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The entire Android-loving public has been waiting for Flash 10.1 support on our beloved Android phones like the Droid and the Nexus One. Some lucky users of select handsets like the HTC Hero and Motorola Devour are graced with Flash Lite, but that has its fair share of limitations. So as we desperately wait for Adobe to bring Flash onboard, who will and won’t be getting a ticket to ride? A post on the Adobe forums suggests it won’t be decided exactly how we thought: Hi all, You can expect the final release for Android to be available mid-year. All Android devices that meet our minimum s/w and h/w requirements will be supported. Unfortunately, I cannot say a lot more publicly about our port to the Android platform at this time. As for WinMo, we have made the tough decision to defer support for that platform until WinMo7. This is due to the fact that WinMo6.5 does not support some of the critical APIs that we need. As for your other questions: * Yes, we will support the Motorola Milestone. * No, the HTC Hero will not be supported b/c it does not have the correct Anroid OS version and it’s chipset is not powerful enough. We require a device with an ARM v7 (Cortex) processor. Examples include the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets and TI OMAP3 series. Best regards, Antonio Antonio is an Adobe employee and this suggests something different than what we may have assumed – just because a handset is upgraded to Android 2.0 DOES NOT mean it will be eligible for Flash 10.1 and in fact, many phones won’t be able to enjoy Flash 10.1 regardless of OS updates. In addition to requiring Android 2.0, each phone will also require a minimum processor spec. Taylor from AndroidAndMe did a little research and made a list of US phones that, based on this information (and assuming its true), will not ever have Flash 10.1 capabilities: Sprint Hero Sprint Moment T-Mobile G1 T-Mobile myTouch 3G T-Mobile CLIQ T-Mobile Behold II Verizon Droid Eris Verizon Devour What a shame, what a shame. Hopefully they’ll at least release it to those ready, willing and able by the first half of 2010 as they’ve promised. And hopefully we can have some more clarification on exactly what phones will and won’t enjoy Flash in the future. Afterall, there are people making purchase decisions NOW based on what features their phone might have in a few months from now. We just want some transparency so we can make informed buying decisions! [ Adobe Forum via PocketNow , Thanks Reese!]

Check out the latest Admob reports and a few glaring characteristics will jump out at you – we’ll point them out so you don’t have to sift through the entire report: (1) Android users love their free apps (2) The Market has a lot of Mandroids browsing And this is exactly what Android’s detractors would say – Android is for geeky guys and penny pinchers. Instead, I’d say it suggests the success of the Open Source mentality and the Laissez-faire approach on market regulation. Google has provided an arena where free solutions that are equal or close to paid solutions are widely available. That doesn’t mean developers can’t make bank – go ahead and support your apps with advertising and sponsorships – if I’m getting an app for free I have no problem seeing ads, knowing that it’s what compensates the devs. What I thought was the MOST impressive from the report was something I’ve been saying all along: Android will dominate the iPhone by sheer power in numbers. And don’t tell me about “quality over quantity” because there are PLENTY of people who think the Droid and Nexus One both surpass the iPhone in awesomeness. And, there are many others who wouldn’t prefer any of the 3, but instead something like the Hero, CLIQ or Eve. Choices, choices, choices. Another thing made obvious by the above chart is that I have superior photoshop skills. [Via Admob , PDF Report ]

Check out the latest Admob reports and a few glaring characteristics will jump out at you – we’ll point them out so you don’t have to sift through the entire report: (1) Android users love their free apps (2) The Market has a lot of Mandroids browsing And this is exactly what Android’s detractors would say – Android is for geeky guys and penny pinchers. Instead, I’d say it suggests the success of the Open Source mentality and the Laissez-faire approach on market regulation. Google has provided an arena where free solutions that are equal or close to paid solutions are widely available. That doesn’t mean developers can’t make bank – go ahead and support your apps with advertising and sponsorships – if I’m getting an app for free I have no problem seeing ads, knowing that it’s what compensates the devs. What I thought was the MOST impressive from the report was something I’ve been saying all along: Android will dominate the iPhone by sheer power in numbers. And don’t tell me about “quality over quantity” because there are PLENTY of people who think the Droid and Nexus One both surpass the iPhone in awesomeness. And, there are many others who wouldn’t prefer any of the 3, but instead something like the Hero, CLIQ or Eve. Choices, choices, choices. Another thing made obvious by the above chart is that I have superior photoshop skills. [Via Admob , PDF Report ]

