As I’m sure you have already read we announced some major new products and stats at Mobile World Congress this year. The show was incredible and our stand was extremely busy, I think I spoke to all 60,000 attendees!
We announced Flash Home, Flash Cast 2 and Adobe Mobile Client our new mobile technology that will enable over 70% of devices currently in the market to ship with Flash technology. Flash Home is a game changing product that will enable brands and users to really own their devices by allowing you to easily change the UI of your device to better reflect your personality. One of the most striking changes is a complete device level integration, which means that you can present PIM data across device platforms for the first time. It hasn’t been easy and I should know, as I worked on some of the features.. one was call log which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare to get right.
Flash Cast 2 is another application that we announced and it represents our data services/portal offering. Its a client-server product that will enable content owners to create amazing mobile experiences that run across devices. Users, for the first time, will have the opportunity to access content including news, weather, sport, games and even multimedia. All that using a new client, the Adobe Mobile Client, which is half the size and twice as fast as our Flash Lite player. This means that we can target devices with ARM7 100mhz processors with ease and bring rich and engaging content to those users that would never otherwise have data services.
Flash Lite is currently on 450million handsets, over 300 device models and over 100 mobile and consumer electronics manufacturers are now using the Flash player to standardize their experiences across non-pc devices. Walking around the conference I was knocked back by how many new devices are using Flash for their UI. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, Sony and Nintendo are all using Flash technology as part of their platforms helping them deliver rich and engaging experiences across all device tiers.
Our target of 1bn devices by 2010 was a good one, we’ve used that as a benchmark when speaking with content owners. The great news is that it looks like we’re going to be a whole year early.
2008 looks like its going to be a fantastic year for developers, as always there is much to do.
Hi Mark
Adobe Mobile Client sounds really exciting, especially the 70% of devices in the market bit. Can you explain that a bit more though, does this mean that devices that dont currently have flashlite installed will be able to view flash content?
Would it with only with flash capable phones and dowload the FLplayer OTA, cant imagine it would work on non currently capable phones though.
Regards
Alistair Gillan
Hi Alistair,
The Adobe Mobile Client represents our strategy to ensure that even extremely low end devices can play Flash Lite content.
The market currently is full of ‘feature phones’, medium to low end device that perform basic functions as well as music or camera features. This represents the mass-market of users, and the AMC can reach most all of those.
Most of those devices have a closed OS running proprietary software from OEMs or stack providers. Some don’t even have file systems, let alone OTA upgrade capability. It would be an impossible task to build and test Flash upgrades, even if you are an OEM because of the cost primarily. Thats why most FL players on devices are integrated by the licensees and upgrades occur at different speeds on different platforms.
As more Open OS devices appear in the market we can adopt new strategies but this might require changes in device platforms. Most Open OSs don’t allow you to install a browser plugin for example.
Luckily Adobe Mobile technology is already embedded on most of the top 20 OEM platforms. That will make the transition easier as demand grows for full web browsing and better engaging mobile experiences.
Hi Mark
I’ve just read my question again, which now reads quite garbled! but I think you got the idea of what I was saying. Sounds like everything is still moving in the right direction. It will be interesting to see what affect the apple iphone has on the rest of the market with regards to web browsing experience, did you get to see a demo of Googles mobile OS? Lets hope the forthcoming SDK for the iphone will introduce a flashplayer!!
cheers
Alistair
Aaaaargh!…the horror that was CallLog!
Glad to see all the hard work put into the PIM stuff might actually be used