Nokia Mobile Reviews and Games

Device Central Japanese Service developers for game mobile Adobe Premium
Adobe has announced a Device Central Premium Service for Japanese mobile game / content developers, together with CELL (most of the content in their site is in Japanese only; shortly put, they are one of the leading mobile Flash Lite game developers in the world & Japan - they have a game catalogue of over 600 Flash Lite titles): The new service: Allows real-time device information two days after the devices are released to the market Web subscribtion based (no pricing known yet) Available later this spring (Japan only) Alessandro saw some of their games & numbers at the Adobe booth in Mobile World Congress (Barcelona): “I saw some of their games and a presentation at the Adobe booth and some of their numbers are quite impressive. On one of they game they had 1.5 million downloads the first day of release on their social network service.” Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc.

Nokia use Silverlight mobile devices in will Microsoft
It hopes that by 2010, 1 billion mobile phones will have shipped with Flash Lite. Adobe did not return a request for comment. As the challenger to the incumbent Flash, Microsoft’s goals are more modest. Users with existing phones will also be to get CDs with the application or to simply download it from the Internet, Case said. This “is fairly low risk for Nokia, and given their desire to be agnostic (supporting whatever the end user ultimately wants to use while on the Internet), it allows them to offer end-user choice and the ability to surf to the many sites that will ultimately support Silverlight,” Gold said. Adobe signed a similar deal with Nokia last fall for its Flash Lite player. “Microsoft is clearly trying to gain traction against Flash, and since Nokia has a commanding lead in smartphone devices, this puts Microsoft on the map.” When ready, Silverlight will be installed on all of Nokia’s new smartphones. One of the expectations is naturally that Silverlight will be preinstalled to future phones; but what is more interesting (and a possible bad threat to Adobe Flash Lite) is that several sources state that Silverlight can be installed afterwards to devices that don’t already have it — if that is true, then the adoption rate of Silverlight could be far more quicker than Flash Lite’s adoption rate. According to this article in Computerworld, couple of interesting things:” “This is actually an important win for Microsoft,” wrote Jack Gold, an independent telecom analyst, in an e-mail. Rumors have been around for some time, and now according to this press release by Nokia, Nokia has made an agreement to use Microsoft Silverlight in both S60 and S40 series (although the availability for S40 will be confirmed later), and the adoption will be at the end of this year. Silverlight is a cross-browser technology, similar to Flash (and Flash Lite obviously). Adobe said at the time that more than 300 million phones had shipped with Flash Lite. It is aiming for 200 million downloads of Silverlight across all platforms by the middle of this year.” Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc.

Guillemot Mobile GDC mobile games about speaks 2008: Gameloft’s
At the GDC Mobile 2008, Gameloft’s President & CEO Guillemot spoke at his opening keynote about mobile games and the market, all nicely put together in this Gamasutra article. Some keypoints: Guillemot showed just how much of a change has occurred in the industry by showing the growth of the large mobile developers, with Gameloft now making almost ten times what it did in 2003 (from 14.9 million US to 141 million US). The major problem that all developers face are thousands of different handsets in use and hundreds more that are developed every year, plus hundreds of carriers across the world with tens of languages to support. And even then developers have to submit their games to the carriers. Note: naturally the fragmentation is something that Flash Lite is able to handle well (optimally, only one build per language version is needed, instead of thousands of SKU’s - and the weakest point being market penetration of the Flash Lite devices (still too small for most distributors) Additionally, the non-standard data charges (how much does it cost to download data from mobile network) is an issue > although we are moving towards flat-fee rate charges mobile games industry groth actually slowed in 2007 due to: slowdown of the US economy and its impact on the world walled garden approach of carriers the distinct lack of gaming upon the iPhone delayed launch of Nokia’s OVI platform Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc. “That’s one of the difficulties of the business,” Guillemot admitted, showing that if you created five games a month, across 1,000 handsets, in ten languages, you’d end up with 50,000 SKUs.

2008 and device annual cumulative shipments, Flash Lite and 2007
Adobe has published a new document (based on the information from Strategy Analytics 2008 report): Flash Lite Annual and Cumulative Device Shipments: 2007 and 2008 worldwide annual cumulative device shipments (by region, country and Flash Lite version) See also the previously published data: Flash Lite Device Installed Base: 2007 and 2008 worldwide installed base of Flash Lite devices (by region, country and Flash Lite version) Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc.

