Hasta La Gadget!

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.

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.

So, it’s official. The Nokia X7, unfit for a US launch, has finally found a home with Three in the UK. The heavily leaked stainless steel handset runs an updated Symbian^3 “Anna” (aka, PR2) OS that finally introduces a vastly improved browser and portrait QWERTY with split-view data entry among its 50 new enhancements. Rounding out the specs are an 8 megapixel cam with dual-LED flash, 4-inch OLED ClearBlack display, HD video recording, and 256MB RAM / 1GB ROM with an 8GB memory card tossed in the box. You’ll find the press release, video, and more pic after the break.

Update: Nokia tells us that the X7 features 720p video recording, and a 680MHz CPU — presumably the same old (and we mean old) ARM 11 proc and found in the N8 and E7. Oh, and it’s the same Broadcom BCM2727 GPU and 8 megapixel EDoF camera we reviewed in the E7. The X7 will be available in Q2 with a price set at €380 before taxes and subsidies.

[Thanks, Will B.]

Continue reading Nokia X7 with Symbian ‘Anna’ now official on Three UK (Updated)

Nokia X7 with Symbian ‘Anna’ now official on Three UK (Updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe Flash compatibility  was among the top selling points for the Xoom when Mototola first showed off the device at this year’s CES. After all, Apple’s Steve Jobs has long held a firm, unwavering position that the software just doesn’t work on mobile device–it’s buggy, it crashes, it makes everything slower. And then, after all of that, the Xoom didn’t even launch with the software.

Spent some quality time watching the Home Shopping Network this morning to hear just how the Nook Color will be improved? That’s what we thought… but we bit the bullet and tuned in ourselves to get the details for you. Simply put, HSN says Barnes and Noble will start rolling out an over-the-air software package in “mid-April” that will update the Nook Color to Android 2.2, bringing Adobe Flash Player, Angry Birds, and push email of some sort. It’ll also apparently include “lots of Nook apps,” though the channel’s pitchmen only had one to show on TV — a kid-friendly sketchpad, with a variety of drawing utensils and colored paper. HSN hosts also claim that customers who purchase the Nook Color on the show are “guaranteed to be the very first people updated,” though we’re not sure we’ll take them at their word, considering some of the other fabulous exaggerations we just heard on the air.

HSN details Nook Color update for ‘mid-April’: Android 2.2, Flash, apps and push email originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The 3-in-1 Rogue Grid stacks to shape your light

The Rogue Grid from Expo Imaging is a clever, compact honeycomb-grid to shape the light from your off-camera flash. It has two stackable sections which fit together to make a third, meaning that this pocket-sized accessory takes the place of three bigger ones.

You use a grid when you want to precisely place a spot of light in your photo, without extra light spilling over the rest of the picture. The simplest ones can be made from an old section of cereal box with a handful of chopped-down black straws inside. A honeycomb-grid is like this, but with — as you might guess — honeycomb-shaped holes.

The above photo is confusing. There are actually two grids and one round bezel which holds them, not three as it appears in the picture. One gives a 25º beam, another a 45º beam. Stick them together and the holes line up perfectly, effectively making a longer tube with an even narrower 16º beam. The whole lot sticks to the flashgun with a strap. The set, including strap and carrying bag, is $50, More expensive than a box of drinking straws, but also easier to use.

Introducing the Rogue 3-in-1 Honeycomb Grid [Expo Imaging. Thanks, Greg!]

See Also:

• Honl Adds Softbox to Light-Shaping Tools
• Make Your Own 'Honl' Lighting Kit
• Cheap, Six-In-One Flash Mod Kit Looks Very Handy