All the hype about Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices made a lot of people forget about all the other feature phones that do not have big screens or powerful processors and which will never be capable for running the full Flash experience. For these other phones Adobe is going to release the fourth edition of Flash Lite, which for the first time will support ActionScript 3.0. There are no details about this at all on Adobe’s own website, but according to Blogger Anand Joshi, the new Flash Lite 4 is now available for phone manufacturers from Calsoft – one of Adobe’s partners.

Anand points out that Flash Player 10.1 is merely a plugin for the browser, while Flash Lite 4 is both a plug and a standalone application. The fact that it also resides outside the browser makes it possible for the phone manufacturers to add device-specific capabilities to it, while the same cannot be done for Flash Player 10.1.

You can read more about this on Anand’s blog and on Scott Janousek’s blog as well.

The recently released Google Nexus One phone runs Android 2.1 OS which has support for the Flash Player 10.1 in its browser. Unlike some previous Android devices, the Nexus One is also equipped with the fast Snapdragon processor. This should enable this phone to deliver a Flash experience on the go similar to what you can achieve on the desktop.

This could be the most interesting mobile phone for Flash developers at the moment, as the promised ability to export iPhone applications cannot still be seen before Flash CS5 is released. You can develop Flash applications for the Google Nexus One using your current Flash authoring tools.

Adobe released today the beta editions of Adobe Air 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, the next two major releases for both technologies. The most major feature added to both is the support for multi-touch input – which, however, cannot be used without having a device that support multi-touch such HP TouchSmart or a Dell Latitude XT2 running Windows 7. The FAQs say that you should be able to interact with the gestures of the multi-touch pads of Macbook Pros, but I couldn’t get mine to work with the samples available online.

Other additions to AIR 2.0 include support for the detection of mass storage devices, access to raw microphone data, the ability to open a file with its default application and other new improvements. These editions are going to help increase the popularity of using the Adobe AIR platform for creating cross-platform desktop applications with online functionality.

The new release of Flash Player 10.1 is meant to be the first step for creating a consistent Flash experience across desktop and mobile platforms, however, the beta for this edition of the player is now only available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. Though not available for mobile phones yet, but this player should be the one to properly allow the use of AS3 on mobile devices.

You can check out the demos by visiting the links above and check out sample movies to showcase the capability of the new players. I test Adobe AIR 2.0 on my Macbook Pro and it seems to work just fine.

Earlier this week at FTIC Adobe showed a snap shot of its roadmap for mobile devices for next year. Included in the roadmap is Flash Lite 4, which is expected to be released only for low-end mobile phones and feature phones. This new of Flash Lite should be the first version to support ActionScript 3.0.

Adobe also plans on rolling out Flash Player 10 for more powerful smart phones such as those running Android. This version of the Player should be able to run all Flash movies running on normal desktops and should also include features such as hardware acceleration.

Air Mobile should also come out in 2010. This should come out as a standalone player that will enable running mobile applications.

The year 2010 should be interesting for Flash mobile developers. The support of ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Lite should finally make it possible for us to leave ActionScript 2.0 for good and enjoy the goodness of AS3 on all mobile devices.

You can learn more about this at Dan young’s blog and Scott Janousek’s blog.

According the Flash Mobile Blog, the number of downloads of the Adobe Mobile Packager has finally reached a 100,000 successful downloads. While a significant milestone for Adobe, this number doesn’t mean that there are a 100,000 active developers or that there are a 100,000 applications that were made through the packager.

The Adobe Mobile Packager is a Windows-only tool used by developers to wrap up their Flash Lite files in a format that allows the end user to check for and download the latest version of the Flash Lite player before running the file, therefore avoiding version incompatibility issues.

However, Flash Lite continues to be irrelevant in today’s market for a various number of reasons, including the unfriendliness of the user experience on most Symbian and Windows phones, the wide disparity in capabilities of supported phones, the failure of the Nokia Ovi Store, and  many others. Until the full Flash Player 10 is supported on Android, Adobe might as well just suspend all its mobile operations.

