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.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Adobe’s been teasing us with Flash 10.1 on webOS for what seems like ages now. In fact, the first news about webOS and Flash came from Palm and Adobe more than a year ago. It’s been five months since we first saw Flash demoed on a Palm Pre and in the intervening months we’ve seen it shown off on all manner of Android devices as well. What we haven’t seen is Flash 10.1 on more lowly hardware, such as the Palm Pixi or HTC Hero. Now we might know why.

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!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

There’s been precious little webOS news here at Mobile World Congress, while Android Central, CrackBerry.com, Nokia Experts, and WMExperts have been on fire – even TiPb will have some news in just a bit. But Akitayo reminded us that Adobe was here and likely showing off Flash – so we headed on over.

As you can see from the video above – it’s working but perhaps isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, Flash is definitely not confirmed for February (looks like it was a miscommunication at Palm’s SFR launch). All Adobe is saying is ‘First Half of 2010,’ so it’s unclear what’ll happen there. We found that Flash on the Pre seemed to move just a bit quicker than Flash on a Droid – but the Nexus One beat them both.

Yes, that’s webOS 1.4 there on a GSM Palm Pre, near as we can tell. We didn’t spend a ton of time with the device, but a quick glance showed the video recording there, speed not significantly faster than what current webOS devices run at, and the new way of loading cards you can see in the video above.

Adobe is also showing off Air apps, but unfortunately they didn’t have them ready for the Pre yet.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Here’s some of the latest discussion in the forums: 

• If you think that being inundated with the goings on of people you probably don’t care about in Google’s new Buzz service on the desktop is fun, you’ll be delighted to know that the deluge will soon be making its way to webOS. Confirmation also comes in the form of Google’s own Supported Phones table. If you can’t wait, you can trick Buzz into working in the browser anyway.

• Video Recording is a feature coming our way in this month’s (which apparently didn’t come on the 15th) webOS 1.4 update, and forum member showmrock wants to know: are you excited?
  

• Speaking of that webOS 1.4 update, we’ll also be getting full on Flash 10.1. Impulsebuyer is curious: what websites are you looking forward to browsing with the new plug-in.

• Forum members are discussing which 3D games they’d like to see come the way of webOS next. Grand Theft Auto, anyone?
  

We look forward to seeing you in the forums!  (Not a member?  Remember: registration is free, and the benefits are numerous indeed)

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Mobile World Congress will be getting underway tomorrow in Barcelona and Adobe’s going to be on hand to show off the latest version of Flash 10.1. Not only will the new Flash be shown running on Android and webOS devices, but if we’re reading Adobe’s words correctly, attendees to MWC will actually be able to try it out for themselves. Our own Dieter Bohn is headed to Barcelona to partake in the craziness that is the Mobile World Congress, hopefully he’ll be able to get a hands-on with this newness. If not, we’ll should be able to all get our hands on webOS Flash soon enough anyway.

Thanks to akitayo in our forums for the tip!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

 We’ve already seen a demo from Adobe that showed us some of what’s possible with Flash 10.1 on webOS, and they’ve released another video showcasing the gaming capabilities we’ll see when the software becomes available. It’s slick stuff: double tapping on a flash element makes it go full screen as if you were using a native application, and the Pre appears to be running 3 browser cards with a Flash element quite effortlessly. So not only do we have access to excellent 3D games like Need For Speed thanks to the Plug-in Development Kit, we’ll soon have access the hundreds of thousands of Flash based games out there. 

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Attention anybody who cares about Flash (we know you’re out there): Adobe today released their first public beta version of Flash 10.1. The released version currently is only available for Windows, Macs (Intel only), and Linux users – though Adobe has promised that versions of 10.1 for smartphones will be coming later. The only smartphone platform with a defined “later” is webOS. To be specific:

“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.”

When exactly later this year will be is uncertain, but there are only a few dozen days left before the calendar flips to 2010. In the meantime, you can sign up for a notification for when the Flash 10.1 for webOS beta arrives. Or you can just check back here, as you can be sure that we’ll be all over it, with the final version expect to come early next year. And while the risk-takers amongst you are waiting for their desktop-version of the Flash beta to download, you can check out the Flash 10.1 on a Palm Pre demo video that Adobe posted last month.

[via: Engadget]

Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

While we’re almost entirely certain that Flash will not be included in webOS 1.3.1 (despite the groundwork currently being laid), there does seem to be a timetable out there. Adobe delivered Flash 10.1 for mobile to manufacturers last month, and now they want you to know that it should land on webOS devices in the first half of next year. Note: this isn’t a delay, we’ve always known that delivering to manufacturers and delivering to end users are two different beasts entirely.

Users have reported getting the above message when they click on links to Flash videos or got to Adobe’s Flash website. Amusingly, iPhone users are also greeted with a message when they visit the Flash page, though it’s not quite as encouraging.

Thanks to klubhead for the tip!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Yesterday was all sorts of crazy as far as Palm news is concerned, so we’re still doing some catch-up. Example: Flash 10.1 was shown off live and in person on a Palm Pre at Adobe MAX, Adobe’s worldwide developer conference. The demo appears to have covered the same activities as that video that Adobe posted early yesterday, but the presentation itself included slides with a bit more detail on Flash 10.1, and our friend Buck was there with a camera snapping away.

According to the slides, Flash Player 10.1’s smartphone version comes with the multitouch and accelerometer support we’ve known about for some time, supports HTTP video streaming, has built-in content protection mechanisms, can work with peer-assisted networking, and has been optimized for memory and power consumption while taking advantage of hardware [GPU] acceleration. Of course, webOS needs to be ramped up to take advantage of that GPU first, but we’re talking a few months down the road still.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>