Pocket Flash

Tomi T Ahonen does an amazing job on adding context to the shear volume of mobile phone users there are today. I’ve stripped out the list for those who fall asleep after reading more than ten words.

THE CAR AT 800 M
TELEPHONE 1.3 B
TV 1.5 B
CREDIT CARDS 1.4 B
PC 850 M
INTERNET 1.1 B
THE GOLIATH, MOBILE PHONES 2.7 B

For the Flash Lite developer, or anyone who has attempted to sell Flash Lite as a concept to any client, the crunch always comes when the client asks “so how many phones will this work on”. You see if you said 17, as it is today (or back in 2004 when it was 2 devices and only if they had T-mobiles newsExpress) then your client may loose interest fast, which has been the case on more than one occasion. But if you include that if they managed to get their content in front of just 1% of mobile phone users, then they would be looking at 27,000,000 units, then you can start to make some headway.

It’s this kind of information / ammunition that helps us educate clients about the position of Flash Lite content within the “mobile eco system”, so that they will be comfortable enough to allow you to take their brand / product onto mobile devices.

I only wish I had the time to put in as much effort as guys like Dimitry

Well that will make a few peoples Christmas.

See Bill Perry’s Blog for more details, though one thing to notice is the EULA prohibits redistribution, but hey it’s a massive step in the fight direction. Being able to point end users in the direction of a FREE Flash Player is a much easy sell to potential users of Flash Lite content.

All we need now is a device detection script and we’re set.

Pocket marketing have been granted funding to develop ‘mobisite’, a social networking application which will of course be developed in Flash Lite.

The spec and architecture are on the drawing board as I type, and I’ll be blogging the whole process over the next 5 months from idea to fully signed .sis.

Although I expect to see Flash Lite 2.0 appear over here in the UK during this time, the intention is to stay faithful to 1.1 development whilst future proofing with a 2.0 version at the same time. And you never know you may even see a web based interface trialled in Flex.