It’s been a long time coming, but Adobe has announced that it’s bringing full Flash capabilities to handsets from RIM, Windows Mobile, Android and Palm. The only major smartphone being left behind the pack is the Apple iPhone.

This news comes as Adobe just inked deals to work with Google to bring Flash to Android phones and RIM for Blackberry devices. Both companies have joined the Open Screen project to help extend Flash to as many mobile devices as possible.

This is an important step for Adobe, which has historically offered a Lite version of Flash to be used on handsets. Adobe has been working to optimize Flash for devices with less computing power.

Now the company plans to offer a full version of Flash for all of the major handset platforms. This will provide mobile Web surfers with the capability to see more of the full Web experience on their device.

The only problem is that a good portion of mobile Web surfers use an iPhone. Steve Jobs has said publicly that he’s not interested in bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone.

Jobs’s complaint is that full Flash was too slow for it to be useful on the iPhone and that Flash Lite isn’t Web capable. Since then, Adobe has been working to merge Flash Lite into the main trunk and optimize it for mobile devices.

All that work and 18 months later, but still no change from Apple about integrating Flash into the iPhone. It’s hard to say whether that means that Adobe’s changes didn’t impress Steve Jobs or if he’s too busy focusing on the next generation of Apple products.

Either way, iPhone users are a powerful demographic on the mobile Web. Developers aren’t likely to create a Flash interface for mobile devices if they also have to code an iPhone-specific version for a sizeable portion of their users.

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Entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:21 am under Apple, Media players, Software, Technology.

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