More motion for RIM with Flash and Silverlight

Mobiles-and-PDAs

Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 20-08-2009

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The BlackBerry will soon be able to experience the web in full, even more than some desktop browsers, in fact!

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The Boy Genius Report claims that the manufacturer of the popular BlackBerry mobile phones, Research in Motion, "plans" to integrate full Flash and Silverlight support with the BlackBerry browser.

Full Flash refers to the full Flash Player, not the Flash Lite version. Adobe has already unveiled their plans to release a beta of the full-featured Flash Player 10 for smartphones later this year, and we have already seen HTC Hero sport the full Flash Player albeit a slightly older version 9.

Although there is no clarification as to when and how exactly this will happen, it is reasonable to assume that it will release for Windows Mobile first. Microsoft's Silverlight for Mobile page claims support for S60 and Windows Mobile only, so it it probably these that will get Silverlight first.

Which lends one to think, will Microsoft release Silverlight for Maemo and Android? Since these systems are based on Linux, they might as well release Silverlight for Linux. Or will this once again be left up to the developers of Moonlight? If they do indeed release Silverlight for these platforms themselves, they might as well release a functional Silverlight 3 for Linux.

While there is only a very small number of websites which are built with Silverlight, that number is bound to grow over time, and Silverlight support is sure to make it a little more future-proof, and with Microsoft releasing a Silverlight based online version of Office 2010, we can hope this integration will happen in time.