The latest Flash Player – 10.2 – is now available for download from the Android Market for Android 2.2 (Froyo), 2.3 (Gingerbread) and 3.0 (Honeycomb).
So what can users expect? Well Adobe are promising performance enhancements, which will extend to 2.2 and 2.3 devices. Also, for Honeycomb, the Player will be tightly integrated with the browser allowing Flash content to be treated as part of the web page, rather than a separate overlay, which is unfortunately the case with Android 2.2 and 2.3. So web pages that composite HTML over Flash content will now be rendered correctly.
The Honeycomb release of Flash Player 10.2 is still in beta so hardware acceleration isn’t actually switched on, so expect performance to get even faster once the final release hits Android Market. At present you can comfortably play 480p video on devices such as the Motorola Xoom and that should extend to 720p video once the hardware acceleration is added.