Comments on: Microsoft licenses Flash Lite for mobile phones (yay or yawn?)

By: Serena

Serena — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:18:09 +0000

Flash would be a Yay for me. Its a frustrating to be compromised as with the mobile browser improvements suggest a complete experience. I had thought the launch of the iPhone 3GSand OS3 would bring us closer to mobile Flash. But I do wonder if Apple consider Flash to be a competing source of mobile applications. I think Apple will be the last to offer this as it could marginalise their not insignificant Apps revenue.

By: N97 ohne Vertrag

N97 ohne Vertrag — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:03:50 +0000

Hey! already read it: Nokia N97 is available for Pre-Order in Spain for 450� without contract…!

By: kevin meilak

kevin meilak — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:55:25 +0000

The N800 runs linux…….

This begs the question surely, why hasnt anyone made a linux based mobile??

;-)

By: David Arno

David Arno — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:18:52 +0000

Nathan, the N800 device is a Linux based one and Flash 9 is available for Linux. Thus it would have been a relatively painless process getting Flash 9 onto it. Most phones these days are, I think, either Symbian or Windows CE based. Flash 9 for either of those platforms is nowhere to be seen, and the existence of Flash Lite suggests we may never see it either.

By: Nathan de Vries

Nathan de Vries — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:37:54 +0000

“Next step: Flash 9 (10?) on a phone?”

I’m not so sure about this. Adobe has deprecated their Flash Player SDK (v7) in favour of Flash Lite. Adobe aren’t leaving phone manufacturers with many options for getting FP 9/10 onto their devices. That being said, does anyone know the details of how Nokia are able to provide Flash Player 9 support on their N800 device (ARM11)?

By: David Arno

David Arno — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:46:09 +0000

@Tangent = your sources have somewhat misled you. There is currently no version of Silverlight for Windows mobile. Version 1 is scheduled to appear in the next three months. Version 2 used to be schedlued for release at the same time as the version for Windows & Mac, but probably will be later. Silverlight 2 is Silverlight 1.1 with a different name. Silverlight 2 is still only an early developer beta and so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t work with some v1 stuff.

Oh and Flash most certainly hasn’t maintained perfect backward compatibility. It’s close, but a number of “fudge factors” in my code to handle subtle rendering differences between flash 7 & 8 for example are evidence that “perfect” is too strong a claim.

By: Tangent

Tangent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:53:20 +0000

Well, from my sources, Silverlight for mobile is running Silverlight 1.0 (not 1.1 or 2.0), and sadly, SL 2.0 is not backward compatible with SL 1.0/1.1 — at least not yet. If you are attempting to run Mix08 website with SL 2.0, you might not get any luck.

Flash Player, however, has maintained perfect backward compatibilities.

By: David Arno

David Arno — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:11:07 +0000

Microsoft plan on having the full version of Silverlight on mobile phones, and not just windows mobile phones. Silverlight is coming to Symbian OS phones too.

By: Weyert

Weyert — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:24:52 +0000

Currently, Apple’s iPhone is even too slow to get their own animated user interface work properly without stuttering. I can understand why they don’t want Flash yet on their device. Of course, a full blown Flash Player would be nice to have on mobile phones.