Adobe roadmap says Flash lives! Focus on browser gaming

Thought Flash was gone forever? Adobe wants you to think again.

While they announced the halted development of the Flash plugin for all mobile platforms in Q4 of last year, Adobe clearly still has plans for everyones’ favorite/least favorite multimedia platform, as made evident by the roadmap released today. The PDF that showed up on Twitter early this morning gives a much clearer picture of where Adobe is going to continue to develop and support Flash.

They are planning to narrow focus to two priority areas: what they are calling “premium video” and gaming. The latter is targeted for using Flash as a browser-based gaming solution, where it has already dominated for years. As far as the former, Adobe says they want to collaborate better with their partners in order to bring native video streaming and content protection technology to more platforms.

The roadmap lays out a fairly aggressive intended release cycle beginning with Flash Player 11.2 in Q1 of this year and continuing with a Q2 release and more in the second half of the year. Additionally, it goes on to discuss what they call Flash Next which is said to “ensure that the Flash runtimes meet the needs of developers over the next five to 10 years.” Does that sound like a dead platform to any of you?

Source: Adobe (PDF)
Via: Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter)

Qualcomm Gobi Generation Five: the Mr. Fantastic of cellular chipsets

Earlier today Qualcomm announced the newest version of its Gobi line of chipsets. Gobi chipsets were originally used mostly to embed a multi-carrier mobile broadband into laptops and was first widely utilized by HP starting in 2008 when the first version was released. It was more recently (and much more widely) used as the cell architecture for every iPhone since the Verizon iPhone 4.

What new features has Qualcomm brought to the table for their latest iteration? Most importantly: LTE support.

The fifth-gen Gobi chipsets will support a number of different LTE configurations, while retaining backwards compatibility with HSPA+ and EV-DO. This means that the newest additions to the Gobi family will be even more flexible then their predecessors, allowing for a device with a single cellular chipset to access “true 4G” and 3G networks all over the world.

It also adds integrated GPS capability, and is said to specifically “support leading platforms, such as Windows 8 and Android”.

This is extremely exciting for anyone who uses unlocked devices, or is “turned on” by the idea of being able to carrier hop with a single device and still get 4G data access. I mentioned the potential for such a chipset back in July in my editorial discussing my version of a US wireless market Utopia and how close (or far) we are from it. I’m really happy to see Qualcomm continue to develop the Gobi reference platform as I continue to think that hardware advances like this will move us in the right direction. Granted, there are still a lot of steps carriers can take to prevent carrier-agnostic devices from becoming the norm. Nevertheless, here’s to hoping that future Google Nexi, Apple iPhones, Motorola Droids and Samsung Galaxies will be able to float from carrier to carrier much easier than this sentence can float off your tongue right now.

Source: Qualcomm
Via: 9to5mac

Leaked slide reveals the HP Pre3 may be even later than you thought

Early this week PreCentral made available several leaked HP slides which illustrate what the webOS roadmap for the remainder of 2011 may look like. While the intended release of 64GB and 4G models of the Touchpad in August are not overly unexpected, it is the appearance of the Pre3 under the Fall release category which concerns me. When HP’s next attempt at breaking into the smartphone market was announced back in early February, my overall impression was that the tech community was quite excited for it. That announcement was shared with their equally as exciting attempt at the tablet market with the Touchpad, and the questionable inclusion of the HP Veer, “the world’s smallest 4G phone”.