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.