Palm Pre to do Adobe Flash 10.1

Back in February, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Palm confirmed to join the Open Screen Project, which will bring Adobe Flash Player on the new Palm webOS platform. Led by Adobe, the Open Screen Project includes industry leaders working together to provide a consistent runtime environment and user experience acrossmobile phones, desktops, and other consumer electronic devices.

The lack of news about Flash for the Pre had more than few worried, but Adobe has finally announced today, that a public developer beta of the browser runtime is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOSand desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. General availability for the new Flash 10.1 is expected for the first half of 2010.

Flash is being optimized for Mobile OS’s with multi-touch – like Palm’s WebOS – providing support for gestures and the accelerometer. On the press release, Adobe also mention that “the browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization.” This is great since the webOS with all its multitasking glory eats up the small battery on the Palm Pre rather quickly if you don’t tweak it a little bit.

[source MyPre]