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Adobe Announces Flash Lite 3, Maybe For iPhone

Submitted by Edward Kirk on October 2, 2007 - 5:21pm.
in

This Monday Adobe announced the arrival of their new flash player, Flash Lite 3, an important update to their animation suite for mobile devices. This addition is the first to play video back in their own FLV video format, as well as the first to support animations written in Flash 8, greatly expanding the number of sites that will display properly. There is also speculation that this new revision may be the one to finally end up on the iPhone.

In addition to playing back FLV video format and Flash 8 support, the new Flash Lite 3 also gains an alleged 20% performance jump, making streaming video and progressive downloading more smooth and elegant.

Adobe claims that availability of version 3 is going to depend on handset makers. Officially speaking, it's due to support Windows Mobile, Symbian Series 60 OS, and Qualcomm's BREW platform. Media players and PDAs will also support it. Hopefully we will see it on the iPhone as well, but as of yet there is no word of iPhone/ iPod Touch support.

[via MacNN]

Submitted by Hans on October 2, 2007 - 6:16pm.
oh please oh please oh please!!!
man apple needs to get this to us, it might almost make losing apps worth it to upgrade and get flash

cross fingers but...

Submitted by dimitrin on October 2, 2007 - 9:51pm.
I'm mean apple has been sooooo bad, I bet they will not let you have stand alone apps in flash. So it is good but not nearly as good as 3rd party apps. in my pessimistic outcome...

I hope that apple wakes up and smells the solder! real 3rd party apps are what will make the iphone the killer platform. We all know that.

But to be positive pray for a Flash SA player and 3rd party apps!

I love my iphone even if it doesn't have wifi itunes shop

Submitted by donlphi on October 2, 2007 - 11:53pm.
Flash would make web apps actually tolerable. This is exciting news, but we'll see how it actually works.

The 3rd party apps weren't that great, they were just cool compared to what was on the phone already.

Curiouser and curiouser

Submitted by vertigo on October 3, 2007 - 12:07am.
I doubt if apple is really dying to let people get flash on their phone. First of all, new betas of the flash 9 player will allow for playback of H.264 content, thus negating the need of sites like "youtube" to transcode to both H.264 and flv. Now you just do h.264 and it plays natively in iPhone.

Second of all, adobe has been tracking to release this for a while, and if photoshop and the rest of their software lineup has been any indication, they aren't exactly synchronized on trying to get a product out together. Letting it play video was more for the windows mobile people than for the iPhone.

Third, as a flash developer, flash lite 3 is nowhere near as good as an iPhone SDK. I can't begin to stress that enough. I think i would actually have to recompile a lot of stuff for flash lite 3 playback, so I'm not sure if the millions of swfs that are out there now will play in it.

Submitted by chr1s60 on October 3, 2007 - 12:07am.
I hope this ends up on iPhone. I only have a few complaints about the phone and lack of flash support is one of them. The real question is IF this will work on iPhone, WHEN will it be available?

Separate ways

Submitted by nao2g (not verified) on October 8, 2007 - 11:20pm.
From FAQ about Flash Lite, Adobe is not on the same train as Apple.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/faq/

Q.
Will Flash Lite 3 support Flash 9.x content?
A.
Flash 9.x content support is on the Flash Lite roadmap and will be addressed as this content becomes more pervasive and critical to mobile and consumer electronic devices.

It is important to remember that Flash Lite 3 supports about 85% of all Flash enabled websites today and that users will not necessarily access the same types of websites on a mobile or consumer electronic device that they would in a desktop environment, due to constraints in device (screen size, processors, RAM, input methods, battery) and bandwidth (limited 3/3.5G availability).


Here, ways of thinking over mobile web browsing are totally different between Adobe and Apple.