At Adobe Max Developer conference 2010, Adobe has just announced the release of Adobe AIR 2.5, a common platform for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems. This makes Adobe, a universal platform for all kinds of devices that exist, both old and new ones.

To be more specific, Adobe AIR 2.5 will now support

• Smartphones and tablets based on BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android and iOS
• Desktops running on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems
• Televisions with Samsung as the first television manufacturer to ship Adobe AIR in its line of Samsung SmartTV devices

Adobe has a list of hardware manufacturers which will start selling hardware devices with pre-installed AIR runtime environment so that’s a big push for AIR developers to get more serious about the platform that promises them ‘build once, deploy everywhere’(except Apple) ideology without bothering about how the app would behave on different resolutions, device types etc.

It’s certainly a great news to those developers who’re intellectually equipped with Flash or AIR development tools and simply need to use their existing skillset for making killer AIR apps for all the platforms, barring Apple’s iOS platform due to obvious issues from Apple.

Although Apple is simply disassociating with anything that’s Adobe, the latter is still preferring to build things for Apple platform such as iOS and Mac. However, Adobe is now betting big on Android and upcoming Windows Phone 7 as Apple is showing least hopes of any patchup.

Adobe has also launched InMarket, a one-stop-destination for AIR developers to distribute their apps to various App stores across a wide range of devices. InMarket will take care of everything, from listing, destributing to billing of the apps and will take a 30% cut of developer earnings from the app.

With the release of Adobe AIR 2.5, Adobe’s strategy is clear but it’s still to be seen whether things that Adobe is claiming to achieve will actually deliver or collapse. Apple sidelined Adobe mainly due to unstable/poor Flash performance and battery consumption issues. With a tough target of establishing universal runtime environment for possibly every type of hardware is a big challenge to achieve.

As more hardware devices debut with pre-installed AIR runtime environment, this will become very clear if Adobe AIR will actually become the ‘Must-have’ runtime environment for smartphones, TVs and tablets, just like it is for desktops.