

Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash 'flawlessly' - anderzole
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/adobe-shows-off-prototype-android-tablet-running-air-and-flash/

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raganwald
I'd like a little more detail on what they mean by "flawlessly." It could be
that Steve's idea of "flawlessly" involves things like being thrifty with
battery-hogging system resources, playing nicely with the upcoming multi-
tasking in 4.0, and having a culture around writing applications that feel
"native" on their host platform.

There's nothing wrong with having a different definition of "flawlessly," I'm
just wondering what Adobe means.

~~~
davidedicillo
I agree. Steve Jobs never said that Flash can't run on the iPhone/iPad. I'm
sure he even tried prototypes for it himself. 30 seconds videos doesn't make a
solid product.

~~~
rayval
Actually there are 100 apps written with Adobe's Flash compiler on the App
Store, and no one has complained.

That is, they seem similar to all the other apps on the App Store: simple,
quickly written, drain battery life, crash often. Just like native Objective C
apps :)

~~~
bruceboughton
They are neither Air apps nor Flash movies so are irrelevant to what Adobe are
showing off here. This is about the performance of the Flash/Air runtimes, not
the Flash CS5 cross-compiler.

Apples != Oranges.

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zweben
This will be an interesting test of Steve Jobs' reasoning on why Flash should
be kept off the iPad.

My predictions of Jobs' accuracy:

-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.

-I think he'll be right about made-for-PC flash interfaces being awkward on a tablet, (e.g. problems with hover states).

-I think performance will be acceptable for video but poor on most non-tablet optimized games.

-I think he will be mostly wrong about Flash holding the platform back, because I think most devs who are making content for the tablet will use native code or web apps.

Overall, I think people will be pretty disillusioned with the idea of Flash on
a touchscreen once they use it and its limitations become evident, but I do
think that it will still be seen as an advantage over the iPad among tech-
savvy people, if just for the ability to use flash-reliant websites and to
play non-youtube videos.

~~~
catch23
Also, I think there's going to be a ton of flash apps that won't have updated
their apps to properly use flash's touch apis. I'm sure there's going to be a
whole bunch of apps on yahoo games that just won't work and the owners of the
tablet won't understand why.

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tvon
I expect Flash to run well on tablets eventually (if Apple hasn't motivated
Adobe to make this happen then nothing will). I'm not exactly sold on this
demo though, show it working "flawlessly" on a shipping device with a price
tag and published specs.

edit: Engadget commenter Charbax says:

 _This looks like the development kit based on Nvidia Tegra 2, I think it's
for sale for like $400 without the screen. I filmed these demos a couple
months ago:[http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-
to...](http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-tournament-
on-nvidia-tegra-2/) _

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va_coder
Steve Jobs has always been great motivator; first for the engineers at Apple,
and now for the Flash engineers at Adobe.

~~~
Terretta
He even gets them to ship ahead of schedule. If only he enjoyed Duke Nukem...

~~~
eipipuz
or despised it...

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melling
Google is moving to HTML5 on YouTube so there is no benefit here:

<http://www.youtube.com/html5>

Android should just do h.264 video. There is less overhead.

Also, won't apps written directly for the native (Java) APIs on Android
provide better results? Aren't "native" Windows or Mac apps usually better on
their respective platforms? AIR is a nice idea but adding one more layer on a
phone with limited resources has to cost something in terms of app
performance, battery life, and/or usability. It's good that Google is
supporting Flash. However, I think they just need to be careful to make sure
that there are a lot more "native" Android apps.

~~~
guelo
1\. flash != video

2\. Android does do h.264 and most Android devices have hardware decoders.

3\. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google
doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.

~~~
andreyf
_3\. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google
doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide._

Uh... which market? The cell phone market? I hate to break it to you, but most
people don't buy their phones after considering whether or not the apps they
might be interested in will be running natively or using an intermediate
platform. To most people, phones are about communicating status more than
anything else.

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nl
The most surprising thing there is that engadget found it surprising:

a) We know Android tablets are coming - we've seen them before b) We know
Adobe is porting Flash to Android/ARM

It appear logical that it would run better on an Android tablet that a phone
given the processing power available.

