Good news for those Android users who have been able to update to the Android 2.2 OS “Froyo“, Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 has been released into the Android Market. Though there does seem to have a decent performance boost with the new beta, some things we were hoping for remain to be seen.
I haven’t been able to try this one out since I’m Nexus One-less for the moment, but it looks like the new Adobe Flash 10.1 Player beta has some performance enhancements. Most notably, people are reporting that load times are much faster, virtually zero lag, and the frame rate has improved, giving the users a much smoother experience. Users have said that many Flash-based websites that were viewable, but not perfect, have been ironed out and are now much more enjoyable. While we’re always happy to see an update, things like hardware acceleration are not present, and probably won’t be until the player is out of beta. But with Froyo officially on its way to the Nexus One and Motorola Droid, we can imagine Adobe is almost ready to take the Flash 10.1 Player out of beta sometime soon.
Since I have yet to play with the new Flash Player beta, I’m not sure if the work-around to get Hulu working was blocked or not. I say this because a “fixed flash” application has been released, which allows you to view Hulu. You’ll still have to input the “about:debug” text into the address bar, and change your UAString to desktop though. Success of the ‘fixed’ flash application has only worked for some people, so there may be a chance it won’t work for you. I won’t be posting a link to this, but you can find it where most Android magic happens.
So hopefully when the Froyo is officially released to the masses, given that it’s not held back by carriers and device manufacturers, which will probably be the case, users will be able to view full flash websites with hardware acceleration. If Adobe delivers a great Flash experience for other smartphones, as they already are on Android, there will be less and less need to have “an app for that,” unless you have one of those other sexy phones.
[Via: Phandroid]