Whether you like Flash or not, it's a technology that defines a lot of of our web experience: rich media applications, games, animations, video and audio content players, are built with Flash.

With the evolution of smartphones, browsing the web on a mobile device has become more and more a standard, but up until now, most mobile users had to download a Flash Lite plug in to load sites, apps or players built with that Adobe Technology.

Things are about to change since Adobe recently announced the release of Flash Player 10.1, redesigned with new performance and mobile specific features that will bring the full web experience across desktops and devices.

These release is not free of polemics, due to the recent refusal of Apple to support Flash in popular products like the iPhone and the iPad. Steve Jobs recently argued that the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards, and they are all areas where Flash falls short. Coincidentally, high performance and low power consumption are two improvements of the Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, Apple wants developers to take advantage of iPhone's features and not make them all look on all mobile platforms.

This decision will force developers to use HTML 5 to load videos, or create animations, for example, instead of Adobe's proprietary plug-in, if they want their content to load correctly on iPhones.

Opposite to Apple's stand, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm will include the the Flash Player 10.1 on their products, so that users can choose whether they want to enable that content on their devices or not.

The ability to load Flash content will then be one of the differenciating factors between the brand new iPhone 4.0 and the announced update of Android's OS: Froyo, to be fully released soon.

We'll have to wait and see how these battle of giants unfolds.

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