Thinking of buying a Motorola Xoom without Flash? Think carefully..

One of the most hotly anticipated gadgets shown off at this year's CES show was Motorola's Xoom tablet. With a big screen and the newest version of Android - Honeycomb, designed for tablets - it could be a great product.

But then came the news that when it arrives in the US this week it'll be without one key feature: Flash. Motorola says Flash will be "available after launch". For anyone thinking of picking one up, though, I have one word of warning: Milestone.

The Motorola Milestone is a great Android smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard - you can read our review here. If you buy one, you'll notice that the specifications listed on some shops include Adobe Flash - but Flash has never been available for this device

Android 2.2, which is required to play Flash videos and content, was released in mid 2010, and other phones such as the HTC Desire have been updated to support it. In fact, Motorola even updated its Droid smartphone - the US version of the Milestone - in August.

And yet the Milestone languishes, to this day, on Android 2.1, with the Flash support that users have been promised for months missing. Motorola has promised an update several times - notably for "Q4 2010" (that's the October to December 2010, in English), and then "Early Q1 2011" (January to mid February). Both passed without a release.

The latest word is that 2.2 will arrive by the end of Q1 (end of March). Will it actually show up this time? Past experience suggests otherwise. And even when if it does show up the newer version, Gingerbread, will be out there in the shops.

And that brings us back to the Xoom. We look forward to reviewing this tablet, and we hope that by the time it's released in the UK Flash support will be included. If it's not there at launch, though, the history of the Milestone suggests that UK users might be in for a long and frustrating wait.