Adobe gets Flash at Mobile World Congress

A new version of Flash for smartphones aims to offer a PC-like experience

Adobe used the Mobile World Congress event today to make a raft of announcements aimed at promoting its Flash platform to developers, handset manufacturers and consumers.

The firm is previewing its Flash Player 10 for Smartphones, which aims to bring the full desktop version of Flash to the mobile world, thereby allowing developers to design richer applications for mobile phones.

Flash 10 for Smartphones is currently compatible with Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian S60 platforms, and is due for release next year, according to Zeke Koch, director of product management, platform strategy at Adobe.

"We realised that, with smartphones, people want to browse the whole of the internet, so they need every feature in the full desktop Flash Player," he said. "So we've decided to have a single code base going from phones to desktops."

Adobe announced a new $10m (£7m) fund in partnership with Nokia designed to encourage developers to build applications and services for mobile phones, desktop devices and consumer devices such as set-top boxes.

The fund is tied to the Open Screen Project, an initiative launched in May 2008 aimed at creating a consistent runtime environment across screens using the extensive reach and capabilities of Adobe AIR and the Flash platform, said the firm. Palm today announced that it will join firms such as LG, Motorola and Samsung on the initiative.

Developers hoping to secure some of the funds for their Flash-based applications will be judged on the extent to which they are innovative and compelling for end users, their robustness, and how well they exploit the capabilities and features of Nokia devices, Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR.

Koch explained that the announcement is part of the firm's ongoing efforts to support and encourage Flash developers.

"Our first strategy with Flash on the mobile was to charge device makers a licence fee and this worked quite well - we'll have one billion Flash-enabled devices by the end of the quarter," he said.

"But many of the devices were not open to third-party developers, so we are trying to make mobile [Flash] more aligned to the desktop - open and freely available."

Tony Cripps of analyst firm Ovum argued that the Open Screen Project is an "interesting concept" as it attempts to solve the long-standing problem of application portability.

"Flash has been deployed on hundreds of millions of handsets but no one has really used it yet," he said. "By itself the funding will not deliver much but, if you combine it with the Nokia Ovi Store, it could provide a means for developers to reach out to the community."

Adobe also announced a new version of its Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player, a mobile runtime that enables developers to create Flash apps without needing to worry what versions are running on users' handsets.

When their applications are launched on a mobile, the Flash Player will check to see which version of Flash is installed, and connect to the Adobe servers to download the correct version if necessary, explained Koch.

Adobe also launched its Adobe Reader Mobile SDK at the Barcelona event, which is designed to enable handset manufacturers to deliver devices that can easily download, manage and display PDF content and e-books. The new software engine delivers support for Adobe's "re-flowable PDF" content protection technology, as well as the EPUB file format, an XML-based e-book standard with broad support from the publishing industry.