BARCELONA — More than 20 million mobile phones can now run Adobe Flash apps, Adobe said today, while acknowledging that work still needs to be done to speed up the Flash experience on mobile.
"In 2011 we think we'll be in a little over 36% of all smartphones that ship. There are 40 models of [Flash-enabled] smartphones scheduled to ship in the first half of this year along, and we're already tracking over 50 tablet models," Adobe technical marketing director Anup Murarka said.
Adobe Flash runs on Android 2.2 or greater phones with ARM Cortex-A8 or better processors, and it's supposed to run on Windows Phones and HP WebOS phones in the future. RIM's new BlackBerry Playbook platform uses Adobe's AIR technology. Apple's iOS, on the other hand, is Flash-free.
That doesn't mean that iOS is Adobe-free, Murarka noted. Adobe's tools let developers and publishers create iOS apps which can be submitted to the App Store, and several major magazine apps (such as Wired) are based on Adobe's technology.
The new Flash 10.2 will kick performance up a notch, Murarka said. A technology called Stage Video, which redirects Flash video to a device's GPU rather than its CPU, will be included in the next release for Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the BlackBerry Playbook.
"Developers will be able to hint within their application that their video content meets the requirements to send it all to the GPU, and not touch it again," Murarka said. That results in 80% CPU utilization savings on desktop clients, and somewhat less but still noticeable savings on mobile, he said.
With 3D a hot topic at Mobile World Congress, Murarka said 3D APIs and a 3D rendering engine will arrive as part of Flash later this year, too.
"Integrating a standard 3D engine across all of our runtimes will go a long way. It will be a standard vehicle available in a browser, in application format, on desktops, on phones, on tablets and eventually on TVs," he said.