Flash

[psylichon]

So I was thinking about why the Iphone doesn't have Flash yet and I'm curious... are there any mobile phone browsers that have the ability to display Flash content? I don't know of any Windows Mobiles browsers that do (and I thought I tried them all)... is Flash just that much of a resource hog that it's impossible to render smoothly on a mobile platform?

It seems that the Iphone has enough horsepower though? At least enough speed to handle vector graphics and dynamic zooming...

Then I was thinking... the lack of Flash probably has to do with those vector graphics. Surely this feature make encoding an enclosed player difficult?

I mean obviously, Apple wants to give us "The Whole Internet" which requires Flash... so I'm sure it's something they're working on...?

Lots of question marks there, though... your thoughts?

[Lincoln]

Like other things I wouldn't be surprised to see an iPhone with flash in a couple years.

There are of course several reasons we don't have it, a few of which you stated. Another biggie is that it's a memory hog. With only 4 and 8 gig models, flash would make our phones run like snails.

I'm sure that once a larger version of the iPhone comes out, we'll se Flash. If not, maybe even a smaller version of Flash, made for the iPhone. I don't know.

- John

[Alexander]

So I was thinking about why the Iphone doesn't have Flash yet and I'm curious... are there any mobile phone browsers that have the ability to display Flash content? I don't know of any Windows Mobiles browsers that do (and I thought I tried them all)... is Flash just that much of a resource hog that it's impossible to render smoothly on a mobile platform?

It seems that the Iphone has enough horsepower though? At least enough speed to handle vector graphics and dynamic zooming...

Then I was thinking... the lack of Flash probably has to do with those vector graphics. Surely this feature make encoding an enclosed player difficult?

I mean obviously, Apple wants to give us "The Whole Internet" which requires Flash... so I'm sure it's something they're working on...?

Lots of question marks there, though... your thoughts?

I had a WM plugin that could display flash.

[smitty24]

Adobe is currently developing Flash-lite for mobile devices

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

[scandalex]

Like other things I wouldn't be surprised to see an iPhone with flash in a couple years.

There are of course several reasons we don't have it, a few of which you stated. Another biggie is that it's a memory hog. With only 4 and 8 gig models, flash would make our phones run like snails.

I'm sure that once a larger version of the iPhone comes out, we'll se Flash. If not, maybe even a smaller version of Flash, made for the iPhone. I don't know.

- John
/off topic @psylichon - hiya neighbor; also in PhiLLy PA

/on topic- Even with the fast processor that the iPhone has?

[geordisjd]

/off topic @psylichon - hiya neighbor; also in PhiLLy PA

/on topic- Even with the fast processor that the iPhone has?

I'm not sure what the size of the hard drive has to do with speed of the processor.

Anyway, remember the vtap.com site that will encode flash movies on the iPhone.

[psylichon]

vtap is nice, but it doesn't help with the navigational menus that drive many websites.

And re: memory on the Iphone... flash storage isn't used as RAM is it? I know Apple is tight-lipped with the specs, but I've seen educated guesses that put it at 128MB. If that's it, I'm sure they're doing some sort of caching to the flash storage to achieve what the Iphone does.

So if that were true, do you think 128MB + 8092MB cache would be enough to run integrated Flash in the browser?

[geordisjd]

This is what I found on arstechnica.com:

"Craig reckons that the actual memory bank size of the iPhone is 128MB of RAM and that 11MB of that total is most likely provided for integrated graphics. When one remembers that some variant of OS X is running under that iPhone GUI, it seems hard to believe how much Apple is doing with that small number. I can't even imagine what OS X these days would be like running on 128 MB of RAM (it was painful enough in the early days of OS X), so there must be some serious optimization going on there. "

And the speed of the processor is 600 MHz.

Flash on my old iBook (466 MHz, 8 MB of Vram) doesn't run well at all.