They were hinting at a big announcement, and I was secretly hoping Adobe would announce the launch of their own “Flash Tablet” at this week’s Mobile World conference in Barcelona. That would have made for lots of fun rants ahead. Too bad, it’s just AIR on Android.  TechCrunch reports optimistically:

Apple might eventually have to cave if Flash becomes a standard feature of all other smartphones.

We’ll just wait for New York to wake up and find out what John Gruber has to say about it – although he probably couldn’t give a monkeys – but it is sure to be entertaining reading if he weighs in.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a great idea and a terrible idea. If this is a backdoor for poorly designed and poorly developed Flash Apps and advertising banners to dominate our interactions, then it will do none of us any favours. I think the same about Flash CS5 export to iPhone. But if AIR is another option to distribute apps then why not? (remember, AIR has a great HTML5 rendering engine in WebKit too). This is obviously not going to be subject to the same UI standards that make the iPhone so universally usable, but the reality is we live in a plural world, and the monoculture of iPhone UI specifications cannot possibly last forever, and nor should it. These platforms and devices all need to let go a little to allow the innovators and expressive interface designers experiment a bit.

Interesting times ahead.