Never mind the Blackberrys, Symbian-based Nokias and Palms; it seems the smartphone world is currently being overrun by either Android-based phones or iPhones. It’s been a back-and-forth over the past year, with the new iPhone 4 set to fight off an army of ‘droids. This could help turn the tide for the bots: Adobe just released Flash 10.1 player on the Android Market for any phone capable of running Android 2.2 (Froyo).
Why should it be a big deal? For starters, it shouldn’t have to be until Apple decided to drop Flash support, instead choosing to bank on HTML5. Problem is, there are still a lot of websites that use Flash animation—sites with videos and games that iPhones won’t be able to handle. Like Kongregate.com, which helped us waste a lot of company time throughout the years with free online Flash-based games.
As for Android-based phones? They’re pretty friendly with Adobe and their ability to handle Flash, like their “ability” to expand storage through SD card slots, remain a considerable advantage over the iPhone. Apparently not much of an advantage to the public, since iPhone sales are still going off the heezy, but an advantage nonetheless.
Here’s what’s new on 10.1:
Completely redesigned and optimized for mobile, Flash Player 10.1 delivers new interaction methods with support for mobile-specific input models. Support for accelerometer allows users to view Flash content in landscape and portrait mode. With Smart Zooming, users can scale content to full screen mode delivering immersive application-like experiences from a Web page. Performance optimization work with virtually all major mobile silicon and platform vendors makes efficient use of CPU and battery performance.
The new Smart Rendering feature ensures that Flash content is running only when it becomes visible on the screen, further reducing CPU and battery consumption. With Sleep Mode, Flash Player automatically slows down when the device transitions into screen saver mode. Advanced Out-of-Memory Management allows the player to effectively handle non-optimized content that consumes excessive resources, while automatic memory reduction decreases content usage of RAM by up to 50 percent. Flash Player pauses automatically when events occur such as incoming phone calls or switching from the browser to other device functions. Once users switch back to the browser, Flash Player resumes where it paused.
As for everyone else not-named-iPhone, the 10.1 update won’t be limited to Froyo-based phones. According to Adobe, 10.1 was also released to other mobile platforms, including BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phones, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and should be made available via OTA downloads soon.
Source: Adobe
Tags: Adobe, Android, Flash, Mobile Phones
