If you sport a Google Nexus One with Android 2.2 you can now get the full, beta-less version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1.
Previous beta versions had been available in the Android Market for a while but Adobe is finally taking the training wheels off this thing.
With Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Android, Nexus One users will be able to access a variety of rich media directly from the browser. This includes in-line videos, multiple games and more.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean every single Flash site works as it would on the desktop. Hulu, for example, still doesn’t work on a mobile device because the company wants to charge mobile users for access to its content. This Hulu Plus service will cost about $10 per month.
While the lack of Hulu is a bummer, we’ve found that Adobe Flash on Android works pretty well. In-browser video plays well and Adobe has done a lot to ensure its smartphone versions work well for mobile use cases. This includes the ability to play nice with the multitouch browser and support for the accelerometer.
This is just the first step in Adobe’s long-reaching mobile Flash strategy, as the company is trying to deliver all the content of the web to as many smartphones as possible including Android, BlackBerry, Palm, and Windows Phone.
Of course, the big exception is Apple and its iOS products like the iPhone and iPad. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said Flash is wrong for his company’s products and he believes that the technology is outdated when compared to HTML5.
The cynic could argue that Apple is afraid that Flash and AIR content could provide a major challenge to the Apple iTunes ecosystem, which is quickly becoming a cash cow for Apple. Still, Apple holds a lot of clout with its 100 million iOS users because these are highly sought after by developers and advertisers.
Check out our video of a beta version of Flash on a Google Nexus One.