Adobe unveiled in the recent Mobile World Congress the mobile version of AIR for the Android OS. Like its desktop counterpart, AIR on mobile devices would allow developers to create applications with access to the phone memory and other system attributes and which can be deployed easily on all mobile operating systems that support the runtime.

During the event demos of AIR were shown on the Motorola DROID, but the runtime would also be available for other operating systems such as Blackberry. The new Flash CS5 Professional will allow exporting a mobile application created into a native iPhone application or an AIR application for a mobile device making it very easy to deploy the same project on multiple platforms simultaneously.

You can read more about this and watch demo videos at the Flash Mobile Blog.

There still isn’t any official release date for Flash CS5 Professional – the tool that will enable developers to create native iPhone applications or AIR applications for mobile devices.

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.

Lee Brimelow is back again with a short FAQ on Flash iPhone development that explains a bit about the functionality of Flash iPhone applications and other questions related to the compiling process. The highlight of the FAQ is that Lee expects the public beta version of Flash CS5 to be out before the end of 2009 – We are already in December, so this means it should be out this month if nothing goes wrong! You can learn more from this FAQ by checking it out here.

Lee BrimeLow of the Flash Blog has posted a nice video tutorial on how to create a native iPhone application using the upcoming Flash Professional CS5. This tutorial shows how similar the process for creating an iPhone application is to process for creating AIR applications.

Just like on-device testing using Xcode, those wishing to test their Flash-created iPhone application would have to acquire the $100 developer license from Apple in order to be able to test their applications on their actual devices or in order to distribute them through the iTunes store.

Learn more about this by viewing the video tutorial here.

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.

In addition to its efforts to appear on the iPhone and Android, Adobe has announced in a recent developers conference its cooperation with RIM to bring the full Flash Player to the Blackberry platform.

According to Comscore there are more than 14 million blackberry devices out there and Adobe believes this to be a serious market to tap into.

In addition to the announcement of the full Flash Player, Adobe also announced its intention to Adobe Air and Flex Mobile platform for Blackberry, making RIM the first hardware manufacturer to publicly announce its support of these two new mobile technologies from Adobe.

You can learn more about this announcement at the official Flash Mobile Blog.

This is probably the biggest Flash announcement of the year, Adobe announced that Flash developers will finally be able to create iPhone-compatible Flash games. The next version of the Flash authoring tool, Flash CS5, will have a feature to export AS3 projects to native iPhone applications. This feature does not mean that the iPhone will be able to understand Flash files or that its Safari browser will be capable of running Flash movies, but it means that Flash developers will be able to use Flash CS5 to make native iPhone applications and games by using their existing ActionScript 3.0 skills.

Flash CS5 iPhone applications will have some restrictions such as the inability to use the camera or the copy-and-paste features, but will have the majority of other features including SQLite. Developers will still have to acquire an Apple Developer’s License to be able to sell their applications on the App Store.

This is a truly amazing step forward for Adobe and it will help make Flash developers have a new medium to distribute their content. The beta of Flash CS5 is expected to be released by the end of the 2009.

You can learn more about this, watch a demo video and download sample iPhone applications at http://Adobe.com/iPhone . You can learn more about the restrictions of Flash iPhone Application from the Flash Mobile 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.