Not Another Flash on the iPhone Story....

Unfortunately, yes. Adobe Systems and ARM today announced a technology collaboration that is designed to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR for ARM Powered devices like (but not necessarily including) the Apple iPhone.

ARM Powered devices range from from mobile phones to set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, televisions, automotive platforms, personal media players and other mobile computing devices. The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms to bring rich Internet applications and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide.

The joint technology optimization is targeted for the ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11 family and the Cortex-A series of processors and is expected to be available in the second half of 2009. The partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, a broad Adobe sponsored initiative of industry leaders - including ARM - to deliver a consistent runtime environment across multiple devices by taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR.

To beat a long-dead horse, Flash performance and usage is abysmal on current mobile devices that support playback. Mobile device processors ? including the iPhone's ? simply aren't fast enough to handle most Flash-laden sites. Flash Lite, the scaled down standard designed specifically for mobile devices, is even too much for most devices, and isn't widely used.

In mid-June, Adobe?s CEO said that company already has Flash running on an iPhone emulator (presumably the same emulator included with Apple?s iPhone SDK).

However, at an Apple shareholder meeting in March, CEO Steve Jobs said that Flash won't be coming to the iPhone anytime soon. Jobs said -- echoing our sentment -- that the full-blown version of Flash would perform poorly on the iPhone, and Flash Lite isn't the spirit of the iPhone?s full internet experience. I