Edible Apple

At the Max Conference in LA, Adobe announced the arrival of Flash Player 10.1, an upgrade which promises to make delivering flash video more of a reality than it has been in the past for devices that haven’t been up to snuff.  Flash 10.1 will improve performance by taking advantage of GPU acceleration on a number of chipsets, including NVIDIA’s line of GeForce, Ion, and Tegra chipsets.

Interestingly, the Flash 10.1 player for mobile phones will include support for gestures and will recognize uniquely mobile features such as accelerometer use.  Adobe notes that “19 out of the top 20” smartphone manufacturers are on board with the latest Flash initiative, with the obvious omission being Apple’s iPhone.

Back in February, we opined on why Apple isn’t comfortable or willing to bring Flash support to the iPhone:

… One of the reasons Apple isn’t gung-ho about flash is because it feels it might threaten the popularity of its App store, which is fast becoming a key selling point of the iPhone.  Think about it –  a flash enabled iPhone would only create an avenue for users to entertain themselves outside of the app store.  Why pay and download iFart if you could attain the same functionality for free from a flash app online?

Also, once you introduce flash, a number of potential problems arise that would inevitably affect the user experience, something Apple will never compromise on.  Even if Adobe is able to traverse some of the technical hurdles it faces, what happens when iPhone users try to view a flash enabled video on the web and get an error message saying that they don’t have the most recent version of flash installed?  What if Silverlight all of a sudden takes off?  Inevitably, any flash related glitches will be attributed to Apple, and as with all its products, Apple likes to control the entire device, and loathes the idea of relying on other companies to complete part of the user experience puzzle.

It doesn’t seem that much has changed since then.

You can check out Adobe’s full press release on Flash 10.1 over here.