It’s been a long time coming, but Adobe is finally enabling fully-featured Flash gaming and video viewing on mobile phones with the launch of Flash Player 10.1.
A public beta of 10.1 is being launched today at Google’s annual developer conference for phones running a new version of Android – 2.2, codenamed Froyo.
General availability for Android and for the PC is expected in mid-June, with versions that work on Windows Phone 7, Palm’s WebOS, BlackBerry and Symbian devices coming at a later date.
To date, mobile phone users have had to settle for a stripped down version of Flash known as Flash Lite to watch video in a browser on their devices. This does not come with every phone and alternatives have appeared, such as Skyfire’s browser, which processes the video for mobile viewing on its own servers, and Bolt, which has utilised the phone’s media player.
But I have been impressed with the fully featured experience of 10.1 after trying it for a few days on a Nexus One review unit running Android 2.2.
Flash now not only plays video on websites flawlessly and enables full-screen gaming, but it also responds to touchscreen gestures so that objects in a game can be manipulated with a finger stroke. It also taps into accelerometers, meaning automatic adjustment to portrait or landscape mode.
PC gaming sites such as Miniclip and Kongregate can now offer full-screen gaming on cellphones with minimal adjustment to their current offerings.
In video, I watched movie trailers inline or in full-screen mode on the Sony Pictures and Warner Bros sites.
Adobe says it is cutting development costs for mobile with 10.1 and enabling games to be played across platforms.
At the back end, 10.1 enables hardware acceleration of video, increasing performance. It uses memory more efficiently and intelligently shuts down during low power mode to reduce battery drain.
Adobe cites three hours of video playing over a 3G network as being achievable on the Nexus One and four hours of continuous game playing.
This 10.1 version is an impressive and much needed major update to Flash. Users have suffered a long wait and they will have to show more patience as Android smartphones are slowly updated over-the-air to 2.2 and other platforms are gradually able to adopt it .
