Well we all know Adobe just barely confirmed they are giving in to Steve's dream of eradicating Flash on mobile devices. You'd think with Adobe's announcement that Flash Mobile is now over a done with. Almost every phone manufacturer has announced that they are ditching Flash support for HTML5 and that Flash will cease to exist.

Except RIM, RIM states they see a strong future for Flash on BlackBerry platforms and unlike the rest of the world's manufacturers they intend to continue supporting both Flash and HTML5. Apparently removing Flash compromises a phones ability to browse the web efficiently and offers a second class experience to its consumers. RIM wants to offer the best possible browsing and App experience and they aren't willing to compromise quality just because Adobe has given up.

RIM's statement says "As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations. RIM remains committed to delivering an uncompromised Web browsing experience to our customers, including native support for Adobe Flash Player on our BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (similar to a desktop PC browser), as well as HTML5 support on both our BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook browsers. In fact, we are pleased that Adobe will focus more efforts on the opportunities that HTML5 presents for our developers, and shares our commitment to HTML5 as we discussed together at DevCon Americas."

In fact according to RIM they have a license agreement with Adobe and have been told Adobe will continue to help them with Flash despite officially killing the platform. RIM themselves will continue to release new versions and offer Flash capabilities on both its phones and tablets.

So is this suicidal or brilliant? All the other phones are ditching Flash, Adobe themselves are ditching Flash. Now there is only one phone that will continue to use Flash and that is RIM's BlackBerry's! While many phones could lose the ability to browse existing Flash content and future Flash content Black Berry devices will be continuing to support both HTML5 and Flash.

Do you think other phone manufacturers will announce they will be continuing to use and upgrade Flash? Or is this going to give BlackBerry exclusive Flash content? Could Flash compatibility and future Flash products on Black Berry's be enough to sell hardware? Again is this genius or suicide?

Ummm, did you actually read what you posted?  It says nothing about Blackberry phones continuing to have Flash, only the lamentable PlayBook.  As far as I know, Blackberry phones have never had Flash; they would have to at least wait until the BBX operating system arrives next year.  [Edit: my mistake, they do have Flash, I got it mixed up with Walt Mossberg saying that the PlayBook was the first satisfactory mobile Flash experience.] 

Like most of what RIM seems to have done for the past two years, this just reeks of desperation rather than genius or suicide.  It feels like RIM is just pouring resources into any marketing bulletpoint they can cling to, in the face of relentless competition from Apple's iPad (and now also the Kindle Fire which is killing PlayBook on value).   At least they have done a much better job of staying afloat than Nokia: both companies were slow to acknowledge the disruption caused by the iPhone, and are now suffering for it.

Without Adobe's backing, I expect RIM's fork of Flash will shortly become obsolete (Adobe will march on to Flash 12, while mobile Flash is left behind).  Ubiquity was always the main selling point of Flash: something like 98% of all computers had it.  As the world continues its transition to mobile computing, Flash has already lost that edge and Adobe is finally conceding.  Just as no reputable website depends on Internet Explorer today, the same thing has been happening to Flash since 2007 (more slowly, I think, because it genuinely takes more skill to replace).

Why is everyone so wrong in this announcement?

Flash is not going to be removed from your phone and that version will continue to get updated as needed for security, etc.

The only thing is newer versions of flash won't be ported to mobile use. So in a couple years it will be useless. However, HTML5 will have fully replaced Flash by then anyways so it won't matter.

Its just not a big deal.

From what RIM has said and what media are reporting no other phone manufacturers intend to provide future Flash mobile services. I am unsure of whether that means that Flash will be removed since I doubt that is the case. But RIM is stating they will keep upgrading Flash and supporting the platform which other manufacturers to my knowledge will not.

I do not know the extent RIM will keep Flash going, some media and analysts have suggested RIM having the Adobe software license could continue to upgrade the Flash mobile on their phones, what this means in total is unclear to me. If it means a future Flash mobile upgrade free of Adobe involvement or not is unclear.

Anyways the whole thread is about the fact that RIM is going to continue supporting Flash and upgrading it on their Black Berry platforms.