Microsoft has officially licensed Adobe’s PDF and Flash Lite technology and will include it in future versions of the Windows Mobile Operating System. Flash Lite will be used to enhance the web experience inside Internet Explorer, if there was even an experiance to begin with, and having PDF is just plain damn handy.
Microsoft has also promised to put Silverlight into mobile devices, which is a competitor to Flash Lite. Looks like they’re taking the Nokia approach by throwing as many runtimes into the platform as possible and letting developers choose what they want to do. I’ve always said be careful of sleeping giants and Microsoft really has been ignoring consumers with their mobile OS, look for that to change in the coming years.
And no it isn’t too late, the smartphone market is minuscule, ridiculously minuscule. Symbian, which powers more than half, close to 3/4’s of the smartphones on the planet, has 7% of the total phone market. The majority of devices out there are still “dumb” phones.