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Adobe striving to enter smart phone market
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 08 June 2009, 21:51 IST
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Adobe striving to enter smart phone market
Bangalore: Adobe System, which makes Flash software which is widely used on computers to play Internet videos, is now trying to enter smart phone's market. The company is re-engineering its software so that Flash-based games and videos can run on different handsets as well as PCs without being modified. Adobe has struck alliances with chip designers and phone makers and offered millions of dollars to developers willing to write programs for mobile devices that use its software. Adobe has been hit hard by the recession, with sales dropping 12 percent in the first quarter. Flash is embedded in many of Adobe's products and is a key revenue generator for the company. Creating a single version of Flash that works on PCs and smart phones has been a challenge faced by Adobe for a long time. So far the company has provided separate software called Flash Lite for phones, which brought in $115 million in fiscal 2008, more than double the previous year, but it contributes just a fraction to the Adobe's annual sales of $3.6 billion. The shift comes as smart phones, which are powerful enough to run programs, are proliferating, just as the PC market has weakened. Smart-phone sales jumped 13 percent to 36 million units in the first quarter, while PC shipments fell 6.5 percent to 67 million, according to research company Gartner. In May 2008, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project, a group of more than 25 companies including handset makers and content creators, which committed to making Flash run on different devices. In February, Adobe and Nokia also created a $10 million fund for developers who create applications for mobile devices using Flash. So far, five grants have been awarded, says Matt Collins, a Nokia Marketing Director. Later this year, Adobe will release a trial version of Flash for phones running on operating systems made by Palm, Google and Nokia, but there is still no timetable for a version of Flash that will run on Apple's iPhone or Research In Motion's [RIM] BlackBerry. "We need to have Apple's agreement before we can do it," says Lynch. Apple has balked at putting Flash on its devices. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs last year said Flash is too slow to run on the iPhone for technical reasons and Flash Lite doesn't run enough programs to be included. Analysts say one reason for Apple's reluctance to embrace Flash is that phone makers differentiate themselves based on the software that runs on their devices. For example, if a game is only available on the iPhone then that might lure someone to buy the device. That's why it may be in the interests of Apple and RIM to keep Flash off their gadgets.

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