Big news coming out of the Macromedia camp as they ink deals with Samsung and Nokia to include Flash on certain high-end phones.
BusinessWeek has an interesting article which posts some numbers and figures (if you're into that kind of thing), but they also had those juicy bit:
So what does that amount to? To get an idea, consider Nokia's smart phone, the Series 60, which has 20 million customers, and whose sales are growing 100% per year, says Antti Vasara, head of Nokia's mobile-software sales and marketing.Before these deals, Flash was on about 20 million phones, the bulk of which were part of NTT DoCoMo's (DCM ) network in Japan, a Macromedia partner since 2003. In Macromedia's fiscal third quarter, which ended in December, it made $5.9 million from the inclusion of Flash in mobile devices.
While that sounds like a small amount, consider the massive market opportunity on the horizon. Nearly 200 million handsets shipped in the fourth quarter, according to market researchers at IDC. And for the year, shipments were up 30% from 2003. Some analysts estimate nearly half the phones shipping next year will have enough memory to run Flash. If current growth rates keep up, that's roughly 500 million phones with Flash potential.
Wow! It looks like Flash and mobile devices are set to [finally] take off over on this side of the ocean! Now would be a good time to head over to the Macromedia store and pick up that developer release of Flash Lite 1.1!
Macromedia Looks Flash in Cell Phones [BusinessWeek]
Posted by peter on February 24, 2005 at 03:20 PM