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!

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Android Central sends word that Adobe is touting that Flash 10.1 for mobile is finally done, finished, and has been released to their partners – including Palm.

Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.

In other words, the pressure is apparently on Palm now to ensure that Flash appears in the App Catalog and right quick. Our feeling: even if using Flash for games doesn’t pan out as well as some have hoped, at least we can all stop waiting for it to arrive.

Source: Adobe; full press release after the break

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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More than anything else we find ourselves clamoring for new hardware from Palm. The Pre and Pre Plus are getting to be incredibly long in the tooth (the base hardware was revealed more than 18 months ago). We all knew that something new had to be coming, and at the developers webinar hosted by AT&T today, Palm let it slip that new stuff is on the way. Asked if there were plans to release new devices this year, Palm’s rep said:

“I’m not allowed to talk about future roadmaps, especially because we’re in the process of being acquired by HP, so I can’t say. But yes we have a road map. We are working on future devices. And [a] new version of the OS. So I think, you’re going to find the next year very exciting.”

Very exciting indeed. Watching what’s been coming out of Apple, HTC, and even Motoroa, we’re aching for new hardware in webOS land. Of course, “the next year” means that we have a approximate twelve-month timeframe in which to be excited, though our hope is that the excitement can be spread out over the entire period instead of one big pop. That said, he did say devices, not device, so hopefully the next year will bring more than one or two new launches.

One of those spread-out excitements we hope to see at some point is Flash. While all the delays have made us more than a bit jaded, the tip we got from sepherous isn’t helping. After asking about the continuing delays with getting Flash onto web-friendly webOS, the response boiled down to Palm simply not being able to say what the hold up is.

Update: for completeness’ sake, here’s Palm’s official statement on Flash:

‘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.’

The full video of the webinar is due to be posted on AT&T’s developer site sometime in the mystical next week. Until then, we’ll just savor the transcripted bit and dream of a brighter future.

Thanks to Gerorne for the transcription!

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We’ve recently seen NBC and Vimeo make their content available using HTML5, and we’re beginning some great demonstrations that showcase what’s possible with burgeoning set of technologies that make up the standard.  Engadget has put together something of a roundup of some of the more cutting edge stuff that’s floating around on the ‘net, and one that really caught our eye was Akihabara. Akihabara is a collection of 5 open-source games that aim to emulate the 8 and 16-bit games of old (think Super Nintendo) that all utilize a small subset of HTLM5 to get them up in running in most modern web browsers.  All of the games here are playable through the browser in webOS, and they run great, though the user-configurable keyboard controls are somewhat difficult to get used to on the Pre.  

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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.

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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.

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Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com

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.

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Here’s something to tide you over until we can get our hands on the video of Palm’s presentation at last week’s Game Developer Conference.  Youtube user Monarchy (@HenryLevak) found himself in the Palm booth and fired up the browser on the Palm Pre Plus to see how flashed worked.  Naturally, the first site visited was Hulu.com which (shocker!) didn’t work.  The next site visited was Miniclip, a website featuring Flash 10.1 optimized games that take advantage of on-device hardware such as accelerometers, and the game played – Alien Attack – looked as if it were a native app.  

Everything Flash-based has been looking pretty slick on webOS so far, so tell us: is the anticipation killing you?

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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!

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Here’s some of what’s being discussed in the forums.

• Last week Verizon made it official: VoIP a-okay on its network. Users are speculating: just how long will it take for something like Skype to hit webOS?

• The Pre has a pretty decent camera, and while this thread might be an oldie, it’s a goodie: PreCentral forum members are sharing some of the best pictures they’ve taken with their phones. Go ahead, share yours!

• Even with extended batteries that have been modified to work with the Touchstone charger, there comes a time where we need to charge our phones but don’t have access to an outlet. Thankfully, a number of forum members are chiming in with their recommendations on self-powered USB chargers.

• With all of the fervor over the upcoming webOS 1.4 update and the availability of Flash that will follow, user flea asks an interesting question: will you install the plug-in when it hits the Catalog?

• iTunes sync has been out of the webOS picture for a little while now, but some users are still left high and dry when it comes to a syncing solution.  So big props to forum member cwgtex for creating the "ultimate how-to" guide to get you up and syncing with MediaMonkey, a free iTunes alternative.

We look forward to seeing you in the forums.  Not a member? There’s no better time than the present to become one. Registration is free, and the benefits are immense.

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