While the performance of Adobe’s suite of applications is remarkable in itself, what makes the company stand out more is the way its made itself an integral part of computer usage. Flash dominates the web. The next frontier, without a doubt, is mobile. While Flash hasn’t made a huge foray into mobile phones yet, we’ve heard strong rumblings over the past year or so that it wouldn’t be far off. Lately those rumors have taken off. Take, for instance, this interview on FOX Business with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen (courtesy of Android Guys):
In case you don’t want to watch all seven minutes of the video, Narayen says that Google, as well as RIM and Palm, will make Flash available for smartphones and tablets in the second half of 2010. We’ve heard this before, of course. Flash was supposed to hit mobile phones last fall, but that came and passed without any further developments.
How do we know Adobe is serious this time around? For starters, they’ve already announced a pubic beta of not only Flash, but also AIR. These aren’t available quite yet, but figure to be within the next few weeks. You can sign up for Flash 10.1 here and AIR here. I’d expect them to be a bit clunky at first, but that’s nothing new for beta junkies.
