Flash Player 10.1 Gets Official; Android Version Imminent

Having been in beta for the past few months, Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 has finally emerged as an official release for Windows, Mac and Linux systems.  Packing such niceties as hardware-based H.264 video decoding, HTTP Dynamic Streaming, peer-assisted networking and Multicast, Flash Player 10.1 also includes multitouch support – such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale and two-finger tap – for compatible hardware, and boosted Mac support; on OS X machines, the player is a full-fledged Cocoa app.  Elsewhere, Adobe AIR 2 is also finalized and publicly available.

Adobe reckon 10.1 brings with it reduced power usage, the ability to fast-forward and rewind through web video without always querying the remote server, and functionality to offload video tasks to compatible GPUs rather than bog down the CPU.  There's also a new privacy mode, which respects browsers set to private and doesn't locally cache content.

The official Flash Player 10.1 can be downloaded here.  Meanwhile, Flash Player 10.1 for Android – also currently in beta – will arrive as an official release later in June.