From Russell, Nokia licenses Macromedia Flash Lite. Russell also bought a license for Flash Lite 1.1 for US$10.
Huh? Not a freebie? No free upgrade? Well I believe problems with the Nokia 6600, a popular Series 60 Smartphone, were never resolved, so fat chance.
Macromedia charges for the player to cover development costs and distribution costs for the player. Do they not make money from their development tools? Ain’t Flash players for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux all free?
There is no killer software for Flash Lite, because there aren’t enough clients out there, because there is no killer software. OTOH J2ME is on the majority of the mobile phones out there purchased within the last couple of years, and at least it is possible to port a mobile application or game or whatever from one J2ME platform to another J2ME platform. Yet there is still no J2ME killer application that I am aware of. The fact that mobile applications have so far, like WAP, all failed miserably is an entirely different topic for another day.
The situation Flash Lite is in is not too different to that of Konfabulator, a Javascript VM for running very nice looking applets, for US$25. It first came out for the Mac OS X, and never got anywhere. Now it’s available for Windows, but I doubt on this lesser platforms where users do not appreciate finer things they would be interested. The problem with VMs that cost money, e.g. Flash Lite on existing Smartphones, is that the users do not see the value in acquiring them, so it is virtually impossible for them to reach critical mass.