Adobe announced today that the first Android device to be shipped with the Flash plug-in is the HTC Hero. Though not clearly expressed anywhere in the announcement, this device supports Flash Lite 3.1 and not the previously announced full Flash Player 10. This means that ActionScript 3.0 is not supported, and only up to Flash Player 9 movies made in AS2 will be playable. Adobe claims that this means that up to 85% of Flash on the Internet will be supported.

As seen from the announcement video, the integration of Flash in the player is excellent, the user could double click any Flash object to have that object displayed in full screen landscape mode. This makes viewing Flash video nice and makes playing games comparable to standalone applications.

There is no doubt that this is a great development for Flash, however, the fact that Flash Lite 3.1 does not support AS3 will be a barrier for entry for many developers.

There are no updates on whether Flash will ever be seen on the iPhone, but the other recent competitor, the Palm Pre, is expected to have the full Flash Player 10 sometime next year.

You can learn more about Flash on Android at the Flash Mobile Blog and Adobe.

Flash Lite developers might have heard about the launch of Nokia’s new Ovi App Store for selling mobile content, applications, and games. The store is thought to be one of the competitors for iTunes AppStore for the iPhone.

The Ovi Store was launched last week for a number of jurisdictions such as Australia and Europe, but not the US (probably because it is not one of Nokia’s biggest markets).

Using the Ovi Store Flash Lite and J2ME developers should be able to distribute their content to an international audience for free or for any cost they specify.

I tried using the App Store with my Nokia e65. I couldn’t (or didn’t know how) to download the Ovi Store mobile application, so I decided to use the desktop web based store instead of using the mobile web based store. Getting an application to the phone is not a difficult process, you select an application, put your phone number, and then you will receive an SMS with the link to download it.

For some reason none of the Flash Lite games or application showed up after I set my phone model to e65. I do not know if there are no Flash Lite 1.1 packed as SIS applications for this model or what.

The number of applications currently available on the store is very small and relatively expensive, especially in comparison to the iTunes App Store. For example, there is only one Twitter client and its costs GBP 8 (around USD 13).

The experience of the store is not perfect, I had to re-submit my phone number for each application I wanted to download. External links from other websites leading to an incompatible application simply showed an error message and did not actually tell me that this applications exists and that I can’t see it because my device is not compatible. Also, the listing of the application highlight the category of the application instead of its name making it quite hard to skim through applications.

TechCrunch wrote a negative review of the store, mainly due to the sluggishness of the website and the unexplained disappearance of many of the applications.

It is not fair to make a final judgement on the store, but there is no doubt that Nokia will have to fix a lot in the Ovi App Store for it to complete with other mobile application stores.

 The Ovi Store is Nokia’s response to Apple’s App Store. It is hoped to help developers reach out for Nokia phone users by having the application store integrated in Nokia devices. Nokia recently launched the Publisher section of the Ovi Store to allow developers to register for free as Ovi Publishers. Publishers can sell their applications for a specified amount or offer them for free. If any applications are sold, Nokia will share the profit with the developer on a 30-70 basis (the same percentage used by Apple).

Java and Flash developers should check this out if they are interested in publishing mobile content on Nokia devices.

You can check out the video below to learn more about Ovi.

 Twittle is a nice example of what could possibly be a popular Flash Lite application. Twittle is basically a Twitter client that has all the essential featurse for running updating your status on twitter and reading the latest updates posted by people you follow. It is created using the Twitter API to exchange data between the phone and Twitter. The program is probably written in AS2.

The most popular Twitter  desktop clients (TweetDeck and Twirl) are written in ActionScript on AIR. An untitled proof of concept Flash Lite 2.0 application was developed by Abdul Qabiz from India in 2007, but it was never properly launched or updated. Twittle would be the first proper mobile Twitter client to be made in Flash Lite.

Twittle was developed for Adobe’s Flash Lite Developer Challenge and will be demoed at CITA Wireless 2009 in April.

[via Biskero]

 For those who also missed this one out, Adobe released last month an update to Device Central with new profile definitions for many handsets, mostly Japanese, but also some Nokia and Sony Ericsson ones. You can download the update from here.