Adobe and Qualcomm BREW up a mobile partnership

Adobe has taken another step in its plan for domination of the mobile world — it just announced a partnership that should make it easier to create applications for the Adobe Flash runtime in Qualcomm’s BREW mobile software platform.

This partnership is presumably part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which was announced in April and is the company’s initiative to make Flash the ubiquitous environment for mobile devices. A big part of that initiative involves deals with mobile partners like Motorola and Nokia to create versions of Flash that run easily on their products. It’s a challenge to make Flash, a demanding runtime environment, work well on a mobile devices — it doesn’t work on the iPhone, for example, and a startup called Skyfire just raised $13 million to tackle the problem from the browser side. But Adobe wants to make Flash as ubiquitous on mobile devices as it is on the web, particularly as Microsoft’s competing product Silverlight is making moves into the mobile market.

Flash Lite, the mobile version of Flash, is already compatible with BREW, but only for a fee as part of the BREW extension program. The new BREW Mobile Platform will integrate Flash Lite into its central client, and it will be available without charge. This should make Flash applications a key feature of the BREW platform moving forward. Chipsets with the new, Flash-integrated platform should start shipping this fall.

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