Today the Nokia blog mentioned that the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic got the option to update to Flash Lite 3.1 via App Update. So if you install Flash Lite 3.1 you can upgrade the default Flash Lite 3.0 player of the phone.
Seems a sweet deal, right?
Well, until now we could know which player a particular phone has by looking at the specific platform, like S60 or S40, or using WURFL. Firmware upgrade brought Flash Lite 2.0 enabled phone to be Flash Lite 3.0. The firmware update also updated the User Agent of the phone, so there is a correlation between the UA and the various runtime versions.
The Flash Lite 3.1 update is outside this scenario, which means that there is NO way to know which Flash Lite player users have on their Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. You cannot distribute your Flash Lite 3.1 content because you do not know if a user has done the update.
To me seemed naive to have done this without thinking the consequences and I hope there is some other ways around, but at the moment there is none.
Any information from Nokia on this issue would be good!
Alessandro
Note: this Flash Lite 3.1 runtime is not the same as the Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player, but it’s the runtime that Adobe provided to OEM. Flash Lite 3.1 adds Flash Video HD as major capability in addition to others.
Check Mark comment for more key feature.
I checked my phone for the 3.1 update and it wasnt there….does that mean i have 2.0 and am doomed to it forever?
Hey Alessandro,
Just a correction there, the Distributable Player is also version 3.1, not 3.01.
The key difference between 3.0 and 3.1 are the web features, it was designed to ensure that 92% of the top 500 websites work seamlessly. It’s the same plugin that will land on the WM6.5 platform, it’s also used in the digital home and of course the distributable player.
So if your creating an application for the Nokia 5800 then you can continue to target Flash Lite 3.0. What you loose is html text, embedded img tag support and the additional video features like seek, smooth etc.
The issues that you bring up are completely valid, it’s also a perfect example why we have the Distributable Player.
Mark
http://www.flashmobileblog.com
Ciao Mark,
thanks for the comment, I corrected the post.
I just do not see why the FL 3.1 player could not have come with a firmware upgrade. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is so popular that firmware upgrades have been of popular demand!!
Hopefully it’s on its way and there will be no issue.
Alessandro
Hi Alessandro,
Can you drop me an email about the problems you see with this FlashLite release? From Mark’s comments I understand that it should not impact developed applications, only web content rendering should be sensibly improved. So why is this updated through “App. update” worst than a firmware update?
– Lucian
Ciao Lucian,
just sent the email.
Yes, the content is backward compatible. So previous FL content will playback in FL3.1.
The benefit of the browsing is clear and to me that’s the only improvements that the update brings since the FL3.1 cannot be detected.
Alessandro
Hi Alessandro,
I imagine that the version number that Flash Lite 3.1 reports will be substantially higher, in the 9.x range. With Flash Lite 3.0 it was in the 8.x range, that’s because most developers were compiling as Flash 9 but coding in AS2.
Can you try that out?
Mark
Ciao Mark,
do not have a 5800 yet. From other devs, yes, the version 9.x. I think someone mentioned in the UG mailing list.
Alessandro