A Lot More Flash (And AIR) Phones Coming Soon From Ribbit

ribbit-small.pngEarlier this morning, I posted about TringMe and the coming flood of Flash-based Web phones. I forgot to mention Ribbit, which is about to publicly unleash an entire development platform for building Flash phones on December 13. Ribbit’s development platform is already in private beta and allows programmers to build Web phones that can make, receive, and record calls, send voice messages, and manage contacts. Ribbit runs the back-end VOIP service, and it supports applications built on both Adobe Flex and AIR. (Read more about Ribbit here).

One developer, Joe Johnston, used Adobe AIR and Ribbit to create an Adobe AIR iPhone that looks just like a regular iPhone and can actually make calls from your desktop. This is not a Flash phone because it opens up as a separate Adobe AIR app in your browser. But it gives you a good sense of the types of interfaces that are possible, and that we may be seeing a lot more of soon. Here is a video of the phone making a call that shows how it works (and a slicker demo of the same app can be found here):