Adobe has just announced the latest iteration of its rich Internet applications platform runtime environment, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, and a public beta is expected for most platforms by the end of the year, with a full launch early next year. The biggest part of the announcement is that the full version of the player will be available across multiple platforms including many mobile ones, which will now be able to take advantage of all of the capabilities of the Flash technology.

“With Flash Player moving to new mobile platforms, users will be able to experience virtually all Flash technology based Web content and applications wherever they are,” David Wadhwani, general manager and VP, Platform Business Unit at Adobe, said. “We are excited about the broad collaboration of close to 50 industry leaders in the Open Screen Project and the ongoing collaboration with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide. It will be great to see first devices ship with full Flash Player in the first half of next year.”

For the desktop the release will mostly be an evolutionary step with few new features or functionality. It will however be the first unified release across all of the platforms in the Open Screen Project which aims to create a coherent runtime environment regardless if it runs on PCs, mobile devices and even consumer electronics devices.

An important push in the new version will be towards better support for video playback with Adobe aiming to bring full HD video capabilities to more devices, something that will only be possible if it gets the hardware manufacturer to implement support for the technology on the chip level. Adobe Flash is one of the most popular web technologies in use today and its order of magnitude more popular than its competitors like Microsoft Silverlight or Java. Adobe claims that 75 percent of all web videos and 70 percent of the games online are powered by Flash and that the runtime version currently available of the Flash Player is installed on 93 percent of the world’s computers.