Flex News Desk

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may think Flash is junk but Adobe says it’s creating a media player for the iPhone anyway using the software tools Apple just released for third-party use.

Once built, Adobe intends to distribute the thing through Apple’s iTunes store, according to what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told Wall Street when Adobe released its quarterly results.

“Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience,” he said. “So we are committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone, and we will work with Apple.”

He said the company has evaluated the iPhone SDK and “We can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves, and we think it benefits our joint customers so we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.”

How Adobe’s going to entice Apple to work with it when Jobs thinks Flash is too slow on the iPhone and Flash Lite is useless is anybody’s guess.

As a matter of fact, Cnet says it can’t be done because Flash is a plug-in that would have to work closely with iPhone’s Safari browser and third-party developers can’t do that without Apple’s blessing.

Ditto on selling the thing at the App Store.

So now Adobe is backtracking and saying it can start to develop a way to get Flash Player on the iPhone but “to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.”

So for the time being Adobe will apparently have to content itself with the 100 million new cell phones that were sold in its first quarter with Flash on board and with Microsoft’s license to the technology for its smartphone widgetry.

Adobe’s results, by the way, beat Wall Street estimates and the company shrugged off concerns with the economy.

It earned $219.4 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenues up 37% to $890.4 million. Adobe credited Creative Suite 3 with sales in its unit up 57% to $543.5 million.