Short Version: Hey ladies! Your Droid is here. The Motorola Devour (it’s actually DEVOUR but I refuse to shout at you) is a social media Android phone with enough style to beat down a million Droids. But is it just one more brick in the Android wall? Features: Amazing extruded aluminum case MotoBLUR UI Full keyboard Removable battery 3.5mm headphone jack Pros: Removable storage Good interface performance MotoBLUR adds lots of social networking features Cons: A true toss-up between Droid and Devour Cramped keyboard Heavy Review: As if there were any doubt as to whether the Droid was from Mars and the Devour was from Venus, just think about last Devour commercial featuring an unclothed Megan Fox taking pictures of herself in a tub. Here, let me show you it: The Droid , if you recall, is a man’s phone. It is everything the Devour isn’t: thin, lithe, ready to cut, and mean like a snake. The Devour is the MacBook of the Motorola line, clad in soft, soothing aluminum and graced with an elegance that haven’t seen out of Motorola since the RAZR. The Phone The phone has a full 3.5mm jack and slide down keyboard. It has a small, hidden slot for a MicroSD card – it includes 8GB out of the box – and is fairly featureless except for three buttons on the right edge and a main optical trackpad/button below the message indicator. The 3.1-inch, 320

Ladies and gentlemen, I know have the Motorola Devour in my possession. It’s Verizon’s 3rd Android Phone and launches at BestBuy February 25th followed by VZW retail stores in March. Although its tech specs don’t quite match the Droid or Droid Eris in terms of pure horse power, I’m pretty excited about this phone if not only for the keyboard: Over the next several days you can expect a bunch of videos and reviews to be published on Phandroid so keep checking in or subscribe via RSS to find out our detailed thoughts and opinions. If you can’t wait any longer to converse about the Devour, head on over to the Motorola Devour Forum where plenty of people are already gathered.

As if gadget choices weren’t complicated enough, Best Buy might be making your Verizon Android handset decisions a lot more difficult. According to Best Buy’s Facebook page , the DROID is dropping down to just $99.99 with the DEVOUR going for the same exact rate when it’s released on February 25. So many choices, so little time! Need some help? If you’re eligible for an upgrade or you’re looking to pick up one of these devices whilst hopping onto the Verizon bandwagon, check out this video of CrunchGear’s initial impressions of the device. Still not convinced? Stay tuned for a full hands-on review of the DEVOUR and maybe your mind will be made up then. Oh, and if $99.99 seems pricey for these hot handsets, you’ll be glad to know that the Droid Eris can be had for free with a new two-year activation.

Motorola is cranking out Android handsets and its latest phone, the Devour, is here. The Devour has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, an aluminum body and a custom user interface called MotoBlur that aggregates contacts and feeds from different social networking sites, such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, into a single stream. Priced at $150 with a two-year contract, the Devour will become the third Android phone to run on the Verizon Wireless network next month. “The Devour is about streaming your social life into the phone,” says Dan Rudolph, director of product marketing for Motorola. “The more social networking accounts you have, the more value you will get from the phone.” Still, our first look at the Devour was disappointing. Under the hood, the phone isn’t state of the art in terms of its technical specification–it lacks multi-touch, it doesn’t feature the 1 GHz Qualcomm processor seen on the Nexus One and runs an older version of the Android operating system. Nor does it impress with its looks. The much-touted aluminum body aside, the phone is bulky, big and very retro in its styling. Here’s a closer look at it. The Devour is a slider phone with a physical keyboard that’s much more pleasant to use than the Motorola Droid . The keyboard, which seems carved directly into the aluminum body, has buttons that are soft yet respond firmly. But at 5.9 ounces the phone is a bulky beast. It weighs almost the same as the Droid but it is positively plus-sized when compared to its lightweight peers: The iPhone 3G S is only 4.8 ounces and the Nexus One is just 4.5 ounces. What makes the Devour seem hefty is its harsh, boxy look. Unlike the softer, rounded corners that are popular among most smartphones today, the Devour is a rectangular slab with sharp square edges in a hardware design that is reminiscent of the Palm VII. Motorola and Verizon say that they want to evoke a masculine look with the phone but hey, don’t boys want pretty devices too? The Devour screen is bright but not as vivid as the OLED display on the Nexus One and it seems to smudge very easily. Just a few minutes of using it left fingerprint marks all over the display. In an interesting twist, the Devour has a tiny touch-sensitive thumbpad on the right that can be used to scroll through the icons on the screen and select one. The slider, itself, though feels flimsy because it is also a toggle button on one of its sides. The phone has a 600 MHz Qualcomm processor that is a tad faster than the Droid’s but is significantly slower than the 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip used in the Nexus One. Instead of a removable back plane, the Devour has the cover for the battery and the microSD card at the side of the device–similar to what we see in a compact digital camera. It’s an attempt  to make the phone more stable, says Motorola’s Rudolph, since smartphones users have complained about the battery cover at the back slipping off in some phones. Beyond that, the Devour has its basics covered. It includes a camera capable of both video and still photos, a 8GB microSD card, accelerometer, Wi-Fi and GPS. Though it’s the latest phone from Motorola’s stable, the Devour runs Android 1.6, which is a surprise considering that most of the latest Android phones use version 2.0 or 2.1 of the OS. The older Android flavor also means that Devour users have to manually download an update to get turn-by-turn navigation on their phone. But what Motorola says will give the Devour its edge is the use of the MotoBlur skin, which is missing on the Android. After a quick initial set-up, the MotoBlur brings in your Twitter feed, Facebook updates and messages including e-mail and text messages into little widgets on the homescreen. Integrated contacts and data is the name of the game so the interface aggregates corporate and personal e-mail accounts and display them on a single screen–though you can keep them separate if you want. You can also arrange to view new messages in a card-like view (similar to the Palm Pre) or in an easily scrollable list. There are some sweet extras. User can back up their phone for free on the MotoBlur website through their MotoBlur account. They can also track their phone for free and remote-wipe it if it is lost, a service that Apple charges $100 a year for with its MobileMe service. Clearly, Motorola wants to get as many Android handsets out as it can, ostensibly in an attempt to give consumers the choice they want. But at this point, it feels like the process has lost its soul. There’s not much innovation in hardware design or in the user interface. The Devour is yet another cookie cutter phone churned out to keep the corporate coffers full. But in an extremely competitive smartphone market,  it’s an approach that may not be enough cut it with choosy consumers. See Also: Motorola Introduces New Android Phone, the Backflip Motorola Backflip Will Be the First Android Phone on AT&T Hands-On With The Motorola Quench Motorola’s First Android Phone Takes Aim at Social Networks Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

