Adobe

Photoshop Express Beta, Adobe’s free, web-based editor won us over with its 2GB free storage and clean, ad-free interface. Now, it’s more sharing-friendly, too. Today, Adobe announced a partnership with Flickr (Photobucket, Google Picasa, and Facebook were on board from the beginning). We expect the integration to be just as smooth as the others’, and, as always, we love that you can be logged into any and all of these sites simultaneously (in the case of Picnik, only Premium subscribers can do this).

Adobe also announced an embeddable player, allowing users to post slide shows on blogs and social networking sites, as they would a viral YouTube clip. There’s also now a “save as” function, so users can save as many editions of a photo as they like (now, if only Adobe would add as many fun filters as Picnik!). Other sharing features, available since launch, include the ability to save edited photos back to photo sharing sites, and to browse more than 30,000 public galleries, as you can on Flickr.

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.