ARM flexes web muscles with Flash move

Mobile chip vendor ARM is busy this week, announcing plans on Monday to incorporate Adobe’s Flash and Air software platforms into devices powered by ARM processors.

The chip shop said the technology collaboration with the software firm would optimise and enable Adobe’s Flash Player 10 and Air for ARM powered devices, ranging from mobile phones to set top boxes, mobile internet devices (MIDs), televisions, automotive platforms, personal media players and other mobile computing devices.

The Adobe software will be optimised for the ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11T family and the Cortex-A series of processors and is expected to be available in the second half of 2009.

The partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, an Adobe sponsored initiative to deliver a consistent runtime environment across multiple devices by taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe Air, to address the challenges of web browsing on a broad range of screens.

As one of the most popular web platforms, the absence of Flash on the iPhone has been criticised as one of the device’s main failings. The vast majority of video available on the internet is encoded in Flash, and although Apple struck a deal with YouTube to get the popular video sharing site onto the iPhone, users have still been locked out of a boatload of content. YouTube itself uses Flash, and in order to get onto the iPhone, it had to re-encode all its videos in an iPhone friendly format.

Then again, Adobe hinted last month that a Flash player for the iPhone does exist, but it can’t be made commercially available until given the go ahead by Apple itself.

At the moment ARM is also flexing its muscles after striking a deal with Canonical, the commercial backer of Ubuntu, to put the Linux OS on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and other handheld gadgets including smartphones.