Adobe pushes Flash for mobile devices

Google, Motorola and others sign up to Open Screen Project.

Adobe has signed up Google, Motorola, Nvidia, Palm, RIM and Qualcomm for its new Flash Player 10.1 software for mobile devices.

The company hopes 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 has created the Open Screen Project to get Flash to run directly on small mobile devices.

Google announced yesterday that it has joined, and companies such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Nokia, and RIM, along with 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 include support in its iPhone handsets.

Since more than 75 percent of video on the web is delivered via Flash Player, manufacturers hope that 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 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 oriented between landscape and portrait modes, as well as multi-touch.

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