Downloader: Adobe announces AIR, Flash for smartphones

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Adobe announces AIR, Flash for smartphones

Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR are both coming to smartphones, starting with devices running Google's Android operating system.

We've been expecting to see Flash Player 10.1 for a while, but it looks like it should be coming pretty soon. A beta version has already been made available to mobile developers and content providers. Adobe says it should be available to the general public in the first half of the year. While the player is initially coming to Android, support for BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm WebOS and Windows Mobile are also on the way.

Adobe AIR is something else altogether. The platform currently allows developers to write applications that can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac desktops. By expanding AIR to mobile devices, developers will basically be able to write applications in Flash that can run on all sorts of devices, which is pretty awesome news for programmers looking to maximize their reach, but also for users looking to run the same applications on a number of different devices.

Want to create an RSS reader, calendar, or video game application for Palm, Windows Mobile, and Android devices without having to rewrite the code for each platform? There'll be an app for that.

Like Flash, AIR will be available first on Android devices. For a demo of AIR running on a Motorola Droid, check out the video after the break, courtesy of The Flash Blog.