Adobe Air 2.5 announced with support for mobiles and TVs

Adobe Air 2.5 - if you look carefully you'll see it's balancing on a G-string

Adobe has formally announced Air 2.5 – with support not only for the PC, but also mobile phones and television, with massive names like Samsung, Acer, HTC, Motorola and RIM all set to support the system runtime.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (Air) allows developers to build rich internet applications using the likes of flash, HTML or Ajax, and the move from desktop to mobile and TV is a significant one for the company.

Samsung's SmartTV will be the first platform to ship with Adobe Air support, but some of the biggest names in mobile manufacturing are also readying device support.

Leverage existing code

"A key element of the Adobe Flash Platform, Air enables developers to leverage existing code to create and deliver standalone applications across devices and platforms," explains Adobe.

"Adobe AIR now supports smartphones and tablets based on Android, iOS, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and desktops including Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

"In addition, Samsung will be the first television manufacturer to ship Adobe Air in its line of Samsung SmartTV devices while Acer, HTC, Motorola, RIM, Samsung and others are expected to ship the runtime pre-installed on a variety of devices including tablets and smartphones later this year and early 2011."

Adobe InMarket

To support this new arrival, Adobe InMarket was also announced – a marketplace for developers to "easily distribute and sell their applications on app stores across different device types from Acer, Intel, and others."

"With the release of Air 2.5 more than three million Flash developers can now build a single game or application and easily deploy it across multiple application stores and devices," said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Creative and Interactive Solutions Business at Adobe.

"This is a huge step forward for developers looking to build rich, engaging applications but have historically had to incur the cost of building and deploying this content across multiple devices and platforms."

Adobe Air 2.5 also brings new features including support for smartphone features like accelerometer, camera, video, microphone, gestures, geo-location and multi-touch.

Patrick Goss is the ex-Editor in Chief of TechRadar. Patrick was a passionate and experienced journalist, and he has been lucky enough to work on some of the finest online properties on the planet, building audiences everywhere and establishing himself at the forefront of digital content. After a long stint as the boss at TechRadar, Patrick has now moved on to a role with Apple, where he is the Managing Editor for the App Store in the UK.