Co-founder and chief technical director at Bizi, Michael Aykut, says the concept was born after spending time talking to other developers and realising that the biggest issue they faced was the cost of porting, which could cost up to AU$20,000 for a single handset manufacturer.

"As a small company we couldn't afford that much money, so we had to do something different," Aykut says. "We needed something that could tell us what the user was running and adapt the game or application to the user environment."

He drew upon his university interest in artificial intelligence, and merged that with his new interest in mobile phones to create the Bizi AI, which polls the phone to determine its characteristics, and sends those back to the developer. Aykut says in many cases, such as with the Symbian platform, this is impossible for any other technology.

"In normal Java there is nothing that can tell you that [the handset] is a Symbian phone," Aykut claims. "And the user doesn't even know about it because it is instant. Our AI come built into the application, and controls how it runs on the handset, so you don't have to worry about what type of handset it is."

Bizi plans to release 100 mobile games by July this year, and will swiftly scale up beyond its current 15 employees. Aykut says he is reticent to give the AI to other developers for fear that the library could be reversed engineered. However, Bizi will build games for developers for a fee.

Meanwhile Adobe continues to work hard to increase the distribution of Flash amongst the handset makers, to drive up the available customer base for developers. But the only Australian company to embrace Flash wholeheartedly on the mobile is the Queensland-based developer Moket. Company founder Dale Rankin started as a straight Flash developer, but says he began looking at Flash Lite in 2004, starting with the creation of several demonstration applications.

In 2005 he launched Moket to focus on the mobile space. Rankine says it remains the only dedicated Flash Lite company in Australia, and is licensing content to other parts of the world.

Having come from a traditional web development background, Rankine says there are certain lessons that need to be learned when moving to mobile.

"Simpler is better," Rankine says. "You are almost taking a backwards step in designing for a device that is an nth of the power of what you are used to calling upon when developing web applications. Although in a lot of ways the restriction of the device brings out more creativity in the developer in terms of how they are going to achieve things.

"Certainly usability plays a much larger role in developing applications for the handheld device. Web users have become a lot savvier about applications and how to interact through a browser, whereas with a mobile phone you are dealing with a very basic device that uses a lot of muscle memory with your fingers. So developing applications that are intuitive and easy to use from the very first go is critical to the success or failure of your application. You need to treat the user as a dummy almost in proposing what they need to do to interact with your application."

While his audience is limited by the number of Flash-compatible handsets in the market, Rankine says it is only a matter of time before numbers increase.

"When we started there was no handsets outside of Japan, and no guarantees that there ever would be," Rankine says. "But we feel a lot more comfortable about the future now that the Nokia handsets that were promised are in circulation. There are probably 50 or 60 [kinds of] Flash-enabled handsets around the world."

Rankine is also aware that his decision to stick with Flash Lite means he can circumvent many of the porting issues suffered by Java developers, although he says there are still some porting issues.

"You just can't get away from the fact that the mobile platform is a fragmented one," Rankine says. "But Flash reduces the load on porting as a part of the process, because rather than having to port a specific run-time for every handset, we can cover off a vast majority with one installer file. And even being clever about how you code with Flash means you can develop content that plays on a variety of screen dimensions without having to recode the entire application from scratch.

"It would be ideal to have the 'create once, play anywhere' ubiquity that you have on the web, but it's a completely different playing field with the hardware that is involved in the industry."