According to some extensive testing undertaken by Adobe and posted on the Flash Mobile Blog, Flash 10.1 is not the battery hog that Steve Jobs claimed it would be. A few weeks back, Jobs made the bold claim that Flash, were it to be used on the iPad, would chop the battery life from 10 hours to 1.5 hours. Mark Doherty at Flash Mobile Blog ran some tests and came up with some interesting conclusions.
Doherty ran a 17 minute video via Flash on the Nexus One. The results? Well, rather than Flash making the battery life cripplingly low, the 17 minute video caused the battery to drop by only 6%. It’s worth bearing in mind, that this was using 10.1 and perhaps Jobs had an earlier version of Flash in mind, but, at the end of the day, the actual evidence seems pretty damning.
It all just smacks of another attempt to add to the apparent smear campaign being waged against Adobe by Apple’s supporters. At the end of the day, it looks highly unlikely that the iPhone or iPad will ever see a version of Flash. A few months back, whilst announcing Flash 10.1 for mobile devices, Adobe explained why, at that time, there were no expected release dates for the iPhone version – Adobe’s Anup Murarka stated, “Unfortunately we have no news for you there, as we’ve said before, we need additional support and cooperation from Apple to get Flash on the iPhone.â€. It seems to have been from around then that the relationship, at least publicly, between the two companies became a little frosty.
Whilst all this Adobe v Apple tit for tat goes on, it’s worth bearing one thing in mind – as I said at the time of the announcement of Flash 10.1 – Flash would open up many opportunities on any smartphone that supports it. Rather than being tied to downloads from an apps market, app developers could serve many apps directly from the web using Flash. Such an open platform isn’t exactly how Apple like to operate, and it’s not inconceiveable that it could have a direct impact on apps sales. Of course, I wouldn’t, for a second, contemplate claiming that Apple have side-stepped Flash and started this frankly immature war of words with Adobe in an attempt to keep their golden goose to themselves. Just saying…