flash

Google announced the 2.2 update to their Android Mobile OS this morning. Codenamed Froyo this update brings a major feature along with it, full support for Flash.

When Steve Jobs let loose his rant on Flash earlier this month he challenged the community on the existence of Flash on a mobile device. Not just the existence, but a stable and good existence:

We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.

Ginny Mies of PC World had a chance to play with the new version of Android and had some experiences with the Flash player. Some were good and some were just what we feared:

I tried playing a couple of beloved Flash games that aren't optimized for mobile and was disappointed that I couldn't play some of them without a keyboard. For example, with Dino Run, I had to press the "space" bar to do a certain action, but I couldn't access the touch keyboard (the keyboard only comes up when you're in a typing field).

So games are out, but Flash is all about video and the "full Web". How does Hulu fare on Froyo?

Missing from all of this Flash action, of course, is Hulu. I was really disappointed when I tried-and ultimately failed-to watch an episode of "30 Rock" on the Nexus One. According to Adobe, Hulu does not own distribution rights for their content on mobile devices and therefore cannot stream video to smartphones.

So the device is capable of delivering the "full web" but the full web cannot deliver itself.

What this means for flash on mobile devices has yet to be seen. This is one story that will not go away

Since Apple unveiled the iPad last Wednesday a large focus has been centered on the lack of Flash support.

Sides were quickly formed; Pro-Flash or Anti-Flash.

The Pro-Flash side calling it absolutely unacceptable for a modern and powerful media device to not allow Flash content.

The Anti-Flash side points out the public lack of support on the iPhone along with major reasons to despise the technology.

The Pro-Flash camp pointed out sites like Hulu and YouTube for video, and the numerous games available only through a Flash interface. Adobe even chimed in with a blog post presenting their argument for Flash.

And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

They have a valid (somewhat) point that the flash platform allows flexibility and a maturity that does not exist in other technologies such as HTML5.

The Flash Blog (An independent site evangelizing the Flash platform) was quick to point out how widespread the content is including pointing out very obviously the porn side of the web. They used a very effective tagline in the post that had twitter ablaze with arguments.

Millions of websites use Flash. Get used to the blue legos.

On the other side of the fence was the Anti-Flash camp, pointing out statements that Flash is the leading cause of crashes on Mac's. The fact that it is a huge CPU hog and that is just a bad format. I would generally count myself in this camp, my MacBook runs Flash content horribly. HTML5 is going to be great, especially when paired with the advances in AJAX.