Adobe released its new version of Flash Player 10.2 for Android Honeycomb yesterday with a promise of features and functionality for Android tablets. Yet, there is a problem.
Android tablets cannot yet support Flash 10.2.
In a note sent along with the release, Adobe said, “Please note that users of the Motorola Xoom and other tablets that run Android 3.0.1 will not be able to experience Flash Player improvements until the devices receive an upcoming update to Honeycomb.”
Adobe is ready for Android yet it seems that Android is not ready for Adobe. The saga of Honeycomb’s missing features continues.
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There is good news here for the reported 250,000 Xoom tablets that Motorola has reportedly shipped – there is a software update coming soon. It is not often that developers are actually ahead of functionality before the maker of the OS. But that seems to have been the case with Honeycomb since it was released. A lot of promises and not much but a buggy, unfinished user experience returned. As our Sarah Perez said it early this week, “I don’t want to buy your prototype device.“
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When the Xoom launched in late February, the promise was that there would be Flash integration and LTE compatibility updates coming within the month. Flash Player 10.1 did come for Honeycomb in mid-March but it was Android conforming to Adobe’s build as opposed to the other way around.
To be honest, I really wanted to buy a Xoom when it first came out. I went to Best Buy, I sat there and played with it, admired its power and quality design. I even went to Verizon and had a salesman hold one in stock for me. Poor fellow must have been disappointed when I never came back. So, I bought an iPad 2 instead and am happy with the decision. My theory is that I can sell the iPad 2 if there is an Android tablet that comes along and blows my socks off. Either that, or keep both tablets. I am a tech writer after all. Being able to test apps on various gadgets is part of the job. Also, having the newest technology around my apartment is a bit of a status symbol, but that is beside the point.
It is not just Flash or the lack of tablet specific apps that stayed my wallet. It was the promise of functionality to come with an ambiguous timeframe. Yes, technology moves fast but really not as fast as most people perceive. The gadget market moves fast because there are a lot of players and stiff competition. But the base technologies take a while to develop. Like QNX for the BlackBerry PlayBook or making sure that Honeycomb functions at all, these have been projects in the making for years and they are still not done. The iPad did not just arrive out of thin air. Apple has been developing the OS, hardware and ecosystem since the iPod debuted. That is 10 years of tinkering that everybody else is trying to cram into three.
In the case of Verizon’s 4G LTE, this is not just a matter of waiting for an OTA update to a Honeycomb tablet. There is infrastructure (towers and backhaul and so forth) to deal with and making sure that LTE plays nice with hardware. A number of LTE smartphones have been delayed recently including the Motorola Bionic and HTC Thunderbolt because of issues with LTE. Hence, the Xoom waits with everyone else during the growing pains of promised technology.
Eventually, the thought is, that Google will finally get ahead of the game and release version of Honeycomb that is as fluid and functional as iOS. But as Adobe today shows us, that time has not come quite yet.
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