We often get customer requests for a platform that is suitable for running Adobe Flash applications. Unfortunately none of the desktop flash players are suitable for embedded devices. Finally Adobe has become aware of the huge market for embedded flash devices and produced a version of Flash targeted specifically at ARM based devices. To use Adobe's own words "Adobe Flash Lite is a highly optimized implementation of the Flash runtime for mobile phones, consumer electronic devices". First the good news.... We have successfully run Adobe's Flash Lite on our OMAP3530 Digital Video (DV) platform. While it will not play flash movies designed for high end desktop machines only (i.e. with lots of full screen scrolling), it performed much better than we expected with very smooth playback at 720p. Absolutely perfect for digital signage and kiosk type applications. The bad news.... Flash Lite is not open source and requires a royalty payment to Adobe (approximately US$7 per unit). The second limitation is that the latest version of Flash Lite (3) supports the equivalent of Flash 8 and hence does not support Action Script 3. Hence newer flash movies, designed for Flash 9 or 10 will not run. This is usually not a problem as the main reason customers want to use Flash is because of the developers familiarity with the development tools, and it is easy enough to target Flash Lite Players during content generation. Although there are a few limitations with Flash Lite, it is a very viable option for embedded platforms. Combined with the processing power of the Cortex A8 in the OMAP3530 there is finally a good embedded solution for Flash enabled products. A market space previously dominated by clunky, power hungry x86 platforms. For more information check out the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/