Adobe detailed their new Flash Player 10.1 on the Palm Pre the other day at their Adobe MAX developers’ conference and might we say this looks very promising indeed. Much was covered in regards to what is possible with the webOS integration with multi-touch and use of the accelerometer.

The smartphone version of Flash Player 10.1 has built-in content protection, support for HTTP video streaming and can also work with peer-assisted networking. This version has been optimized to take advantage of hardware acceleration to watch memory and energy consumption to save our much-needed battery life. This does not yet pertain to webOS as of yet but is a possibility in the future when it is further along in development. The memory consumption optimization is so far advanced that it has usage rates at 40-70% lower than Flash 10. Think of that kind of usage eating up all the memory that the Pre does not have to spare.

Generally speaking Adobe Flash Player playing a video is estimated to get 3.4 hours of battery life, Flash animation on the other hand is getting 6.5 hours of battery life in the same situation. Say you did everything you could to conserve battery like turning brightness down, ending all other processes and turning off any radio signals, this would give you 14.5 hours of battery. Needless to say the Pre and other powerful smartphone will not pull such great battery life but it certainly gives us a lot of hope for having working Flash support on our handsets.