Adobe Delivers Flash To More Mobile Devices With Player 10.1

Consumers who’ve been waiting and hoping for full Flash capability on their mobile devices from smartphones to netbooks won’t have to wait much longer. Adobe announced today that Flash Player 10.1 is headed to developers’ doorsteps later this year and public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS phones will be out by early 2010.

Adobe is working with several manufacturers, companies, and developers through the Open Screen Project to get Flash on as many devices as possible. 19 out of the top 20 mobile handset manufacturers are now collaborating with Adobe to integrate Flash technology into their devices. One of the newest partners is RIM, who announced today that they’re working to bring Flash to BlackBerry devices. Google, whose YouTube, Android, Chrome and web search products depend heavily on Adobe integration, announced that they’re on board today. Nokia introduced new Web Runtime extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver that will make creating and building content for Nokia phones and other mobile devices easier.The feature set Adobe and their partners are aiming for will take advantage of the full capabilities of each mobile device — multitouch gestures, auto screen orientation via accelerometer, and mobile input models.

The only manufacturer missing is Apple — still no Flash on the iPhone it seems.

New developments and improvements aren’t limited to mobile phones. Flash 10.1 will take advantage of GPU video and graphics acceleration on devices with Nvidia’s GeForce, Ion and Tegra chips to deliver smoother viewing experiences. This will be welcome news to netbook lovers as well as those of us waiting to see what the new smartbooks and tablets on the horizon will bring.  With the GPU-accelerated video decoding users will be able to view full-screen Hulu videos on their netbooks without that slight stutter. Plus, browser-acceleration will cut down on resource hogging and reduce battery consumption. I’m particularly interested in seeing how the new smartphone, smartbook and tablet devices with the Tegra chip perform when it comes to streaming Flash video Perhaps we’ll even see it on the Zune HD.

Will Apple be on board by the time Flash Player 10.1 is out of beta and ready for mainstream consumers? It’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be embarrassing if the iPhone was the only smartphone on the market without full Flash support. The widespread support for this initiative from both manufacturers and consumers (who want an uncompromised web experience on all of their devices) may make it difficult for Apple to hold out.

General availability of the new Flash player for computers is expected in the first half of 2010 along with some of the Flash-enabled devices.