Macromedia has won the backing of Qualcomm to develop and distribute Flash Lite applications and multimedia content to BREW-enabled mobile handsets and mobile operators in the US. Reinforcing the deal, Macromedia has become an Elite member of Qualcomm's BREW Alliance Program.
Tony Cripps, Analyst at Ovum, comments:
Comment: Macromedia may have found the mass market mobile opening for Flash Lite that it - and no doubt new owners Adobe - has been craving, following high profile, but less enveloping, deals with Nokia and Samsung, among others.
Mobile phones based on Qualcomm's BREW mobile application platform are restricted to the CDMA world but they still make up around 20% of all handset shipments per year, according to Ovum's forecasts. That could be as many as 144 million globally in 2005 and around half that in the US market that this deal is focused on.
Qualcomm's tight control over CDMA technologies makes BREW a more solid platform from which to launch new services than comparable environments used by GSM/UMTS operators. The problems caused by fragmentation and lack of interoperability in technologies such as mobile Java and multimedia messaging are well documented.
CDMA may only account for one fifth of the worlds handset shipments but as a proving ground for Flash Lite it is perfectly placed. We believe that Flash Lite has the potential to become a de facto standard for rich multimedia content on mobile handsets.
The million-plus developers - or perhaps more accurately, designers - who already use the Flash environment to build interactive content for conventional web sites is an impressive base from which to take Flash to the mobile world, en masse. Now, with the backing of Qualcomm, that dream may become reality sooner than expected. Build the phones and the developers will come.