Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen, recently spoke to Fox Business about the launch of Adobe CS5 and Apple’s resistance to putting Flash on the iPhone OS and banning of Flash-compiled apps. That’s all good and fun, but what we care about is this quote:

We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year.

The first release date Adobe gave us: October 2009. Sigh.

This does line up with what PreCentral Forum member deesugar heard from Adobe employee Antonio Flores: "As Mark indicated, we’re holding Palm to strict ship criteria but they are close. We expect that a public beta should occur in a similar timeframe to that of Android – May/June. At this time, we’re not doing a wider pre-release program."

[via: Business Insider]

Thanks to coasterer for the tip! Also: the irony of having to post a Flash-only video on this story is not lost on us.

We already knew that Flash is coming to webOS, but today, during an Adobe conference at Moble World Congress, it was announced that Adobe is bring their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) to smartphones, including webOS.

Adobe's AIR lets developers create applications based on web programming languages like HTML and javascript, and naturally with support for Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex.

This move by Adobe is part of their efforts to entice developers over, and really it's quite smart. Developers will only need to make a single AIR application and that will be deployable on all major smartphone platforms.

Keen readers might remember how back in September we reported on how Flash 10.1 would include support multi-touch and accelerometers. Well, evidently Adobe's continuing down that route and Gizmodo is reporting multi-touch support is present in the Android port at the very least.

From the sounds of it, AIR will be debuting on the Android and will launch on other platforms, including webOS thereafter.  This is an interesting announcement to say the least. It'll definitely be fascinating to see how events unravel from here.

[via: Gizmodo]

Apparently, webOS 1.4 is coming in February, and it will bring along Flash 10.1 and Video recording to the Palm Pre. Flash 10.1 should come built-in, although the beta version should be available “very soon” from the App Catalog itself, for all of us webOS users to download.

And the most important update will be video recording, at least for the great majority of Palm Pre owners, like me for example. Some of the stuff you should be able to do on your Pre will be; upload your videos straight to YouTube, Facebook, email and MMS, as you can see on the image above.

For those unfamiliar, WebGL is a cross-platform and royalty free web standard for a low-level  3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0 that offers a way to render 3D graphics in the browser without requiring plugins such as Adobe's Flash (which is coming to webOS next year) and Microsoft's Silverlight.  Since webOS is based largely on web technologies, and applications are essentially web apps, this bodes well for Palm's platform.

We've seen some amazing things done with the technology prior to the draft specification being released. We have a couple of demos (in Flash, not webGL :| ) after the break!

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At this moment, the version that’s been released is available only for Windows, Macs with Intel chips, and Linux users. Although Adobe promised that smartphones will be getting the 10.1 version later. The good news for Pre users who want to get Flash is that, the only mobile platform with a promise for an earlier then 2010 beta on their sight is webOS.

And here’s why:

A prerelease version of Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. A beta is expected to be available for Palm webOS later this year. Sign up to be notified when Flash Player 10.1 for Palm Pre beta is available.

So there you have it folks, those of you who are waiting on Flash, Adobe is working hard to get out for you. Palm Pixi and Pre owners, get ready, as it would seem you will be amongst the first to get Flash Player 10.1 on your smartphones.

Now we get even more hope – as you can see on the image above – when we see on our Palm Pre phones that Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.1 will be coming to a webOS device near you in the first half of 2010. Now, I was hoping for an end of this year, but what the heck. I can only hope that “first half of 2010″ actually means January instead of May or June.

At least we can take comfort on not getting the same message that the iDon’t phone users are getting. According to a friend of mine that has the fruit phone, they are getting the following message:

Flash Player not available for your device
Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch

The lack of news about Flash for the Pre had more than few worried, but Adobe has finally announced today, that a public developer beta of the browser runtime is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. General availability for the new Flash 10.1 is expected for the first half of 2010.

Flash is being optimized for Mobile OS’s with multi-touch – like Palm’s WebOS – providing support for gestures and the accelerometer. On the press release, Adobe also mention that “the browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization.” This is great since the webOS with all its multitasking glory eats up the small battery on the Palm Pre rather quickly if you don’t tweak it a little bit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: Palm Infocenter

“We’re excited that our customers will benefit from the creativity and broad range of Flash content and applications created by the millions of designers and developers using Adobe’s popular tools and technologies,” said Pam Deziel, vice president, software product management, Palm, Inc.

Together with the announcement, Adobe has also released Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player for Symbian and Windows Mobile platform today.