Bill Perry (Mobile evangelist for Adobe) has just posted the Flash Lite install base forecasts for 2008 from the Strategy Analytics Flash-Enabled Handset Forecast from January 4, 2008. The forecast includes the installed base of Flash Lite devices by Region, Country and Version. Bill’s PDF highlighting the 91% Global Growth of Flash Lite in 2007 can be downloaded here.
Worldwide, the totals for 2008 add up to: 461,733,000 mobile devices with Flash Lite pre-installed.
The score card for 2008 reads:
1. APAC – 154,761,000
2. Western Europe – 107,832,000
3. Japan – 77,603,000
4. Americas – 64,561,000
5. CALA – 32,024,000
6. Central Europe – 24,952,000
What are the biggest surprises?
I truly did not expect the Flash Lite 2.x numbers to be so high. Adobe is forecasting that in 2008 the Americas and Western Europe will have higher Flash Lite 2.0 or 2.1 adoption than 1.1! Despite this, Flash Lite 1.1 will still most likely stay the obvious standard.
I am very excited to see that the Americas are so close in numbers to Japan. Additionally, they have more than double the numbers of Central America, Latin America, and Central Europe. It’s no surprise that Western Europe and APAC still top the charts.
What does this all mean?
As companies like Verizon continue to grow with Flash Lite, consumer adoption rates will no doubt go up as well. As a full service mobile marketing firm that is passionate about mobile and pushing the medium forward, we can continue to pursue Flash Lite development with our clients—knowing that one day in the near future it will become the mobile standard of third party development.
We have been working commercially with Flash Lite for some time. Our projects have ranged from oem user interface development, to consumer content such as custom applications and games. We couldn’t be happier about the news.
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting this. These figures are for the worldwide “install-base”, handsets already out there, so all the ones from 2007 are technically still counted for the 2008 figures. So to see any growth you’d expect the numbers to *more* than double between 2007 and 2008 let alone getting excited about <100% growth which is to be expected if Adobe are committed to increasing the numbers. More importantly, without figures for the total handsets in said markets this figures are completely arbitrary in terms of any sort of penetration stats, which are all important.
You are correct in assuming that the 2008 figures include the 2007 figures. The reason that I am excited about this pdf that Bill produced, is that Flash Lite is an amazing development tool when compared to J2ME, and it’s nice to see an uptick in the numbers.
Adobe does not simply give away the Flash Lite player, they license it to device manufactures using a fee-per-device royalty model. From my perspective, 91% growth in 2007 means that not only are more and more manufactures willing to pay for software that is not yet an industry standard, but they are also willing to pay for it in the future.
Considering that the development cycle for a handset can be as much as 2 years or more. I can only assume that things have been moving in the right direction for Adobe for quite some time (which is great from my perspective).
To your arbitrary figures point…a while back an article was written discussing the context of 2.7 BILLION mobile phones (globally). You may enjoy the read.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html