Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile Devices and Smart Phones

Adobe, during Adobe MAX 2009, has officially announced the follow up on the details of roll out availability of Flash Player 10.1, a new version of Flash which supports and delivers full Flash player experience to mobile devices, smartphones, Pocket PCs, netbooks, notebooks and desktop computers. The main difference with previous version of Flash is that full Flash Player, instead of Flash Lite, a cut-down version of Flash Player, will now be supported across mobile platform.

Apple will make available free download of public beta of Adobe Flash 10.1 for Windows Mobile and Palm WebOS later in 2009, with Flash 10.1 for Google Android and Symbian plan to be released in early 2010. Actual portable devices and mobile devices with Flash 10.1 implemented and built-in will likely be available for mass market purchase in first half of 2010. A Flash version for BlackBerry is also expected, although no details been given yet.

Some features of Flash 10.1 includes multiple screen orientations, support for hardware graphics acceleration for H.264 video on chipsets including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and NVIDIA GeForce, ION, and Tegra, and support for multi-touch gestures and accelerometers where present. Flash is also expected to have increased software rendering speed of 87 percent and have lesser memory consumption by 55 percent on mobile platforms versus desktop platforms.

The one popular device platform that will continue to lack of Flash support is iPhone. There is no details on when iPhone will or may get full or lite Flash support yet.

To run Flash, system requirement for mobile devices require at least a 500-MHz ARM11 processor, with minimum of Windows Mobile OS version 6.5, or Android OS version 2.0.

Currently, mobile phone devices only able to use Flash Lite, and not full Flash plugin, which can only show a subset of Flash pages. Adobe Flash has been used to power many of the streaming videos, games and interactive pages on the Internet. According to Adobe, Flash is used for 75% of video and 70% of games on the web. Flash is also been installed in almost all consumer computer machine, a relative high penetration rate when comparing with rival rich Internet application runtimes such as Microsoft Silverlight and Sun Java.

Update: Download Adobe Flash Player 10.2