Adobe releases AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 betas

Today, Adobe has made the betas of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The big features in AIR 2 were shown off at Adobe MAX in October, and they include: Support for USB mass storage devices, support for multi-touch and gesture-based input, improved support for local peripherals and native application processes, improved performance, and peer to peer and UDP networking.

Flash Player 10.1 adds a host of functions designed with the mobile device in mind. Even though today's beta of 10.1 is not available on mobile platforms, Adobe says it will be available "across a broad spectrum of smartphones and other Internet-connected devices in 2010." Already, it includes support for Android 2.0, Windows Mobile 6.5, Symbian S60 V5 and Palm WebOS.

In order for Flash Player 10.1 to be "ready for mobility," Adobe says it has made a number of tweaks to run on constrained systems, which include performance improvements, rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations.

Like AIR 2, Flash 10.1 supports multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer and mobile input models which will bring rich Flash interaction to mobile platforms. Going further, however, it also adds support for screen orientation changes, sleep mode, adaptive frame rate streaming, and graphics hardware acceleration.