After HTC’s announcement of the Hero handset this week, Adobe dropped a nice video onto their site showing off Flash in the Hero’s web browser. Mobile Flash has been the holy grail of the industry, and it looks like now might just be the time that it will become commonplace. In the video it loads Flash content a little slow, but once it’s loaded it seems to run pretty well. There is a link to a video at the bottom of the post.
The HTC Hero is going to ship with Flash support when it launches. It is an Android device, but they have made a couple of statements regarding Flash and how it won’t be available on all Android devices yet. Flash will not be available as a download for any Google devices such as the T-Mobile G1, or T-Mobile myTouch 3G here in the States. Due to some licensing issues, they cannot offer it. They are working to get it running on most other Android devices and hope to launch it sometime in the future, I think I read somewhere that it could possibly be in October.
What really bothers me about this is how lax Apple seems to be about getting Flash on the iPhone while Adobe is developing it for almost every other smartphone OS out there. With the launch of the iPhone 3GS, Apple has one of the most powerful handsets out there which should be able to handle Flash content no problem as long as Apple would work with Adobe to get it working. The iPhone has been out in one form or another for 2 years now and there is still absolutely no Flash support at all. Don’t they see that this is what the consumers want?
Here is the link to Adobe’s video demonstration of Flash running on the device, HTC Hero: The First Android Device with Flash.
Update 06/27/09: I mixed up my stories, Flash will eventually be on all Android devices, it is the HTC Hero’s Sense UI that won’t be allowed on any Google-branded devices because of licensing restrictions.