Motorola's Xoom tablet will be launching without Adobe's Flash Player, with early purchasers having to wait for an OTA download.

Adobe has announced that its Flash Player 10.2 will not be preloaded on the first crop of Android tablets, although it has promised to make the Player available as an over-the-air download soon after.

Its announcement was sparked by blogosphere speculation about the wording on Verizon Wireless' webpage for the new Motorola Xoom tablet, which noted that "Adobe Flash expected Spring 2011".

Motorola then confirmed that this meant no Flash when the device launches this week. "Motorola Xoom will include full support for Adobe Flash Player for accessing the rich video and animations of the web, to be available after launch," said the company in a statement.

Flash is one of the key advantages Android-based tablets have over Apple's iPad, so the news came as something of a surprise. However, Adobe has since published its own response to the reports.

"Adobe will offer Flash Player 10.2 pre-installed on some tablets and as an OTA download on others within a few weeks of Android 3 (Honeycomb) devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom," says the company in a blog post.

It goes on to say that "Consumers are clearly asking for Flash support on tablet devices and the good news is that they won’t have to wait long. We are aware of over 50 tablets that will ship in 2011 supporting a full web experience (including Flash support) and Xoom users will be among the first to enjoy this benefit."