I spoke to Steve Glagow at Orange, Director of Orange Partner Programme, in advance of the Orange Partner Camp at Cape Canaveral next week. I asked him about what trends he is seeing in development for mobile devices. He was guarded, saying that Orange is seeing growth in all three of the core platforms it supports: Symbian Series 60, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Linux. He says that “Linux is dramatically increasing”, but of course it it is doing so from a small base in this context; Symbian is the largest platform for Orange in absolute terms, and Java the most prominent language. Palm’s adoption of Windows Mobile has given Microsoft a boost, especially in the US. What about Flash, which is less widely deployed on mobile devices than it is on the desktop. Will Orange be pre-installing the Flash runtime? “The reason I won’t answer that is that we’ve been looking at Flash for some time now, and we’ve not made a formal decision,” he told me.

It’s an intriguing answer. Many us think that Flash/Flex/Apollo (all of which use the Flash runtime) is set to grow substantially as a rich client platform, supported by XML web services or Flex Data Services on the server. Extending this to mobile devices makes sense, but only if the runtime is deployed. Adobe needs to break into this Java-dominated space. The Apple iPhone could also be an influence here: as far as I’m aware, it is not initially going to include either runtime, but I have the impression that Steve Jobs is warmer towards Flash than towards Java, which he called “this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

My prediction: Flash will get out there eventually. As fast data connections become more common, the Flash runtime will be increasingly desirable.