Bad news for those of you who were looking forward to the release of the Motorola Xoom, the world’s first Honeycomb-based tablet. It seems that the tablet will not ship with Adobe Flash at launch, and that you’ll have to wait to sometime this spring to see proper Flash support. That’s a shame.
The Xoom will be released this Thursday, and eyes keener than mine have spotted, in tiny print alongside the bottom of a Verizon Wireless ad this ominous warning: “Adobe Flash expected Spring 2011.”
Expected, eh?
Let’s not forget that, technically, Spring 2011 can be anywhere from late March to late June. Wonderful, no?
This, taken together with the fact that the Xoom will cost quite a bit more than the iPad, would seem to be the kind of news that Android fans could do without.
But that being said, how big of a loss is the lack of mobile Flash? It’s not like you can watch Hulu on anything but an approved browser, and YouTube and Netflix (and others) work just fine using non-Flash implementations on the iPad. Not to sound like an iPad fanboy—guess who came up with the five reasons not to buy a tablet?—but I don’t see anything here that would knock it off its perch.