RIM, the makers of the still-strong Blackberry line of smartphones, announced that they’re planning on bringing full support for both Silverlight and Flash to their handsets. That makes RIM the first smartphone company to put their word behind both of these pieces of software. The Silverlight announcement is particularly exciting. While Flash is far more widely used, Silverlight is the method of choice for allowing users to watch Netflix instant streaming.
Overall, this is a very good announcement for the smartphone ecosystem as a whole as it may work to force the hands of other companies. While my prognosis for RIM has been pretty grim for a while, I’m sure there is a whole base of users who would gladly drop their iPhones to go and get a Blackberry if they could access Hulu whenever they wanted. And it doesn’t hurt that Blackberry handsets are available on pretty much every carrier, so consumers are free to choose whichever provider has the best coverage where they live.
The reason to give up your current smartphone for one that can do Flash and the like is pretty clear: access to content. In addition to Apple’s usual tendency of making everyone think their product is super sexy, the iPhone’s desirability is largely due to the huge glut of stuff you have on the thing. It functions as a portable media player, a game console, and an all-around pretty good pocket computer. That’s a lot.
But the web opened up by support for Flash on a phone is huge. Instantly, you get Hulu, YouTube, and a ton of game sites. And I’ll bring up an old technology-pusher: pornography. It’s good to remember that one of the reasons that VHS became the standard for home video was that VHS’ backers allowed porn onto their platform, while Sony (which was backing the competing Betamax format at the time) did not.