> The secret to a great cocktail, most connoisseurs would agree, has something to do with the ice, the liquor, the glass — and the bartender. But what if the bartender is not a warm-blooded human with a sympathetic ear, but rather a cold, soulless machine made of pistons, valves and servos? At a bar in San Francisco, a group of artists, engineers and tinkerers sought the answer with their creations: robots designed specifically to pour out a nice drink. The booze-making bots included an all-mechanical, lever-operated robot; a Cosmobot with a rocket-shaped body; and Barnold, who is “strong and big, just like Arnold.” “We really just like robots and cocktails, and both together seemed like the perfect thing,” said Simone Davalos, one of the organizers of the Barbot 2010 event. “There is no real aim for world-changing, paradigm-shifting technological achievement, at least not from our perspective, but who knows? Lots of amazing things have happened over cocktails.” From cosmos to appletinis, these robots measured, mixed and poured out drinks that were precisely assembled. And those droids were mesmerizing to watch. As for the drinks themselves, having sampled drinks from almost all the robots, my verdict is that the robots still have a long way to go. The cocktails taste just a little too clinical. There’s a missing ingredient in there. Could that be the human touch? The Corpse Reviver Even a humble cocktail robot can be an engineering marvel. The imaginatively named Corpse Reviver is a cleverly designed robot that’s completely mechanical. “It’s all levers and linkages,” said Benjamin Cowden. who created the robot. The Corpse Reviver has four levers that are attached to four bottles arranged in a circle. To make yourself a drink, place a glass at the center and pull the first lever. This pushes the attached bottle up, then tips a measured pour of a little more than an ounce into a bowl-shaped holding container. Do the same with the two other levers, and finally pull back on the fourth to release the stopper and push the liquid from the holding container into a second chamber that’s full of ice. A few seconds later, the drink is in the glass. “This is my favorite robot in this room,” said Lillian Fritz-Laylin who had come to check out the event . “It’s interactive on multiple levels. It’s not just ‘push a button and walk away.’ And the drink was really good.” Cowden designed the entire mechanism and sketched it out on a 2-D design program. All the parts for the robot have been custom laser-cut. And it’s the attention to details that really make this a winner. For instance, once a lever is pulled and the bottle tips out its pour, a hydraulic damper and spring mechanism make sure it slowly and steadily returns to its original position. Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

It’s the handset that Megan Fox used to make men crumble everywhere, and now it looks like the Motorola DEVOUR can be had at Best Buy pretty soon. At $149.99, it’s $50 less than the DROID, but of course, there are the bells and whistles. If the grainy picture above is accurate, you’ll need to sign up for a two-year contract with Verizon and pick up a data plan that is at least $29.99 per month. That’s not too shabby considering all the data you’ll be gobbling up anyway with this phone. The best part of buying phones at Best Buy? No mail-in-rebate required. [via Engadget ]

Just as Motorola was getting its act together and releasing brilliant hardware after years of, well, dirge, they’re now splitting down the middle into two independent companies—on one side the phone division, the other, the set-top box side. Don’t glare at your Droid and vow to never put more money into Motorola, because the split is actually a good thing. It’ll make them more streamlined and focused, with equal attention being placed on each side—though the handset side will own the name and license it to the dustier set-top box side. Sounds fair, considering we only care about the mobile division anyway, but apparently they’re both raking in around the same amount in sales (approximately $11 billion last year each). Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day when I could write about Moto’s corporate struggles and actually be able to put a positive spin on it, but it does sound like the right decision has been made up above. [ NY Times ]