A longtime friend of mine set up camp today in the pro-Flash region, tagging the iPad as having a serious blind spot to the wonders of Adobe’s visual software. As the world knew in April, the iPad doesn’t support Flash. As the world has learned after 3.2 million sales of the iPad in the first 90 days, users don’t seem to care. There is, after all, little that Flash does to help a business user.
An Apple content sales agenda — sell more movies! — was the only reason my pal could see that his girlfriend’s iPad was Flash-less. He was right about one thing: the iPad is much better at letting you consume information than producing it. It’s a weakness that might be firmed up in the second 100 days of the product’s life. When there’s about 7 million of them in the marketplace.
But Flash? It’s sort of a hot topic if you have to view it on Apple’s business products — or anybody else’s. Hot as in spin your fan, heat your laptop bottom, slow your user experience down. It’s not the content, it’s the compromise. That’s what drove Flash off mobile devices iPhones and the iPad. Apple doesn’t want us to get burned by the power demands of Flash.
Want to view the future of a Web without Flash? It’s coming, and it’s arrived first on your iPad screen.
My friend Guy, who runs a bang-up marketing strategy company, said Apple wants nothing to do with technology that will weaken its content sales; thus, no Flash. And yet, there’s a Flash-free Netflix app, producing thousands and thousands of hours of content, approved by Apple for the iPad. Same for ABC TV. BBC. NPR. YouTube. All iPad apps. If Apple was barring the door to content-tech, how’d they let Netflix et al get past ‘em?
Maybe Herr Jobs was washing his turtlenecks that day. (Bah-dump-bump! “Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress. Try the veal.”)
I don’t miss Flash on my iPad. If I must simply must view it, I curse the laggard content provider and fire up my MacBook Pro. And then keep it off my bare legs. And plug it in after 45 minutes.
You don’t need to be an engineer to know Flash is a performance bog. Flash-happy Farmville starts up on my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo) and then pegs my CPU at plus-100%. So the Mac starts swapping out to 4GB of memory. Same effect on my battery-powered laptop (Intel Core Duo). Battery life there about 30 percent less, I’d estimate, than with non-Flash use. Farmville has a theme song you can’t turn off — the music of fan RPM.
These days I sigh when I bump into Flash at the front of a website. “Not clever enough to compel me with anything more fundamental and less invasive,” I think. For those hiring Flash developers, I hope it’s at the insistence of their clients. Web design ought to strive for as simple a level of tech as possible. Simpler, more secure tech=more eyeballs, I believe. (To paraphrase Homer Simpson, “Stupid marketers. Be more clever!)
So in contrast, Guy believes the world is so much better on the alternative to iPad/iPhone, Planet Android. There’s plenty of people who claim to understand why Google just killed off its latest Android experiment, the Nexus One unlocked phone.
I love it when anyone outside of Google (myself too!) pretends to know what course that Death Star will take. The world is littered with experiments, flung onto your disk drives and theirs, that Google hopes will stick. Wave. Buzz. Voice. Blogger blogs with FTP posting (my personal gripe; Google is so advanced that FTP blog support has dropped outside its ken.) On and on the brilliant catalog of shooting stars goes — and tracking them is like trying to ascertain the political and economic principles of China. Inscrutable, they both are.
And so there’s Android to admire — but not trust just yet for smartphone mail. According to a writer at InfoWorld, it still won’t support enterprise business-level Exchange: “The newest Android OS’s claims over Exchange support obscure a key fact: It’s not really there.” Froyo is still waiting on support for *secured* Exchange accounts, says Galen Gruman:
“If you’re looking for a smartphone to use at work, forget the advertising and marketing claims. The truth is that you have three viable options: a BlackBerry, an iPhone (though not for highest-level security needs), and a Windows Mobile device. Although Google and its Android allies talk up Exchange support, the truth is that Android is a couple years behind Apple and a decade behind Microsoft and RIM in corporate Exchange support. That means Android is fine for personal use — and for personal use only.”
Gadzooks! Forget advertising and marketing marketing claims? How will we ever decide what to buy, or love, or despise? Oh yeah, there’s that Internet thingy with all those long threads, relating personal experience with products and technology.
Me, I’m satisfied being an iPad owner who doesn’t endure Flash. If only the file transfers were well-designed for this 100-day-old product. I’d put that one at a higher consumer satisfaction priority than Flash support.
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