Saturday, March 19, 2011

Adobe Flash player 10.2 to hit Honeycomb today


Adobe has promised Flash Player 10.2 to hit the Android Market on Friday, March 18, and that is still the plan. A quick look in the Android market, either from our Droid X, Motorola Xoom, or market.android.com shows it's still not there, but Adobe says it's still coming.

The 10.2 release adds a number of improvements, but for Motorola Xoom users who were promised Flash support on their devices, it adds just that: Flash support. The world's first Honeycomb device shipped unfinished, some said, with no Flash support, despite it being widely publicized as one of the advantages of the Xoom over the iPad (and iPad 2).

Flash support allows access to things like Web games and other functionality or video embedded in Web pages.  iPad and iPhone users note the absence of Flash support on their devices, which the company has vowed to forever eschew, by various blank areas on Web browser renderings of some pages.

Apple is pushing HTML 5 as an alternative to Flash, and has pointed to bugs, performance, and other reasons as reasons for avoiding implementation on iOS.

All three of the latest Android releases (2.2, 2.3, and 3.0, or Froyo, Gingerbread, and Honeycomb respectively) will get the 10.2 treatment. 10.2 promises performances for 2.2 and 2.3. However, as noted, the Xoom and any 3.0 brethren are still seeing a beta version, so there are issues such as the tablet having difficulty rendering 720p video since hardware acceleration is actually turned off right now.

When all is coded, the full 10.2 release on Honeycomb, as opposed to the beta coming today, "will bring 720p playback to a really smooth, enjoyable level." Let us know in the comments when you see the update hit your phone (or Xoom).

Update: just hit tour Droid X and Xoom.

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