Adobe Air peer-to-peer video call concept Android app hands-on (video)

If you recall, a few days ago we stumbled upon a cheekily-named concept app (which has since been renamed for obvious reasons) from Adobe that does video-calling on Android. This is pretty rad considering it's just Qik and Fring offering the same service for the green bot right now, so we trotted along to Adobe's London office to get a closer look at this demo. As with many things in life, not all went as planned as you can see after the break -- the video stream froze up on several occasions, but then again Adobe's Mark Doherty only spent three days cooking this simple app. Regardless, this should still help Android developers understand the beefed-up peer-to-peer capabilities in the forthcoming Air 2.5 runtime, which is now "feature-complete" and undergoing extensive testing ahead of launch later this year.

Things are less positive for Flash availability on other mobile platforms, though. While Nokia's just waiting for a Linux SDK before it can start porting Flash apps to its devices within 2010, Adobe implied that it's still waiting for two other vendors to respond -- Palm's already been shown a Flash build running on webOS devices, and it's just a matter of the company signing up for Adobe's device certification system; RIM, on the other hand, is a bit more vague, but we were told it's definitely interested in both Air and Flash. And here's the surprise of the day: no comment on Flash for iOS (not to be confused with its digital publishing tools for the iPad), but there's no stopping you from hacking it in yourself.

Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob's smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn't be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it's interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica's own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.