Microsoft Licenses Adobe Flash Lite 3, Reader LE

Adobe announced this morning that Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite 3.x for future versions of its Internet Explorer mobile browser as well as Reader LE for viewing Adobe PDF documents on your mobile handset without needing third-party software to do so.

In the past, Flash Lite 3 support has been limited to handsets running Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 and Qualcomm BREW. Users with Windows Mobile 5 may have had experience playing Flash Lite 2.1 on their phones, but it wasn’t an optimal experience because it didn’t support FLV files on Web sites. Flash Lite 3 was launched in October 2007, adding FLV support, as well as a 15-20 percent increase in ActionScript performance, and a 20-30 percent increase in rendering performance. It now supports most Flash 8 content available on the Web. For more changes between the versions, check out Adobe’s version comparison Web site.

The announcement means that consumers will have a richer out-of-the-box browsing experience, although Adobe wasn’t clear in naming which version of Windows Mobile Microsoft would include Adobe Flash Lite. If you’re antsy to view Flash Web sites on your mobile phone sooner, we suggest signing up for the second Skyfire beta, a browser that already supports Flash and provides much faster browsing speeds than IE mobile does.