That’s really big news, Flash 10 is coming for real on Android mobile phones. The HTC Hero will be the first one featuring a native Flash Player 10. I’m pretty anxious to see how it’s really going to come out, and especially hot the tons of flash content such as rich websites or casual games are going to adapt and feel like on a mobile. HTC Hero is due July 15th.
Check out the video below to see the official Adobe announce.

This is also big news as it waves goodbye to the Flash Lite initiative Adobe kinda failed at delivering (outside of Japan at least) which was supposed to be a mobilized and light version of Flash. Now they seem to be willing to focus on providing native deep integration of their player within their OS. How it’s going to impact application development is yet another question but if they can bring the Air framework along this is really going to change the face of the market…
Last but not least, it’s now official, Android gets multitouch!

I haven’t been talking about Flash Lite for quite some time for a very simple reason, imho the subject is boring. Let me explain :

• Flash Lite covers only a very little amount of terminals mostly Windows Mobile 5&6 or Symbian series 60
• Flash Lite only worked as a solid use case in Japan on the Symbian platform to feature idle screen animations and tiny games
• The player is poorly integrated to the mobile phone platform and thus gives very little interactivity to available components such as dialing, text messaging and thus limiting a lot any business logics you would like to get inside your Flash application

Adobe made a big announce on their “Open Screen Project” in December where they announced they would remove any licensing fee on their player and push it inside their partner ecosystem on any MID (Mobile Internet Device – this is this year’s Mobile World Congress’s buzzword) and just released an Adobe Mobile Packager:

The Adobe Mobile Packager is a desktop tool to wrap a SWF application with a player version checker, an icon, and metadata into an installable file for user-friendly discovery on S60 and Windows Mobile devices. The resulting output file is recognizable by S60 (.SIS) and Windows Mobile (.CAB) operating systems, acting essentially like .ZIP or .AIR files

All in all it really doesn’t get me exited, technically this is no big deal, they could have done that for years and it’s just yet another announce trying to convince us that Flash is coming to the mobile like they have been doing for years (at least since 2004 which makes it 5 years) and yet none of the high end devices in my pockets are Flash compliant. And I still wonder how they’re going to manage the complexity of the ecosystem they’re building, this is going to be harder than handling 3 existing platforms (sorry, the Palm Pre doesn’t count until it’s released) which is what they are doing right now…
Adobe, stop talking big about strategy and start getting things done !