Adobe announced the release of the mobile profile Flash Lite 3 runtime. Flash Lite 3 is a version of the Flash player optimized to run on cell phones and other memory constrained platforms. This updates the core code base to Flash Player 8, bringing it closer to the functionality and features set of the desktop player (currently at version 9). (For more information on Flash Lite, see Flash Lite: Graphics for Mobile Devices by Hartti Suomela.)
Cell phone makers NTT DoCoMo and Nokia also announced that both would soon offer cell phones supporting the Flash Lite 3 runtine. Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing at Adobe anticipates significant growth in the adoption of the Flash runtime: "Our licensees worldwide, led by Nokia, have now shipped 300 million Flash-enable devices around the world... We expect to be in over a billion devices by 2010." Anup emphasized a "growing opportunity for developers target mobile devices including the hundreds of millions of Nokia one that ship every year." Not all of Nokia's offerings are limited to Flash Lite, however. The N800 portable device, which uses a Linux-based OS, supports the desktop version Flash Player 9.
The most notable upgrade to Flash Lite 3 is its support for FLV format Flash video, a feature that has been in the greatest demand by Flash developers. Flash Lite 3 supports both the Sorensen Spark and the ON2 VP6 codecs. Adobe also announced that it is adding the H.264 codec to the Flash desktop runtime. It is also working to bring the codec to the Flash Lite player in the future. Anup stated that, "We continue to work toward point in time in the future where we we'll be doing simultaneous desktop and embedded or mobile releases." For now, Flash Lite 3 still lacks some of the features of the desktop player, such as alpha blending between multiple graphics and video planes and live motion blur effects. Adobe wasn't able to get acceptable performance on the typical mobile phone profile.
To aid developers looking to take advantage of Flash Lite 3, Adobe and Nokia have updated the hardware profiles in the Device Central utility in Adobe's Creative Suite 3 tools. This lets developers test Flash apps against multiple device profiles to determine if the app can be supported properly. Device Central includes metadata for the specs for the Flash implementations and also the screen resolution, color depth, and MIME types supported for each device. Device Central is incorporated in all Adobe developer tools, as well as its graphics and content generation offerings, such as Premiere, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
Application development for the Flash Lite beta, thus far has focused on consumer targeted apps, but that may change once the runtime see greater adoption. Adobe has seen a lot of interest from enterprise developers for building mobile IT apps. Anup stated, "We are seeing interest that [enterprise developers] would like to create a mobile experience. Aside from video, Flash-based UIs and building entire data services on Flash are the other elements we see getting a fair bit of traction, depending on what's popular depending on a given geography or operating/subscriber population." More information is available at the Flash Lite main page: www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/.
