BlackBerry browser to get full Flash and Silverlight support?

Sounds like RIM's trying to do more than just bring the woeful BlackBerry browser up to par with the competition -- Boy Genius Report says Waterloo's trying to leap way out in front by building in full Flash and Silverlight support. BGR says it'll be full Flash, not Flash Lite or the Open Screen Project's mobile Flash 10 implementation, but don't get too excited: it'll be next summer before RIM ships devices fast enough to handle it, and even then things may be delayed since they'll need HSPA or LTE data speeds to pull it off. Hey, maybe in the meantime all those engineers could maybe work on things like properly rendering a text page? Just an idea.

[Mobile Enthusiast Posted Aug 19th 2009 4:59PM]

This is an interesting rumor, but your reason for the delay so far seems flawed:
My Pocket PC from 2003 could play full flash and Java on a 300 mhz processor by using NetFront Browser... and I'm fairly certain it wasn't flash Lite or any toned-down version at the time. The UI kind of sucked, and browsers like Opera have clearly taken over for other reasons, but it could play flash animations and games fairly well for a mobile device back then.
Are you telling me that the current iterations of the Blackberry hardware are not any faster than my PDA from 6 years ago?

And as far as the connection speed... hogwash!
Flash and Silverlight play just fine when using even a cellular modem on normal 3G networks... Never saw someone browins youtube on a laptop with a 3G card? Heck, I've used my mobile modem on an Edge connection once, and it just took longer to load. There's no reason current networks aren't fast enough for flash.

The reason is because BB development for anything beyond messaging has been extremely behind the times. I'm glad to see RIM is trying to stay competitive, but this gets a great big meh...

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 19th 2009 6:01PM]

@ mobile thanks you stole my comment... but seriously thats bull wm has been doin flash for years.. remember tcpmp used to play videos out of pocket ie.. that was before skyfire, and you tube players..

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 19th 2009 6:48PM]

Finally a well needed update, and flash support before the iPhone.

Check out this review of the new WordPress app for Blackberry: http://connectedcommuter.com/tech-reviews/wordpress-for-blackberry-review/

-Dennis

[Mobile Enthusiast Posted Aug 20th 2009 1:26AM]

What the- Are you just shamelessly looking for places to plug your own blog or something?

What's the wordpress engine got to do with flash support? And while we're at it, no one said Blackberry is getting Flash support before Apple does... this is just an announcement that they plan to add support to their native browser (which sort of sucks currently) in the future.
If I recall correctly, Apple made a similar announcement a few months back- the only reason the iPhone doesn't currently have flash support is supposedly because of licensing issues with Adobe.

Its not breaking news, and Blackberry still has a way to go to compete in the mobile browsing experience.

Hey, if we're shamelessly plugging blogs, how about http://angryphonecritic.blogspot.com, http://mopocket.com or my personal http://mobile-enthusiast.blogspot.com ?
At least I'm keeping things on topic. :P