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February 21st, 2011, 17:41 GMT · By

Motorola XOOM Launches without Flash Player

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Motorola XOOM
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Motorola XOOM, the first tablet PC that mobile phone maker Motorola officially introduced this year, is expected to land on shelves in a matter of days without all of the previously touted capabilities included into the mix.

When it hits the market on February 24th, the Android 3.0 Honeycomb-based device won't include Adobe's Flash Player technology, it seems.

The Motorola XOOM is expected to become available for purchase on Thursday on Verizon Wireless' airwaves, and the company has already placed a listing for it on its website.

According to Verizon, the Motorola XOOM is the “first tablet powered by Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).” The wireless carrier also notes that the tablet would become available on February 24th, and lists some of its main features.

Among these, we can count:

- 1 GHz dual-core processor and fully Flash-enabled for video-rich web
- A 10.1-inch HD widescreen display and a 3D interface that gets in your face
- With Google Maps, you'll get quick-loading 3D vector maps that you can tilt, rotate, and zoom into with photo-real Street View


However, although Verizon says that XOOM would support flash-based content, the small print at the bottom of the banner reads: “Adobe Flash expected Spring 2011.”

Some of the latest reports on the matter suggest that the Flash version that Motorola XOOM should arrive on shelves with would be Flash Player 10.2, which was announced for mobile devices at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and which should arrive in a matter of weeks.

Until that actually happens, the XOOM, and all other Honeycomb-based tablet PCs that should hit the shelves soon, would have a disadvantage in front of devices running under Android 2.2 or 2.3, as well as in front of Apple's iPad.

Adobe announced at MWC that it is hard at work with the release of Flash 10.2 for mobile devices, but no specific info on when would the software become available emerged for the time being.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: TheMokoda on 21 Feb 2011, 19:42 UTC reply to this comment

Your reporting is inaccurate. You wrote that the XOOM will release without Flash support. This is not true. The tablet does have Flash support. The version of Flash that is intended to run with Android 3.0 is not yet ready for release, so the SOFTWARE will not be included when the tablet launches. The tablet does support it, however.
It is possible to simply install Flash 10.1 from the Marketplace until 10.2 releases, but I don't know how that would be, since that version isn't optimized for Android 3.0. Although Motorola should have realized what an important thing this is to many people and made this clear and up front from the beginning, at the end of the day, it's no fault of Motorola's that Flash isn't ready yet; that's on Adobe and maybe partly Google, not Motorola.


Comment #2 by: LMS on 22 Feb 2011, 01:01 UTC reply to this comment

Spring release for Flash 10.2 and after its downloaded how many fixes afterwards, and at the price they want for the device, hmmm think I will wait for Ipad 2.


Comment #3 by: Sujoy on 11 Aug 2011, 13:38 UTC reply to this comment

Im not able to play SWF file locally in my Xoom. It has Flash Player 10.2 and Android 3.0.

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