Today, Adobe and ARM announced that they are showing Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR to the small form factor world.

Early this spring, a group of ARM licensees joined together in the the Open Screen Project. The goal is working to enable a consistent runtime environment, taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). This will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, and mobile internet devices (MIDs).  

Kerry McBuire of ARM told the Examiner that the collaboration and new launches are expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms. Kerry said that the Open Screen Project now has a major toolkit to enhance the capabilities of every mobile phone manufacturer by adding Flash Player 10 applications to mainstream users, not just traditional high-end smartphones. 

Discussing the importance of the new Flash 10 player and Ubuntu on the ARM processor, McBuire pointed out that Flash is now a leading video format for web TV. She said ARM is working with Adobe on devices including set-top boxes, televisions, automotive platforms, personal media players and other mobile computing devices. All these can now use open source Ubuntu as their operating system.

We counted five manufacturers' representatives participating in the announcement: Broadcom, Freescale, Nvidia, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. Delivery of a fully functional product is scheduled for the second half of 2009. The early prototypes we saw were well done. They showed Flash Player 10 on small displays as well as MIDs similar to the Archos 5 shown at Pocketables.

We think this combination will be a winner for end users on all sizes of device. X