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Adobe Says Flash On iPhone Still Up In The Air

Adobe Says Flash On iPhone Still Up In The Air

Adobe has been working feverishly to add full Flash functionality to smartphones, but hasn’t made much progress with Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry.

Adobe plans to bring Flash 10 to Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android and webOS (Palm) smartphones by year’s end, but in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch didn’t offer a time frame for when it might bring Flash to the iPhone and BlackBerry, suggesting that at least one of the companies was holding up this process.

“We need to have Apple’s agreement before we can do it,” Lynch told The Wall Street Journal.

For all the ranting and raving about the iPhone’s transcendental brilliance, its lack of full Flash support has been one glaring drawback to the device’s Web browsing experience. Adobe’s Flash Lite isn’t a powerful enough option, and last March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the full version of Flash ran too sluggishly on the iPhone.

Adobe last September revealed its desire to port Flash to the iPhone but said Apple would need to revise its iPhone SDK and licensing terms for that to be possible.

Flash’s greatest strength is its universality, but Adobe faces a growing threat from Microsoft’s Silverlight Web multimedia platform. Microsoft plans to launch Silverlight 3 in July, and that release will challenge Adobe with advanced new 3-D effects and the ability to run applications outside Web browsers.

[Thanks: http://www.crn.com]