Adobe AIR 2.5 announced, supports smartphones, tablets, TVs and desktops

Yesterday's session of the MAX 2010 conference saw the announcement of the latest iteration to AIR, Adobe's desktop runtime for HTML, Ajax, Flex, and (of course) Flash. AIR 2.5 brings greater device support with it, covering smartphones and tablets running BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android and iOS; Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop; and TVs, with Samsung the first to jump on-board the AIR bandwagon with its Smart TVs due in 2011. With support for hardware features, such as accelerometers, GPS, cameras, microphones, and multi-touch, and hardware acceleration (currently only available for Windows) to make sure that the experience is still smooth, AIR could make quite a convincing write-it-once, get-it-out-on-everything platform. Adobe's even leveraging its Adobe InMarket to help developers get their AIR-driven apps packaged and into various app stores, minus its 30 percent cut of course.

Whether you'll be able to get AIR apps through Apple's approval process remains to be seen, but given Apple's relaxed stance, anything's possible. Excited Flex and Flash developers should be able to get the SDK imminently (currently still showing 2.0.2 at the time of writing), while the rest of us will have to sit back and wait with baited breath to see whether AIR 2.5 improves on its rather clunky forefathers

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