Android have officially joined the Open Screen Project with the announcement of Flash support on the upcoming HTC Hero device. Flash is supported in the browser, but can also be launched in full screen mode by double-tapping a SWF from the browser, which is a neat way of launching “standalone” content. I’m thinking maybe you could use some kind of badge (like an AIR installer badge) which sits on the web page, but then when double-tapped, it goes to full screen and then starts the app/game/content. Mmmm … anyway … maybe Mark or someone could comment on that idea.
The HTC Hero is also a multi-touch device which could make for some interesting Flash applications as well.
It needs to be pointed out that this is not Flash Player 10, but interestingly has been referred to as a “mobile-optimized runtime” rather than Flash Lite. Still AS2.0 based, and can reportedly view around 80% of all Flash web content today.
Read more on the announcement over on Mark’s blog and also watch a video of Flash on the HTC Hero in action over in the Mobile and Devices Dev Center.
“not Flash Player 10″ sounds negative, but the full article does say, as promised, “In the near future we’ll be shipping full Flash Player [10] on the Android platform”.
Well with the mass amounts of news flying around in the past week about Flash 10 coming to Symbian, Android, WinMo, Palm, I didn’t think that framing it in this way would come across as negative. Certainly given all that media coverage, many developers may have tried to connect the dots a little early and jump the gun on thinking what version of “Flash” was being talked about. In any case, it’s actually Flash Lite 3.1.