Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

What makes Flash 10.1 so important is its new dedicated support for mobile playback. Take a look at the list of new features in 10.1 – improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage and rendering along with support for multi-touch, accelerometers, automatic pause, sleep mode, adaptive frame rate and hardware video acceleration – and you’ll see that it’s a major rewrite designed with one aim in mind: extending full Flash usage from the desktop to the device.

With the phone market dwarfing that of desktop computers, Flash 10.1 is key to Adobe’s plans to “Enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere” – the mission statement of the Adobe-led Open Screen Project (OSP).

What makes Adobe likely to succeed in this aim is less the list of new features than the list of partners that have signed up to the OSP and to supporting 10.1: Palm, Motorola, Intel, ARM, Sony Ericsson, NVIDIA, Samsung, HTC, Nokia and, since October, RIM and Google. Microsoft is not on the list, unsurprisingly considering its similar ambitions for Silverlight, but Windows Mobile 6.5 support is built in.

It all sounds so simple: just produce web-optimised content in the same old way but now it will automatically work as well on a handheld device as it does on the desktop. No more Flash Lite. No more Device Central. Everything just working seamlessly across any device, anywhere…

…That’s the dream, but let’s get real.

To begin with, Adobe clearly still has to cater for older and less powerful devices that aren’t up to supporting 10.1 so Flash Lite is not ready for the scrapheap quite yet. In fact it was revealed recently that the player is set to be updated in 2010 with Flash Lite 4.0 providing ActionScript 3.0 support and browser-based playback .

Which raises the whole question of standalone applications for mobiles. As both Flash 10.1 and Flash Lite 4.0 are designed for browsing (as Mark Doherty from Adobe recently confirmed) then the future for standalone applications clearly lies with AIR.

On this front, yesterday Adobe also announced the launch of the AIR 2.0 beta which raises further questions regarding compatibility and device support – especially as one of its new features is the ability to extend the cross-platform AIR runtime with native code. However, there’s no mention of smartphones.

As the Open Screen Project home page makes clear though, AIR support is very much part of Adobe’s plans for the future. And certain hints on the Adobe AIR team blog, for example, suggest that AIR support for smartphones (or at least Android) is well advanced.

Then there’s Apple. After Microsoft, the most obvious name missing from Adobe’s list of OSP partners is arguably the most important of all. And, unlike Microsoft, Apple simply refuses to let Flash anywhere near the iPhone under the terms of its SDK.

However Adobe is not going to let a little thing like that stop it. As it announced at AdobeMAX, Adobe’s  solution is to enable ActionScript 3-based Flash CS5 projects to be recompiled and targeted natively at the iPhone. This went down a treat with the audience, but it will inevitably add a whole new raft of compatibility issues and another layer of complexity.

My original feeling on this was: why not keep things simple and just wait for performance to improve and for Apple to cave in? On reflection though I think that this compiling to native code is a natural extension of the Flash/AIR line-up allowing cross-platform cores to be fine-tuned to individual platforms.

Finally there’s the whole question of how best to target the mobile device. Nowadays most serious Flash developers are using Flex, so particularly relevant here is the announcement on Adobe Labs of “Slider” a mobile-optimized version of the Flex framework.  To an extent Slider sounds like Flex Lite, a streamlined subset of functionality designed to boost performance on less powerful systems. However with a whole new raft of dedicated features for managing screens, resolution-independent sizing and mobile form factors and input methods it’s going to add as much functionality as it cuts. And, with it, add new complexity.

The benefits of mobile playback are  enormous and the launch of Flash Player 10.1 is unreservedly welcome. However it’s also clear that the dream of simple cross-device playback is for the consumer, not for the producer. Device Central is not going to disappear; it’s going to become more central. And so is Flex/Flash Builder/Slider and the all-new Flash Catalyst.

Transitioning to the new world of cross-device development is certainly not going to be as trivial as that point release implies.