The tablet is probably a Tegra2 based thing (since you can buy the dev boards
and they run Android well) or possibly Android-on-Atom.

Both Tegra2 and Atom are much powerful than the Cortex-A8 (Snapdragon/Apple
A4) processes found in phones (and the iPad)

~~~
apphacker
Maybe it's surprising because the iPad does not run flash.

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asnyder
Is it just me, or is this redirecting to thetvsquad instead?

~~~
dc2k08
The copy:

Well, here's something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash
running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0
Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that,
according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps "flawlessly." Unfortunately,
there doesn't appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and
judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the
word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the
goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired's
Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup,
although we'd definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See
for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttn1G0Kw62o>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo>

cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/adobe-
shows-off-prototype-android-tablet-running-air-and-
flash/&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___IE358)

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thenbrent
Showing a 12 second demo without a crash makes a product flawless?

Every dodgy piece of software ever made just earned a "flawless"
reclassification.

Someone tell Microsoft: Vista _was_ flawless after-all.

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ck2
They must have h.264 hardware acceleration in effect because running a flash
video full screen pegs my desktop CPU.

~~~
windsurfer
The latest mac flash beta fixes a lot of cpu issues.

~~~
buster
I hate how people blame Adobe when videos run slow, it seems to work out well
for Apple...

People on this world: If flash videos on your mac have been slow in the past,
it is because Apple, as a closed and proprietary platform, didn't expose the
proper API for hardware video acceleration and thus, Adobe wasn't able to use
hardware acceleration! This is not Adobes fault!

~~~
texel
Shenanigans. I can watch HD Netflix streaming on my Mac Mini without a hiccup
with CPU to spare, but 480p Lost on the same machine makes it cry for mercy.
Pretty Microsoft doesn't have access to any super secret APIs that Apple saw
fit to hide from Adobe.

~~~
buster
Mh, as a developer i can see that it can be a totally different thing then
just "here it works, here it doesn't". Software architecture is not as simple
as you seem to think.

Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just
recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight
uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering
but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's
extremely superficial to just blame Adobe.

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-
acceler...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-accelerate-
flash-video-using-new-apple-api.ars)

~~~
texel
The Mac Mini in question has no means for hardware video acceleration, so
you're right, Silverlight does software rendering but faster. How on earth
then is it _not_ Adobe's fault that they can't do the same?

~~~
buster
I haven't said that it's entirely Apples fault. I wanted to give the
understanding that there may be different technical reasons to that.

From my point of view it is obvious that video playback could be faster if
Adobe had access to hardware acceleration. We can agree on that point, right?
This is obviously Apples decision to make an API public or not. Of course, i
am not saying that video playback couldn't be smooth in software mode. The
point that mplayer plays almost everything and smooth on different hardware is
a good point. But to pass the buck to Adobe all the time is just wrong. I
mean, the API is now public and Adobe already has built in the hardware
acceleration, that is quite fast and shows that they are doing something to
address the problem.

Obviously my opinion seems to upset others, so i should have just shut up and
let people brag about how bad Adobe is. I'm not using a Mac, i am not
developing with Adobe tools and i have no problems with my flash plugin, so in
the end why should i care. I just hate one-sided views.

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pavs
All aol blogs are redirecting to tvsquad, including engadget.

From their Twitter feed:

<http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436>

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c00p3r
Why people are so stupid? (a stupid rhetoric question =)

The same crap designed to run on x86 CPUs with heavy FPU usage even with
hardware GPU acceleration on Windows, cannot run smoothly on ARM CPU without
any acceleration or comparable FPU. That is all marketing bullshit.

Even on Linux i386 they use no acceleration at all. Do ldd libflashplayer.so
and try to |grep nvidia or something like that. Then try ldd mplayer and
compare.

Flash sucks as technology, and Apple understand it. Of course, they want Flash
on their devices, but it just broken. By definition.

The same shit with JRE. Dalvik VM in Android or that on Google App Engine is
not the same as JRE, and you cannot, and never will be able to run some
bloated spring+hibernate+swing crap on ARM.

Just face it: ARM is a completely different platform. Their favorite mantra
"Code once, run everywhere" does not work anymore.

