It’s no secret that Steve Jobs is on a mission to move the world away from Flash and towards HTML5 supported technologies. Jobs has been quoted as saying “Flash is full of security holes,” and it’s an “old technology” during meetings with the Wall Street Journal folks. He has a bit of a point when it comes to video streaming, but, I’m surprised that not many people are talking about how Apple’s trying to stop Flash games from competing with their iPhone games. If Flash gets approved game developers will be able to continue using the flash platform instead of using the iPhone SDK. That’s the real issue here, not streaming video content. Flash games will challenge Apple’s AppStore model, and that’s something Apple doesn’t want to encourage.
We haven’t had much proof that flash kills battery life on mobile devices, and we certainly haven’t been given the option to test it out on our iPhones, but there’s an interesting video circulating the internet today that shows the repercussions of having Flash on a mobile device.
The video below shows a Nexus One phone running Flash 10.1. The Nexus One plays a couple of games, and streams a couple of videos during an 8 minute period. How does the battery hold up? It seems like the battery goes from around 50% to about 25% by the seven minute mark of the video — a pretty big battery hit for 8 minutes of use.
Maybe Jobs has a point, Flash just isn’t ready for mobile devices.
Update (Feb 24: 11:57PM EST) : We’ve been getting some blow back about this post so I thought I’d update everyone.
- There are claims from the video creator that the video in question below was edited extensively. The funny thing is that there’s no indication of editing. I’ve watched the video over and over again.
- A number of people have made similar claims in the comments of his vimeo page, but he never explains what’s up with his video. He just keeps claiming it was edited together despite the clock running continuously the whole time (attached a screenshot below).
- I wish I had the foresight to screen capture this stuff, but I’m pretty sure Michael Chaize said at some point that he’s an Adobe employee.
- A bunch of people are complaining about comments being deleted, which seems about right considering the “working at adobe” comment disappeared (again, I might be wrong), but Mark Doherty calls him a colleague here.
- I’ve downloaded the video to my hard drive from Vimeo just in case it mysteriously disappears over night.
- You can read an Adobe employees response to my post here.
Sample Conversation from Vimeo Page (admission of guilt? You can decide).
Video of Flash running on the Nexus One.
Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus One from michael chaize on Vimeo.
Article Via PC World and Gruber
