Adobe released a "preview" of their Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5 sometime around September 10th. What this means for Flash developers is we can start creating content for the Motorola Q and other "Smartphones", which are about to explode in popularity over the next few years. As a "Q" owner and Flash developer, I was eager to make my first mobile Flash app.

The plugin is currently in beta and they are targeting developers only in this release. What that means is that you will need to register with their mobile developer program to get it. No big deal. Just head over to labs.adobe.com, register, install, activate the plugin, and your ready to go.

You will want something to play with once you have this new capability on your phone, so feel free to download my Amazon book search tool : amazon_motoQ_v09.swf  (right-click and save to your desktop, then pass it to your phone via ActiveSync).

Here is what it looks like:
(embedded for traditional browsers, not phones)

It’s not the world’s most useful software, but I needed a proof of concept.  Specifically I wanted to know if I could access a Web Service and bring data to the phone from public APIs like we find at Google, eBay, Flickr, and of course Amazon.  The Flash application is not really grabbing the data from Amazon directly, but hitting a gateway on my own domain.  I think it would actually be easier to hit the Web Service on Amazon directly, but I already had this code from a tutorial that was graciously provided by Allesandro Crugnola.

You will want to download it to your phone and run it as a stand-alone app, not in the browser.  The Flash Player install will associate the SWF extension with the runtime player, so as long as you have installed the Flash Lite 2.1 preview, you will be able to launch the SWF from your WM5 phone’s file system.  I have created a page on the Web, which embeds this mobile Flash file in an HTML page so that phones can browse to it.  Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the D-pad on the phone to talk to the Flash content when its in the browser.  There is a special way to embed Flash Lite content for the IE version in Windows Mobile 5 phones.

Same photo, different phone. This one is comong from the new Motorola Q. The image quality is still poor, but better. Click the image to see the 1280×1024 size image. Zoom was set to 1x, and brightness was “automatic”.

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