Flash Player 10.2 Update Out Today, Supposedly Improves Performance on Non-Honeycomb Devices
It’s finally March 18th and that means Adobe should be issuing the update to Flash Player 10.2 sometime today. The update adds support and performance enhancements for Android 3.0 Honeycomb which explains why the Motorola XOOM didn’t ship with the Player.
According to Adobe, though, other changes and fixes have improved Flash performance for more than just Honeycomb dual-core devices. I haven’t gotten the update yet myself (and I didn’t install the one that was floating around the internet last week), but Engadget says there’s a noticeable improvement in performance when playing back a 480p video on YouTube using their Motorola DROID 2. (That device has a 1GHz OMAP 3 processor, by the way.)
They say that the Motorola XOOM played those same 480p videos back “perfectly smooth”, though HD 720p still gave them trouble. Unfortunately, this is because Adobe has not yet enabled hardware acceleration in what is said to be a beta release. It’ll be switched on in a future update that Adobe says should make HD playback “really smooth”. Look out for the upgrade on your Android 2.2+ device today and let us know when it appears by hitting us up here.