One Flash Lite platform we do not seem to hear much discussion about are Sony Ericsson OSE phones. Currently these are walkman series phones running SE’s proprietary OSE operating system. Flash Lite is implemented in the browser, and many models support SWF screensavers and wallpapers.

Since SE is one of the top 3 manufacturers and distributes devices world wide, this is an important Flash Lite platform. Along with Nokia series 40 phones, it is the main target device for SWF screensavers. However, in my opinion, it has some problems for offline types of game and application oriented content.

No archive/installer
As I mentioned in a previous post “the need for a Flash Lite installer/archive“, there is no installer/archive for the proprietary OSE platform. This is a problem for delivering Flash based games and applications because we cannot conveniently package our application assets into an archive and install on the phone so that the user sees an icon in the application menu. This may be possible using Java but no one seems to have accomplished this or at least stated so publicly.

Instead of delivering an archive and installer we may be limited to delivering a single SWF and expect that the user knows to browse the phone’s file system to find the SWF. Unfortunately, single SWF limit the types of games and applications we can deliver compared to an archive containing multiple assets.

Using Symbian .SIS or Windows .cab, we can deliver many assets within one archive in a seamless way to supporting phones. This is not an option for SE phones. How do we deliver offline types of content with many assets? It might be asking too much for an end user to unzip a file downloaded over the web and transfer a folder of stuff to a SE phone, compared to installing a single SWF file.

One good thing about the SE Flash Lite browser implementation is that it will automatically launch the browser to display the offline SWF file. This is more intuitive than requiring the user to first open the Flash Lite standalone player and then browse to a SWF. But, we still do not have a custom icon and we cannot install SWF in the application folder on OSE phones, which seems to be reserved for Java applications and games.

No control over fullscreen display
While it is possible for the browser to display offline SWF in fullscreen, we have no way to automatically set the browser to display SWF content in fullscreen. The Flash Lite fullscreen FSCommand2 does not affect the web browser. The end user may or may not have configured the browser to display in fullscreen, and there is no way to use ActionScript to set the browser in fullscreen mode. We are at the mercy of the user’s browser display configuration which defaults to standard display, not full screen.

There does not even seem to be a way detect the browser screen orientation using Flash Lite (many of these devices are FL1.1) or browser javascript. The Netfront browser can be standard (not full screen), full screen or landscape (on some QVGA SE phones). It is up to the end user to toggle to fullscreen which requires accessing a menu. (It is possible to toggle to full screen by pressing the “*” key but only if the browser is displaying HTML, not a SWF).

This will be a problem for SWF containing bitmap images because the player will scale everything to fit into the available display causing bitmap image distortion. The end user may first see a distorted version of our content before setting browser to fullscreen enabling proper scaling.

What is the SE platform good for?
It seems to be an important platform for screensaver and wallpaper content, but not very well conceived for offline games or applications. Of course one might claim it is a good platform for Flash Lite mobile web sites. This last situation is kind of a wash in my opinion because there are few browser based implementations on phones outside of Japan. Even when there are more phones supporting Flash Lite web sites, we have problems to deal with such as:

1) how do we detect whether a phone browser supports Flash Lite? The SE browser does not give any information about Flash Lite support.

2) Do we serve SWF only or HTML with embedded SWF? For interactivity on SE phones we need to load SWF on its own, if we embed a SWF in HTML it is no longer interactive. On the other hand, other browser implementations, like Pocket IE, require SWF to be embedded in HTML, and not loaded natively.

Trying to deliver flash based web site to any phone may be a complex problem, but lets get back on topic.

How did this situation develop?
I think it is important to consider how this situation came to be and what we can do to address it. In this case it seems SE has a view of what Flash Lite is good for, but this is not shared by most developers, or else we would hear more about content released for SE phones.

SE probably decided to go with an implementation similar to imode because that is what it was familiar with. As I argued above, the browser implementation while important, is going to be problematic for Flash based web sites outside of Japan. We as developers need to tell SE this so they can appreciate the difference between the Flash Lite market in Japan compared to the rest of the world. Most developers would probably prefer a standalone implementation at this point in time, or atleast a browser implementation that works like the standalone with fullscreen control and some support for archive/installers.

As for the developer community, there has not been much commentary on the SE phone situation, as posted on MXNA. I think developers need to express their concerns more openly to both Adobe and manufacturers or else we get stuck with platforms that are not helping our business models. We could do a better job of pointing out problems and letting Adobe know about it. Otherwise we get stuck with implementations that are not well thought out.

Adobe should be more active in helping a manufacturer plan how an implementation will work, and offer advice based upon Flash Lite developer trends and consumer trends. Did Adobe advise SE about its Flash Lite implementation? It is fine to have a major manufacturer license technology but if developers aren’t developing for it because it does not meet their needs, and the manufacturer starts to wonder why there is no developer activity around Flash Lite, it may also wonder if this was a wise investment. I doubt that is good for Adobe’s image or for Flash Lite.

For what its worth, SE has been doing a lot to encourage Flash Lite development. They have improved documentation and published developer articles. Currently SE is seeking input through its developer forum, on how it can improve its flash Lite documentation and its Flash Lite strategy. I hope that other Flash Lite developers will participate in this thread to help SE improve Flash Lite so we can have better and more intelligent Flash Lite implementations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Sony Ericsson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.