Flash 10 already supports HD video on the desktop, but 10.1 -- announced this week at Adobe's MAX conference in Los Angeles -- is being billed the first to really reap the full benefits of the Open Screen Project by unifying feature sets across a wide variety of platforms on the desktop, the laptop, and the pocket. As usual, Windows, Mac, and Linux will all get hooked up with the latest release, but public betas of 10.1 for Windows Mobile and webOS will be hitting before the end of the year as well followed by Android and Symbian in "early" 2010. RIM's also gotten official with its rumored membership in the Open Screen Project, though the lack of a timeline for 10.1 support in BlackBerry OS is a stark reminder of the long technical road that lies ahead for Waterloo as it tries to match the smartphone competition tit-for-tat in the multimedia space. At the end of the day, mobile Flash means nothing without the horsepower to properly drive it, so let's hope that Tegra, Snapdragon, and next-generation architectures like OMAP4 start to come on board en masse just as these builds come out of beta.

Speaking of fast chipsets, the other big news out of the show is that Flash 10.1 will take advantage of GPU acceleration on a number of key mobile platforms, including both nVidia's Tegra and Qualcomm's Snapdragon alongside ION for smooth (well, theoretically smooth) 720p and 1080p video on the latest generation of netbooks and smartbooks.

Update: Added video of the Palm Pre running three instances of Flash in parallel after the break.

Read - Flash 10.1 announcement
Read - RIM joins the OSP

	CLIQ	Galaxy	Tattoo	Hero	Magic / MT3G	Dream / G1
Carrier	T-Mobile	-- (GSM / HSDPA)	-- (GSM / EDGE)	Sprint	T-Mobile	T-Mobile
Manuf.	Motorola	Samsung	HTC	HTC	HTC	HTC
Price	--	--	--	$179.99	$99.99	$149.99
Released	--	July 2009	--	Oct 11, 2009	Aug 5, 2009	Oct 22, 2008
Keyboard	Slide-out	Virtual	Virtual	Virtual	Virtual	Slide-out
Android	MOTOBLUR	Standard	Sense UI	Sense UI	Standard	Standard
Processor	528MHz MSM7201A	528MHz ARM11	528MHz MSM7225	528MHz MSM7201A	528MHz MSM7201A	528MHz MSM7201A
Screen	3.1-inch (est.), 320 x 480	3.2-inch, 320 x 480	2.8-inch, 240 x 320	3.2-inch, 320 x 480	3.2-inch, 320 x 480	3.2-inch, 480 x 320
Headphone	3.5mm	3.5mm	3.5mm	3.5mm	ExtUSB	ExtUSB
Touchscreen	Capacitive	Capacitive	Resistive	Capacitive	Capacitive	Capacitive
Still Camera	5MP with AF	5MP with Flash	3.2MP	5MP with AF	3.2MP with AF	3.2MP with AF
Bluetooth	2.0	2.1	2.0	2.0	2.0	2.0
Exchange	ActiveSync	ActiveSync	--	ActiveSync	Depends on version	Depends on version
Storage	256MB, microSD	8GB, microSD	512MB, microSD	512MB, microSD	512MB, microSD	256MB, microSD
Battery	1400mAh	1500mAh	1100mAh	1500 mAh	1340 mAh	1150 mAh
Weight	163g	114g	113g	135g	116g	158g

It's been over 11 months since the Android first hit the scene with HTC's T-Mobile G1, and in that time we've come to the conclusion that, despite having more or less a clean slate on industrial design choices and specs, little progress has been made in the way of variation. Stacked up side-to-side, Motorola CLIQ manages to stand out with a slide-out keyboard and MOTOBLUR skin, but under the hood, it's pretty much as uniform as a netbook. Peruse for yourself in the chart above.

We just got a look at the myTouch 3G, and while it's great to see T-Mobile's next Android phone all official and everything, there are certainly few surprises for those of us already familiar with the HTC Magic / Google Ion. We found ourselves, despite the best knowledge otherwise, still looking fruitlessly for a 3.5mm headphone jack -- it was silly that the G1 didn't ship with it, but this year it's downright shameful. At least the included adapter is nice. Please, HTC Hero, come and save us from this madness. Fresh off our play time with the Hero, we found the stock Android 1.5 keyboard to be quite a bit of a step back. It's certainly usable, but we found ourselves missing the spacebar quite a lot, and the responsiveness just wasn't at HTC's level, though prediction was pretty good. The included zippered case is nice, though we don't know what we'd use it for, and the unboxing experience is generally pleasant and uneventful. In a lot of ways, the phone seems like a last generation product, but it's obviously the only one of its kind available in the States at the moment, so we suppose T-Mobile would beg to differ. Every single cover we've seen so far looks completely horrible, and while it's nice to have "options," we'd think twice before putting a pic of our dog on the back of one of these. Perhaps the best news making the rounds is that T-Mobile is thinking about putting a Visual Voicemail app in the forthcoming app pack, though it wasn't pre-loaded on any of the handset we checked out, and apparently the app pack is more of a curated Market than a single app combo download. Peep an enthralling video of the hardware after the break.

Can't wait until July to check out every nook and cranny of T-Mobile's version of the Ion / Magic? A couple of tipsters, including one anonymously, have lent us a hand in that department with pictures of an apparent myTouch 3G unboxing, as well as an entire user guide dating back to May 19th. We're still rummaging through it ourselves, but so far we're not seeing anything we didn't already know or see for ourselves with the phone's many other releases. Completionists can hit up the 113-page manual in the gallery below.


[Thanks, Derek]

Looks like our hopeless optimism might win again. Android lovers who didn't get their hands on the Google Ion (a.k.a. HTC Magic) already can look forward to a summer launch of T-Mobile's version, myTouch 3G. According to the Wall Street Journal citing, the ever-resourceful "people familiar with the matter" group, all the details will be announced next week. Of course, the definition of "summer" can be stretched pretty far, we dare say even into September, but regardless of that technically, it seems promising the G1 successor is just over the horizon. Excited? We are.

By our calendars, "early summer" is pretty much now -- so we're excited to hear that T-Mobile USA has officially announced its plans to release its next Android-powered device in that timeframe. The carrier isn't saying what that phone is, but if we were the betting type, our money would be on a carrier-branded version of the HTC Magic / Google Ion -- possibly to be called the myTouch 3G -- especially since it's been rumored for eons and we now have unlocked AWS versions of the phone out and about. Stay tuned as we find out more.

Call it a sign of the times, call it a Google I/O attendee who just didn't really like the Ion, call it an overabundance of Western-style capitalism, call it man's almost instinctive need to generate profit -- whatever the case, one of the 4,000 specially-branded Ions given away at the conference this week is now available to the highest bidder. Never mind the fact that it's an I/O special edition, though -- outside of this particular device, we're not sure where you can find a 1700MHz 3G HTC Magic at any price, so we're sure this is going to be worth plenty of cold, hard cash to plenty of people who aren't in San Francisco at the moment. Oh, and don't worry if you miss out on this one; we'd be shocked if there weren't others in the pipeline.

[Via TmoToday]