The BlackBerry PlayBook, which launches April 19, continued to have problems with Flash support before launch. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Here’s a telling sign of how hard Research in Motion and Adobe are working on Flash: Just a week before the release of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, both companies were still working out the kinks with the tablet’s Flash support and operating system stability.
‘We wanted to do it right.’ – RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis
Wired.com received a PlayBook review unit last week, and during our testing, the tablet choked on a number of sites and games running the popular Flash platform for animations and interactive content.
Adobe’s explanation for the problem: The PlayBook is running pre-release software, including the OS, and RIM and Adobe are still working on some final “code check-ins” to smooth over some issues with the plug-in’s performance.
“There’s a pretty complex hardware and software stack here,” explained Danny Winokur, vice president of Adobe’s Flash runtime software division. “It starts with the silicon and goes all the way down to drivers and the OS. Issues at any layer in that stack can be exposed when any piece of content comes into play and affect the stability that users are having.”
In other words, for Adobe and hardware partners like RIM, implementing Flash on the new crop of mobile tablets isn’t smooth as jelly.
Last week, Wired.com speculated that Flash was one of the factors contributing to a delayed launch of the PlayBook, which was originally scheduled for a first-quarter launch.
“RIM is on track to launch the BlackBerry PlayBook on April 19th, which is within three weeks of the original timing estimate provided in the fall,” RIM said in a prepared response to that article. “We don’t know where the rumor started, but any suggestion that Flash support has caused a delay is simply false.”
The PlayBook hits stores in only six days, on April 19. (Check out our full review of the PlayBook.)
It’s not unheard of for companies to be fixing bugs with their products until the last minute. Indeed, software updates to the PlayBook improved (but didn’t eliminate) Flash instability during the time we were testing it.
But it’s a sign of just how challenging it is to make Flash work right on mobile devices.
(Disclosure: Wired.com is owned by Conde Nast, which has been working closely with Adobe to bring digital versions of magazines, including Wired, to tablet devices.)
John Cooney, head of game development at Armor Games (which produces Flash-based games), seconded Adobe’s claim that the mobile environment is technologically complex.
“Mobile devices run differently and have different requirements in both hardware and software,” said Cooney. “They’re going to want to deliver a really good experience and any finagling they can do to get a device running 100 percent will be their bread and butter.”
In our testing over several days, some YouTube videos played choppily, every Flash game we accessed through Facebook crashed the PlayBook browser and some games at AddictingGames.com also crashed.
The problems are cropping up despite the fact that Flash has been supported on QNX, the operating system underlying the PlayBook OS, since 2009. Even though Adobe touts the plug-in as a “write once, run anywhere” runtime environment, the story right now is more precisely, “write once, work sometimes, on some devices.”
RIM says it has been working with Adobe to bring Flash to its devices for two years.
“It’s because we wanted to do it right,” RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis told Wired.com in an interview.
Continuous Improvement
RIM delivered two different over-the-air software updates during our time with the PlayBook. These updates improved browser stability while viewing the same test videos on YouTube, and many Flash games on Popcap ran, albeit sluggishly, particularly during complex animations. Apart from Facebook, Flash games worked without crashing about 90 percent of the time after the updates.
However, all Flash games accessed through Facebook continued to crash the browser. Other types of content did not cause the browser to crash. Adobe was able to replicate the Facebook games bug, and said it was working to fix it.
RIM Senior software manager Michael Cooley said some of our problems may have stemmed from some last-minute tweaks to the OS build.
“In our optimizations in these final days, we introduced an issue to the browser,” Cooley told Wired.com in an interview. He said issues included, but were not specific to, Flash content. Earlier versions of the PlayBook OS had a memory leak problem related to the Documents to Go and Kobo apps, RIM said. Those problems were resolved with a software update over the weekend.
Given the improvements, there’s a good chance that Flash will be running fine on the PlayBook in the near future, perhaps even in time for the tablet’s April 19 ship date.
But RIM is not the only manufacturer to have difficulty implementing Flash on a tablet.
Motorola’s Xoom tablet was heavily marketed as Flash-capable in the time leading up to its release, but it failed to launch with Flash support.
Currently, a version of Flash is available for the Xoom (and other Android 3.0 tablets) in the Android Market, although it is beta software and has stability issues. A shipping version is expected within weeks, Adobe says.
To be fair, creating a one-size-fits-all web platform is challenging for any company, particularly one that must deal with a wide variety of hardware partners. But perhaps Adobe wouldn’t be facing so many challenges had it been quicker to react to the release of the iPhone in 2007.
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