I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg Sony VGP-BPS8 Battery at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices
.” After spending time playing Dell Studio 17 Battery with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android
2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.
How bad is mobile Flash? When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it Dell Studio 1737 Battery was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…
When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even Dell Studio 1535 Battery over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons. At some point during playback, an overlay message warned me that this video was “not optimized for mobile.” I encountered the same message Sony VGP-BPS9 Battery when I tried to play a trailer of the Expendables that was embedded on the movie’s mySpace page. Wasn’t Flash 10.1 supposed to erase the boundaries between mobile and the desktop?
During these Flash lockups, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the screen and most taps were ignored or followed many seconds later. The only way I found to get your phone back to normal when it’s having a Flash meltdown like this is to hit the back button or the home button to get out of the program and even then the phone Sony VGP-BPS9A/B Battery takes a second to become responsive again.
To help users find content, Adobe promotes its Abobe Flash showcase for mobile in the Android Sony VGP-BPS9/B Battery Market, but it’s just a link to a mobile site, not an app. There I found a link to the Sony Pictures trailer site, and all of the clips played smoothly at full screen. I also found links to a number of TV shows that play in Flash, but not always well. An episode of CSI on CBS.com actually played without locking up the system, but it was rather jerky.
The difference between the smooth Flash VGP-BPS9/S trailers on Sony.com, the jerky episode of CSI, and the system locking Flash video on Fox.com is that the smoother ones were optimized specifically for phone playback. But if content providers have to go back and optimize their videos for mobile platforms, one of the key benefits of mobile Flash–backward compatibility with millions of existing videos–is lost. If you’re modifying your videos anyway, why not go the full monty and use an HTML 5 player instead Dell GD761 Battery of Flash?
Back in April, Jobs pointed out that mobile Flash had been promised and delayed since dell Latitude E5400 Battery the beginning toshiba PA3534U-1BRS Battery of 2009. “We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath,” he wrote. Unfortunately, many Web content providers haven’t been holding their breath either. As we surfed around, we found more and more sites that work with HTML 5. The difference between an HTML 5 video and a Flash video that works well is so slight you can’t tell. I visited South Park Studios on my PC and saw that it used Flash to play episodes of the popular show, so I tried it on dell Latitude E4300 Battery my phone. I was pleasantly surprised at how well Flash episodes of South Park streamed over 3G, until I realized that the site had detected that I was on my phone and was serving me HTML 5 video instead.
After my mixed experience with video, I was curious to try Flash-based games on our Android phones. When I tried going to famous Flash game Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad R60 Battery sites like Newgrounds or Addicting Games, I found that, as Steve Jobs said, “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.” Many of the games I loaded were slow to start and slowed the system, making it difficult to scroll around the page or tap on links. But much worse was that, even when these titles loaded, there was no way to control most of the action. Most games required keyboard or mouse actions I simply could not perform on my phone, even with its Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad R61 Battery QWERTY slider. One shooter wanted me to hit the CTRL key to fire; another asked for the left mouse button.
Finally, I went to Mochi Games, a site that Adobe points to from its Flash showcase, a site Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad T61 Battery that is designed specifically for mobile flash. There, I found an attractive looking zombie game called Blood Red that was made for touch and required me to tap the screen to fire my gun at the oncoming undead. Unfortunately, when I tapped my shots went all over the place and I was dead within seconds. Was Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad T60 Battery it Flash that caused the bullets I shot to go to places I didn’t tap or was it my poor hand-eye coordination? I don’t know, but I was frustrated.
Aside from playing videos and gaming, another purported benefit of Flash is that gives you the real web, without showing empty boxes on your favorite sites. While I love this idea, I actually found that some Flash sites had more difficulty loading on the mobile browser when I had the plug-in enabled. At one point, for a period of about 45 minutes, I was inexplicably unable to load either New York Times home page or LAPTOP’s home page as the Droid 2′s browser got stuck at the point where it was trying to download some Flash ads Dell Vostro 1500 Battery and a Flash video player.
When we ran our phone battery test, which surfs the Web Dell Laptop Battery until the handset’s battery dies, the whole process crashed when the browser reached Veoh.com, a site with an autoplaying Flash video on its home page. Once we disabled Flash, we were able to run the test to completion.
Despite all the problems I experienced with Flash Player 10.1, I suppose Adobe deserves credit for bringing the grownup PC experience of Flash to phones. Now, I can browse around the Web and attempt to use Flash sites that were never designed for my phone and see how it goes. Sometimes, I’ll even be good battery pleasantly surprised. The South Park Avatar Creator, which is featured in Adobe’s showcase, is a really neat Flash tool for creating a South Park version of yourself.
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