The software maker released Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1 for mobile handset manufactures. The updated profile of the company's Flash Player targets mass-market mobile phones that do not have enough processing power.

Developers will get access to the Flash Lite 1.1 through a content development kit (CDK). The download covers tips, techniques and sample code for developing Flash content on mobile phones using Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004.

Juha Christensen, Macromedia president of mobile and devices, said Macromedia is counting on its more than one million strong community of Flash developers and designers to help animate the space.

"We're looking to evolve the phone as it exists today with improvements to the presentation layer," Christensen told internetnews.com.

Christensen said Macromedia is just forming an evangelist group to spread the word and has already received a good response after the company's recent developers conference in Japan.

"One of the things we've been recommending to developers is to think in terms of the form factor," Christensen said. "You are not going to find a mouse or a full keyboard on a mobile phone."

Christensen said one of the benefits of Flash is that the code size is a mere 314 Kb and needs at least 1MB ROM, 50 MIPS and 2MB RAM to operate.

The player has support for the W3C standard SVG Tiny (SVG-T) and new scripting commands that let developers build functions, such as sending multimedia messages, dialing and checking the network status and battery level. The update also adds improved audio support for MP3, PCM , ADPCM and SMAF (Synthetic music Mobile Application Format) audio formats.