Tag Archives: Motorola

MWC 2011 and Flash Platform: Good Progress and Good Performance

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With Mobile World Congress coming to a close in Barcelona, we are seeing tremendous momentum for the Flash Platform runtimes on mobile devices. It’s incredibly exciting to see, touch and play with all the latest devices that our ecosystem partners are announcing and launching this year, including tablets like the Motorola XOOM, RIM Blackberry PlayBook and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S II, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and neo and the five new Android smartphones from HTC. With beautiful web content for Flash Player and rich apps built with AIR, these devices highlight the wide adoption of both the Flash Player and AIR, especially since the former has only been available for about 6 months and AIR has only been available for a little more than 3 months!

While the momentum has been astonishing, there are still some questions on how Flash Player is performing on mobile devices. Tim Siglin, an editor at Streaming Media and co-founder of Transitions, Inc., wanted to find out for himself and published his findings in his whitepaper Performance or Penalty – Assessing Flash Player 10.1 Impact on Android Handsets. It is an in-depth look at the performance of Flash Player on a number of mobile devices, and the results may surprise you. Key highlights from the whitepaper include:

  • For the vast majority of video content delivered for Flash Player on mobile devices, performance is equivalent to the full frame rate experience on desktop. This is a huge improvement vs. video played back on previous devices.
  • The most significant factors impacting mobile battery life for video playback, for both Flash Player and the native device player, is appropriate video encoding and optimization.
  • There is minimal, if any, impact on mobile device battery life with Flash Player, even with multiple apps running.
  • All web content, running in Flash Player or not, consume battery power at consistent rates over WiFi in the native browser.
  • GPS, 3G and other resources on a phone consume more power than Flash Player, including when highly interactive content is viewed.
  • Flash Player 10.1 performance was 350% better than equivalent content in HTML, running an average of 24 frames per second for Flash Player 10.1 and 7 fps for HTML.

These initial findings support the positive feedback we have seen from users on Android Market where there have been over 6M downloads, 150K ratings resulting in a 4.5 out of 5.0 stars for Flash Player. Here are a few additional new devices that were announced yesterday at Mobile World Congress that are supporting the Flash Platform runtimes:

Flash Platform at CES 2011

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Happy New Year! Know what early January means besides new gym memberships? CES of course! The world’s largest consumer tech show, with 2500 exhibitors unveiling “next generation” consumer electronics is under way, and there’s some great news about new devices, apps, chips and services from Open Screen Project partners and others.

  • At MAX 2010 we announced AIR for TV for developers and content providers to extend rich media experiences and interactivity to TV. At CES, the HDTV market leader in the U.S., Samsung, and Adobe announced that Samsung will be the first to integrate support for Adobe AIR 2.5 for TV, making it easy for developers to build (using Creative Suite 5), distribute and monetize standalone applications through Samsung’s Smart TV applications store, Samsung Apps. All of Samsung’s 2011 Smart TVs and Smart Blu-ray players will include support for Adobe AIR for TV. Samsung also announced plans to bring Flash Player 10.1 to its Smart TV browser, extending the company’s current support for Flash Player 10.1 on Samsung smartphones and tablets.
  • What will the AIR app experience on Samsung TV’s be like? Companies such as CNET, Epix and YouTube are now developing apps for Samsung’s TV app store. Check out the video below for an early look:

Want to start developing your own apps for the new Samsung TVs? Watch Don Woodward’s MAX 2010 session, “How to Develop AIR for TV Applications” and then check out the resource pages here.

