BlackBerry to sport Flash and Silverlight next year

From InfoWorld: Research In Motion is set to bring full Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support to the company's BlackBerry phones. The BoyGenius Report blog claims RIM will introduce the new functionality sometime next summer, together with more powerful handsets.

The BlackBerry Web browser is not particularly famous for its capability to display pages properly, but RIM is working on a major overhaul of the software. The crown jewel of the new BlackBerry browser though, would be full Flash and Silverlight support, according to the BoyGenius report.

Only a handful of Nokia devices have Adobe Flash support, which is actually a stripped down version of the software, called Flash Lite. While the iPhone and the Palm Pre have no such capabilities, only the HTC Hero, running on Google Android OS, has proper Flash technology support. Silverlight, Microsoft's alternative platform to Adobe Flash, is not supported on any mobile devices at the moment.

In order to have full Flash and Silverlight capabilities, BlackBerry devices would need to be more powerful, together with access to higher data speeds -- and BoyGenius claims RIM is already working on that. Don't gear up for these capabilities on a BlackBerry handset soon though -- the expected arrival date for Flash and Sliverlight-flaunting BlackBerry phones is only sometime next summer.

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