Flash Player 10.1 arrives for good for netbooks

It now supports GPU acceleration

The new Flash Player – version 10.1 has arrived in Adobe Labs after all. This new version is very important and also different from the previous versions in many ways. First, it perfectly aligns with Adobe’s strategy of conquering the netbook and handheld space. The latest Flash Player enables GPU acceleration, so that you can save the CPU power for something else along with faster rendering, scripting, memory utilization, start-up time, and battery and CPU optimizations. This is very important as today’s netbooks and mobile phones run on processors that have a hard time running high definition flash contents. The reason for this is that Flash Player used to utilize the CPU memory, which is not much in these devices. The latest version uses GPU acceleration, saving your CPU memory for other uses.

The concern is though, that it doesnot support all graphics card yet – especially some crucial cards from the netbooks point of view like GMA 950 which is found in so many netbooks. Good news for NVIDIA that it supports the ION platform.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project, that Adobe started with about 50 other firms who believe in letting the developers building exciting products on top of these platforms. "We are excited to join Adobe and other industry leaders in the Open Screen Project," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of Product Management at Google. "This initiative supports our common goal to move the Web forward as a platform and to spur innovation in the industry through technology such as Adobe Flash."

Adobe and RIM have already announced a partnership of supporting Flash contents more widely in Blackberry handsets. Adobe expects the first handset with full flash-support to start shipping in the first half of next year. It had ongoing collaboration with 19 out of 20 mobile handset manufacturers. Although the Android and Symbian version are expected only in the first half of 2010, Motorola is expected to be one of the first players to a release an Android handset supporting Adobe Flash Player 10.1.

The Adobe Flash Platform is one of the best platforms for Web designing and development of creating expressive content that can stream continuously to different output interfaces in a wide range of devices, mainly through browsers. Its reach is over 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops. In fact Flash Player 10 was installed on more than 93 percent of computers in just the first ten months since its release. Although Microsoft is coming up with its own Silverlight, it no way is able to catch up with the dominance the Flash commands in the content streaming and delivery.

Try Flash Player 10.1 in Adobe Labs.