I am back from Adobe Max 2008 and I am trying to digest all the information regarding Flash on Mobile devices, we can finally know the direction Adobe is taking in regards to Mobile devices.

After close to a year of not disclosing much information regarding the direction of Flash Lite Kevin Lynch (Adobe CTO) announced some interesting news at Adobe Max. Let’s take a look at what’s Adobe are cooking and try to interpret the information:

1. Andy Rubin - director of Google android acknowledge G1 supporting Flash 10, Kevin Lynch displayed an Android phone working with Flash 10 player.
2. Kevin Lynch pulled an iPhone and advice us that Adobe are still working on getting Flash 10 on the iPhone and they need to get the approval of Apple.
3. Future vision: Multi screen awareness and Collaboration of more devices on the same screen. For instance, user will be able to drop images, FLV from phone (using a prototype Samsung) to desktop, TV and more. Another example, multi users awareness; two mobile devices will be able to share one screen to play a game.
4. Adobe Air on Intel or mobile internet devices.
5. Symbian distributed with Flash 10, somewhere in the future.
6. FL distributed player and package was released and deployed to large number of phones and if flash is missing user will be able to install the flash Lite over the wire and download the Flash application.
7. Windows mobile devices support Flash 10.

Regarding Google android that was an obvious, since I can’t imagine Google not placing Flash on G1 and not utilizing YouTube entire library which is based on FLV, although some videos are converted to other formats (that’s how iPhone users are able to view YouTube videos) the announcement was pretty obvious to me.

A Windows mobile devices to support Flash 10 was also an obvious announcement, since earlier this year we heard Microsoft bought a license of Flash 10 it was pretty clear that we will see Flash 10 on Windows mobile devices in 2009.

I was asking some senior Adobe employees, which I cannot disclose their names, and it seems that the entire Flash Lite team was transferred to work on Flash 10. Does that mean that Flash Lite is dead? Not so fast…

Adobe are moving in the direction of building Mobile applications for Flash 10 with Flex and AIR, and we can start seeing release versions hopefully in 2009, however don’t forget that there are close to billion mobile phones support Flash Lite 1.0/2.0 and 3.0 worldwide and many devices will not be able to support Flash 10 since they are not powerful enough, so we are looking at a small percentage of devices supporting Flash 10, however no doubt that the future of Flash mobile is Flash 10 and Flash Lite will slowly fade out in the next 5 years.

Regarding Multi screen awareness and Collaboration of more devices on the same screen, Kevin Lynce pulled a Samsung UMOC mobile device supporting Air applications, the device looked capable and I am sure Samsung will be able to release a normal sized phone supporting Air somewhere in the near future.

Feel free to leave comments here regarding your take or knowledge about Adobe future vision…