The long-awaited release has been redesigned from the ground up with new performance and mobile-specific features, Adobe officials said. Flash Player 10.1 is the first release that brings the full Web across desktops and devices. Mobile users will now be able to experience millions of sites with rich applications and content inside the browser including games, animations, rich Internet applications (RIAs), data presentations and visualizations, e-commerce, music, video, audio, and more.

On June 22, Adobe announced that Flash Player 10.1 also was released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be preinstalled on smartphones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.

"We are thrilled that more than three million Flash designers and developers are now able to unleash their creativity on the world of smartphones, tablets, netbooks, televisions and other consumer electronics," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of Platform Business at Adobe, in a statement. "The combined power of the leading rich media technology platform with millions of passionate creatives is sure to impact the world in ways we haven’t even imagined yet."

The new Smart Rendering feature ensures that Flash content is running only when it becomes visible on the screen, further reducing CPU and battery consumption. With Sleep Mode, Flash Player automatically slows down when the device transitions into screen saver mode. Advanced Out-of-Memory Management allows the player to effectively handle non-optimized content that consumes excessive resources, while automatic memory reduction decreases content usage of RAM by up to 50 percent. Flash Player pauses automatically when events occur such as incoming phone calls or switching from the browser to other device functions. Once users switch back to the browser, Flash Player resumes where it paused.

"With Flash Player 10.1 we aligned our development efforts to create a single run-time that works across desktops and devices. Performance and power efficiency was a huge focus since different devices have varying sized processors and memory, and we needed to ensure Flash Player 10.1 would work across all of them. So we made a number of changes to Flash Player that directly translate to faster execution and reduced resource consumption. We achieved some large gains in reducing the amount of memory used at runtime, particularly for bitmap-intensive apps."