Flash Player extends to mobile devices

ADOBE HAS SIGNED UP Google, Motorola, Nvidia, Palm, RIM, and Qualcomm for its new Flash Player 10.1 software for mobile gear.

The outfit has a cunning plan to get Flash Player 10.1 accelerated directly onto the chips in smartphones, netbooks, and small laptops based on the ARM chip architecture. So far Flash video has been pretty much ignored on mobile phones.

Adobe created what it calls the Open Screen Project to get Flash to run directly on small mobile devices. Now apparently Google has joined. Other outfits such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Nokia, and RIM, and ARM chip suppliers such as Qualcomm, are all participants in the Open Screen Project.

Motorola will ship Google Android based devices with Flash Player support early next year.

However Adobe's Flash project has been snubbed by Apple, which has refused to support it. This apparently means that Flash videos will not be available on exploding Iphones any time soon.

Since more than 75 per cent of video on the web is delivered via Flash Player, manufacturers hope it will make their products more attractive.

A public developer beta of Flash 10.1 is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux later this year.

Public betas for the Android and Symbian operating systems are expected to be available in early 2010. Flash Player version 10.1 includes more comprehensive Flash player support for accelerometer-based screen orientation, in which the screen can be reoriented between landscape and portrait modes, and multitouch.

RIM, Nokia, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all saying they will be bringing Flash Player to their devices, including BlackBerry smartphones, Nokia devices, Nvidia silicon, and Qualcomm chipsets. µ