There’s a bunch of excellent commentary and backstory around the web about Adobe’s push for mobile dominance (relevance?) with today’s Open Screen Project announcement.

Ed Burnette at ZDNet points out that pretty much every mobile handset player (Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, Intel, ARM) has lined up behind Adobe. Who’s left out? Apple and Google. Hmm…

Amol Sharma in the Wall Street Journal writes that the battle is over (1) the mobile web, and (2) online video:

Making video from Web sites work on cellphones is widely seen as a crucial component of the new shift. Adobe’s wider distribution of Flash is one significant step. As part of the deal, Adobe is dropping its traditional licensing fees and making changes to its technology that simplify its integration into mobile phones. Adobe says it is pursuing other efforts to enable Flash on the iPhone.

“Flash video is the most popular form of video on the Internet today. It’s really important to be able to bring that to mobile,” said Gary Kovacs, vice president of product management and marketing for Adobe’s mobile devices unit.

We’re looking at yet another standards war — just like VHS versus Beta, or HD-DVD versus BluRay. As long as Adobe, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are duking it out, the rest of us will lose. Publishers, websites, and e-commerce vendors will suffer from a fragmented mobile web until one camp achieves enough scale that consumers can get universal access to the web from any device.

Filed under: Google, video