What Google showed at Google IO was a "pre-beta build, not the final product release," Adobe director of technology strategy for partner development Anup Muraka . "However it's a really solid technology base and it's going to play a lot of content."
"The goal for this release is that most existing Flash content should just work," says Muraka. "We acknowledge that not all content is going to behave the same; some content will work better than others. You can't expect high bit-rate HD video to work perfectly on a small screen smartphone over a 3Gnetwork- but we're still seeing good performance for video playback."
To help with that, Flash Player 10.1 tried to use less memory. "We've done a lot of work to reduce memory consumption for content, especially unoptimised content. In many cases," claims Muraka, "we see as much as 50% reduction."
Flash 10.1 and Android battery life
Flash 10.1 has settings to save battery life like not playing content that's not visible on screen; but it also has ways for developers to over-ride that.
"If you want to do something like background audio, you don't want it to stop," points out Muraka although he does admit "I think what developers end up wanting to do may end up conflicting with what the OS wants to do."
And it's not just Flash that runs down battery life; "You'll see this in web pages as well. There are web sites doing auto refresh and those are extremely taxing on battery life. Take your favourite Twitter page; if it's getting lot of updates you'll see a pretty big battery drain just from updates."
What kind of battery life are you going to get once you start using Flash? We'll be testing this ourselves but on a Nexus One running a pre-release build of Froyo and Flash Player 10.1 streaming H.264 video encoded for mobile, Muraka says you'll get "well over three hours of battery life" or "four-plus hours of casual gameplay".
That's with no hardware acceleration (which will improve battery life). "Even just with the baseline software-only player we can deliver a great experience and not the perception that it's going to just immediately kill whatever device it's running on."
Flash 10.1 adds support for rotating the screen using an accelerometer, and for multi-touch, gestures and on-screen keyboards (which Muraka points out will be useful for touch screens and tablets as well as phones), but developers will have to write their Flash content to use.
It also has 'smart zooming' which scales content to fill the screen so Flash in a web page can feel more like an application.
Flash 10.1 on Android release date
What's going to be available first is a public beta of Flash 10.1 on Android; you'll be able to download it from the Android Marketplace when Android 2.2 (which it needs) is available.
Adobe couldn't confirm when that would be, but Flash Player 10.1 will be finished in June (for Android, Windows, Linux and Mac as well).
It will be pre-installed on new devices in June but if you upgrade your phone to Froyo and visit a page that needs Flash, you'll be able to download the player directly the way you can on a PC.
"If you have a device capable of downloading it, you'll see the Flash badge and we'll do all the right things to get you Flash."
Users of other devices shouldn't feel left out; again Adobe isn't talking dates but Muraka confirmed "the work hasn't stopped on all the other platforms we're working on and still making progress with partners on; Windows Phone 7, Palm WebOS, BlackBerry- and Symbian" (although, he noted "we still have work to do on that").
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