<start of rant>

So far I have believed the mantra that Flash Lite works the same way across the devices and that there is no fragmentation in Flash Lite. Well, based on my recent experiences, I need to re-think my stand on this...

I was creating a simple Flash Lite app for a short article. The app would retrieve pictures and some data ovet network. Of course, as I wanted to load pictures, not swf animations, I had to use Flash Lite 2. After some sweating I was able to get my app running on the testing tools of Flash Professional 8. Task completed - I wrote the instructions to recreate the app and was ready to submit the article.

For some reason, I decided to test the app on a real device. Big mistake :-)

First device failed completely (I was using Flash Lite 2 enabled Series 40 device). The second test was with S60 phone with developer version of Flash Lite 2.1 installed (available from Adobe Web site). Now the application started, but still there were some quite sever issues. I was either able to get the image downloaded or then the data, but never the both at the same time. Also the soft key -based navigation required extra work as my initial code did not work. Of course everything worked perfectly in the "phone emulators" on my desktop.

Lessons learned: Always test with a real device and always test with all devices you are targeting.

<end of rant>