Adobe Talks Flash Player 10.1 Installation and Updates

Software company Adobe is set to release during the first half of the ongoing year its Flash Player 10.1 solution for a series of mobile platforms available on the market today, and now it shares a few more details on what the discovery, installation and update of the technology imply. This move is driven mainly by the fact that the Flash Player 10.1 will become available for much more devices than before, practically doubling its platform reach.

One of the main issues with the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 is that not all existing smartphones on the market will be supported. We’ve already learned that Windows Mobile 6.5-based handsets won't enjoy the technology, and that the same applies to Android-based phones with low specs, and Adobe says that it is decided to do so in order to deliver a greater efficiency.

“To explain, smartphones have a typical lifespan that is less than half that of a desktop computer, and so hardware choices are made by planning for the future. Over the past few years we have shipped over 1.5Billion devices with Flash Lite using this simple rule. Therefore the choice to target the ARM Cortex-A8 chipsets will result in greater efficiency, and most importantly a wider range of consistent experiences as uptake grows. To be clear, that uptake is already happening, and it will expand rapidly just like it does every other year,” a recent post on the Flash Mobile Blog reads.

Flash Lite is the solution the company develops for handsets which do not meet the minimum hardware requirements to run Flash Player 10.1, and a new version of this solution is on its way to mobile phones out there. As for Flash Player, it will be installed on handsets in the same manner in which it comes to desktop computers, namely users will be prompted to download and install it when visiting certain wed pages, while new handsets might come with the solution pre-installed. Updates for Flash Player are to be delivered via the application store update process for some platforms, or over-the-air for others, and additional update means are also taken into consideration.