Adobe Continues Working To Make Flash MobileAdobe Continues Working To Make Flash Mobile

Adobe sees smartphones as the next frontier of Web surfing, and it continues with its efforts to bring a full version of Flash to these mobile computing devices.

Earlier this year, Adobe committed to bringing a full version of Flash 10 to smartphones with Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and webOS by the beginning of next year, and it's steadily moving along with this goal. This is a strong shift from Adobe's previous strategy, which was to create a less robust version of Flash for mobile devices.

"Smartphones are where the game is now," Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "Our chips are on the table. We've made our bets."

The company is facing multiple challenges, though, as Flash is generally considered too resource-intensive for most of the hardware that powers smartphones today. Adobe said it's working with its partners to modify the software to run efficiently on these mobile devices, and it has established the Open Screen Project to help achieve this goal.

Not all of the challenges are technical though, as Adobe has no plans to bring the full version of Flash to major players like Research In Motion and Apple. Both companies provide the hardware and software for their smartphones and generally like to have a lot of control over what third parties can do with their devices.

Flash has been a nagging hole in the iPhone's browsing experience because it means popular sites like Hulu aren't accessible in their full form. The company was even forced to pull an ad in the United Kingdom because of the lack of Flash. Apple still maintains that Flash is not good enough to run on the iPhone without significantly slowing it down, and it may turn to alternative methods like HTML5 to deliver video from the Web.

As smartphones become equipped with more desktop-like capabilities, road warriors may soon be able to ditch their laptops. information looked at how smartphones could potentially become replacements for laptops, and the report can be downloaded here (registration required).