Adobe has big plans for its ubiquitous Flash platform and a key part of them is smartbooks.
In a major announcement this week, Adobe has confirmed it will release Flash Player 10.1 in “early 2010″ with a whole host of new features. Key elements include support for smartphone OSes Google Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm’s webOS (RIM is in talks) and , even more interesting, full compatibility with the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform featured heavily in smartbooks.
Furthermore, Flash Player 10.1 will add support for GPU acceleration which brings a new lease of life to netbooks sporting nVidia’s ION platform, which bolsters Intel’s Atom processor with more powerful dedicated graphics. Previously Flash performance had been locked to the performance of a device’s CPU, a component which is often a slower part of netbooks, smartbooks and smartphones since it reduces cost and increases battery life.
This new-found flexibility comes courtesy of some major reworking of core Flash code, with Adobe claiming software rendering and memory consumption will be reduced by a hefty 87 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
Flash isn’t without its critics, however, and many decry its proprietary nature in favour of open source alternatives such as Gnash and Swfdec. Microsoft has also come up with Silverlight, but it has yet to significantly take-off. Consequently Flash is still by far the most dominant web video and games standard, with Adobe boasting current market share in each category of over 70 per cent.
With Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now set to significantly improve Flash performance across a wide range of portable devices, it suggests that lead isn’t likely to be cut anytime soon.
Gordon
