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February 16, 2006
The State of Flash Lite
At the Seattle Mobile meeting Monday night someone asked one of the speakers what the status and current viability was of Flash Lite for creating games. No one seemed to have much new information about Flash Lite as it currently stands other than we'd all heard a lot about it a while ago but it had not really shown up on the radar yet. There were a couple of announcements from Adobe this week at 3GSM regarding Flash Lite so I thought I would post some notes about the state of Flash Lite as it stands. So here in no particular order are some specifics:
- Macromedia released Flash Lite 2 in early January of this year. Here is a Link to the press release.
- Shipments of mobile devices running Flash have more than tripled from 12 to 45 million units within the last twelve months.
- Adobe announced this week at 3GSM that LG and BenQ have both licensed Flash Lite.
- Nokia is working on embedding Flash Lite into their Series 60 phones. Reportedly they are also going to be embedding it in some series 40 phones as well.
- NTT DoCoMo has had Flash Lite enabled devices for over 3 years. Over 20 Million DoCoMo (over 45%) subscribers have Flash Lite enabled phones
- Currently there are no U.S. carriers that have phones that support Flash Lite (pre-installed).
- In October, Macromedia and Qualcomm announced an agreement that Macromedia would create a Flash Lite extension for BREW. Press release here.
- The Yankee Group put out an excellent white paper about Flash Lite in the Japanese market and where it is going in the U.S. The paper can be found here on the Macromedia site.
For developers interested in developing in Flash Lite, here are some development resources:
- Macromedia Mobile and Devices Developer Center - Start here.
- Macromedia Mobile Developer Program - It's free. Dev kits, specs, etc. .
- Flash Devices - Great resource for information about Flash Lite, run by the manger of developer relations for mobile and devices at Adobe.
- Flash Mobile Forum. A good source of Flash Lite news and discussions about Flash Lite.
So are any of you mobile developers in the European and/or North American markets doing any development in Flash Lite?
Posted by David Adams at February 16, 2006 11:03 AM
Comments
There was a webinar by Gary Kovac of Adobe on Mobile Software and Flashlite in Jan 06. Here is a link to that presentation if people are interested. http://fiercemarkets.breezecentral.com/p56733452/
Posted by: Chintan Mehta at February 16, 2006 12:39 PM
I remember the flashy press release and the reviews on the Lite version. Nokia was talking about introducing the Lite with their N90 series. I had run through some reviews on http://www.inods.com for Flash Lite a couple of weeks back and if I am not wrong it supports the Flash 7 player. Lets see if how fast it becomes part of the standard mobile package.
Posted by: Greg at February 16, 2006 03:10 PM
Ciao,
as far as Flash Lite enabled phones all the new Symbian 9.1 OS powered phones will have Flash Lite embeded, also the Symbian 3rd editon SDK contains Flash Lite. Other phones are coming out, many Sony Ericsson have Flash Lite pre-installed.
I do full time Flash Lite development www.biskero.org and I am also the manager of the Adobe Mobile User Group of Boston, you can check more infos here: www.flashmobilegroup.org
Alessandro
Posted by: Alessandro at February 21, 2006 01:07 PM