12 Comments

Flash Isn’t Good Enough For The iPhone

March 5, 2008 by in Geeky with 12 Comments

When pumped as to why there’s no flash on the iPhone, Steve Jobs gave Adobe a punch in the ‘nads saying that Adobe’s Flash isn’t good enough for the iPhone.

As Jobs put it Tuesday, Apple’s iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.

Yeah, it’s flash that’s not good enough.

Basically, Steve Jobs is the only one that knows when there will be a solution for the flash-less iPhone. My suggestion? Get a phone at a reasonable price that can handle flash.

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  • http://www.donthedev.com/ Don Wilson

    Or, stop worrying about something that should stay on the PC.

  • Mike Meyer

    “Get a phone at a reasonable price that can handle flash.”
    What phone is that?

  • Michael Curtis

    This is, currently, one of my biggest problems with the iPhone safari: no Flash! Just at a time when loads of sites are not even bothering to create HTML alternatives (as they used to)…

    The thing is, Adobe will need to rework flash purely for the iPhone. The version which runs on the PSP is suitable, but it does suffer from being slow.

  • Jed Savage

    It’s flash’s problem, not apples. Like jobs said, flash on iphone would be slow because the mobile flash player is slow. I’d do the same thing, you don’t want your product to look sluggish because a 3rd party doesn’t know how to write their mobile code.

  • http://www.netherspire.com Hakan

    You have a phone that can actually play Flash based YouTube Services and you are telling people that Flash is not good enough. Ok, Steve. I’ll stick with my old phone. At least it has 3G and doesn’t suck on battery life.

  • http://uneasysilence.com Evan

    Mike – My E50 has flash. Perfect? No, but it has more than the iPhone!

  • http://www.slackitude.com Jason

    Hakan: Youtube on the iPhone doesn’t use Flash at all. It uses h.264.

    And anyone who thinks that Flash isn’t going to be slow as hell and suck battery life is delusional. Pull up some Flash-heavy sites on your computer and watch the CPU use. It’s pretty severe. That being said, I’d still like to see Flash on my iPhone.

  • dchao

    Get a Nokia N810, that has Flash on it and it’s cheaper than a iPhone.

  • hitsuji

    This is a very strange answer from apple since the iphone has a ~400mhz processor and any windows mobile based phone with an equivalent processor ive ever tried runs flash pretty well

  • http://www.espressoreport.com Richard

    Viewing full flash sites on a tiny screen? That’s not for me. Since this kind of thing only appeals to the geeks in most cases, I think the majority of iPhone users will be happy it does everything but flash for right now.

    I remember having flash on my HTC TyTyn (WM 6.1) and trying to use mycokerewards.com was an absolute nightmare.

    Flash on a small screen? Save it for a real UMPC and not your “smartphone.”

  • http://www.pbronline.us Tronguy

    Flash is a pig. Don’t believe me? go to http://www.myepets.com (I have a six year old daughter who’s into this) using anything of less than about 1.4Ghz, Mac or PC, and watch the slowness. This site isn’t doing anything my old Amiga 500 couldn’t do with CPU to spare (move sprites around the screen, basically) but Flash is hugely consumptive of CPU resources. I hate flash. But, it’s here to stay.

    I am with Jobs on this, they really should rewrite it to be faster.

  • chad

    this is one of my biggest problems with people criticizing iphones. Show me a Palm with fucking flash… fine… a windows mobile device…. ohhhh there aren’t any….

    Since when did flash become a benchmark of a mobile phones browser abilities?!?! It hasn’t been on many (if not for the person with the Nokia above that would have been ANY) phones in the past, and now …. NOW you are saying the iPhone is the lacking party…. Go watch youtube on your 700w…. oh wait…. yea, not so much.

    My point is…. benchmarks/expectations for quality shouldn’t be set for something that is already a non-standard or practice for a smart phone with web access.

    (now the MMS issues are a cat of another color, the idea the iphone lacks them is a complete joke and Jobs should be brutally assulted with a pineapple for his decision thereof to leave it out)

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