Verizon to Carry Flash-enabled Phones
I read about Adobe’s Flash Lite platform during 3GSM last February. Then recently, I bumped into this article from Beta News about Verizon planning to push Flash Lite on their handsets:
Verizon Wireless will become the first mobile operator in the United States to include Adobe’s Flash animation software on its phones, thanks to a deal signed between the companies Wednesday. The idea is to give customers more options for viewing graphics on a small screen.
In Mobilecrunch, there are some comments that this would make a good platform for application development especially when compared to its existing BREW platform. I agree with this comment and feel that this is definitely one way to go. There is a also a note about the need for Mobile AJAX. Well, this is definitely a step in the right direction.
This is possible since Flash is already a very strongly-supported platform for web development. It should, therefore, be a logical platform for mobile (web) application development. However, wouldn’t mobile AJAX be better supported by Mobile Javascript instead? Flash might be too heavy an overhead for mobile developers and licensing definitely scares some manufacturers away.
Will people want to go with Opera Mini (which supports Javascript on the Mobile) instead? It already has a good chunk of the market which will probably attract a handful of developers.
April 17th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Verizon Wireless will limited version of Flash Lite 1.1 instead more powerfull Flash Lite 2.0 . Means, we cannot expect even the minimal development of applications on this platform
April 17th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Well, that is unfortunate. However, it is still a step in the right direction by giving application developers additional tools for making better application (abiet better looking ones initially).