Macromedia Flash Lite for Symbian

Macromedia has been pretty quiet here in the states on mobile devices, about a year ago Macromedia shipped the Macromedia Flash player 6 for Pocket PC, but since then if you wanted Macromedia Flash content, the only place was really on a Sony CLIE (now retired) and in Japan on the 505 series phones from DoCoMo. But today Macromedia announced something pretty surprising if you know the history of the Flash format. Macromedia's new device offering is called "Flash Lite" and will support the SVG-T standard (Scalable Vector Graphics-Tiny) as well as run on the Symbian OS. According to all reports the reference platform for development kit coming out in soon is Symbian Ltd.'s Symbian OS, so that means we're likely to see Flash lite on a pretty wide variety of devices like Sony Ericsson p900, Nokia 3650 and Nokia NGage to name a few. Macromedia also announced a Flash-based application service called FlashCast, which we're not sure of where it fits in the device roadmap, but it was reported to be a cable TV-like offering with channels of content.

 

So what does this mean? It looks like Macromedia might be ditching Microsoft and not developing new versions of the Flash player for the Pocket PC or Smartphone and focusing on Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets and also adding in another way to generate revenue with FlashCast as a publishing system, who knows.

 

Flash Lite info here.

[Tuig @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Wow, it took 'm three years from announcement to.... announcement (although I distinctly remember seeing a (beta?) version on a 3650 more than a year ago)

http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/1101.html

[TheZodiac @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Hmm... there was a FLASH player on my N9290.

[Ashley Bennett @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

Flash MX 2004 comes with templates to create Flash content for mobile devices. I created a games for the Nokia 3650 as part of a University project at the end of last year, but the player for the phone still isn't here!

And I seriously doubt Macromedia are "ditching Microsoft and not developing new versions of the Flash player for the Pocket PC or Smartphone". They want as large an install base as possible.

[kosso @ Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

It looks like the only way to get a player on a handset, is to but a phone with it already installed (imode, etc). And they say the costs are per handset, so Macromedia will make money for every phone sold by the manufacturers with on. This is obviously totally different to the desktop plugin situation, as the mobile operators stand to make ALOT more money by getting users to interact with rich media, by the data bandwidth charges alone. As they are in the control of the handsets, I imagine they'll quickly jusmp on the bandwagon and get the players on handsets.

T-Mobile are about to launch in the UK. A service called 'News Express', which will run on Symbian devices using Flahs Lite (and Flash Cast).. they will no doubt charge for content, as well as charging for the actual bandwidth used too (depending on contract). ...

I personally can't wait until I can see the stuff I've created in MX2K4 on one of my many Symbian phones! :)