A few days ago Adobe launched a new beta version of its Flash Player 10.1. Including several important improvements and bug fixes, Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 is definitely a pleasant release both for flash devs and users.

Beta 3 release probably brought the biggest piece of cake to owners of netbooks (at least to those with the Intel GMA 500 and Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator graphics chipsets). As you might already know, the third beta provides better HD Web video streaming performance.

Early Web video tests conducted by numerous techi observers and enthusiasts, (Cnet test, Engadget test) show great results: both 720p and 1080p streaming videos play back quite smoothly. Of course, experts don’t hurry to call this an outright performance, but the progress is obvious and more is expected to come with the final release of Flash Player 10.1 later this year. If you still haven’t tried Beta 3 on your netbook, catch up and share your impressions in comments! One thing we’d like to caution you about is that you need to install updated drivers for the aforesaid chipsets before attempting playback after the player update.

Another long-awaited feature brought by Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 is a microphone access. Back in Flash Player 10 Adobe Team added a feature called scripted audio playback, gave developers a possibility to write an AS code and then generate sound of that. In this version of Flash player they added the capability to do the same thing for audio recording, so you could write a script, capture an audio, process it and then output it. Basically, in order to record audio in AS you can now use right the same event you used for playback, just in reverse. The ability to manipulate the audio coming into the microphone/line input enables flash developers to create some really cool audio triggered applications.

The new 10.1 also introduces some clever innovation in the field of RTMFP protocol which now supports groups. The main benefit of this technology is that when you want to broadcast flash files to multiple viewers, FlashPlayer spreads the bandwidth load across different users.

The new version of Flash Player is a step towards mobile integration. It introduces new mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities, such as support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile text and accelerometer input. No doubt, currently Flash Player runs on devices with a number of limitations, but this is just a beginning and the very fact that it can run on rather limited mobile platforms is impressive.

The list of new features of Flash Player 10.1 is much longer, you can find the full list of improvements and download the third beta on Adobe Labs.