There are a couple certainties when it comes to Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 and the prospects for integrated Flash support on smartphones – Apple won’t ever allow native Flash on the iPhone, and Windows Mobile 6.5 will be left out of the Flash 10.1 party in a few months. Wait, wasn’t Windows Mobile 6.5 expected to be one of the headlining platforms to get jiggy with Flash Player 10.1, you ask? Well, it was, keyword being was. Adobe has reportedly decided to pull the plug on Flash Player 10.1 for Windows Mobile 6.5, aiming instead for the Windows Phone 7 Series platform due out later this year.
Adobe had been planning to blitz all major smartphone platforms with a Flash Player 10.1 offering in mid-2010, but the company’s plans have changed in light of the Windows Phone 7 announcement at Mobile World Congress. It’s not clear how Adobe didn’t realize this problem beforehand, but Windows Mobile 6.5 apparently doesn’t support some APIs that Adobe needs to make Flash 10.1 work correctly. An Adobe representative is quoted as saying:
You can expect the final release for Android to be available mid-year. All Android devices that meet our minimum s/w and h/w requirements will be supported. Unfortunately, I cannot say a lot more publicly about our port to the Android platform at this time.
As for WinMo, we have made the tough decision to defer support for that platform until WinMo7. This is due to the fact that WinMo6.5 does not support some of the critical APIs that we need.
If you’re not feeling a bit sorry for the aging Windows Mobile platform, you should be. With Windows Phone 7 completely overshadowing Windows Mobile 6.5 and Adobe confirming the death of Flash 10.1 for WinMo, the stylus-happy smartphone operating system of yester-year is being kicked to the curb left and right.
Hey, at least Marketplace apps can install to a storage card. Chin up, bucko.