Adobe Flash porting to Android?

Correction at 8:05 a.m. PDT to reflect updated information from Bsquare that says it's porting Flash technology, not Adobe's player itself, to Android, and that it's ported Flash to 100 embedded devices in general, not 100 Android devices.

(Credit: CNET)

Adobe wowed a crowd last November when it demoed a full-fledged version of Flash 10 on T-Mobile's Google Android phone, the G1. We've been waiting expectantly since then to see Flash 10 mobile materialize for Android.

On Wednesday, embedded devices company Bsquare hinted there could be some movement in that direction, though not necessarily from Adobe itself. Instead, the company will partner with "a global, tier-one carrier" to port Adobe's Flash technology to Android's operating system to the carrier's mystery device. Bsquare notes that it has already ported similar technology to roughly 100 devices. While Bsquare isn't quite ready to spill the beans on which international carrier has commissioned its services, we're speculating that it could be T-Mobile, which already won Google's contract to exclusively supply the Android G1 phone in the U.S.

In addition to keeping the carrier name in the dark, it's also unclear what the product's limitations will be, how the ported Flash technology compares to or competes with Adobe's forthcoming offering, and when the finished product will begin to benefit the fine Android owners out there.

[elllroy]

"Adobe wowed a crowd last November when it demoed a full-fledged version..."

what? they woved a crowd by being able to eventually see annoying advertising on your mobile?
flash is a pain in the ass. it is slow, it is a resource hog and eats your battery faster than you can click "skip this intro".

i don't get why the pundits her at cnet are so behind this proprietary technology. wouldn't it be good to have a standard-compliant web with html 5.0 for animation and .264 for video? no proprietary technologies from whatever company as a "standard".

(i get the feeling that some people only support flash on phones because apple refuses to do it on the iphone.) but it is not adobe against apple here it is proprietary against open standards. can't imagine anyone here wants adobe, microsoft or even apple to succeed in establishing their formats as a web-standard.

[Topokitty]

Actually as was pointed out by Brandon, Flash is a defacto standard. What you and other Apple fanboys are mad about is not that H.264 isn't getting used, because it is, you're mad that it's not in a Quicktime container. Apple needs to face the fact that they lost, Flash is and for the foreseeable future will be the standard for video on the internet. Yes they were able to bully Google into reencoding some videos on YouTube but there are many more providers ,Blip.TV and Vimeo off the top of my head, who have great content but aren't available on the iPhone.

[Perry_Clease]

"Flash is a defacto standard."

That doesn't mean that isn't as ellroy says "flash is a pain in the ass. it is slow, it is a resource hog and eats your battery faster than you can click "skip this intro." If smart phones and netbooks could not play Flash then it would eventually go away.

[brandonbradley]

The Flash player itself is proprietary, but Macromedia made the swf file format open, so calling it a proprietary format isn't really accurate. Flash video is also quickly becoming a standard on the web and it does support .h264 encoding in addition to the on2vp6 codec. Yes flash can be a resource hog, and yes a good many of the things created with it are bad, but that is often more the fault of who built those things than the tool used to build it. Just like the hammer is not the problem when someone builds a house that falls over.