Several weeks after Steve Jobs made an unflattering comment on Adobe’s Flash player, considering it to be “too slow to be useful,” Adobe talked back… in an unexpected way: the company is working on developing a version of Flash compatible with Apple’s iPhone. Tough love?...

Adobe Systems Inc. Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said on Tuesday that “Flash is synonymous with the Internet and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the web and experience the web’s glory really needs Flash support […] So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we will work with Apple.”

What should we make of this? Adobe took Jobs’ considerations as such and is prepared to offer something better in terms of performance? Narayen said during a call conference with the investors that Adobe already evaluated the iPhone SDK and “can now start to develop the Flash player … we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.”

Just a couple of weeks after Adobe had stated at the Mobile World Congress that “content providers worldwide trust Adobe … and now mobile is the target for innovative applications that showcase their brands and unique content,” Steve Jobs said Adobe’s Flash needed some performance improvements so as to suit the iPhone.

Adobe already announced they’ve shipped 500 million devices by now and signed a deal with Microsoft to bring the Flash Lite experience to Windows Mobile. Apple’s iPhone should be the next step, now that SDK is out. No other Adobe representative commented on Narayen’s announcement so far.

Within the next two years, Adobe is expected to double the number of devices worldwide, but it still remains to be seen whether its efforts will convince Steve Jobs that Flash Lite isn’t as slow as he thought and can work just fine with his beloved iPhones.