Adobe Ships 500 Millionth Flash Lite Shipment And Microsoft Licenses Flash Lite

Adobe is making two announcements this morning related to its Flash Lite software today. Flash Lite has passed the 500 million software installation mark. This means that Flash Lite is pre-installed on 500 million phones to-date. Flash Lite is a slimmed-down version of the full Adobe Flash that is included on nearly every computer today.

The other announcement is Microsoft is licensing the new Flash Lite 3.0 version for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile. This could help Microsoft to gain mobile browser ground against the iPhone as the latter does not currently have Flash support.

I recently purchased a Windows Mobile phone and have found the default IE browser to be barely usable. The browser works great with Twitter, but for anything that uses JavaScript or any "new" technology, it is slow or non-responsive. On the other hand, I installed Opera Mobile and it's awesome. While you have to scroll left to right to view an entire page (or zoom out), sites and pages render perfectly. It's an excellent competitor to the iPhone's Safari browser. I was even able to write a full CN post using Opera Mobile which was amazing.

Update: Adobe employee Ryan Stewart has provided a perspective from the inside.