That screen you see above, that’s what shows up when you point a webOS phone to get.adobe.com/flashplayer. We’ve gone through many iterations of this screen, with the text prior to this one promising that Palm and Adobe were working to get Flash Player 10.1 onto webOS “as quickly as possible.” That came in July, and before that it was the second half of 2010, or the first half of 2010, or February, or by the end of 2009.

Obviously, not a single one of those has panned out (excepting the "second half of 2010"), despite the fact that we’ve been seeing Flash running on webOS devices since October of last year. And Adobe announced in June (of this year) that the finished version of Flash 10.1 had been released to their mobile platform partners, Palm included. It’s been three months since Palm supposedly received Flash, and in the meantime we’ve seen Adobe tinkering with download redirects. But now the message presented to webOS users is nearly as depressing as that given to iPhone users. It now reads:

Sorry Adobe® Flash® Player is not available from Adobe.com for your device’s operating system or browser.

Sad, eh? Having received this message ourselves and a number of tips from users like yourself, we decided to investigate, only to be met with nothingness. Our contacts at Palm had nothing to report, which is better than what we got from Adobe. Despite repeated requests for comment, we were met with stony silence from the folks at Adobe.

So the question remains, do we even care anymore? Sure, Android has Flash Player 10.1, so long as you’re running the right version of the OS on the right device. Even then, with the massively superior hardware that we’re seeing crammed into more and more Android devices, the Flash experience is still less than ideal. It’s slow, it’s cranky, it’s resource hogging. It's, well, it's Flash.

Android devices may be selling like gangbusters, but there’s still a large and influential player in the smartphone market that wants nothing to do with Flash: Apple. We’re not the biggest cheerleaders of the bitten fruit brand and their iOS operating system (though will continue to laud them for outstanding advertising), but at this point we’re understanding their position on Flash. In fact, we’re moving from understanding to agreeing.

Do we want a slow and painful experience on our mobile devices? No. Nobody wants that. It’s not like Flash is really a great experience on our desktop computers, and they’re several times more powerful than anything you can fit in your pocket. There are still some things that modern HTML5 browsers cannot do that Flash can, but here’s the question: between increasingly capable HTML5 websites and fully capable PDK apps, is there any need for Flash?

We've been waiting patiently (or perhaps not so patiently) for Flash to become available on webOS. That day may be coming sooner rather than later. Visiting get.adobe.com/flashplayer from a webOS device now pops up a strangely random app in Palm's Web App Feed called "Conversion."

It could be that the imminent release of webOS 1.4.5 will bring along with it a special surprise: Flash. Or it could just be a bug like the App Catalog down time earlier today.

Via RoscoePColtrane in the PreCentral Forums, Thanks for the tip, Alex!

Update: during the PalmCast tonight, we reported that PC reader Garrison discovered an app in Palm's beta feed called "FlashPlayer Beta." Investigating the app, we discovered that is was indeed a 'com.palm.app' app, which is to say it most likely came from Palm. We also discovered that it would only work with webOS 1.3.5, not 1.4 or the upcoming 1.4.5. So far as we can tell, it doesn't download, install or work at all. In our PalmCast chat, Rod Whitby came up with what we think is the most likely explanation:

I'm leaning towards the "FlashPlayer" app being an ancient internal Palm test version which has not been published and someone just found the URL by trial and error. If it's for 1.3.5 and not Albacore then it would not work on 1.4.x anyway

 In other words - it's a sign, a good sign, but not Flash for webOS just yet. We can't say for sure whether these strange happenings in the night really do portent the imminent release of Flash for webOS - but it's definitely on our minds now.

Thanks Garrison!

Update 2: Crazy night, what with these Flash shenanigans combined with the rough launch of 1.4.5 on Sprint. At least one of them has a clear explanation, though, as Chuq Von Rospach of Palm has let us know what the story is with the FlashPlayer App:

The flash that was found in the beta feed was in fact an earlier beta that evidently wasn't pulled and happened to get found. It's not functional on 1.4.x and won't work, and we've pushed an update to the system to pull it from the feeds.

Reader klubhead is the first of many to let us know that Adobe has changed the default "Flash doesn't work yet" message you get when you tap a Flash element on a webOS phone to the newer official statement we got from Palm earlier this month:

Adobe and Palm continue to work together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to WebOS as quickly as possible. At present, the integration work between the Player and WebOS is undergoing extensive testing to ensure we deliver a high quality implementation.

Want a preview of what you can expect from Flash on your webOS device? Well, the you should point your browser to m.flash.com. Oh, wait, you thought I meant on your phone? That’s not what I meant - go to your desktop where you’ve already got Flash installed, and go to m.flash.com. Then you can check out Flash for mobile.

