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NewsFlash: coming to a mobile phone near you soon...

Few mobile phone owners realise how much Flash has taken over in the smartphone business - especially Flash Lite. In future, Flash will be provided not by Macromedia, but by its new owner, Adobe.

It's hard to say which Adobe is better known for - Photoshop and its ability to revise history, or Acrobat, and its ability to stop the fastest PC in its tracks while it first asks you to consider updating (even when there isn't an update that affects it) and then loads a couple of hundred program overlaps before turning its attention, finally, to letting you actually read the story you wanted to just glance at briefly.

The deal doesn't bother me in itself. For reasons more to do with the nature of the people I know in both companies, I often get them confused anyway.

And technically, I don't doubt that it will be some time before there are any implications to analyse. Personally, I hate Flash - not because it makes some Web sites spend half an hour downloading self-indulgent pyrotechnics before showing you what you want to see, but because I like sending URLs to colleagues; and Flash disables the normal right-click ability to extract just the shortcut.

But even though this appears to be a match made in Heaven, and even though it puts paid to dozens of rumours of a Microsoft takeover of Macromedia (over several years!) it irritates me particularly because of the way the news was released over the weekend.

I'm sure there's nothing wrong... but it's a ploy which always brings me out in hives.