Adobe unveiled in the recent Mobile World Congress the mobile version of AIR for the Android OS. Like its desktop counterpart, AIR on mobile devices would allow developers to create applications with access to the phone memory and other system attributes and which can be deployed easily on all mobile operating systems that support the runtime.

During the event demos of AIR were shown on the Motorola DROID, but the runtime would also be available for other operating systems such as Blackberry. The new Flash CS5 Professional will allow exporting a mobile application created into a native iPhone application or an AIR application for a mobile device making it very easy to deploy the same project on multiple platforms simultaneously.

You can read more about this and watch demo videos at the Flash Mobile Blog.

There still isn’t any official release date for Flash CS5 Professional – the tool that will enable developers to create native iPhone applications or AIR applications for mobile devices.

Earlier this month Adobe release the public beta of its upcoming AIR 2.0 SDK – codenamed Athena. The latest version of the SDK will enable you to create AIR applications with new features such as the support for mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, multi-touch gestures, HTML5 & CSS3 support, and many other new features. You can learn more about Athena and download the SDK at Adobe Labs.

Google uncovered a lot of details yesterday about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS. This operating system is based on the the Google Chrome browser and will not have any native applications at all, and even though Adobe is an official partner of Google Chrome OS, this means that Adobe AIR will NOT be supported.

However, in its demo, Google showed how Flash for delivering the gaming experience on Chrome OS – which can obviously be done on any other browser as well. That is not to say that Flash will be the ONLY solution for creating applications and games on Google Chrome as many rich web applications, including these made by Google, are written in AJAX (which may or may not include Flash elements).

You can learn more about Google Chrome OS from Google’s official blog.

Adobe released today the beta editions of Adobe Air 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, the next two major releases for both technologies. The most major feature added to both is the support for multi-touch input – which, however, cannot be used without having a device that support multi-touch such HP TouchSmart or a Dell Latitude XT2 running Windows 7. The FAQs say that you should be able to interact with the gestures of the multi-touch pads of Macbook Pros, but I couldn’t get mine to work with the samples available online.

Other additions to AIR 2.0 include support for the detection of mass storage devices, access to raw microphone data, the ability to open a file with its default application and other new improvements. These editions are going to help increase the popularity of using the Adobe AIR platform for creating cross-platform desktop applications with online functionality.

The new release of Flash Player 10.1 is meant to be the first step for creating a consistent Flash experience across desktop and mobile platforms, however, the beta for this edition of the player is now only available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. Though not available for mobile phones yet, but this player should be the one to properly allow the use of AS3 on mobile devices.

You can check out the demos by visiting the links above and check out sample movies to showcase the capability of the new players. I test Adobe AIR 2.0 on my Macbook Pro and it seems to work just fine.

Earlier this week at FTIC Adobe showed a snap shot of its roadmap for mobile devices for next year. Included in the roadmap is Flash Lite 4, which is expected to be released only for low-end mobile phones and feature phones. This new of Flash Lite should be the first version to support ActionScript 3.0.

Adobe also plans on rolling out Flash Player 10 for more powerful smart phones such as those running Android. This version of the Player should be able to run all Flash movies running on normal desktops and should also include features such as hardware acceleration.

Air Mobile should also come out in 2010. This should come out as a standalone player that will enable running mobile applications.

The year 2010 should be interesting for Flash mobile developers. The support of ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Lite should finally make it possible for us to leave ActionScript 2.0 for good and enjoy the goodness of AS3 on all mobile devices.

You can learn more about this at Dan young’s blog and Scott Janousek’s blog.

Our latest tutorial will teach you how to create a simple AIR application that works as a clock widget. The application will also have basic AIR-online functionality such as dragging the whole window and closing the application. The tutorial will cover the whole process for creating the application including the signing process. You can view this tutorial here.

Adobe recently released a new product in Labs called Adobe Wave, which is basically a service tied to an AIR application to send updates directly to the desktop of end users. It serves the same function as a desktop based RSS reader, but is proprietary, does not read regular RSS feeds, and has no web based access for users to check the latest updates. The service will probably not have any wide spread due to the effort necessary for publishers to set up their feeds and integrate the Wave API into existing feeds.

Anyway, Flash developers should still check it out because it is a great example of a light-weight AIR application that has a nice simple interface and great web connectivity.

You can learn more about Adobe Wave at Adobe Labs.