Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) has announced “new technology that lets developers combine Adobe’s (NSDQ: ADBE) Flash Lite and Java ME into a single Java application”, reports PC World. The basic premise is that Flash has some nice user-interface capabilities but lacks some of the features of Java, such as access to Bluetooth, WiFi and secure payments. With the new system they can “mix and match” different components from both systems. SE will release a set of APIs for the capability in the second half of this year, and the resulting applications whill be treated like typical Java apps within SE’s developer platform. The aim is to have the technology on all the manufacturer’s handsets, and the company plans to share the technology with the broader community, either via standards, open source or a combination of the two.

Tricia adds: Another reason why you’d want to disguise a Flash application as a Java application is because carriers often don’t support Flash on their decks, even though Flash is commonly found on the handset. In the U.S., this is particularly true with a lot of carriers supporting Brew or Java. The announcement reminds me a lot of a conversation I had recently with Smashing Ideas, an online and mobile game developer and publisher that publishes strictly in Flash. The Seattle studio likes Flash because it can eliminate a lot of the industry’s headaches, namely development time and costs due to porting the game to thousands of handsets. However, because it develops in Flash, Smashing Ideas only distributes with Verizon (NYSE: VZ) in the U.S. The big example of a phone that doesn’t support Flash is the iPhone, but otherwise Smashing Ideas says 500 million handsets have Flash. This is the exact reason Sony Ericsson is tackling the problem. “What we are providing are special APIs that allows a Flash application to interact with Java…The aim is to get it into the majority of phones” said Ulf Wretling, Director of Sony Ericsson Developer World. 

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