Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash 'flawlessly'
engadget.com
engadget.com
There's nothing wrong with having a different definition of "flawlessly," I'm just wondering what Adobe means.
That is, they seem similar to all the other apps on the App Store: simple, quickly written, drain battery life, crash often. Just like native Objective C apps :)
Apples != Oranges.
My predictions of Jobs' accuracy:
-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.
-I think he'll be right about made-for-PC flash interfaces being awkward on a tablet, (e.g. problems with hover states).
-I think performance will be acceptable for video but poor on most non-tablet optimized games.
-I think he will be mostly wrong about Flash holding the platform back, because I think most devs who are making content for the tablet will use native code or web apps.
Overall, I think people will be pretty disillusioned with the idea of Flash on a touchscreen once they use it and its limitations become evident, but I do think that it will still be seen as an advantage over the iPad among tech-savvy people, if just for the ability to use flash-reliant websites and to play non-youtube videos.
It's probably worth pointing out that the Macbook Pro line has about 10 hours of battery life. It's only the so called "equally good laptops for cheaper" that struggle on with a couple of hours of battery.
edit: Engadget commenter Charbax says:
This looks like the development kit based on Nvidia Tegra 2, I think it's for sale for like $400 without the screen. I filmed these demos a couple months ago: http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-to...
All in all, I would say it is safe to say Google has been a great motivator for the engineers at Adobe, not Steve. I would guess the engineers at Adobe could care less what Steve says, for they won't be helping him with his iPhone OS.
Android should just do h.264 video. There is less overhead.
Also, won't apps written directly for the native (Java) APIs on Android provide better results? Aren't "native" Windows or Mac apps usually better on their respective platforms? AIR is a nice idea but adding one more layer on a phone with limited resources has to cost something in terms of app performance, battery life, and/or usability. It's good that Google is supporting Flash. However, I think they just need to be careful to make sure that there are a lot more "native" Android apps.
2. Android does do h.264 and most Android devices have hardware decoders.
3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.
Uh... which market? The cell phone market? I hate to break it to you, but most people don't buy their phones after considering whether or not the apps they might be interested in will be running natively or using an intermediate platform. To most people, phones are about communicating status more than anything else.
a) We know Android tablets are coming - we've seen them before b) We know Adobe is porting Flash to Android/ARM
It appear logical that it would run better on an Android tablet that a phone given the processing power available.
The tablet is probably a Tegra2 based thing (since you can buy the dev boards and they run Android well) or possibly Android-on-Atom.
Both Tegra2 and Atom are much powerful than the Cortex-A8 (Snapdragon/Apple A4) processes found in phones (and the iPad)
Well, here's something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0 Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that, according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps "flawlessly." Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired's Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup, although we'd definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttn1G0Kw62o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo
cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Every dodgy piece of software ever made just earned a "flawless" reclassification.
Someone tell Microsoft: Vista was flawless after-all.
People on this world: If flash videos on your mac have been slow in the past, it is because Apple, as a closed and proprietary platform, didn't expose the proper API for hardware video acceleration and thus, Adobe wasn't able to use hardware acceleration! This is not Adobes fault!
Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-acceler...
(fyi, i wish that flash video dies, too, as much as everyone)
From my point of view it is obvious that video playback could be faster if Adobe had access to hardware acceleration. We can agree on that point, right? This is obviously Apples decision to make an API public or not. Of course, i am not saying that video playback couldn't be smooth in software mode. The point that mplayer plays almost everything and smooth on different hardware is a good point. But to pass the buck to Adobe all the time is just wrong. I mean, the API is now public and Adobe already has built in the hardware acceleration, that is quite fast and shows that they are doing something to address the problem.
Obviously my opinion seems to upset others, so i should have just shut up and let people brag about how bad Adobe is. I'm not using a Mac, i am not developing with Adobe tools and i have no problems with my flash plugin, so in the end why should i care. I just hate one-sided views.
From their Twitter feed:
The same crap designed to run on x86 CPUs with heavy FPU usage even with hardware GPU acceleration on Windows, cannot run smoothly on ARM CPU without any acceleration or comparable FPU. That is all marketing bullshit.
Even on Linux i386 they use no acceleration at all. Do ldd libflashplayer.so and try to |grep nvidia or something like that. Then try ldd mplayer and compare.
Flash sucks as technology, and Apple understand it. Of course, they want Flash on their devices, but it just broken. By definition.
The same shit with JRE. Dalvik VM in Android or that on Google App Engine is not the same as JRE, and you cannot, and never will be able to run some bloated spring+hibernate+swing crap on ARM.
Just face it: ARM is a completely different platform. Their favorite mantra "Code once, run everywhere" does not work anymore.