  • Motorola made news about upcoming devices:
    • With Verizon, they unveiled the Motorola XOOM — the first device on Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS designed from the ground up for tablets. Coming Q2 2011. They also announced the DROID Bionic 4G, a new, fast, Android smartphone. Both with support for Flash Player 10.1.
    • With T-Mobile, Motorola announced Motorola CLIQ 2™ with MOTOBLUR™, a 3.7-inch touch screen smartphone with a slide-out keypad. Powered by Android 2.2 and Flash Player 10.1. Available in late January.
    • With AT&T, they launched the Motorola ATRIX 4G, which runs a full Mozilla Firefox 3.6 browser and supports Flash Player 10.1. Available Q1 2011
  • NVIDIA announced the arrival of NVIDIA® Tegra™ 2 chips that will power “superphones.” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was on stage with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang discussing the new developments and the importance of Flash support on devices. Watch a demo of a new LG Optimus 2X superphone on CNET
  • AMD announced the Fusion family of APUs with low battery consumption, improved graphics and video performance on notebooks and netbooks. AMD Fusion APUs will compliment the upcoming release of Flash Player 10.2, which will include a new video hardware acceleration model that enables dramatically enhanced video playback performance. Sigma Designs, a leading provider of SoC solutions for delivering home entertainment, announced support for AIR for TV and Flash Player running in an Espial browser for TVs. STMicroelectronics, a leader in chips for set-top boxes and digital TVs, introduced out-of-the box content protection for premium Interactive TV video using Adobe Flash Access. Flash Access is integrated with AIR for TV for a content protection solution with support of a broad range of business models, including electronic sell-through, pay-per-view, subscriptions or rentals, just to name a few. Support for Adobe AIR for TV with Flash Access on STMicroelectronics chipsets allows device manufacturers and content providers to rely on a secure, flexible and scalable solution for content distribution and monetization across many devices.
  • Another interesting announcement from CES is for UltraViolet, a new system that will allow consumers to purchase digital content and watch it wherever and whenever they want. People who purchase UltraViolet entertainment can watch film and TV content across multiple branded platforms, such as computers, connected TVs, game consoles, smartphones and tablets. UltraViolet came about from a consortium of companies as part of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which includes Adobe and dozens of other companies such as Akamai, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Dell, Fox, HP, Intel, LG Electronics, Lionsgate, Microsoft, Motorola, NBC Universal, Netflix, Nokia, Panasonic, Paramount Pictures, Philips, RIAA, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Technicolor, Toshiba and VeriSign.

Be sure to check back after CES as we hope to provide some on-the-floor demos of the Flash Platform in action!

Went to Max? Got a Droid 2? We Want Your Apps!

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Thanks to all of you who joined us at MAX 2010. We hope your new Droid 2 is already helping you create some amazing mobile experiences that use Flash Player and Adobe AIR because we want to expose what you’re making! Adobe and Motorola are looking for cool new Flash Player compatible web sites and AIR for Android apps that will ‘wow’ Droid users – whether they are regular folks or business types. If you have something great, it could be featured in:

  • Motorola print or TV ads
  • Adobe TV demos and success stories
  • The m.flash.com showcase
  • The Adobe Times Square billboard
  • Demos at industry events
  • SHOP4APPS by Motorola – currently available in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and China (1 million + downloads in China)

So submit your apps and sites here!

Need help getting started? Go to the Adobe Mobile and Devices Developer Center.

Important Upcoming Dates

To submit for CES (January 6-9, 2011)
Deadline: December 17

To submit for Mobile World Congress (Feb 14-17, 2011)
Deadline: January 5

Day One at Adobe MAX 2010!

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Greetings from MAX 2010, where the news is all about how the Flash Platform is powering the multi screen revolution. It’s been a really exciting Day One keynote, full of surprises, and this morning we’ve seen the following from Kevin Lynch & his special guests:

  • Web authoring is being enhanced, including CSS support to optimize delivery of HTML content for multiple screens, a new prototype (“Edge”) which enhances motion design (and is built on JQuery), and Site Catalyst support in CS Live for Web/browser adoption stats
  • It’s a good thing…when Martha Stewart herself is on stage! She showed off a beautiful new version of Martha Stewart Living magazine on an iPad, recognizably branded, followed by Kevin showing Wired magazine on the 16×9 Malata tablet running Android. Kevin was then joined by Joe Simon, the CEO of Condé Nast to talk about how they are optimizing delivery of CN magazines using Adobe tools on multiple devices (including the New Yorker showing off dynamic pagination in HTML), demonstrating this on the iPad, Malata, and Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets. Kevin continued with some exciting sneak peeks including dynamic wrapping of text around shapes in HTML, and the New Digital Publishing Suite for publishers who want to create, produce, distribute & monetize, & analyze their content (now in beta), as well as an announcement that Adobe is contributing to WebKit
  • Moving on to the digital home, Kevin showed off a Samsung TV streaming Amazon’s Video on Demand service with HD video on a GoogleTV, as well as HBO Go HD video, with support for StageVideo. AIR is not only for Android but also for TVs – and the CTO of Epix, Marc Goldberg, made a special appearance to show off a new Epix app for TVs. In FMS, you’ll soon have on-the-fly video encoding support as well as P2P support for video (the keynote today was being streamed using P2P)
  • And how about some editing on tablets? Demos included not only content aware and fill, but also color mixing on a tablet interacting with Photoshop running on a laptop
  • As for the enterprise, there are new LiveCycle ES 2.5 announcements, and David Nüescheler, CTO of Day Software, joined Kevin on stage to demonstrate multi screen content for enterprise. Kevin then showed off an eUnity healthcare demo – built in Flex 4.5, now in beta – showcasing how a Canadian hospital is now viewing/interacting with MRIs in the Flash Player…on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet! (You can see a video of the BB PlayBook here later today.) Mike Lazarides, RIM President & Co-CEO joined Kevin onstage to talk about how the UI for the PlayBook is based on AIR, and then demo’ed some AIR apps on the PlayBook, including SAP’s CIO Cockpit, SalesForce Chatter, and HD video from BBC Motion Gallery, and showing off multi-tasking on the tablet. The SDK is now available for the PlayBook, and those developers who write an app that’s accepted by RIM will be eligible for a free BlackBerry PlayBook.
  • In gaming, Kevin showed off Sony Picture’s “Green Hornet” movie Flash-based game for desktop and mobile, as well as hardware accelerated graphics in a Retro Shooter game on an HTC phone. He entertained the crowd with the Idle Worship game, a new social game now in beta – particularly entertaining if you’ve ever wanted to throw a lightning bolt. Following that, he showed off game controller support for Flash while demo’ing Meteor Storm, and then came the big gaming surprise – a prototype of a 3D driving game that took full advantage of hardware acceleration, which he navigated using a USB steering wheel from Logitech. Here’s a preview of this 3D functionality which will be available in an upcoming release of Flash Player and AIR
  • And at the very end came an announcement that got a huge response, when Christy Wyatt, Corporate Vice President from Motorola announced that all MAX attendees were getting a free Motorola Droid 2 phone, because “anyone who’s not giving you Flash on a mobile device is not giving you the Internet.”

All of this coming on the heels of our news announcements today, including the release of Adobe® AIR® 2.5 SDK for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems (http://blogs.adobe.com/air) and these other announcements:

  • http://m.flash.com has been updated with AIR for Android apps and social features, so you can share your favorite sites or apps as well as submit your site to Adobe; now available, http://tv.flash.com with 12 experiences powered by Flash for Google TV

Lots of sessions to come, and more fun previews tomorrow with @BenForta and his special guests. Keep an eye on this blog for new updates throughout MAX!

Flash Player 10.1 and Droid X

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I was at the Droid X launch event in SF today and it’s a pretty slick device. Big screen, fast, HDMI output for streaming HD video to your TV. (It also comes with a HD camcorder). Although the device will first ship with Android 2.1, and not Froyo until later this summer, the team’s demo unit had an early version of Froyo and we were demo-ing Flash Player 10.1. Of course, I work for Adobe and the Flash Player team and I’m biased, but Flash content runs great on that device. We were showing off Kongregate and Mochi games, replays of the USA win on ESPN, videos from Sony Pictures — and as long as we had a good signal we had great content.

Read more about the Droid X in the press release. Paul Betlem, Flash Player engineering, also discusses some of the specs of the Droid X on the Flash Player team blog.

Thinking about optimizing your Flash content ready for the slew of devices coming to market in the next few months? Start here.

Droid_X_front_Home-H4-Web2.jpg

Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile Available

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Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile is here! Fully redesigned with new performance and mobile-specific functionality, mobile users will now be able to experience the full web — games, animations, RIAs, data visualizations, music, video, audio and more.

Flash Player 10.1 beta is already one of the top free apps on Android Market today and will be available as a final production release for smartphones and tablets once users are able to upgrade to Android 2.2 “Froyo.” Supported devices are expected to include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, DROID by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S and others.

