Flash Player 10.1 available as a beta version

Adobe delivers the beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

Through their Labs, Adobe has delivered a first beta version of Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X, Linux operating systems and netbooks running the x86 architecture. At the same time, support announced for a large range of smartphones has not yet been provided.

It should be noted though that supported environments won’t benefit from all features, with for example video hardware acceleration (H.264 decoding) only being offered for Windows PC’s equipped with suitable graphics cards. According to Adobe, this acceleration should improve performance, while helping to conserve battery life on portable devices.

While to today all Flash acceleration was handled by the GPU with NVIDIA cards, AMD has taken advantage of this beta release to announce support of the Vision technology, which includes different cards like the ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 5700 and HD 5800.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Flash Player 10.1 has been developed through the Open Source Project so that they could offer support to a diverse range of platforms. The final version is anticipated for release in the first half of 2010, although without native 64 bit support.

At the same time that this beta version of Flash Player 10.1 is being offered, Adobe has also released a beta version of their desktop application execution environment, AIR 2.0. This integrates Flash Player 10.1 and offers developers a series of new features with support for large storage peripheral detection, user interfaces for multi-touch screens, support for Web pages using HTML 5 and CSS3, new API’s for access to audio data from microphones and support of the UDP network protocol.

Download Flash Player 10.1 (beta)
Download Adobe AIR 2.0 (beta)