Full flash on smartphones by 2010, but what about the rest of us?

On Monday, at Barcelona's GSMA "mobile telephony of the future" Mobile World Congress, Adobe announced that its brand new latest version of video applications software Flash will be pre-loaded on most smartphones by 2010. As it is standard fare for viewing most animated PC websites, Adobe are rightly assuming that most smartphone owners will want to check the internet sites without hitches on their phones.

A lot of huffing and puffing over at bleeding-edge West Coast tech watering hole techcrunch.com about how terrible it is that the iPhone isn't in the smartphone list, but everyone knows that Apple is keeping a stranglehold on Flash in order to prop up its money-making walled garden called iTunes. The larger question that begs to be answered is: and what about all the non-smartphones that make up 88% of the total mobile phone market?

It is amazing that while Japan has FlashLite on most of its run-of-the-mill phones, and of course all of the Windows smartphones, the Western world is still mired in a with-us-or-against-us tussle by PC software players muscling in on the mobile action. In East Asia, mobile Flash websites are a dime a dozen, but you'd be lucky to get Flash to play inline on any website even on my slick Nokia N95 8GB here in the UK... When I try to check even the most basic of internet websites on my phone: if it senses even a sliver of Flash anywhere on the webpage, up comes the tiny blue question mark icon for "unknown object" sitting cosily in the centre of where the Flash animation should have been. Come on guys, why should I wait until 2010 for what you can get on the PC right now, and then only on one in ten phones worldwide?

Get real: Adobe is waiving its fees for license use to speed up Flash adoption - what are telcos and handset manufacturers waiting for? You could have one in three handsets worldwide with Flash by 2011, two in three by 2013. The future is now.