Sarcasm aside, the Adobe Flash showcase for mobile gives a preview of several premiere Flash-enabled websites that we have great expectations for functionality should Flash ever actually arrive on webOS. In the meantime, we’re going to sit here and shrink our browser windows down to tiny and pretend we’re using our phones...

Thanks to @JohnLBurger, klubhead, nascar_fan, and Nathan and to our own Jonathan Ezor!

An increasing number of companies are changing the way they serve up content on the web by moving away from Adobe's Flash technology to HTML5 and/or direct streaming.  Two notable sites, NBC.com and Vimeo, have made it so any modern smartphone platform with a decent WebKit based browser can view their content.  Why are an increasing number of media companies making this move? It's probably safe to assume that Apple and its recent success with the Flash-less iPad has something to do with it.  

As evidenced in the above video, performance isn't terrific on my Sprint Palm Pre when using either site, as things bog down considerably when more than one browser instance (or just one browser instance) is open. Overall quality seems to be much better when viewing Vimeo content, as NBC.com content is consistently too compressed on both the audio and video fronts. Still, it's great to have access to more of this kind of content without having to have Flash, because who knows when it'll actually come the way of webOS.

We've been waiting for Adobe's Flash to come to webOS since February of last year, but it's Google's newest release of its Android operating system announced at the Google IO event in San Francisco, version 2.2 or "Froyo", that will be the first mobile OS to support the re-worked, GPU accelerated and touch optimized web technology that has been the topic of such hot debate in recent months.  As you'd expect, there wasn't any news pertaining to webOS.

When we'll finally see the technology come the way of webOS is still a guessing game at this point. Adobe has continually pushed back any tentative launch dates over the past year - the company originally planned on a late-2009 release, and subsequently pushed that date back to vague "first half of 2010" back in November, and outside of the occasional demo of  Flash-based games and videos and the like on the platform, the company has remained quiet since.  

Will we actually see Flash before the first half of 2010 closes in just over a month? The prospect is actually still looking good, as the groundwork for Flash has already been put into place and an upcoming update to webOS will expand the possibilities of what developers can do with the PDK. We know, we know, too often when we get our hopes up we find them dashed. Maybe, though, just maybe we'll see it soon.

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.

An Adobe employee, after revealing that they were not working on getting Flash 10.1 to work on Windows Mobile 6.5 (little surprise) recently declared that Adobe was only working to get Flash for Android working on ARMv7 processors. Processors that fall into that category include the Qualcomm Snapdragon powering devices like the Google Nexus One (and HTC Desire) and the TI OMAP3430 inside the Palm Pre, Pre Plus, and Motorola Droid/Milestone.

What doesn’t have an ARMv7 could be a problem for some webOS users: the Palm Pixi and Pixi Plus run off the Qualcomm MSM7627 processor, which is an ARMv6 chip. The MSM7627 is a beastly little chip, with two processing cores (600 MHz for processing, 400 MHz for the modem) and a 300 MHz graphics-core with Open GL 2.0 support - all packed into a tiny thumbnail-sized package. Has Adobe come out and said that they’re not working on Flash for the Pixi? Nope, but they haven’t said that they are. Even our man Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, when showing off Flash 10.1 at CES 2010, was careful to say that Flash 10.1 would be coming to “all Pre phones.” Note the lack of Pixi in there.

[via: Engadget [via: Gizmodo]]

Thanks to Shadow-360 in the forums for the heads up!

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]

Thanks to akitayo in our forums for the tip!

Flash 10.1 will not come built into webOS 1.4. The new version of webOS will come with support for the Flash plug-in, which will be available for free from the App Catalog. Additionally, it’s going to be Adobe’s call as to when the Flash plug-in makes its way to the App Catalog.

Of course, we all are looking forward to full video recording and editing on the Pre and Pixi. Palm has also promised battery and speed enhancements, but those sorts of things tend to incremental, so don't expect the world there.

On top of the above, we also have this posting in Sprint's forums via QuarlesLT in our own forums detailing just a little bit more about webOS 1.4:

Get even more out of your Palm Pre and Pixi, Palm webOS 1.4 update is on the horizon.
I wanted to let everyone know that we’re planning to have an update to your Palm Pre and Palm Pixi later this quarter. We’ll be updating to Palm webOS 1.4. A few of the key updates include:

• Video Capture functionality with editing capability
• Adobe Flash Player 10 (Palm Pre only)
  
• Full Phonebook transfer capabilities
  
• Calendar Enhancements
  
• Messaging Enhancements
  

These are just a few of the high-lights with much more detail to come. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions around timing and details of the update and I won’t be able to share any more than what is listed above but we wanted to let our Community know it was coming.

So 1.4 is looking like the .5 update over 1.3.5.1 that is really is: some nice enhancements here and there, but it we don't expect revolutionary changes.