Flash Lite, Nokia and MTJ
The North American market is so sheltered from the rest of the world when it comes to mobile devices. I came to this realization when I was in Greece for the 2004 Olympics, walked into a Samsung booth at the Olympic village and saw the latest phones to come on the market — 3.2 mega pixel camera, phone-to-phone video conferencing, brilliant screens & UIs — no big deal to them.
Last week during the php|works conference, I sat through a talk about Flash + PHP by Christian Wenz. During the session, he briefly mentioned Flash Lite — Flash on mobile devices? I can’t believe I had never heard of this before, its gaining lots of momentum all over the world (Japan, Korea, Europe) there are over 140 supported devices world wide. A full list can be seen here. From the list, its easy to see the largest supporter of Flash enabled devices is Nokia.
As mentioned in a previous post, the MTJ DSDP project had its first M1 release last week. This project is being sponsored mainly by Nokia, with support from other companies like IBM, Sony, Sprint, etc… There seems to be a continuous struggle about what developers should use for UIs, Flash Lite or J2ME, but it appears the answer keeps coming back to: it depends on the application and what you’re doing. The fact remains, with Nokia and so many other companies supporting Flash Lite, there is no way Nokia has been contributing so much effort to the MTJ project, without plans to make an open source Flash Lite development extension to MTJ.
The first official Flash Lite enabled phone was recently released in the US, you probably heard of saw commercials it: Verizon Wireless Chocolate. Click here to see a video of the LG VX8500 phone in action. This phone was released about a year ago in Korea.
