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Feb. 15, 2010

Adobe Systems has been wanting to broadly distribute its Flash technology for quite some time now, so the company thought it would be a good idea to join the LiMo Foundation, a group devoted to installing the Linux operating system on today's modern cell phones.

Adobe recently came to realize that its Flash technology is actually missing from today's most popular smartphone, Apple's iPhone, and even the iPad, a situation that has left Adobe executives quite irritated, to say the least.

By joining the LiMo Foundation, Adobe gains a new channel for corporate alliances, including some big names in the wireless handset market. Other LiMo members include LG Electronics, Samsung, NTT Docomo, NEC, Orange, Panasonic, Motorola, SK Telecom, Telefonica, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.

Adobe's Flash Player is extremely popular today on most PCs, laptops and corporate workstations. However, the company's Flash Lite effort hasn't met much success in extending the programming foundation to mobile phones.

Now with a new generation of relatively powerful smartphones on the market, Adobe is trying again with a full-featured but lightweight version of its new computer software, Flash Player 10.1, due in or around mid-April.

Adobe has said that its Creative Suite programming and authoring tools for Flash will be able to create Flash software for LiMo mobile devices, a move Adobe says will simplify building Flash into those devices.

Adobe announced its decision in conjunction with the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona last week.

David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe's Flash business says "bringing the Flash Platform to The LiMo Foundation opens up a significantly new opportunity for Adobe to further its goals of open standards and multi-screen interoperability of rich mobile content."

It will be interesting to see in the coming few weeks if other large commercial software companies follow in Adobe's footsteps.

Less than two weeks ago, The Symbian Foundation says it is opening its source code to encourage more MID (mobile Internet device) makers to design more devices that incorporate its operating system.

Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of Global Alliances says "opening up the source code also should stimulate Symbian's efforts in North America, a region where the platform has been slower to take off."

He added "making our source code available to the open source community and being more transparent to mobile apps developers is how the Symbian operating system will move forward, and could attract more device makers, including nontraditional handset manufacturers, to choose the platform as they build new wireless products."

The Symbian OS is eleven years old and still leads the mobile operating system market as far as the number of devices using it, with more than 330 million devices running Symbian. But the platform is losing some marketshare and mindshare to OSs from Apple, Google and Research In Motion' Blackberry.

Because of that, Nokia bought out the rest of the Symbian contributors in 2008 and promised to open the platform and formed the Symbian Foundation.

Making the source code available for free could make it more attractive to device makers, especially those in the emerging consumer electronics devices category.

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Source: Adobe Systems Inc.

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