The imminent launch on Thursday of the Motorola Xoom, the first device to launch with Android Honeycomb, wouldn't be complete without at least one more surprise from Motorola and Verizon. While Xoom are finally being seen in significant numbers at some Best Buy stores in preparation for the launch, an advertisement for the Xoom has revealed it will ship without Adobe Flash support.
According to the picture above taken from a Verizon Wireless advertisement, Adobe Flash is "expected" to become available for the Xoom (and likely any other Honeycomb device) sometime in Spring of this year. Engadget apparently reached out to Motorola for confirmation, who said:
Motorola XOOM will include full support for Adobe® Flash® Player® for accessing the rich video and animations of the web, to be available after launch.
We heard about the announcement of Adobe Flash 10.2 a week ago, and based on what we know so far, it seems to be a version of Adobe Flash specifically aimed at tablets and other "mobile devices." At the time, Adobe indicated that Flash 10.2 should be available "in the next few weeks."
It seems logical to then assume that the Xoom will not launch with support for Adobe Flash 10.1. In all likelihood, 10.2 will not only improve the performance of Flash, but is also the only version which will work correctly on Android Honeycomb.
This new revelation also supports Engadget's earlier opinion that Flash 10.2 will be coming to mobile devices such as smartphones, if we assume that Flash 10.2 is the only version of Adobe Flash that will work on Android Honeycomb. We've heard several times that Honeycomb will be coming to smartphones in some form or another, so I would say it's a safe bet that Android tablets and smartphones will be running Adove Flash 10.2 within a few months.
No word on a more exact release date for the 10.2 update other than Spring 2011, so anyone out there thinking of buying a Xoom should make sure they understand that Flash content won't be available for a few weeks.
Image from Verizon Wireless
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