Adobe dumps employee iPhones for Android

Shunned by Apple, Adobe will buy its employees phones that can run the Adobe Flash mobile platform.

A week after Steve Jobs unleashed his anti-Flash manifesto, Adobe is abandoning Apple's mobile handsets for its competitor's in the corporate offices.  The report from CNET didn't say which Android phones Adobe's 8,000 employees would get, but HTC phones like the Nexus One were mentioned by their sources.

The move by Adobe makes business sense because it wants its employees to use the technology it builds.  While Photoshop.com runs on the iPhone and Adobe's interesting iPad application, Ideas seems like it has a strong future, Adobe may not be able to build these applications in a future versions of the iPhoneOS because they are compiled in Flash.  Apple has made it abundantly clear that it no longer has any interest in Flash, at least on its iProducts.

However, it isn't certain why Adobe is going with Android rather than Palm, Nokia or Blackberry, who are also slated to include Flash 10.1 on their handsets in the coming months.  Perhaps knowing that HTC (patent lawsuits) and Android are Apple's major competitors factored into the decision.

An announcement about Adobe's (ADBE) Flash on Android is expected at the Google I/O conference later this month.

Microsoft (MSFT) employees are also discouraged from using the iPhone and some have even gone into hiding with their devices according to the WSJ.  It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens at Adobe.