Yay, Flash is publicly available for mobiles, at last! But, a few things to note:

Macromedia are still pursuing a sell-the-player model. The Nokia deal (and others) are fantastic and don't involve direct costs to the public (from what I can tell), but expecting end-users to pay $10 for a player sounds more hopeful than realistic.

I wonder what'll happen with updates and re-releases - how will Macromedia put procedures or processes in place for this, to make it painless even for people who find Series 60 handsets overly complex and too "computery"? They did really well on the web by continually evolving the product, but that continual evolution won't translate well to mobile with some effort on their part.

We can expect to see tons of awful phone applications (and some really really great ones) as a result of deals like this. Flash may lower the barrier to producing mobile applications, but doesn't make it trivial to produce good ones (just as homebrew web-page building software like FrontPage didn't take the skill out of producing large-scale well-designed web sites).

Anyway, this is a big deal for us and I'm really excited about it. The player has looked great for years (we did some related work back in 2002), almost showing up aspects of the rest of the handset UI. Here's hoping for a swift move from announcements to distribution...