ARM Cosies Up With Adobe, Announces Second Partnership in 24 hours

Adobe Systems has joined hands with the chip designing firm ARM Holdings to offer better web based services on mobile devices powered by ARM chipsets.

This is the second significant announcement by ARM within the last 24 hours, following the one it had with Ubuntu.

In a joint statement released at the Adobe MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco, the duo said that the agreement aims at to “optimise and enable” Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR, for a variety of ARM powered devices, including mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile internet devices, netbooks, televisions, and other such platforms.

Incidentally, Adobe designs tools for some of the prominent video software on the internet, and played a vital role in the success of Google’s YouTube.

As per the statement, the partnership has stemmed out of Adobe’s industry-wide initiative, dubbed as “Open Screen Project”, which aims at offering easy web browsing experience on a variety of devices.

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The partnership with Adobe would allow ARM to compete against the offerings from Intel, which touts of providing full internet experience due to Flash technology from Adobe, ARM’s top exec Simon Hickman claims.

A large number of prominent handset manufacturers, including Nokia, Samsung, Research in Motion, and Apple, employ ARM processors in their devices.

It also paves the way for an Adobe Flash port for the next version of iPhone (assuming that the next iPhone will use ARM CPUs).

It is expected that a wide range of ARM powered devices, like mobile phone set-top boxes, etc, optimised for Adobe Flash Player 10 will be available in the later half of 2009.