Macromedia Inc. on Friday said Nokia Corp. has agreed to a partnership that gives Macromedia a big boost in its efforts to convince developers to use its Flash technology in building mobile-phone applications.

Under the deal, Nokia would incorporate Flash development tools within the tool sets Nokia provides to the 1.8 million registered developers in its Forum Nokia community, opening up a "huge" market for Macromedia, Gary Kovacs, vice president of marketing for mobile and devices at the San Francisco company, said. Macromedia currently has more than a million developers worldwide using its Flash technology, according to the company.

A timetable for release of the Flash-embedded Nokia tools has not been set, Kovacs said.

"The tools Nokia has today will evolve (to include Flash), without having to introduce a whole new development paradigm," Kovacs said.

Flash is most often used today to develop animation for website advertising or entertainment. Macromedia, however, has been expanding the technology for building media-rich user interfaces. Korean handset maker Samsung Electronics has built a Flash UI for some of its phones, Kovacs said.

Nokia has also agreed to embed the Flash player within its Series 40, 60 and 80 phones, Kovacs said. The latter two are advanced cellular phones that are capable of surfing the web and offer calendaring, email, contact lists and access to documents and other data services. Both models run the Symbian operating system, which is a competitor to Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC.

The formal partnership is Macromedia's first with Nokia, Kovacs said. The company now has agreements with two of the top five handset makers. The other one is Samsung.

Macromedia Flash has been used by NTT DoCoMo in Japan for about two years, Brad Akyuz, analyst for market researcher Current Analysis, said.

"With the Nokia move, however, Macromedia now has a chance to expand its reach globally," Akyuz said. "Nokia's smartphones are retailing basically everywhere in the world."

Advanced cellular phones, often called "smartphones," make up a small percentage of the 664.5 million handsets that shipped last year, according to International Data Corp.

Phones capable of accessing multimedia and other advances services, however, are expected to dominate the market in time, as wireless carriers build out broadband networks capable of delivering these services.