Adobe confirms full Flash for smartphones – but not the iPhone

by Stevie Smith - Feb 16 2009, 08:42

Revealed ahead of toady's World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Adobe’s mainstay video and animation application Flash is set to spread its reach from the PC-based Web experience over to upper-tier smartphone mobile handsets.

According to San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc., it is hard at work developing for the mobile industry, with handset devices expected to receive a full PC version of the Flash player software by 2010.

However, iPhone owners might feel their noses are being put out of joint seeing as Adobe followed its announcement by saying it currently has no concrete plans to bring Flash to Apple’s touch-screen smartphone – although both tech companies continue to work towards a mobile solution.

Placed in the spotlight of the busy Barcelona trade show, Adobe representative David Wadhwani confirmed to Reuters that, iPhone notwithstanding, smartphone platforms that definitely will play host to Flash in 2010 include handsets running the Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia Symbian, and Google Android operating systems.

The arrival of a full, PC-based version of Adobe’s mobile Flash player should help the leading software outfit build on the established popularity of its scaled down Flash Lite application, which has already found purchase with approaching 1 billion handsets.

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