During an Apple shareholder’s meeting this week, Steve Jobs addressed the iPhone’s inability to play Flash video (which is becoming a standard way to distribute video content, as evidenced by the success of video sharing sites like YouTube) and said that Adobe’s mobile Flash platform, the Flash Lite Player, isn’t advanced enough for the iPhone and “performs too slow to be useful.”
What kind of crap is this?
There have been a few times that I’ve considered purchasing an iPhone, solely based on the Safari browser integration and its ability to render pages in the same way that Safari on a desktop system would. What keeps me from taking the iPlunge is the iPhone’s inability to play Flash.
I understand that there are battery and performance considerations to factor in allowing the iPhone to have this functionality, but to have the balls to off-handedly blame Adobe for the iPhone’s shortcomings is amazing to me.
When not referring to himself in the third person, Brian likes rain and getting caught in Pina Coladas. Oh, and let's not forget making love to Cape dunes. Yeah, those really do it for me....er, um.. I mean Brian.
March 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Yeah, I was caught off guard by that one as well. I recently downloaded Flex and it looked like a brilliant way to build nice fatty little client applications – until I realized they didn’t (and now won’t) work on an iPhone. I haven’t taken the “iPlunge” yet and want to but there are now four things holding me back:
1) No flash support
2) Having to break my Sprint agreement
3) Android will be more open than the iPhone
4) 3G support
I guess I’ll have to wait until 2 of these get knocked down.