Flash Player 10 Coming to ARM Powered Devices

Adobe Systems and ARM today announced a technology collaboration to optimize and enable Adobe® Flash® Player 10 and Adobe AIR™ for ARM Powered® devices, ranging from mobile phones to set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, televisions, automotive platforms, personal media players and other mobile computing devices. The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms to bring rich Internet applications and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide.

The joint technology optimization is targeted for the ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11™ family and the Cortex™-A series of processors and is expected to be available in the second half of 2009. The partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, a broad Adobe sponsored initiative of industry leaders - including ARM - to deliver a consistent runtime environment across multiple devices by taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR. The initiative is set to address the challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens, and remove the barriers to publish content and applications seamlessly across screens. For more information, visit www.openscreenproject.org.

How this will translate to Flash on the iPhone is yet unknown. Adobe's Anup Muraka said, that devices with at least 200 MHz processors, more than around 16 Mbytes of RAM and a "completely capable [Web] browser" will be able to render Web-based Flash content. The iPhone has at least a 500 MHz processor and much more than 16 MB of RAM so Steve Jobs statement that "Flash performs too slow to be useful" no longer seems valid. In the end its up to Apple to decide since a fully integrated version of Flash would violate the iPhone SDK terms.


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