A lofty goal, indeed. But think of the payoff.

The problems don’t occur on your everyday run of the mill app that doesn’e integrate with the hardware. The problem is very evident when you want to interface with the hardware (i.e. Place a phone call, take a picture, capture video from the Smartphone). That means Air better have low level drivers to support each function on each OS across all Smartphone models…A very lofty goal…just because the code will run without crashing doesn’t mean the software will perform it’s intended function.
@REGARDvs

Based on the fact that the Blackberry OS is what it is.

From some informal chats with Adobe software engineers at Adobe Max, Flash on the Blackberry is lagging far, far behind due to the fact that the Blackberry OS is narrowly focused on what it does, and is difficult to work with outside of those areas.

Also based on the fact that for two years now, Adobe has been pushing Flash to smartphones, and Blackberry hasn’t even hit the “Still working on it- coming soon, maybe” list. Based on the fact that Flash has been shown on several smartphone platforms- not production ready, but functional enough for a demonstration in a keynote address, but Flash-on-Blackberry isn’t even to the point where Adobe is willing to talk about it as being in development. That’s right- when Adobe listed the smartphone platforms they were working with for Flash, Blackberry wasn’t mentioned. Not as a possibility, not as a far-future thing. Not mentioned at all.

I love my Curve, and will probably be picking up either a Storm or a Tour in the near future. But Blackberry appears to be way, way behind in this area, and I honestly think that within a few years, running Flash on a handset is going to be as expected a feature as GPS and WiFi are now. I really do hope that I’m wrong, but I don’t think that I am.

@Steve
Okay- I get wrapped up in my little fishbowl and forget about the world outside it. AIR offers a runtime that allows one set of code to run in (almost completely) the same fashion on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (Most distros). Similar to a JVM. Not *truely* “Write Once, Run Everywhere” I can see the same thing happening in the smartphone world- WinMo, iPhone, WebOS, and Android AIR runtimes allowing code to run on any AIR-enabled smartphone without having to rewrite the app for every platform.

Seriously, people. “Smartphones, and BlackBerry, will remain a powerful industry.”? No kidding- doesn’t take an industry insider to scope that one. “Greater enterprise functionality”? It’s their bread and butter- of *course* they’re going to offer greater functionality. What is this, a “How to state the blindingly obvious” contest?

Here’s a prediction. Within 3 years, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, Nokia, and WebOS will support the latest version of Flash natively on the device, with full hooks into the API. RIM will not support this.

Here’s another. Adobe will release AIR Mobile, in some fashion, taking advantage of the above integration. Developing apps for smartphones will then require AIR Mobile (or whatever they call it) and one codebase to be deployed on multiple platforms. Except the Blackberry.

I might be wrong, although I doubt it. But at least I’m not restating the obvious and passing it off as an insider’s view.

2. RIM eats Palm (potential buyout?)

Now that Palm might have a competitive smartphone, they could buy the R&D for the WebOS and not spend the time flashing up the BB OS.

…then again, it could be a complete clusterf*ck