Flash Player 10.1 was also released to our mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS. We expect FP 10.1 will be an over-the-air download and even pre-installed on some smartphones, tablets and other devices in the coming months. Stay tuned to news from your device manufacturer.

There are loads of partners speaking in support of this news – many part of the Open Screen Project. Click the link to read quotes and musings from some of them, including ARM, Dell, Google, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola, Qualcomm, RIM, Samsung and others. Additionally, Intel, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments posted to their blogs, and Brightcove issued a press release in support of the news.

What’s new in Flash Player 10.1? You can get all the details from the Flash Player team’s rundown of the work that went into the new runtime. And here are some of the top things to know:

  • It’s been completely redesigned and optimized for mobile, including new interaction methods that support mobile-specific input models, and support for accelerometer.
  • With Smart Zooming, users can scale content to full screen mode. Performance optimization work with virtually all major mobile silicon and platform vendors makes efficient use of CPU and battery performance.
  • New Smart Rendering ensures that Flash content is running only when it becomes visible on the screen further reducing CPU and battery consumption.
  • Sleep Mode makes Flash Player automatically slow down when the device transitions into screen saver mode.
  • Advanced Out-of-Memory Management allows the player to effectively handle non-optimized content that consumes excessive resources.
  • Automatic memory reduction decreases content usage of RAM by up to 50 percent.
  • Flash Player pauses automatically when events occur such as incoming phone calls or switching from the browser to other functions. Once users switch back to the browser, Flash Player resumes where it paused.

If you haven’t seen demos of Flash Player 10.1 on Android yet, check these out. You can also visit our demos page for more.

Google Nexus One

NVIDIA – Hardware accelerated HD video on netbook

Dell Mini 5 Tablet

NVIDIA TEGRA Tablet

Palm Pre

Be sure to check out the new Flash Player 10.1 product pages and ADC content to learn more. We can’t wait to see what you develop!

Flash Player 10.1 on Motorola Droid and Motorola Backflip

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The latest in our series of Flash Player 10.1 video demos comes hot on the heels of Motorola’s announcement of the Backflip, Droid and it’s Milestone variant.

You will remember that at MAX 2009 we showed a disguised Android device, previously unannounced, running Flash Player 10.1. That was in fact the Droid, and with our continued partnership with Motorola and Google it’s great to see Flash Player 10.1 start to filter through the platform. From a developer perspective, this is a good indicator that we’re now able to bring Flash to devices by platform; in this case Android 2.x.

In his video demo, Adrian shows the New York Times website which is now able to detect these Android devices and provide a more complete web experience including video, images and animations which until now have only been suited to the desktop.

Most news and entertainment sites today are using Flash to playback their video content, engaging with their audiences using rich media throughout their sites.

The award winning BBC News site is also shown in this video, and interestingly shows some nice device detection from the BBC whereby highly optimized video is sent across the web as they detect lower bandwidths using the Flash Media Server.

As with our other videos, these are teasers to give you some idea of the wide scope of devices including WebOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux that will be able to run Flash Player 10.1 later this year.

Enjoy..

10 leading CEOs discuss the Open Screen Project and Flash

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CEOs from ARM, Broadcom, DoCoMo, Google, HTC, Motorola, NVIDIA, Palm, QUALCOMM, and RIM talk about how they’re bringing Flash Platform technologies to their devices and platforms as part of the Open Screen Project and why they think it’s important to have Flash on their devices and platforms.

Google joins the Open Screen Project

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Recently you probably noticed that I’ve been working on Android a little, and for good reason of course.  Though it would be easy to focus this post on Android, let’s just look at some of the places where Google use Flash today.

  • Youtube
  • Google Maps
  • Site Search
  • Web Search
  • Chrome / OS

So you see Flash is everywhere at Google and we’ve been working together for years to build upon this relationship.  Google joining the Open Screen Project may seem like a matter of course given our demo’s last year and given their investments in the Flash Platform.

In the past few months we’ve seen stellar device launches from HTC and Motorola using Android.  Those of you with beady eyes will also have spotted others from Sony Ericsson and “others” coming down the pipe soon.

I want ALL of them, but might stick to the Hero for now.

Oh, in case they’re watching.  Dear HTC, please fix the SSL certificates for Exchange email eh?

Google Team, welcome to the Open Screen Project