It's an exciting time to be a Flash Lite developer. I've been perservering with Flash Lite for around 4 years now, and most people who know me, know that I've put everything into it. There have been times when the excuses we've had to make for Flash Lite have made it seem a bit like "what am I really doing here!?", but times are certainly changing.

With the recent announcement of the S60 5th Edition OS release, Flash Lite developers have some added bonuses, namely the introduction of Flash Lite integration with the new Nokia Platform Services. For the first time, native ActionScript classes can be used within a Flash Lite 3 application to make direct calls to services on the device, such as Camera, Contacts, Landmarks, Location, Sensors, and many more. You can read about this in the S60 5th Edition: What's New For Developers document

The new Nokia 5800 Xpress Music (or the "Tube") is the first device to have this Platform Services support. I recently announced on my business blog, that my company Moket is porting many of its games to the 5800 and its touchscreen interface for release very shortly, and the next step will be to start making use of Platform Services. We recently demonstrated the "touch" version of our game Trench Rocket at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome.

Recently, Forum Nokia Senior Architect for Emerging Technologies, Robert Burdick, recorded a webinar on the subject of Flash Lite and Platform Services - the recording is available here now. If you are attending the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco in a couple of weeks (Nov 16-19) then you'll be hearing and seeing a lot more about this great new platform and how to use it to create a new breed of Flash mobile applications that are truley integrated with the device.But stay tuned here for more news and samples of Flash Lite 3 content being developed on top of Nokia Platform Services!