Adobe Flash Player for Smartphones Coming this Fall

Adobe said just announced that it will release a beta version of its Flash player for some smartphones before the end of this year.

This company has made getting Flash support onto smartphones as a top priority. In previous years it has tried doing this with scaled down versions, but recently admitted defeat for this strategy. The new plan is to bring the full version of Flash to most devices.

Adobe said today that a beta of Flash Player 10 for smartphones will be introduced at its MAX conference this October.

Coming To Some Models
In today's announcement it didn't give any details on which smartphones this player will be supporting. However, Adobe said recently that it's working on a beta version of a Flash player for Google's Android, Palm's webOS, and Nokia Symbian S60. When the company was first talking about this software last year, it included Windows Mobile on the list of supported operating systems.

The outlook is less rosy for two of the biggest mobile platforms, though.  Adobe does not know when versions of Flash will be available for Apple's iPhone or RIM's BlackBerry models. There are apparently either technical or business issues blocking these two.

More About Adobe Flash
A Flash player is on virtually all desktop PCs, but this technology has only been slowly creeping onto smartphones. Devices without it aren't be able to easily view many web sites, as these depend on Flash for navigation.

In addition, popular sites like Hulu, Fox on Demand, and NBC.com require a high-performance Flash player to view their videos.

Source: Adobe