Adobe announced the new Flash Player 10.2 today, envisaging an innovative Stage Video capability, a full hardware accelerated video pipeline, playing higher quality video and reducing the processing power, saving battery power on your end.  Adobe certifies the new Flash Player as being 34 times more efficient. Additional features are custom native mouse cursors for personalization, multiple monitor full-screen support, Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support, and enhanced sub-pixel rendering for superior text readability, especially for complex character-based languages.

The only drawback might be that websites and content providers now are working on upgrading their video players so as to render the full Stage Video experience. Some companies have already started the upgrading work; Vimeo, Brightcover, Epix and YouTube, to name a few, being committed to delivering excellent video playback services.

It is interesting to note the timing of the Flash Player 10.2, as earlier today McAfee reported a sharp rise in the level of mobile phone malware in the firm’s quarterly threat report. McAfee pointed fingers at Adobe and emphasized that “throughout 2010 malware developers have heavily exploited weaknesses in both Flash and especially PDF technologies. McAfee Labs databases reveal that malicious PDFs targeting Adobe Acrobat topped the number of unique samples by a wide margin, making them the favorite target of client-side exploitation.”

This bad review is just one more con point on Apple’s charts, as they continue to reject Adobe Flash running on iOS devices for a number of reasons, keeping its sole control over application distribution and design within their Apple Store. This rejection implicitly hinders HTML5 from becoming the universal delivery platform video streaming with H.264 content on Apple devices and PCs on Windows, Mac or Linux.