Flash 10.1 Invites Everyone to the Full Flash Party! Except the iPhone

The race to make smart-phones harder, better, faster and stronger is nearly as exciting as the rapid advancements in computing from 1990-2000. Here’s yet another milestone in the evolution of such devices…except for the one that Apple makes (at least for the time being). Adobe today released that Flash Player 10.1 will provide full Flash support for smart-phones that utilize WinMo, Plam WebOS, Android and Symbian OS. Adobe will also be working with RIM to add support to Blackberries as well.

The iPhone? Hah! Not even mentioned! This isn’t surprising either considering that earlier this year, the company proclaimed that full Flash would be too detrimental to battery life. The software would of course tax the CPU too much. Thanks for making my decisions for me Comrade iPhone. Here’s the funny part about all of this to me, this version of Flash has been modified to utilize the GPU for acceleration instead of gassing the CPU. So what’s the deal Apple?

Flash Player 10.1 will give the user the full Flash experience on their smart-phone. This applies to all of those Kongregate Flash games that you all love so much, HD video support for Hulu lovers, and simplifies things for you developers out there.

There will be some waiting involved. This new version of Flash isn’t expected to be released for awhile yet. This is taking into account the fact that the first beta versions for Windows Mobile and WebOS won’t be around until the end of this year, followed shortly by Android and Symbian in early 2010. Still though, my plan to acquire an HTC Hero this month over the iPhone suddenly tastes a little sweeter.

Source: Adobe