This is my first blog, and it’s been a long time coming. I hope it’s worth it…

I’ve always been interested in Flash Lite but following Adobe’s recently press release I thought I’d take another look.

For those in digital, Flash lite has been around for a while. For everyone else Flash Lite is a way of playing flash animations, games and all a whole load of other things on your mobile phone or PDA that you’ve probably never heard of.

The bad news? The reason that most people won’t have heard of it is that mobile phone manufacturers don’t include Flash Lite at the moment so most handsets don’t support it.

The good news? Adobe has recently started talks with the major phone manufacturers (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung and more) and is in the process of convincing, begging and bribing them to include their software on new handsets.

This is great news for digital marketing and all the people that use it. It means that the flash animations, games and all the other lovely stuff we build can now be adapted to use on mobile phones.

Personally I’m looking forward to the challenges that planning, designing and building for a new platform is going to bring. It opens up the work we do to a whole new range of consumers so thousands more people can see what we’re capable of. It also means loads of new ideas for our clients.

With all this in mind it may still be some time (probably until your contract runs out) until you get a handset that can support Flash Lite, so most people won’t be able to take advantage. Some manufacturers are bizarrely adding flash lite on some handsets and excluding it from newer models, so it’ll probably be a while until the playing field, so to speak, levels out.

But never one to waste time and always ahead of the game, I’ve created Magnitude’s first Flash Lite game. Basing it on the premise that all phones are different, but a keypad is pretty much universal we’ve built a brain boggling maths game that only uses the keypad.

Magnitude’s Mobile Mini Mathmites game invites you to test your brain by adding up small numbers in under 60 seconds. With the power of flash lite you can download a desktop game (exe), a flash lite (swf) file for your mobile or play it on a webpage. Check them out here… http://www.magnitude.co.uk/projects/minimathmites/

…well that was my first blog. I hope you liked it,

Lawrence Alexander (Larry )