For a blog called "the geek's geek" it sure sounds like the guy needs some technical support because many others report a completely better experience.
Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!
If native optimized HTML5 video plays smoothly and Flash doesn't, nobody cares that it's not fair to compare the two. The "fracking mobile phone" point is irrelevant. Either Flash plays smoothly or it dies.
In this post however he seems to be comparing mobile-optimised HTML5 video against desktop standard Flash video. My netbook won't play HD native video but it will play optimised Flash - does this mean Flash is great on my netbook and native video must suck? Both of these are unfair comparisons. (Though I accept your point that users couldn't care less :)
No. Straw man. The point is, Flash video doesn't currently work on Android unless you re-encode it. If you're going to re-encode video, you're going to move to HTML5.
It's really this simple: Flash's bid for relevance on mobile phones is only going to work if they can make desktop Flash video work reliably.
They don't even need to make the games and stuff work properly. Stipulate that they fix that. They still fail if everyone shakes off the Flash video lockin.
Exactly. It's the "No porting necessary" bit that would be appealing and would let Flash swiftly be relevant on mobile. Little porting is fine too. But anything non trivial, like changing the user interface, puts Flash on mobile on much more equal footing with HTML5, which Flash should avoid.
> Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!
My iPhone 3G's processor is faster than one of my laptops (that I used on a daily basis, but recently retired it due to buying a new Starling Netbook). You're damn right it better perform just as well!
Your iPhone's processor may have a larger number representing its clock, but your laptop's processor is likely much faster.
You can't compare different CPU architectures by the number of hz. Desktop (=laptop in this case) processors are out-of-order power-sucking beasts compared to the power sipping CPU in your phone and other devices.
t1=time.time(); x=[i*i for i in xrange(1000000)]; time.time()-t1
On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, this runs in 0.47 seconds. On my Nexus One (using the Python executable from Scripting Layer for Android), it takes around 3.8 seconds. So the N1 is around an eighth of the speed of the iMac (ignoring the C2D's second core), which is actually pretty impressive.
Keep in mind that the N1 has a 1 GHz CPU, so the OP was correct in that you can't do an apples to apples comparison when different architectures are at play.
You are correct. But I did want to mention that I'm running an old iPhone...two generations old by now. I imagine that the newer iOS and Andriod phones are indeed comparable in speed to a decent but not top-of-the-line laptop.
I see nothing wrong with assuming that your phone should be able to handle laptop-like web media functions, such as watching video and playing audio or games.
It's not only the CPU that's the problem, but swap space too. While a laptop would have swap disk, as the OS would require one, an iPad/iPhone/iPod would not, and it's limited by the memory there is. As there can be N number of flash applications running on the same web pages, it could be that you need N "flash engines" running (I don't know that for a fact - just guessing here). And because it's hidden from the main browser, it can't control it. For example the browse might be able to do some kind of limit how much javascript memory/cycles are used, but can't do for plugin like adobe's.
Just punditry on my side, but I've also tried the jailroken frash on my iPad - and while it worked fine, I clearly saw that certain games are not playable - they were made for mouse with buttons, and just does not work with fingers.
Obviously this could be changed, but what Steve is afraid, is that people might perceive this as iPhone/iPad/iPod failure, rather than flash application one just expecting a mouse, and someone trying to emulate it with "fingers".
"Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!"
This would be more persuasive if there weren't non-Flash video and non-Flash games for comparison that don't have the same problems.
Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!