03/06/2008, 8:35am, EST
Thursday, March 6thiPhone already running Flash?
Politics, not performance, are the reasons why Flash is not already available on the iPhone, according to a claim by FastCompany's Robert Scoble. Although not yet corroborated by additional sources, the tip rebuffs company chief Steve Jobs' claims that software limitations have prevented the phone's mobile browser from supporting the plug-in. Instead, the comments are reportedly a pressure tactic to have Adobe drop demands to use its own PDF engine on the phone, allowing Apple to use its own.
A functional version of Flash has allegedly been running on the device for "quite a while," contradicting Jobs' assertions that a mid-grade version of Flash, which balances performance needs with features, does not yet exist. The iPhone is entirely capable of full desktop Flash, according to the claimed source. A "Chumby with half the CPU horsepower can run Flash 8," the tip says.
While unverified, the tip comes just hours ahead of Apple's discussion of its enterprise and third-party development plans, and as competitors increasingly push Flash as an advantage for their own mobile browsers. Nokia stresses that several of its Nseries smartphones support Flash Lite and recently demonstrated a full web experience that included full HTML rendering along with Flash. The company's N800 series Internet tablets also received full Flash 9 support last year.
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Can Flash be made to work? Maybe. Is Apple ready to support Flash? No.
Does the iPhone do video capture? Not yet, but you never know. LOL :-)
en
I've experimented with taking an entire book manuscript and creating a layout in Pages that fits iPhone/iPodTouch dimensions, and I can tell you it's doable. Certainly, pages are shorter, but you don't have to constantly flick/scroll while reading, which makes the experience more book-like.
If Jobs really did say "people don't read anymore," the how the heck do outfits like Borders and Barnes&Noble stay in business? No, there really is a viable market out there for a usable digital book reader, and if it just happens to play music, let you surf the internet, read email, play movies, recieves phone calls, and fits in your pocket, mores the better
The bookreader for the iPhone (iTablet also please) is a given, we'll have it this year. But what we need is a new iTunes section for books and integration with the Google book project.
Jobs has already discounted using Flash Lite because of it's implementation differences. From reading the wiki page, he appears to be right. Finely, Steve admitted that they've got flash running on the iphone when he said it runs like crap. I parse his statement as meaning that they've tried it, but the experience doesn't meet Apple's usual high standards.
The N800 is probably the best test bed. Be nice to see some benchmarks for it's Flash performance, and how having a Flash web app open affects the battery life.
What is interesting here is that unlike Java, Jobs has still not said 'No' to Flash on the iPhone, and is openly talking about the problems. Reading between the lines it is obvious that a version of Flash has been running on the iPhone for months - you'd need to have done that to be disappointed with it's performance. Running is one thing, acceptable another.