Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe: "This isn't the death of Flash, just a new way of delivering it… Even Adobe's own next generation tablet applications (like Photoshop Touch) have been written in AIR, with new features meaning there's no need to have a separate runtime from application code. While AIR may not be as obvious as Flash, it's the same ActionScript code running – it just looks like a native app rather a browser plug-in.

"Developers working with AIR get access to the familiar ActionScript development and design environments, plus a whole raft of additional APIs that come from no longer being limited by the browser's sandbox and limitations. Take touch for example: Android is capable of multi-touch, but Google's given the browser only one touch point. Running outside in AIR the same code gets access to all the hardware capabilities, with full ten point touch on a Honeycomb tablet like the Galaxy Tab 10.1."

So how many touch points does Apple have in the browser?

"RIM, for its part, says it has licensed Adobe’s source code and plans to continue supporting Flash on the PlayBook.

“'As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations. RIM remains committed to delivering an uncompromised Web browsing experience to our customers, including native support for Adobe Flash Player on our BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (similar to a desktop PC browser), as well as HTML5 support on both our BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook browsers,' RIM said in a statement to AllThingsD."

You can rely on RIM.