SAN DIEGO--Qualcomm and Adobe have partnered up to embed Adobe’s Flash technology into the BREW platform, giving BREW’s small development community a set of powerful tools and simultaneously giving Flash’s enormous developer pool a mobile outlet for their Web content and applications.

Several of BREW’s core developers immediately announced applications using the new Flash capabilities, and Verizon Wireless, BREW’s biggest carrier customer, revealed it would launch a new portfolio of Flash games and content using the new platform release.

Both Adobe and Qualcomm stand to gain from the partnership. While Qualcomm has achieved niche success with BREW, winning customers from Asia to Latin America along with marquee provider Verizon, the number of developers for BREW is still relatively small, numbering only a few thousand. Meanwhile, millions of content developers build applications in Flash, ranging from the lowliest YouTube video to feature-rich 3D games. By making the Flash toolkit the core development platform on BREW, Qualcomm and its carrier customers can potentially tap into the enormous store of content and its associated developers.

Simultaneously, Adobe has had trouble duplicating its success on the wired Web over the mobile network. Despite signing multiple partnerships with handset makers and operators to embed or upload the BREW client on devices, Adobe has had trouble attracting developers to the mobile platform.

“We’ve crossed the 500-million mark for Flash on phones, but we’re not seeing the explosion in content we’ve seen on the desktop,” Adobe director of technical marketing Anup Murarka said. With BREW’s base of millions of phones, its distribution platform and back-end support, Adobe hopes to change that, Murarka said.

Part of the issue has been the two separate versions of Flash. Adobe standard Flash player for the desktop PC differs substantially from Flash Lite, the mobile player it distributes for handsets. Adobe has been adding Flash functions—such as video support—to Flash Lite, but ultimately the mobile player can’t match the desktop player and content designed for the latter can’t be easily optimized for the former. With no easy path to port desktop Flash content to mobile devices, most developers have just bypassed it. Qualcomm’s hefty BREW customer base, which includes the Verizon Wireless, Alltel, U.S. Cellular, Japan’s KDDI, Brazil’s Vivo and dozen other operators, may provide the incentive for those developers to rethink their mobile strategy, Murarka said. Ultimately, he added, mobile apps and content created for BREW’s Flash platform can be extended to any Flash-enabled phone.

Furthermore, Adobe is planning to break down the distinction between Flash and Flash Lite with its next installment of Flash, called AIR, will allow developers to program for the mobile and PC screens simultaneously, thus eliminating that development barrier.

The advantages for Qualcomm’s existing BREW developers are also substantial, said Steve Sprigg, senior vice president of Engineering for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. BREW developers get immediate access to Flash’s familiar and extensive set of development tools, which they can use to build richer applications. Ironically, many BREW developers actually build their applications conceptually in Flash, and then rebuild the commercial versions as a native BREW app, Sprigg said. He added, though, that Qualcomm does not expect BREW to become merely a distribution platform for Flash content. Sprigg expects developers to use aspects of both runtime environment to develop their content, taking advantage of BREW’s back-end capabilities, mobile toolkits and its user interface uiOne, while using Flash as a means to develop rich content quickly.

“You’ll see some very sophisticated applications come out of this,” Sprigg said. “You’ll see a mixture of both native BREW and Flash. Portions will be in C code and portions in Flash.”

Verizon Wireless announced it would offer MobiTween’s Flash gaming portal, Mobigamz on its Get It Now. The portal sells a variety of Flash Lite games for download. Verizon independently committed to Flash Lite in 2006, which Qualcomm distributed through the BREW platform.