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German court re-locks iPhone; Adobe's Flash 9 with H.264 support

A German court on Tuesday overturned a temporary injunction against T-Mobile which had order the wireless carrier to offer Apple's iPhone to customers unlocked and without a service contract. Meanwhile, Adobe has released a new version of Flash 9 that includes H.264 high-definition video support.

iPhone re-locked in Germany

T-Mobile can

">go back to selling

Apple's iPhone exclusively and locked to its own service, a German court ruled Tuesday, reversing an injunction last month requiring the company to sell an unlocked version in Europe's biggest economy.

The Hamburg District Court said the Deutsche Telekom mobile unit can force customers who purchase the touch-screen handset to take out a T-Mobile contract and can continue to offer the device with a locked SIM card.

"We are pleased with the outcome," T-Mobile spokesman Rene Bresken said.

The company will reportedly stop selling an unlocked version but said that after customers' contracts expire, it will unlock their iPhone at no charge.

Adobe Flash 9 with H.264 support

Meanwhile, Adobe on Tuesday announced the immediate availability of Flash Player 9 Update 3 software, previously code named Moviestar.

The San Jose, Calif.-based software maker said Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities.

The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

Adobe said it will extend support for H.264 flash to applications developed for Adobe AIR software, a cross-operating system application runtime that enables developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Expected to be available in early 2008, Adobe Media Player, the first application from Adobe built on Adobe AIR, will leverage both H.264 video and HE-AAC audio support.

Adobe Flash Player 9 is immediately available as a free download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms from this website.