The Story
At its annual developer conference, Adobe announced that it would be working to make Flash available on more or less every major smartphone as early as next year with the release of Flash 10.1. This includes Windows Mobile, Palm’s WebOS, Google’s Android operating system, and Symbian. The BlackBerry browser is expected to get Flash a little later on.
Some types of handsets have already been running Flash Lite, which has its share of problems. Adobe representatives said that as phones have been built with better processors, the need for Flash Lite has been obsoleted in many cases because the phone can provide the resources necessary to properly run full Flash.
The iPhone wasn’t mentioned in Adobe’s announcement. Apparently Adobe had said it would work with Apple to make a version of Flash for the iPhone, but so far we have no ETA on when that will actually become available to consumers.
Tipping The Scales
Whenever Flash 10.1 hits phones in 2010, it’s going to give people yet another reason to not get an iPhone. The iPhone right now is the best media smartphone on the market, but it won’t be able to retain that title if everything else has Flash. So much content across the internet is only accessible with Flash. People are going to see the new Windows Mobile phones running Flash, and they’ll say “Oh, now I can watch Hulu wherever I am!”
Will Carriers Limit Access To Flash Sites?
As has been established time and again, the wireless providers hate it when users access a lot of data. If we’ve learned anything from the iPhone, it’s that AT&T’s network is made of splinters and toothpaste.
With that in mind, it seems possible that carriers will do something to make Flash a little less useful than we might believe. If everyone is walking around watching Homestar Runner on their phones, companies like Verizon and AT&T could find themselves with some very slow networks.
The problem with limiting Flash access is that there does not seem to be a good way to make that happen. On the iPhone, for example, everything that uses data more intensely is a separate application; Apple does not allow access to Skype over cellular data networks. But Flash runs in the browser. If the carriers cripple that, they’ll have a whole lot of outrage on their hands.
