

First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS - sendos
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/first-look-flash-android
Excerpt:<p>"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds.  Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.<p>But it’s not a flawless experience either."
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tomlin
"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One
running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no
website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog,
nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources."

Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.

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Maktab
More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making
Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive
improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it
seems to be a lot better.

For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the
start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on
the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would
have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to
it.

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tomlin
Great. So Apple will support Flash now that is it up to snuff? Please.

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Maktab
Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort
of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full
mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?

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jim-greer
We did a kongregate mobile site and I was surprised how many games played
really well. The best were adapted slightly for mobile, but a lot of these are
just the desktop version - the developers have never seen them on a mobile
device.

<http://m.kongregate.com>

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cjbos
Love your site! I was at a flash conference last weekend... all the adobe
developers compiled to native android apps and then show them working on the
nexus one. It was surprising how simple the whole process was.

Do you think the flash games on your site will also be compiled as native
apps? If so is there a way to integrate kongregate achievements so I can still
gain the points?

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jim-greer
Thanks!

At this point we're just doing them through the browser. I don't think
'compiled as native apps' is the right description. They're converted into Air
apps, but they're still using the Flash runtime:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime>

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neovive
This is good news for the thousands of skilled Flash developers that really
know how to leverage the platform for interactivity and gaming. As the article
points out, content must still be optimized for 10.1 to see the most benefit
and that will take time.

Although Flash filled an important need for video when the FLV format was
first introduced, it's role as the primary video player for the web will be
marginalized over time. However, that will bring the focus of Flash back
towards it's roots of vector animation and interactivity at which it does an
excellent job.

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johnrob
I wonder if rejecting flash is Apple's 21st century version of not licensing
their operating system. In the 80's, nobody knew such a move was a death
magnet. Perhaps missing the mobile flash train could be something similar
today.

Interestingly, running flash on phones could pose a threat to Apple's current
business model. On the iPhone, music/movies/games all come via the app store.
However, flash can deliver all of those directly to the browser - whether for
free (youtube), or for a fee (netflicks).

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rryyan
I don't think protecting the app store is a reason why Apple is disallowing
Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Apple has indicated that it runs the app store near
break-even, and doesn't view it as a profit generator:
[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wildly_successful_but_not_hugely_profitable_for_apple.html).
The app store is there to sell devices -- like the iTunes store for the iPod.

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glhaynes
It's not App Store revenue that Apple's concerned about, it's app exclusivity
and platform control, both of which they expect to lead to device sales.

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davidedicillo
Keep reading. Not sure about you, but I consider using 40% of charge for two
hours of Flash a lot.

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jasonlotito
That's actually on par with the iPhone 3GS.

Let's look at some numbers!

FTA: "As I surfed a number of Flash-heavy websites, played movie trailers and
little video clips on and off for about two hours the battery level on my
phone was down to about 61 percent from a fully charged battery"

So, 2 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites, at about 20% of
battery life per hour. So, that's 5 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy
websites doing a mix of things.

Compare that to the iPhone:

From the Apple website: <http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html> Under the
Battery life sidebar: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G"

So, the author experienced the same level of battery use as a user would
experience on an iPhone 3GS doing a comparable task.

Edit: I should point out that the it appears the Wired author was using an
internal network, which, for the iPhone is: "9 hours of Internet use on Wi-
Fi". However, I still feel as if this doesn't change the results much.

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glhaynes
It's not clear from the article, though, whether the Android device was on 3G
or WiFi... WiFi uses considerably less power.

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jasonlotito
Yeah, I noticed I hand't clarified that. Even still, 5 hours of browsing
highly interactive content isn't bad. You get the added bonus of Flash, which
for some sites, is critical.

FTA: "Our corporate Wi-Fi connection just didn’t seem good enough and most
Flash-heavy sites took a while to load."

So I assume the testing with Wi-Fi, though again, this isn't completely clear.
Even still, I think this demonstrates that mobile flash isn't the harbinger of
death that Jobs was making it out to be, and demonstrates that the reaction to
Flash is more than just for technical reasons.

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MikeCapone
Any word on when Flash 10.1 is coming to OS X? Flash is such a resource hog
even on my Mac Pro, I'm hoping this will mitigate the problem.

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not_an_alien
Depending on your needs, you may want to try the 'Gala' beta instead:
<http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89>

It's Flash 10.0, but with the hooks for hardware decoding in Mac OSX (that
Apple only added very recently to the plugin API). It's supposed to perform
much, much better on Mac OSX for video playback.

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icefox
"Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your
phone’s resources.

But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video —
can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it
is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth."

How am I suppose to merge those two statements?

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awolf
No Hulu? ... Then what's the point?

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jasonlotito
There is more to the internet then Hulu. In fact, the majority of the internet
doesn't care about Hulu, because Hulu restricts access outside the US anyways.
However, their are a far greater number of sites with Flash content that would
benefit from this.

