 2.2, aka Froyo, and over coming months Flash 10.1 will spread to many other mobile operating systems. "Were expecting really broad platform support over the next 12 to 18 months," said Anup Murarka, Adobes director of technology strategy. "There may be a little bit of a slow start as these devices trickle out," he said, but a broader range expanding also to tablets, Netbooks, TVs, and set-top boxes will emerge for Christmas and at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Also due to get Flash Player 10.1 are Palms WebOS, Research in Motions BlackBerry OS, Nokias Symbian, the MeeGo version of Linux from Intel and Nokia, and Windows Phone 7--though not at that operating systems debut, Murarka said. Many companies will pre-install Flash Player 10.1 on their phones through deals Adobe is hammering out, but in the case of Google, those with Froyo phones will be able to download it directly from the Android Market. Its no surprise that Adobes partner list omits one very important swath of the mobile device market: Apples iOS, the operating system that powers not only the influential iPhone but also the new iPad and the iPod Touch. Adobe has been twice thwarted in its ambition to spread Flash there--first when Apple rejected it outright, and second when it blocked a more indirect Adobe effort to convert Flash applications into native iOS applications. Apple CEO Steve Jobs castigated Flash for being insecure, crash-inducing, and a relic from a bygone age of computing. But the length of Adobes list of supporters shows that the company still has a lot of clout. Adobes ability to secure mobile device partners--and there are a number of chipmakers cooperating on Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, too--is reminiscent of an earlier age when Microsoft, not Apple, was the company whose power galvanized competitors. Then, Microsofts rivals threw their collective weight behind Sun Microsystems Java in the 1990s and behind Linux shortly afterward, in both cases helping to counterbalance if not vanquish Microsoft. Battle lost, war not over Jobs complaints, documented in a very public letter, helped spur those trying to build a better Flash competitor out of Web standards built into browsers without plug-ins. That effort, even though Adobe supports it to a degree, poses a major competitive threat to Flash. Adobe knows it lost the Apple battle, but its not giving up the war. "We work with Apple on the desktop, but were not making any progress on the mobile side," Murarka said. What that means for Flash programmers who want their software on iOS devices: "Developers will have to absorb additional cost to do development for that platform." The biggest point of counterattack against Apple will be simply support on other phones, a move Adobe believes will keep Flash relevant in the era in which smartphones are miniature general-purpose computers, albeit wimpier than your average laptop. Apples objections undermines Adobes "multiscreen" ambition to let Flash programmers create a single application that adapts to many different systems. But even without its presence, Flash Player 10.1 for mobile extends Flash programmers reach--to Android phones including the Motorola Droid, Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S, and HTC Evo, Incredible, and Desire, for starts. "There is still an issue for content providers and application developers in targeting multiple mobile platforms (RIM, Symbian, Android). With Flash 10.1, they will at least have a common solution to target multiple non-Apple platforms plus desktop environments with one code base, one project, one skill-set, etc.," said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "They may still have to target Apple with a separate effort, but this is an improvement over the current much higher-cost situation, which is a different solution for each platform." Now it will be up to Adobe and its Flash allies to back up their claims of performance, compatibility, and desirability. Adobe claims notable performance for technology derided as a CPU hog on full-fledged computers: "We can watch over three hours of video on a Nexus One, streamed over 3G," Murarka said, and casual games will run for four hours. Adobe previously had offered a stripped down and not terribly successful Flash Lite for phones, but in November 2008 announced its intent to concentrate instead on a unified Flash Player for both computers and smartphones. The work was difficult, in part because Adobe had to rework Flash for devices lacking the relatively copious memory and processor power of a regular computer. One helpful side effect, though, is that Flash Player 10.1 should consume less memory and processing power on desktop computers, too.