Adobe’s Mobile Flash Player 10.1 Slips to Second Half of 2010
(Image courtesy of AppleInsider)Poor Adobe Flash: It can’t get a break on Apple’s iDevices (iPhone, iPod touch and iPad) and now the company has confessed that the devices that are capable of using the mobile version of Flash 10.1 won’t be seeing it until later this year.AppleInsider is reporting that Adobe has pushed back the debut of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile platforms until “the second half of the year” after early previews of the software with Google Android and Palm webOS devices. Adobe is promising to also support RIM’s Blackberry, Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, also on target for this winter.According to the company’s own timeline seen above, Adobe had planned to release Flash 10.1 for mobile in the second half of 2009, then shifted it to the first half of this year. That means the latest push will make the release a full year late to the table -- and Adobe is pinning at least some of the blame on Apple for its outright neglect of the Flash platform.Adobe chief executive Snatanu Narayen recently told Fox Business that Apple’s total lack of interest in bundling the forthcoming Flash Player on the iPhone OS was purely a business decision on their part rather than a technological one, and that it “hurts customers” -- despite the fact that Adobe has yet to ship a full mobile version of Flash for any platform.AppleInsider is quick to note that existing mobile devices that run Adobe Flash are using some variation of the desktop runtime or what Adobe calls “Flash Lite,” which is based on the older Flash 8 technology from 2005. It would seem that the biggest hurdle in getting a full mobile version of Flash on such devices is overcoming the software’s voracious appetite for memory as well as processing time, since even the now-delayed Flash 10.1 for mobile requires a fast Cortex A8 processor -- which means it will only run on the highest-end Android, Palm, Blackberry and Symbian phones, even when it does finally debut.Apple CEO Steve Jobs has gone on record describing Flash as “a CPU hog riddled with security holes” and famously dismissed the technology outright by saying that “we don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology.” Ouch.
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/adobe%E2%80%99s_mobile_flash_player_101_slips_second_half_2010
