Flash Goes Full on Mobile

Adobe has announced the launch of its latest Flash Player 10.1 for desktops, netbooks and mobile devices. While you might have passed it off as “just another update”, what makes this one very special is the fact that this version will offer full support to mobile devices – unlike the “lite” version of yesteryears.

The announcement was made at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles. The latest version will come to handhelds by mid 2010 and will be offered on almost all major smartphone platforms. The long list of supported vendors include Symbian S60, Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile 6.5 and the BlackBerry OS which seemed to be a last-minute addition. If you’re still looking for MacOS for the iPhone well, we’re sorry, thats not there in the list — at least for now. It seems that it has to do something with Apple’s unfriendliness that has caused this delay in bringing flash player to the iPhone. As for the delay, there is no word if this is just a delay or a comprehensive no to flash on the iPhone.

On the exciting side of things, Flash Player 10.1 will feature pack in hardware acceleration support for H.264 video on major upcoming mobile chipsets that include Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, NVIDIA GeForce, ION, and Tegra. Oh and it will also support multi-touch gestures. – minus the iPhone. Interesting.

Apart from Flash 10.1 Adobe is also partnering with Google for what is known as the “Open Screen Project” whose sole aim is to support Flash video everywhere on the interweb. What this might translate to in the future is that you might see AIR to feature in Google’s Chrome browser. That said, it would be interesting to see how Google will handle this – especially with HTML5 around the corner. – Techtree

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