A new age of mobile gaming on its way with Flash Lite?
It’s already on over a billion phones, apparently
Sun Microsystem’s J2ME (the mobile strain of Java) is believed to have been equipped on more than 2.5 billion mobile handsets. Mighty impressive stuff, and the corner stone for the mobile games industry. But as much as we love J2ME here at Pocket Gamer, the advent of the iPhone seems to have heralded the end of the Java Age.
The system struggles to provide the next generation of mobile games people now expect, though an alternative might be around the corner. Adobe’s Flash Lite has been circling for a while now, with over a billion mobile downloads of the framework to date.
Many of these downloads will be net browser related and haven't offered much other than the ability to view websites properly. But the latest version of Flash Lite, 3.1, offers a unique new feature. Just as it does in our PC internet browsers, a new form of distributable player will allow handsets to download Flash Lite on the fly.
This means that, for example, a Flash-based mobile game could be sold even though the framework isn’t currently installed on the handset. Previously the user would have had to manually fetch and install the system for the game to work – a prohibitive chore that’s held back the concept of Flash-based mobile gaming.
South African games developer SkillPod has been recruited to provide a small launch catalogue of around 30 mobile Flash Lite games to celebrate the launch of Adobe’s 3.1 version of the system (which only weighs in at around 400KB, if you’re worried about a game automatically downloading loads of data). Hopefully this will demonstrate the capability and dynamism of Flash based games over the aging Java system.
Initially the system is only available for Nokia’s S60 handsets and, rather ironically, Windows Mobile – which has made little use of Microsoft’s Flash competitor, Silverlight. Of course, there’s still no signs of any breed of Flash for the iPhone, so at least Microsoft has the upper hand there.
It’s still early days, and although Flash Lite 3.1 potentially offers a whole new age of mobile-based games and applications (including multimedia playback, since most web video is now also Flash based), a lot of current Flash content on the internet would need re-encoding to work properly with the distributable mobile framework.
Should it take off on lower end handsets, however, this could re-revolutionise mobile gaming and applications, and replace J2ME as the foundations upon which the mobile software industry is built. Watch this space.
