flashmobileblog.com

Currently I’m in San Francisco where I’ll be having some end of year meetings and setting out the plan for 2008. Lots has happened this year at Adobe, the 25th Anniversary, the largest product launch in history. Flash reached 99.1% of penetration on the desktop making it the most popular plugin ever. In mobile we launched several Flash Cast trials that will lead to at least three services in 2008 covering US, Europe and China. Flash Lite has shipped on well over 300million devices most of which are outside Japan.

Flash Lite 3 also launched will massive amounts of attention from across the world and devices shipping in Japan within a few months of its release. Nokia will be shipping FL3 on their S60 devices in Q1/08 and Sony Ericsson have also agreed to ship FL2 across their device range.

We saw some fantastic devices using Flash for their UI including the PSP, PS3, Wii, MicrosoftTV, Airbus IFE, Samsung phones and Mp3 players, IRiver mp3 players, Nokia S40 music phone and fantastic devices from LG and Sony Ericsson.

The iPhone finally reached the UK two months ago and it has certainly helped raise the game for device manufacturers. The iPhone is a fantastic example of a niche product that is perfectly targeted at its customer base.

UPDATE - You can now buy these applications for $20 and they are improved versions.  I’ve paid for mine and I’m very happy to do so. 

Then came the Ipod Touch, actually it was somewhat expected as the technology that went into the iPhone was so valuable, it would be crazy not to use it. I went to investigate at the Apple store here in San Francisco and found that the Touch doesn’t have the Mail, Maps or Weather apps. That would have been the end of that purchase only that after some searching I found that there is a growing community of users that are already building applications for their iPhones/iPod Touch.

The process was pretty painless, took about 1 hour and I now have a very useful gadget for viewing the web, looking at maps all with a great mp3 player.

Ok ok, it doesn’t have Flash, but before I started it couldn’t do maps, weather, email or pretend to be a ‘Flash light’.

Yesterday I popped into my local store and got myself an LG Viewty KU990, largely seen as the successor to the Prada device, which also a Flash UI. The phone is marketed as a camera phone with support for up to ISO800, how it also support H.264 video at 120fps! Roll on the slow motion clips…

LG have clearly seen the benefit in using Flash for their UI layer and the effort shows. The big difference between this device and others using Flash is that it sports a touch screen as the primary interface. It’s very hard at this time to be 100% accurate about which features have been done using native code. My guess is that the whole UI is in Flash with possibly Java or the native OS hooked in to support the text entry engines and video overlay capabilities.

Another important feature on the device is the ability to run your own content! I’ve discovered the ‘My Stuff’ folder that lists Flash content, so to answer Nick’s question yes you can run your own content. I’m currently trying to find out but I’m pretty sure its Flash Lite 2.1.

The camera results are awesome, you can see in the photos below (click to enlarge) of my back garden. Unfortunately there were no squirrels out there today so they are a little dull

 

 

Here is a link to a great video showing the features of the phone, note the different input methods of landscape/portrait keyboard and handwriting recognition. I have to admit that I’ve found the handwriting recognition to be pretty inaccurate so far, which isn’t unexpected as most are. Typing on the keyboard in either mode works perfectly.

The salesperson told me that these devices are selling extremely well based on heavy marketing by operators that expected the iphone to be extremely successful here in the UK. This has resulted in some shops running out of stock and their supply chain having to route around more units to cope with the demand.

If I had to list one problem that’s got to be the lack of support for my new shiny macbook. I can’t even seem to send files to Leopard which is a pain, although using windows didn’t like it either

Great news, the waiting is over. Starting today developers can download the Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition for supported handsets via Adobe Labs. You can get all of the information on the site but here are a few key things to mention:

Developer Edition only
This Flash Lite 3 player is for developers only and is not for end-users (consumers) and can not be distributed with any Flash Lite content.

No IMEI required
The installer (SIS file) does not require a developer to provide their IMEI (also known as serial number) to Adobe in order to get the player. Any developer that has a supported device can install the player. There is a brief start-up splash screen that appears each time the player is launched - this is in place because it’s the developer edition. Handsets that commercially ship with Flash Lite 3 pre-installed will not have this start-up splash screen.

Standalone Player only
The Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition is only the standalone player and will show up as an icon in the applications folder as “Flash”. The pre-installed Flash Lite player that’s already on a device will be in the same folder and called “Flash Player” - so there will be two similar icons. Testing of SWF files can only be done through the standalone player; web browser, screensaver and wallpaper content types are not supported.

Supported handsets
The Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition has only been certified by Adobe on the Nokia N95 (non-US 3G version). Technically it should work on any Nokia S60 3rd edition or later devices. Adobe has not certified Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition on any other Nokia S60 3rd edition devices and cannot guarantee that the player will work on them. Other Nokia S60 3rd edition or newer models include: 3250, 5500 Sport, 5700, 6110 Navigator, 6120 Classic, 6121 Classic, 6290, E50, E51, E60, E61, E61i, E62, E65, E70, E90, N71, N73, N73 Music Edition, N75, N76, N77, N80, N80 IE, N81, N81 8GB, N82, N91, N91 8GB, N92, N93, N93i, N95, N95 US 3G, N95 8GB.

Uninstalling a previous version of Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition
If you were a developer who submitted your IMEI number in October and received an early version of the Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition in October it’s recommend you uninstall the current version and install this new version.

Developing Flash Lite 3 content
In order to create Flash Lite 3 content developers will need to update both Flash CS3 and Device Central CS3 - both are free updates.  You can also download the FL3 developer Edition for S60.

So head on over to the site, download and install the player and share your thoughts with the community.