Smartphones: what's hot, what's not

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 07:07

Business IT - Technology

However, Adobe’s Flash and Flash Lite have achieved the best penetration, according to Ovum, with 41 smartphone models supporting Flash, and Symbian dominating.

Ovum reports that Windows Mobile has patchy support for Flash – “manufacturers even support it inconsistently across their Windows Mobile portfolios” - and iPhone OS and Android currently do not support it at all.

Of the other RIA frameworks tracked - Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight – Ovum reports that penetration is zero, indicating that “usefulness of these platforms for application developers is still some way off.”

Ovum says that one of the biggest talking points in the industry in the last 12 months has been the rise of on-device application stores, but according to Renowden, despite the limitless hype, very few devices were released with pre-installed app store clients.

“Apple’s iPhone, HTC’s Android devices and several Nokia handsets, featuring Nokia’s Download! client, not the newer Ovi Store, were the only devices with app stores pre-installed.

“We expect a big change in this area, as platform owners and manufacturers have now begun to respond in earnest to the app store buzz. On-device app stores have launched on BlackBerry and Palm’s WebOS, Nokia now has Ovi Store, Windows Mobile 6.5 will feature an app store, and a greater proportion of new handsets will feature these clients in the next version of the tracker,” Renowden predicts.