Yeah, I was also wondering how much of it was strategic positioning on the part of Jobs. It's probably a little bit of both. iPhone, while packs a punch for its size is still not a 1GHz+ machine (600MHz, if I remember correctly) that you can waste cycles on. The "up to par"-ness probably was stated to buy Apple some time to see if they can do better to circumvent it.
I'd agree, it has a feel of an ulterior motive on behalf of Jobs. However Flash is awful, I haven't noticed a marked improvement in 5 years. The only reason flash keeps working is because processor power is improving on par with Flashes impotence.
I'm not surprised in the slightest that the iPhone can't handle flash, because my old 2GHz machine struggled with larger files. My current laptop can render 1080p, yet in flash it can barely manage the 'large' setting on some streaming videos.
The iPhone would be perfect for flash games, but it will never be able to run them because flash is poor for games. They even run slow on my 4GHz laptop; I've even tried the worst ones on a new four-core (~8GHz) and they still run poorly. It astounds me that a large corporation like Adobe can't code performance at all when it would increase the popularity of Flash if it performed better.
Adobe did improve performance dramatically with Flash 9, but only new code gets the speedup. Many game developers seem to still be generating the old slow bytecode.
The Jobs quote about Flash lite not being "up to par" with the iPhone is pretty much BS too.. The latest Flash Lite 3 is actually very robust and would cover just about all that is needed for a great iPhone + flash implementation.
I agree the real reasons for not doing so are based on ulterior motives. Apple is greedy and doesnt want Adobe playing in their walled garden.
