HTC Hero has Adobe Flash platform technology
By Ben Robinson on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 2:04 PM PST In Developer, HTC
In a press release that was somewhat low-key a little while back, Adobe and HTC announced they would have Flash support in the browser on the HTC Hero. That info sailed by largely unnoticed, but in actual fact it has big implications for the browsing experience!
(At this point, you might want to have a look at the HTC Hero review I did here)
Let’s take a look at a chunk of the press release:
“As the first Android device with Flash, the new HTC Hero represents a key milestone for Android and the Flash Platform. With close to 80 percent of all videos online delivered with Adobe Flash technology, consumers want to access rich Web content on-the-go.” said David Wadhwani, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “The collaboration with HTC offers people a more complete Flash based Web browsing experience today and presents an important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future.”
The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript® 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content.
There are some big leaps forward there in terms of the amount of Flash elements in a webpage that can now be supported on a mobile device – and to my mind, the HTC Hero is the first device to get there and do it well!
My experience of the Flash rendering whilst reviewing the device was good – so hats off to HTC on that one for a good integration.
If you want to see a lot more about the Flash support of the HTC Hero, I’d suggest you go here to the Adobe Developer Connection website, where you can watch a video of the browsing user experience enabled by Flash.
Great article, I got my Hero delivered a few days ago and it’s really quite incredible.
I wrote a post on this at launch:
http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/06/24/adobe-and-htc-bring-flash-platform-to-android-2/
Mark Doherty
Platform Evangelist for Mobile and Devices
Adobe
Just to keep things in perspective – A lot of Nokias and Blackberries had flash in the browser for a while now. Granted it was flash lite but since flash lite 3.0 is 99% flash 9 compatible you may as well call it flash.
So the Hero is not “the first device to get there” although I do commend them on a great job. I might even end up getting a Hero.