Adobe and HTC team up on Flash for Android

HTC and Adobe have joined forces to bring full Flash 10 support to Google's Android open source mobile operating system.

Most smartphones, including the iPhone, do not natively support Flash owing to its fairly high system requirements, despite its near ubiquitous use online and in other applications.

Several workarounds have been created, including dedicated applications to address certain sites, such as YouTube players, and Skyfire has created a web browser for Windows Mobile that uses its own technology to provide Flash support.

HTC said that its newly announced Hero handset will be the first Android device to offer support for Flash, and that all future phones should include it as well.

"As the first Android device with Flash, the new HTC Hero represents a key milestone for Android and the Flash platform," said David Wadhwani, vice president and general manager of the platform business unit at Adobe.

"With close to 80 per cent of all videos online delivered with Flash technology, consumers want to access rich web content on the go. The collaboration with HTC offers a more complete Flash-based web browsing experience, and presents an important step towards full web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future."

The move was helped by HTC's participation in the Open Screen Project, a broad effort involving around 25 industry players aiming to deliver a consistent runtime across multiple environments.

HTC reckons that Hero users will be able to view web content and applications not supported by mobile phones in the past, and view YouTube videos on the device, including switching to a full screen mode by double tapping the screen.

"Adobe Flash is an important core technology for people interacting and experiencing the web. It is only natural to be offering it on the new HTC Hero first," said John Wang, chief marketing officer at HTC.

"We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with Adobe and to bringing Flash Player 10 support to our phones in the future."

As well as video playback, the integration allows the use of interactive content through ActionScript 2.0. It also includes support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs for higher quality video and playback of existing web content.