Flash to Bring Web HD Video to Tablets

Adobe has announced that the recently launched Flash Player 10.2 will be available on a myriad of mobile devices soon. At the same time, Adobe is also touting the adoption of the AIR platform. The company says it expects 200 million mobile devices to be able to run AIR apps by the end of the year.

"We are thrilled to see mobile adoption of Flash Player and AIR exceeding even our own expectations, with much more to come in the months ahead," David Wadhwani, SVP of the Creative and Interactive Solutions Business Unit at Adobe, said.

"This is tremendous progress toward ensuring that mobile users everywhere have access to their favorite content from casual games to Web video and enterprise applications regardless of what device they are using," he added.

While Adobe announced that Flash Player 10.2 will be landing on mobile devices soon, it hasn't really set a date. It also isn't saying on which devices it's going to be available on.

Stage Video, one of the big touted features in Flash Player 10.2 are only confirmed to be available in Android 3.0 Honeycomb and BlackBerry Tablet OS. Stage Video makes use of dedicated hardware on these devices to offload the task of decoding video from the main processor.

Dedicated hardware on tablet devices could easily be capable of decoding 1080p HD video, something that even the mighty dual-core processors on the latest smartphones wouldn't be able to do on their own.

Flash and AIR, which is based on Flash, seem to have a future on mobile devices, virtually every platform other than Apple are supporting it, but it remains to be seen if it actually becomes as popular on the mobile front as it is on desktops.

App developers already have plenty of choices for their creations, though Flash and AIR would bring some cross-platform support advantages, and HTML5 is perfectly capable of handling HD video as well.

Adobe has been fighting against the mighty Apple on the mobile front ever since the Cupertino-based company refused to include Flash on its mobile devices and even went on the attack with a scathing criticism of the platform.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend seems to apply here, as Adobe has partnered with just about everyone else except Apple, and Flash is supported on Android, BlackBerry and WebOS on both tablets and smartphones.