Flash Lite

Flash is broadly known for its animation capabilities. Flash plug-in is by far the most popular plug-in for the Internet browsers and it is installed on well over 90% of all desktops. It is the leading platform for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA). For the discussion of RIA technologies, you can refer to my article “Rich Internet Applications Pick Up Where HTML Stops” published by Computerworld.

Flash Lite intends to replicate the success of its older sibling on mobile devices. It offers rich multimedia capabilities (images, audio, video), which makes it a particularly appealing platform for entertainment applications. To develop Flash Lite applications you need Macromedia Flash Professional 8 with the Flash Lite 2 update. The software supports rich content authoring, programming in ActionScript, and testing using mobile emulator. It is distributed with a number of mobile templates and over 90 specific handset profiles. For an interesting introduction to Flash programming (and comparison of Flash Lite to Mobile Java at the same time) you can refer to Eddie McGreal’s article “So You're Thinking About Using Flash Instead of J2ME?”
Flash Lite applications run on top of Flash Lite player, which in turn runs on top of a mobile operating system. The players are available for Symbian, BREW and Windows Mobile.

Flash Lite is promising. However these are still early days. Verizon is the first USA carrier which embraced it. FlashLite is supported on six BREW enabled handsets distributed by Verizon.