Earlier today, a lot of commotion was created in the tech press over a Verizon ad, stating that Flash wouldn’t be making its way to Android tablets until Spring 2011. A long haul, especially given that the first tablet to run Android Honeycomb – Motorola Xoom, will be available in a short while.
Now Adobe has written a blog post clarifying the wait – they say it will be available “within a few weeks of Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom”. Which sounds like it should be around mid-March, though Adobe has still left itself some room. At least it sounds a lot better than June (spring).
Adobe used the remainder of the blog post to explain why Flash is still important to mobile. This is waht they had to say:
“We are excited about the progress we’ve made optimizing Flash for tablets, alongside partners including Motorola, and expect our momentum to continue. As we announced last week, over 20 million smartphones were shipped or upgraded with Flash Player in 2010 and over 150,000 consumers on the Android Market are rating it 4.5 out of 5 stars. We have raised our estimates for 2011 and expect to see Flash installed on over 132 million devices by the end of this year. Consumers are clearly asking for Flash support on tablet devices and the good news is that they won’t have to wait long. We are aware of over 50 tablets that will ship in 2011 supporting a full web experience (including Flash support) and Xoom users will be among the first to enjoy this benefit.”
