Flash Player for the iPhone, perhaps!

Adobe and Arm have announced that they are working togther on Flash for ARM based devices.

Adobe Systems Incorporated 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.

Macrumors speculates that this could means the iPhone.

This optimization is targeted at the existing ARM11 family (used in the iPhone) and will be available in the second half of 2009. Details are rather sparse, though the implication appears to be that this “optimization” will deliver Adobe Flash to existing mobile devices that are based on the latest ARM platforms.

PCMag further specifies 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.” Apple’s iPhone, of course, fits into all these categories, which raises the question whether or not this could finally deliver Flash functionality to the current iPhone.

One of the “problems” with the iPhone and iPod touch is the lack of Flash support.

Lots of mobile learning content is Flash based and therefore does not work on the iPhone.

It is possible to create interactive learning apps for the iPhone using the SDK but that is beyond the scope for most creative teachers who want to use the device.

2 thoughts on “Flash Player for the iPhone, perhaps!”

  1. Flash on the iphone and or touch would be good but I can also see it causing problems. Assuming the iPhone would be accessing ‘full flash’, as opposed to Flash Lite, which is used on mobile phones then we could see a shortening of battery life as can be very heavy on CPU cycles, this means less battery life and also possibly an impact on the performance of the device – depending on how many resources were being used etc..

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