Palm Pre gets Adobe Flash Player and Paid Apps

Two big things happened yesterday for Palm Pre owners that should makes owning this device sheer pleasure (as if that wasn’t already the case). One was the announcement of Flash Player 10.1 and the second was that the app catalog finally has its first set of paid apps.

Yesterday, Adobe announced that Flash player 10.1 would be available for devices running WebOS and Windows Mobile later this year. The betas for Android and Symbian OS are expected to be available in early 2010. So what exactly does this mean to the average mobile user? Full flash content on your mobile device. Now when you visit sites such as youtube.com you can play videos directly from the browser instead of using a separate application.  “With Flash Player moving to new mobile platforms, users will be able to experience virtually all Flash technology based Web content and applications wherever they are,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

For all of the details about release dates and supported platforms check out the full press release.

But the real treat that came with yesterday’s announcement was that Adobe decided to demo some of the features of the upcoming flash player release on the Palm Pre.  Check the video to see what’s in store for Palm Pre users.

The next big news of the day was the addition of paid apps into the app catalog along with a number of free apps as well.  There are currently 125 apps in total in the catalog and 13 paid apps.  Prices range from .99 to $7.99.  There are games, gps tools, news readers etc. Again if the app catalog is moving too slowly for you I suggest going the homebrew route.

But it looks like as a whole things are picking up quite nicely for Palm, the little engine that could, and I personally am glad to be along for the ride.