Adobe announced on the eve of its MAX developer conference that the next version of the Flash Player, 10.1, will run on phones as well as PC and Mac when it comes out in the first half of 2010.
We’ll get for the first time the same version of Flash on PC and phones rather than the cut-down Flash Lite for cellphones, and it’s the first time you’ll be able to download and install Flash onto your phone yourself rather than having to hope the OS or handset has it bundled. And having Flash on phones is the first step towards having AIR apps running natively on cellphones.
Flash Player 10.1 won’t run on every smartphone. According to Flash senior product marketing manager T. Barclay, the list includes “Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian Series 60, Palm webOS and hopefully others we will be able to talk about in the near future”.
The developer beta version for Palm and for Windows Mobile 6.5 will be available before the end of the year and the public betas for Android and Symbian are expected early in 2010.
FULL FLASH ON PHONES: Today, only 40% of new phones have the basic Flash Lite version. In 2010 all new smartphones will have full Flash.
The final version of Flash 10.1 will ship in the first half of next year and Barclay says that “there will be devices in the market that support it”.
If the Flash player doesn’t come on a new phone or as part of a system software update, it will be available online through app-stores; or if you try to load Flash content, Tom Barclay says you might get an automatic download link.
“Our goal is to make Flash very easy to install and keep it updated to avoid fragmentation of the runtime,” says Tom Barclay.
Flash on Google Chrome and Android
As well as working with Adobe on the Google Android Flash player, G. is also signing up to the Open-Screen project that Adobe announced at the beginning of 2009.
While Google hasn’t made any public announcements about Chrome and Flash compatibility, Adrian Ludwig – the group Flash product marketing manager – says that “their participation is a strong indication that they’re planning on delivering AIR and the Flash player to their OS”.
POWER UP: Flash is graphics, video and scripts – AIR turns that into fully-fledged applications.
That might seem odd in light of the fact that Ian Fette - Chrome product manager hinted (during Google’s developer conference) that he was hoping to see more video on the web move away from Flash into codecs supported by its proposed HTML 5 video tag: “We have to support about 50 image formats in the browser — it’s just too complicated; we want to make it simpler for videos.”
But with 75% of videos on the web currently in Flash format, Adrian Ludwig says Google is being pragmatic about supporting the Flash platform: “They consider a Flash player one of the technologies that’s very important for Google to be successful in building web technologies.”
Optimised for phones and devices
The apparent issue with Flash on phones is whether the mobile processor is powerful enough to show content. T. Barclay claims “a lot of existing content will just work on those phones”, while the new Flash player takes advantage of hardware graphics acceleration and video decoding.
With other improvements in the code structure, Tom Barclay promises the new Flash player increases software rendering performance by over 87% and reduces processor memory consumption by 55%.
Adobe team has worked on specific optimisation for mobile phones based on Snapdragon chips (which means high end smartphones like the Toshiba TG O1 or the promised SmartBook devices), as well as for Nvidia’s Ion and Tegra chips.
Buy one of the new netbooks like the Hewlett Packard Mini 311, Samsung N510 or Lenovo Ideapad S12 and you’ll be able to try the public beta version of Flash – 10.1 that will show full frame H264 video by the end of 2009.
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