Software maker Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) and chip designer ARM Holdings are bringing web-based Flash to mobile phones, set-top boxes, televisions, cars, and personal media players the companies said today. The two are working together to optimize Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR for mobile devices based on ARM processors, which should improve the mobile browsing experience. The ARM-based chips are expected to hit the market in the second half of 2009.

Currently, Flash, which allows developers to integrate video into web pages and develop rich internet applications, has only been available on mobile devices in Adobe’s pared-down Flash Lite version. But the lightweight version, doesn’t always allow for the best browsing experience, especially for applications such as games or video content. It’s also only available for phones based on Symbian and more recently, Windows Mobile. The iPhone, for example, famously doesn’t support Flash Lite, nor does the G1 (although those days appeared numbered since Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, announced it was working with Adobe this morning at MAX and provided a demo of Flash Player 10 running on the G1 during the keynote.) In March, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs dismissed Flash for the iPhone, deeming it “too slow to be useful.” But while its up in the air when Jobs will change his mind, Adobe’s Anup Muraka told PC Magazine that an Android-based version of Flash would be available “in the coming months.” He also said that Adobe and RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) were working on how it could be enabled for Blackberry devices (release).

In other Flash news, Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) released its Software Development Kit for its Brew mobile platform. Among other features, the platform now supports Flash 6, or Adobe Mobile Client (AMC), a new version of the Flash player. (release).

Tricia adds: Steve Sprigg, Qualcomm’s SVP of engineering, explained in an interview how the release of the new SDK is critical. Currently, many companies develop Flash experiences for the Brew platform, which encompasses millions of feature phones, but it requires a lot of heavy lifting on the behalf of a developer. Going forward, anyone who is familiar with the Adobe tools will be able to easily create mobile applications. They will also be able to be much more sophisticated experiences instead of simple Web content. For experience, even the phone’s user interface could be written in Flash. He said new mass market handsets with this technology will launch in 2009, but unfortunately, existing handsets in the market won’t be able to support the new platform. Both of these announcements will be discussed this week at Adobe’s MAX developer conference in San Francisco, and are part of Adobe’s ongoing Open Screen Project, which envisions creating a common language for developers to easily roll out applications across multiple devices, such as mobile phones, TVs and other devices. The vision is still fairly far out, with significant volume of various devices being released to consumers in 2010, but now is the time to evangelize to developers the benefits of using Flash, said Anup Murarka, Adobe’s director for technical marketing.

• Microsoft Considers Silverlight For Android, Says iPhone Not Likely
• Adobe’s Ready, But It Is Still Up To Apple Whether Flash Comes To The iPhone
• Jobs to Adobe: Flash Just Isn’t Good Enough For iPhone