Adobe Flash on Phones Started in Japan Five Years Ago: It's All About Rich APP's and Cool U.I.'s

There's been quite a lot of buzz over the last day over the licensing of Adobe's Flash Lite 3 to competitor Microsoft for use in mobile handsets running the new Silverlight multimedia platform.

While the Adobe software enables viewing of Flash video players on phones, the immediate value of Flash Lite to Silverlight is its rich application environment for games and customized user interfaces.  This rich, interactive environment is the promise of the new Microsoft platform.

To explore what the Adobe platform brings to the mobile world and how it has grown, I interviewed Brian Frank, a member of the Adobe mobile team in San Francisco earlier this month. 

Brian explains how Flash became ubiquitous on mobile phones in Japan starting five years ago, far before there was any online video on phones.

-- Andy Plesser