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May 20

First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS

Posted in: adobe, Android, flash, froyo, Google, nexus one, operating system, os, Phones, Today's Chili

Flash has been a contentious point for the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe.

The latest volley: Adobe is releasing Flash Player 10.1 for mobile phones and desktops today. And it is piggy-backing on Google’s fast growing Android operating system to hit back at Apple.

Google’s latest mobile operating system, Android 2.2, aka FroYo, will support Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1, a new version that claims to be optimized for mobile viewing.

That will make Android the first mobile operating system to support the full Flash player, instead of the stripped-down Flash Lite player that is currently found on most smartphones with Flash support.

Among PC users, Flash is popular: It is on more than 98 percent of all browsers, and the platform claims more than 3 million developers worldwide. Nearly 70 percent of web-based games are built using Flash, says Adobe.

But when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it stunned users by shunning Flash, instead creating its own walled garden of applications including games for its customers to play with. That’s led many to announce, somewhat prematurely, the death of Flash.

We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2, and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.

But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video — can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth. Our corporate Wi-Fi connection just didn’t seem good enough, and most Flash-heavy sites took a while to load.

Still it is a step forward and with fine-tuning, the beta version of the Flash Player should get better. Read on to see how Flash did on Android 2.2 OS.

Flash is fun — when it works.

Accessing many restaurant websites, movie trailers or most fashion sites on the iPhone is impossible. It’s isn’t a big inconvenience, but the small, blue, Lego-like icon that appears in place of Flash content has come to signify the part of the online world that’s cut off to an iPhone user.

With Flash Player 10.1 on Android 2.2, one of the first things I did was check out Swadley’s, a barbecue restaurant in Oaklahoma City that a friend mentioned a few days ago. Swadley’s website, built using Flash, has the outline of a cowboy on a horse galloping through the front page. It’s cheesy on a desktop, but on an iPhone it’s just a black hole.

My new Nexus One browser had no such problems. The Swadley’s site loads exactly as it does on the desktop, and was fast enough to signal the promise of the technology.

From there, I hopped on to the Sony Pictures web site to check out the trailer for Karate Kid, a re-make starring Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith. I could watch the trailers, pinch-to-enlarge it and check out some of the trivia on the site. But Flash stumbled here, forcing me to reload the site about three times when the trailer didn’t pop up on the screen the way it was supposed to.

The Warner Bros. site optimized for Flash Player 10.1 did better, with movie trailers playing flawlessly on the phone.

That’s not to say everything is perfect with Flash Player 10.1. Fashion websites have been big supporters of Flash, using it to showcase videos of their latest collections and runway presentations. Chanel’s site has a video that shows its Cruise 2010 collection. Five seconds into the video, it failed to play and the spinning circle took over the site, forcing me to close it down.

For Hulu enthusiasts, there’s bad news. Flash Player 10.1 doesn’t mean you can revisit Lost episodes on the phone. Hulu doesn’t own the distribution rights for its content on mobile devices and so won’t stream to any mobile device, says Adobe.

Flash-based games sites, including Club Penguin, were accessible to the FroYo phone, in stark contrast to the iPhone (and previous versions of Android). But that’s where the fun ended. Loading the content is a frustratingly long process, and the Club Penguin site seemed to challenge the processing power of the phone, so my penguin on the phone couldn’t do much.

Flash Player 10.1 supports gestures, such as dragging your finger to scroll the screen or double-tapping on the video, and that works pretty smoothly.

Optimized battery life

Apple’s biggest beef with Adobe Flash is that the technology hogs battery life and is a drain on system resources.

Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory.

As I surfed a number of Flash-heavy websites, played movie trailers and little video clips on and off for about two hours. the battery level on my phone was down to about 61 percent from a fully charged battery.

Adobe says Flash Player 10.1 along with FroYo will be available starting June, though handset makers and carriers might take longer to push it to consumers. Ultimately, Flash will be available on the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and webOS platforms — basically everything except the iPhone, says Adobe — though the company didn’t give specific availability for other platforms.

But three years after Apple declared a war against mobile Flash, you have to wonder if Adobe’s efforts are too late. The online video landscape has changed significantly. Many major websites are switching to to HTML5, and video players such as Brightcove are serving up HTML5 videos for devices not compliant with Flash. Separately, Apple has worked with companies such as YouTube to produce iPhone versions of their sites. And even galloping-cowboy animations can be rendered using HTML5, eventually.

As a user, whether your phone supports Flash or not is increasingly becoming irrelevant. Getting Flash Player 10.1 mobile out is just the first step for Adobe. It will be greater challenge for the firm to show why mobile-phone users should really care about it.

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Photo: Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One phone
Keith Axline/Wired.com