Analysis: Flash Lite may give Windows Mobile a fighting chance against surging iPhone

Computerworld - After being publicly scorned by Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs earlier this month, Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash Lite mobile media player on Monday found itself in the warm embrace of a strange bedfellow: Microsoft Corp.

Despite their longtime mutual dependence — Adobe sells most of its software on Windows — the two vendors recently have quarreled like unhappy housemates as they compete more directly with each other in the Web development tools and rich applications markets.

But yesterday, Adobe announced that Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite for eventual use as a plug-in for Internet Explorer on phones running Windows Mobile. Microsoft didn't say when it will begin supporting Flash Lite and the Adobe Reader LE software, which it also licensed, on Windows Mobile.

Some analysts and Flash advocates said the deal should help boost Adobe's chances of reaching its ambitious goal of getting Flash Lite installed on a billion mobile phones by 2010. That, in turn, could help Adobe sell more of its Flash development and media streaming tools.

Adobe claimed on Monday that it now is halfway to the 1 billion phone mark for Flash Lite.

But that technology isn't a big money-maker yet, said Hayden Porter, a Flash developer in Akron, Ohio, who is bullish about the Microsoft deal. "I'm not sure a lot of North American developers can make their living on Flash Lite today," Porter said. "This helps bring Flash Lite into the mainstream."

For Microsoft, tying up with Flash Lite may help it revitalize the long-lagging Windows Mobile platform with a killer app: online video. "Microsoft wants the phone salesman to be able to say, 'With this Windows Mobile phone, you can watch any YouTube video you want,'" Porter said.

YouTube LLC streams videos on the Web via Flash at a 320-by-240 resolution that fits the Quarter VGA (QVGA) size of most smart phone screens. But screen size is only one requirement; others include having enough memory and CPU horsepower, as well as the ability to decode Flash videos.

Last year, YouTube began re-encoding some of its videos into the H.264 codec so that Apple's iPhone can view them. And in January, it launched a beta version of its YouTube for Mobile service, which lets a variety of other smart phones view many, but not all, its videos.

Still, YouTube is far from making all its videos equally accessible to Flash-enabled phones and devices that don't support the Adobe software. Couple that with growing demand for video, and "in a year, any phone that doesn't have Flash Lite on it is going to be at a competitive disadvantage," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. For Microsoft, he added, "not to do this deal would have been foolish."