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Today's release of the software to platform partners -- said to be ARM, Brightcove, Dell, Google, HTC, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, RIM, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and others -- comes as the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of a long saga.
Adobe first promised its "no holds-barred, desktop-class" implementation of Flash Player 10 for mobile devices at its annual MAX conference in 2008. Last year, the company announced Flash Player 10.1, promising betas for Windows Mobile and Palm's webOS by the end of the year, alongside revisions targeting Windows, Macintosh, and Linux desktop computers. Flash Player 10.1 betas for Android and Symbian would follow in "early 2010," it was also announced.
In an April interview, however, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said the mobile Flash Player for Android, Palm, BlackBerry, and Symbian phones was not yet ready for release. "The second part of this year is when you are going to see Flash on a number of those devices," he added at the time.
Adobe now says that as of today, its many partners have the software, which will be "made available via over-the-air downloads and ... be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months." Devices that will support the mobile Flash Player 10.1 will include those running "Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian OS," the company added.
Existing mobile devices that claim to run Flash typically only support old versions of the runtime, or else employ Flash Lite, a pared-down version that cannot play the same content as desktop versions. (Windows Mobile and Symbian are presently limited to Flash Lite playback.) Nokia's Maemo Linux-based N900 (below) was reportedly the first mobile device to run the full Flash Player, first in a 9.x version and later in 10.1.
Meanwhile, Google's Android is becoming the "go to" operating system for those who want Flash content. A beta version of the mobile Flash Player 10.1 was released last month for those testing Android 2.2 ("Froyo"), as our sister publication LinuxDevices.com reported.
Now, Adobe says, the production release of Flash Player 10.1 will be available through the Android Market for any devices whose users have upgraded to Android 2.2. Devices that will support "Froyo" and Flash Player 10.1 are said to include:
Adobe added that a Windows Phone 7 version of Flash would eventually appear, but not when the smartphone operating system is first released this fall. Today's mention of "future versions of Windows Phone" only seemed to underscore that delay.
Performance improvements
Adobe touts the mobile Flash Player 10.1 as having been "completely redesigned and optimized for mobile," adding that it now supports accelerometers, mobile-specific input models, and easy zooming to full-screen mode. Performance optimizations allow the software to work with "virtually all" mobile silicon, and to make efficient use of CPU and battery performance, the company adds.
According to Adobe, optimizations include:
Analyst feedback
Al Hilwa, program director of the Application Development Program at IDC, is quoted as saying, "Although it is labeled a dot release, Flash Player 10.1 is a significant update that includes a number of new performance and mobile specific features. This allows consumers to see a much bigger part of the Web and allows developers to bring their Flash Platform skills to a much bigger swath of devices.
Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, stated, "For the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to test an Android Froyo device loaded with a beta of Flash Player 10.1. The overall experience and performance of Flash has been impressive. Mobile users now have access to full Web pages with rich Flash content on millions of sites."
Updated desktop versions provide hardware acceleration
As slight consolation for those awaiting mobile versions of Flash Player 10.1, Adobe has been releasing desktop versions of the software that -- for Windows users, at least -- can tap into a system's discrete graphics circuity, when present. Pre-release betas of Flash Player 10.1 were made available for desktop OSes in November 2009, updated to Beta 3 versions in February, made available in Release Candidate (RC) versions in April, and finalized earlier this month.
According to Adobe, the desktop software now supports hardware decoding of H.264 video on computers using GPUs from AMD/ATI GPUs (Radeon HD and FirePro), Broadcom (Crystal HD BCM70012 and BCM70015), Intel (GMA500, 4 Series chipset, 2010 Core processors), and Nvidia (GeForce, Ion, and Quadro).
Further information
More information on features and hardware requirements for both desktop and mobile editions of Flash Player 10.1 may be found on Adobe's website, here.
Downloads of desktop editions of Flash Player 10.1 may be found here. Details of improvements in the latest edition for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux may be found on the Adobe Flash Player Team Blog, here.
