Flash 10.1 to bring rich Web apps to Palm Pre, WinMo, making iPhone an island

It's quite easy for Adobe to throw around statistics about Flash, and you'll frequently hear members of the Adobe team say such things as "Adobe Flash is installed on 99% of PCs," or "75% of all online games are built in Flash," or "80% of all Web video is encoded in Flash." Though these statistics are dubious, there is little doubt about Flash's ubiquity.

But as mobile Web consumption has dramatically increased, mobile Flash technology has been struggling to deliver the full Web experience to resource-constrained devices. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously commented in mid-2008, the full version of Flash was too big, and Flash Lite was too small. What Flash lacked was a product "in the middle" that could fully deliver rich Internet content without also consuming a lot of CPU cycles.

Today at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, Adobe announced the upcoming beta of Flash Player 10.1 -- the first full version of Flash to run on mobile operating systems such as Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Symbian S60, BlackBerry, and Android as well as Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Not a separate mobile Flash, but one Flash to rule them all...at least on the surface.

"The browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization," the company said this morning. "New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities include support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer, and screen orientation bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience."

Yet it's not going to be the magic bullet that brings all rich Internet content onto the mobile platform just yet. As Flash senior product manager Justin Everett-Church said in the ADC blog today, "The majority of improvements going into this release are ones that you will never directly reference, but from which you will benefit all the same...For video content, this means hardware acceleration...For vectors and images, Flash Player is similarly going to take advantage of hardware capabilities whenever possible.

"We have made many more subtle improvements that are all geared to make your content run well," Everett-Church continued, "but there are going to be cases where we will run into the reality that some content simply needs more memory than a mobile device can deliver. No matter how well optimized the system is, Flash Player is still a platform that lets developers write whatever type of application they want. In the end, each data type consumes a certain amount of RAM that can't be changed. For complex applications, there simply may be a need for more memory than is available."

It's certainly a step in the right direction, however, and early demos like the following video really show off the possibilities in the mobile realm:

A public developer beta is expected to be released on Windows Mobile, webOS and desktop operating systems by the end of this year, and the first smartphones shipped with the new runtime will be coming in mid 2010. A beta of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm Pre is expected to be among the first versions available.