Mobile Madness at the Adobe User Group
by dirk
Last week, the NL Adobe User Group organized an event themes ‘Mobile Madness’. While you would expect such an event to be entirely focused on Flash Lite development, the Adobe platform for applications on the mobile phones, most of the speakers actually didn’t use Flash Lite for their examples. Like any mobile event nowadays, all the buzz is about the iPhone (in this case it was “the other phone”) and how to duplicate the success and model of Apple.
Does Flash Lite have a future as mobile platform?
Some 50% of the 200 attendants of the events had an iPhone in their hands. Their main question was: “When will Flash come to the iPhone?” which wasn’t answered. But to me, it looked like the Flash Lite platform offers some interesting aspects:
- More than 1 billion phones are equipped with Flash Lite. Think of all the S60 series phones from Nokia, but also many SonyEricsson and Samsung phones.
- Developing for Flash Lite is really platform independent. Adobe gives you the Device Central application, with which you can preview, test and build your application for all the different mobile phones. All in one IDE.
- Creating ‘flashy’ user interfaces is really easy for people used to working with Flash on the desktop.
So in all, Flash Lite is a very attractive platform for building demonstration apps that will run on many different feature phones.
The disadvantages of Flash
But now the drawback: I purposely say ‘demonstration apps’, because I don’t believe any mobile application will find the big mass in the current feature phone market. The demo given by Serge Jespers from Adobe clearly showed it: Installing the app on the Nokia N95 required some 10 user clicks to accept all the various warning messages and once installed you still have to browse to your applications folder to find the new application. Nothing like the App Store or Android Market…
And one has to say that most Flash applications demonstrated were, like may of their web counterparts mostly commercial branding and not especially useful. It’s nice that you can browse a very fancy bar of cocktails with the Bacardi app, or the latest collection of Dolce & Gabbana, but will you really pick up that app every time you need a drink or want to buy a new outfit?
One last drawback I see is the user interface: You can make the most attractive interface imaginable using Flash, but you can also make it horribly wrong. No ‘Human Interface Guidelines‘, no restrictions. So also a multitude of ways to navigate an application, which in the end makes it confusing for the user. Like many of the web applications you find nowadays.
Other examples of mobile developments
Most other speakers showed current developments on the mobile phone (should I say device? What we saw had nothing to do with calling). A lot of them even on the iPhone. It was nice to see Ralph Cohen from IceMobile give some more details about the Samsung campaign on Queen’s Day 2008 and the Red Bull/Samsung campaign during the air race in Rotterdam.
The focus is clearly on developing campaigns and applications that most people can use now, without having to be a whizkid to install anything on their phone: Get people to make a video call to a special number to directly broadcast their experience live on a big screen. Or get people to send in pictures from their phone. That’s basically what the mass knows to do, all other phone features are still difficult to find and use for most (who don’t have an iPhone or G1).