Flash for Mobile Making Headway?
Looks like Flash is making good traction in the mobile space with Flash Lite. Even Adobe has release freely available versions for the Symbian S60 platforms (2nd and 3rd Edition).
Flash Lite is the Flash technology specifically developed for mobile phones and consumer electronics devices. Flash Lite dramatically accelerates the delivery of rich content and browsing, and customized user interfaces. Designers and developers now have a new level of expressiveness, efficiency and interactivity for content creation.
Flash Lite has seen explosive adoption by OEMs, operators and developers in Japan and Asia, and is quickly growing worldwide. This growth is driven by the mature Flash authoring environment and rendering engine that delivers enhanced content and browsing, customized UI & a rich mobile experience across devices.
What does this mean? Will it displace J2ME? How about Symbian? Or will Mobile AJAX be better? Here are some of my ideas.
- Symbian. I feel no. Symbian will continue to provide a very rich handset interface and open platform for software developers. I do not see Flash going to this level of tight integration with the mobile handset at this point. This is where Symbian will continue to excel.
- Mobile AJAX. AJAX trumped Flash on the Web. However, it maybe too soon to tell if AJAX will trump Flash on the Mobile Web or if will Flash gain the higher ground. If we look back at the history of the web. When Flash was first introduced, it did gain a pretty strong following. But, was later eclipsed by AJAX. The same might happen, initially, on the Mobile Web. The only different this time is that both technologies are made available at the same time. Will history repeat itself? Only time will tell.
- J2ME. Unless J2ME evolves quickly, this is a possibility. J2ME is currently used today as an interface creation technology. That is basically what Flash is. As long as J2ME does not evolve like its older brother, J2SE, and integrate better with the mobile handset, it just might get displaced. This is actually starting right now with J2ME games (majority of J2ME applications are probably games) moving to Flash Lite.
Each platform and technology will probably find a niche market somewhere. For Flash, I believe it will primarily be the interface creation technology of choice because of its ease of use and its large “artist” and not necessarily “programmer” user base.
