Microsoft’s getting serious about supporting Web- based multimedia in Windows Mobile. Today, Adobe announced Redmond is licensing its Flash Lite technology, only a few days ago after Microsoft revealed it would soon bring a mobile version of its own Flash competitor, Silverlight, to its smartphone and PDA platform as well.

The cross-platform Flash is the most widely used way for delivering animations, videos and interactive applications on the Web. Flash Lite is the pared-down version of this technology used to bring this type of content to mobile devices.

According to Adobe, Flash Lite's been downloaded over 500 million times and is available to mobile handsets at all levels—from your basic cell phone to advanced feature phones and smartphones. A spokesperson told PDAStreet, "Our focus has been on ubiquity" and getting it on the broadest range of handsets as possible.

So, for instance, Flash can be used with all Symbian/S60 handsets from Nokia and some Linux handsets. And Sony Ericsson licenses it for both Symbian/UIQ smartphones and some of its feature phones, as does LG, Samsung and a number of Japanese OEMs.

While today's announcement is significant, it isn't the first time Windows Mobile users have gained Flash support. Adobe has already licensed the technology to developers of third-party Web browsers, such as Opera, for the platform. It'll become a standard part of Windows Mobile now, so when Microsoft delivers the OS to OEMs, they're devices will be Flash enabled out of the box.

Adobe couldn't reveal the technical details of their agreement with Microsoft to us. They did say Flash would become an inline plug-in with Pocket Internet Explorer, though.

Microsoft says Silverlight 1.0 for Mobile will provide support for media playback, vector graphics and animation to Windows Mobile. It is created using .NET based technologies and, like Flash, runs through a Web browser most of the time.

In addition to Flash, Nokia recently announced its smartphones would support Silveright.

The fastest-growing smartphone maker isn’t in any rush to pick up either technology. Apple CEO Steve Jobs says the iPhone and iPod touch don't have enough juice to run the full version of Adobe's ubiquitous multimedia system for the Web effectively. And, in his opinion, Adobe's Flash Lite player, simply isn't up to delivering performance up to Apple's standards.

The full version of the Flash player "performs too slow to be useful," Jobs told Apple shareholders a couple of weeks ago, and Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web." Jobs added, “There's this missing product in the middle," but "it just doesn't exist."