Flash 10.2 beta arrives on Android, with mixed bag of results

Adobe managed to roll out its Flash 10.2 beta for the Android platform as promised, touting to deliver better performance for Flash on any dual-core handsets that run on Android 2.2 or 2.3, and is also proud to be the first instance of official support for Android 3.0 tablets. Initial testing has delivered a mixed bag of results at best, where the Motorola XOOM (read our Xoom Review) will play 480p video smoothly but has issues with 720p videos. As for a single-core Droid 2, it can’t even handle a 480p video despite being an “improvement”. There are different factors involved in the performance degradation of course, as part of it could be due to partial hardware acceleration support in the beta, with full acceleration turned off for the moment. We wonder if  we should expect smooth 720p videos when 10.2 is updated. There’s also the issue of Flash on Android 3.0 not properly recognizing touch outside of full screen mode will also be fixed as well.

Update: we played with it on the Motorola Atrix, and it plays 480p videos fine, buy is out of reach for Flash video. Note that the device can play 1080p movies with MPEG4 files.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones, Tablets
Tags: flash, Motorola, motorola xoom, xoom