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Anyone who has used a smartphone recently knows just how frustrating some websites can be without the availability of Flash.  How else would we be able to watch YouTube or see obnoxious Flash ads?  Presumably there are useful applications for the Flash Player outside of Hulu even if we haven’t found them yet.  Now all those uses are coming soon to your smartphone, provided you use a mobile OS not from two major players.

Starting in October, Flash Player 10 for smartphones will be released to developers by Adobe thanks to its “Open Screen” project.  It will be available for Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian S60.  Major chip manufacturers like Intel, Qualcomm, ARM and the like will be optimizing builds for their chipsets. 

The iPhone and BlackBerry lines are the two glaring omissions there.  It’s not entirely surprising for either platform given that Flash tends to drain resources which RIM and Apple probably don’t like.  It may, however, sway some people away from either platform, or more likely add some benefits to the competitors.  Taking attention away from the iPhone and BlackBerry will be very hard for something as big as even Flash.

Of course, a big question is why do we need Flash on our smartphones?  True, there are some websites that require it, but not too many that would be visited on a smartphone many times.  Websites like YouTube and Hulu can easily be solved with an app as we’ve already seen (in the terms of YouTube, at least).  There is always the benefit of maybe eventually getting Adobe AIR on smartphones, making it truly a cross-platform—err, platform.  That would be a nice addition, but most uses for Flash seem like things that we’d want to get rid of on the web anyway, like those silly interactive ads.

Read [MobileCrunch]