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By Suzanne Tindal, 6 March 2008 09:05

NEWS

At Apple's shareholder meeting this week, CEO Steve Jobs took a bat to Adobe's Flash - leading to speculation the door is open for Microsoft's Silverlight on the iPhone.

Jobs said the full-blown PC version of Flash "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone and the mobile version, Flash Lite, "is not capable of being used with the web".

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Adobe returned fire: "Flash and Flash Lite are a huge success. All major handset manufacturers worldwide licence Flash today delivering a broad range of mobile devices ranging from feature phones to smart phones and consumer electronic devices.

"With more than 450 million Flash-enabled mobile devices shipped worldwide and 150 per cent year-over-year growth, we are on track to see one billion Flash-enabled devices by 2010. Consumers demand a rich web experience on any device and platform and Flash delivers just that," the company said.

Meanwhile, Silverlight has been receiving some attention this week with Microsoft's announcement that it will be writing a version of Silverlight for Nokia's S60 smart phone platform, which runs on the Symbian OS.

Microsoft chose to work with Nokia because it has the largest market share of mobile phones but it will sign on with other handset makers to create ports of Silverlight, John Case, a general manager in Microsoft's developer division said this week.

At the Mix '08 show in Las Vegas, Microsoft corporate VP .NET developer platform, Scott Guthrie, alluded to support for Apple's iPhone, saying Microsoft wants Silverlight running on "anything that has an SDK [software development kit]". The iPhone SDK is set to be revealed tomorrow.

IBRS analyst Joseph Sweeney thinks that Microsoft's Silverlight is not in the same space as Flash. He said: "It's not Flash. It's a mobile application framework."

Sweeney does, however, think that it has a future in the mobile market. He said: "I believe it has got good potential for being an application framework on top of an operating system framework for mobile devices."