Game The Deck How Japan Developers In Avoid GDC: Mobile Carrier’s
Even with Flash if you spend a lot on the initial game, the porting cost is next to minimal,” he said. In some cases, people also pay monthly subscription fees. Via MocoNews Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc. The company has 7 million registered users, and nearly 1 million Flash games are played daily. Mobile, and gets about 15 billion page views a month. In one game Collier demonstrated, a waiter grabbed the food as a buffet passed by. At the GDC Mobile, David Collier/Pikkle (mobile content provider in Japan), told developers how Japanese game developers are overcoming two of the mobile game industry’s biggest obstacles, device fragmentation (porting the game to hundreds of mobile devices) and sharing revenue with carriers. You guessed right - Flash Lite is the key - and we couldn’t agree more with David *** “There is a new type of application category that will bring us out of the claws of the carrier and bring us to the promised land of mobile entertainment,” he said. “With Java or Brew, you don’t spend that much on the initial game, but then you do when porting it. “Flash does solve a lot of the porting problems, when you are turning around a lot of games every week,” he added. He said the games have been phenomenally successful. In another, the player creates an avatar and a room, where friends could visit and leave a message. He said by using Flash, the developers won’t have to tweak an application for every phone because it runs in the browser which are fairly standard. He said the business model is still evolving, but many of them rely on Flash ads inside the games. For one Japanese site, he tested the game on 20 phones, but it ended up supporting about 200. In Japan, Collier said the trend is to create short, simple games based on Adobe’s Flash Lite that create games in a browser. The most popular is Mobile Game Town, which for context, said has three times as much traffic as Yahoo! And because it’s not an application, it also means that developers can avoid the carrier’s deck as being the main point of distribution.

Flash market Developers on Part mobile 1: Lite view game
One of our employees Hannu (hi! We believe that when Flash Lite 2.0 or 2.1 are mainstream, we will make this game with Flash Lite.] (to be continued very soon - with years 2005 onwards!) Sponsored by Mortgage Rates Etc. (or have been developed for both versions). After the initial year (2004) we were a bit excited about the possibilities, and digged deeper into the subject. (obviously our background played a big part in this too) At that time, some of the key personnel of Aniway Ltd. It was the first, and last, time for us to do Symbian game development. Also, we have done quite a lot Flash Lite work-for-hire, and trained a lot of people to make something useful with it. Our Flash history: Aniway Ltd. ) asked us to write a short summary on how we (Aniway Ltd.) are viewing the mobile Flash Lite game market currently & in the past, for his thesis. Thanks to AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture: http://www.kopiosto.fi/avek/en_GB/), we were able to raise 30 000 euros for making the demo, out of which we paid 15 000 and AVEK paid the other half. Those games are mostly Flash Lite 1.1., some of them are 2.1. that paid the bills), but it seemed like a good idea to do Research & Design as Flash Lite seemed to be a thing for the near future. >> Added 27.2: Straying from the path (but we didn’t know it back then): [During 2004 we were developing a kick-ass Symbian game demo, In Sanity: Murder of Crows (which had some really nice features; even from today’s viewpoint). And also we have trained companies, organizations, and individuals how to do things with Flash. Mobile Flash Lite 2004: Prologue We have worked with mobile Flash Lite since 2004. has been involved with Macromedia / Adobe Flash since 1999 (founding year of our company - some of us have experience with Flash couple of years before that; Flash was based on FutureSplashAnimator): during the time we have written 2 books on Flash (published by Docendo, only in Finnish), have done adver, single player & multiplayer games / multimedia / websites / consulting / other work-for hire for companies and organizations: standalone, web, mobile, database driven, xml driven - you name it, we have probably done it . It seemed to be somewhat popular in Japan. Why Macromedia / Adobe Flash Lite? As that will be a public document, we decided to publish it here as well - well, at least a more informal version of it, and not so short - actually, this will be an account of Aniway’s Flash Lite history & present & bit about the future as well Word of warning: if you are looking for market speech about how lovely & succesful Flash Lite is, you might not want to read this; although we love Flash Lite, we are Finns and blunt when push comes to shove. Flash Lite game and content market, perspective of a developer Our present with Flash Lite: We have developed a portfolio of Flash Lite games during the past. Device fragmentation (porting to different devices) was a grave issue even back then, and one could only wonder why something like Flash Lite wasn’t used, as it seemed to offer an easier way for porting games & other content. We didn’t make a dime with Flash Lite in 2004 (so we just did what we were used to doing, web Flash etc. owned 1/3 of a J2ME mobile money game development company, and during fall 2004 that company released its first J2ME game.