Any preconceptions that Flash wasn’t going to be available on Android’s tablet-friendly Honeycomb 3.0 have been swiftly dismissed in a blog post from Adobe who confirmed it won’t be available at launch but will be avavilable within a couple of weeks.
It’s thought the Motorola Xoom is going to be the first tablet to be available and it will come with Flash sometime in March but Adobe has kept its options open with that "few weeks" statement. The rest of Adobe's blog post is reserved for bigging up Flash and inherently giving the Flashphobic iPad a little kick.
With the flood of iPad wannabes expected to continue apace over the next few weeks and months, there’s no telling how many of them will ship without the seemingly essential Flash Player. It also remains to be seen how ‘finished’ the first release will be, given that the Windows and Mac versions of the grown-up software have been around forever and still have a well-founded reputation for being crashtastic.
Apple’s well-publicised ban on the Flash Player on its own portable devices was partly down to Adobe’s inability to meet launch deadlines for Apple devices and because it’s one of the main reasons Safari crashes, it looks like this latests announcement is yet another vindication of Steve Jobs’ unpopular yet practical decision to look to HTML 5 as the future of Internet video.