Looks like the Palm Pre is looking more feature-rich by the day. Just recently, Palm announced it is joining the Adobe Systems Open Screen Project, which is an industry initiative dedicated to enabling Flash applications on a wide variety of devices. Almost all desktop PCs already have Adobe Flash player, which is used to view a wide array of web sites for navigation, videos, games and other elements.
According to Bloomberg, Flash player is installed on 98 percent of the world's PCs. By comparison, only about 40 percent of new mobile devices use Flash Lite, and others have no Flash support at all. The iPhone is still lacking this key feature.
As for Palm, Michele Turner, vice president for Flash Product Marketing states:
As an industry innovator Palm will be an important contributer to the Open Screen Project...we're aiming to bring a rich, Flash technology-enabled browsing experience to Palm's impressive web browser.
This means Flash is a go for the Palm Pre; the only question is when. According to the press release, the Flash Player for smartphones is expected to be available to participating handheld manufacturers at the end of 2009.
To sweeten the deal, Adobe and Nokia recently announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund, designed to help developers create applications and services for mobiles and other devices using the Flash Platform. Focus areas include entertainment, social networking, productivity, gaming, news and information.
In other news, IT Voir reports that MySpace Mobile, the world's leading social portal, announced a new, more integrated mobile website that will be available for for webOS. This will solidify MySpace as the only social network with applications on all active smartphone platforms, including the iPhone, Android, Sidekick, Blackberry, and now Palm and Nokia devices.
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