Is the Future Flash?

Flash has been a phenomena on the web, just try surfing without flash and you find a massive number of sites that are either inaccessible without flash or if you are lucky you will get a cut down version for all those luddites without flash installed. This is especially true on gaming sites where flash is used to both make a more interactive user interface and deliver the games.

Flash has been so successful on the web because it managed to provide a standard, scalable interactive technology across a wide range of hardware. Unlike Java which even on the web is less than perfect at the write once, run any where founding concept, flash manages this at a graphical level although with a much reduced functionality compared to Java.

The same is happening on mobile, Flash in the form of Flash Lite 1.1 is now becoming available on new handsets for both European GSM devices and in the US on Brew handsets as a downloadable Brew extension. Early experimenting with Flash provides the results you would expect, even on the latest handsets the experience is slow but compatibility seems excellent. Running the same app across all the handsets and flash does an admirable job of rescaling the graphics and running the underlying code. This mass compatibility across both GSM and BREW handsets makes flash a completely new phenomena on mobile. For the 1st time we have a potential technology that would allow developers to write a single app and deliver across all devices with a common look & feel.

Unfortunately although flash has the potential to solve the compatibility problem it does this at the expense of performance. Flash is limited to only the very newest handsets and even on these the speed of applications is a major concern. Flash will always be limited to delivering puzzle games rather than fast action twitch games and certainly not the new breed of 3D titles becoming available, but even these types of games are too slow on the current breed of handsets.

With a large percentage of the mobile market focused on puzzle games and flash providing the compatibility layer that has so far been the biggest barrier to entry on mobile the future for flash looks very promising once the handset technology can provide a satisfactory performance.

There are still a number of barriers that need to be resolved before flash provides this panacea; most devices don't allow you to save the flash app which means each time you would want to play the game you would need to download it. This works fine on the web but is a nightmare on mobile; also the performance of flash is a concern which needs to be resolved.

At the moment flash looks like a technology that has been brought over from the web world with little or no thought for mobile. Even in it's current form it is showing considerable promise although it isn’t a viable gaming platform yet, with a little bit more effort and increased penetration of the latest handsets it may have a future in mobile.