Quick excerpts from TomSoft’s analysis of the current state of Flashlite Pros Good development environment. Good graphical performance Cons Macromedia/Adobe just start to really experiment the issues of platform interoperability FlashLite, in my view,…

For info on how to render SVG-T in your own SWF, see other research into parsing and drawing such SVG files through ActionScript:
http://www.google.com/search?q=svg+wahlers+triolo

For distribution, Flash Lite is already an overwhelming presence in advanced markets, even though it is not yet common in emerging markets… take a look:
http://www.macromedia.com/mobile/supported_devices/

The reasons they prefer Flash Lite to Java are reduced development time, larger creative base, greater abstraction of device differences.

For “updating your phone”, you’re right, getting masses of consumers to install something there is not practical. Phones have a shorter life than computers do, though, particularly as a local phone ecology advances. Consumer adoption rates should be slower than on computers because of the embedded angle, but they’ll end up being a more solid number because it will be a capability of the phone model itself.

jd/adobe

Great post. FlashLite is quite interesting but Adobe has a long way to go to get any decent adoption. Nokia is a good start however.

I’m also somewhat suspect in regards to OEMs and carriers licensing yet another proprietary player technology. I think the mobile industry has been down this path too many times to easily be swayed to Flash Lite at this stage.

A couple of links that might be of interest:

First, OpenLaszlo apps running on FlashLite 2
http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2006/02/openlaszlo-running-on-a-cell-phone/

Second, the OpenAjax initiative that also includes OpenWave:
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=97D640A5-48E2-4078-A131-D7256CA376DC

The Flash/Ajaxy stuff on cell-phones won’t replace Java and C++ on devices, but it could provide cost effective development alternatives to enable smaller content publishers to enter the mobile market.

I think that what you are describing is the “ideal” target of Flash. However, from my “small” experience with Flash on my SonyEricsson, who is supposed to support FlashLite1.1, I already haves difficulties to make work several FlashLite 1.1 files.
It seems that all of them works on Nokia S60, but not on SE. That’s why I think that fragmentation on Flash is already a reality.

Now regarding SVG tiny compatibility, can you describe it more? I now that Macromedia support includes a SVG Tiny players in some of his FlashLite implementation.

About the player update, Flash will have the same issue than all the embeeded techno: if it’s OpenOS (Symbian, Smartphone) update might be possible, but impossible on most of the mass market phones. So real advantage or disadvantage compared to others technoç

Last point, about “designer technology”: the development environment is -in my view- much more suited for designer than for developper. Again, I play the dummy guy, but it’s probably the first time that I have so much difficulty to learn a new environment and to do some simple things with it.

OOP with Actionscript 3 I meant Actionscript 2

Strengths of FlashLite

- FL development does not imply doing lots of testing on target devices
- OOP with Actionscript 3 support
- No fragmentation (
- SVG Tiny compatibility
- FL 2.0 supports video device capabilities (you can play/stream 3gp files)
- consistent runtime across profiles
- in my opinions FlashLite is not a designer technology (maybe it is in Asia, where FL is used for ringtones, animated wallpapers ..)
- in some phones you can update the player just updating the firmware (Nokia phones)

Cons :

- FlashLite is not low-level in mobile development

Have a look at my old post on J2ME vs. FlashLite :
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2005/08/flashlite_or_j2.html