Adobe Flash 10.1 Coming To Most PlatformsAdobe Flash 10.1 Coming To Most Platforms

Today Adobe announced the release of AIR 2.5 and buried in the announcement is an update on Flash for smartphones. Unless you have an iPhone, chances are good you can either get it today or will be able to in the near future.According to their announcement on BusinessWire, RIM's BlackBerry platform, Google Android and HP's webOS 2.0 are ready to go today. In the future, Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian should have a client. The iPhone is the only one that doesn't, and given the Flash Feud between Apple and Adobe, I wouldn't expect one anytime soon. Adobe is eager and willing to release a client for iOS, but Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, isn't likely to allow that given his Flash Manifesto.

Job's anathema for Flash on the iPhone has bled into other Apple products as well. After asserting that Apple knows "first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash" they have removed Flash as a preinstalled app on the Macbook Air.

Adobe isn't sitting still though. The main point of the announcement is AIR is available on a number of platforms and form factors. It has been on the Mac and Windows platforms for some time now, but Adobe is also pushing the platform on the Blackberry tablet, Android, Linux, and even iOS.

Adobe is also releasing a secure sandboxed version of Reader in the coming weeks called Adobe Reader X that will prevent security threats from harming the host operating system. Even Reader X crashes should be more isolated and cause fewer issues.

If Adobe also develops a Flash X product that may make the program more stable, I wonder if Jobs will back off a bit on his rhetoric against the product?