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Flash On Android Is 'Shockingly Bad'
Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. 'While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset,' writes Lawler. 'All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.'"
This has been my experience as well with my Droid. I realize that the droid is a bit slower than other Android phones, but I hadn't had any trouble with watching HTML5 video on it, so I expected similar results with Flash. I was wrong. The few times I did get it to play, after let the player buffer for several minutes (on WiFi) it played in the single digit frame rates. I uninstalled it after a few days, as sites that had HTML5 video available still defaulted to Flash if they detected it. Having access to HTML5 video on only a portion of sites is preferable to me to having Flash for Android available on all sites. That should say something about just how bad it is.
Open the browser on your phone then select: Menu -> More -> Settings -> Enable Plugins -> On Demand.
That means Flash is disabled by default and a placeholder will be displayed instead, but you just need to touch the green arrow to load and play the flash content if you want to see it. Works a treat, performance is fine, and if you really do want the content it's there with a single press.
Having said that, I find Flash performance to be fairly acceptable for the most part on my Nexus One anyway, and having it on demand like this is much, much, much better than being told you can't have it at all.
Down in the comments for the story, someone has posted this counterexample to youtube. In it, he uses Flash to watch the video complaining about how badly Flash video works on mobile phones on his mobile phone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU
You forgot the Android way of doing things.
3) OPTIONALLY, have flash disabled and enable it on-demand with a single tap. Best of both worlds. You are welcome.
btw, flash on my N1 doesn't eat significantly more battery and sure as hell is not slow most of the time and doesnt heat up more than with regular video playback.
Maybe you should see on-demand Flash in action, rather than make up FUD about russian roulette and browser crashes without any facts to back your statements up.
I've been running Flash on my phone since June, viewing the Flash content I choose to on a daily basis. It's seamless enough that I hardly think about it. I've never had a browser crash from playing Flash content, there's no "roulette" involved. It does in fact "just work" (though I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it brilliant). And as a bonus, if I want to emulate an iPhone, I'm always free to uninstall Flash completely.
funny thing is, according to the article they didn't get any video to play properly.
Well guess what, I am currently watching the flash video of the article on my Nexus One. Its playing fullscreen with no problems at all.
I HAD to TURN ON FLASH because otherwise I would NOT have been able to watch it.
I for one am glad I had the option to do so!
There you go
The N900 isn't very popular because Nokia never intended for it to be an iPhone killer. The N900 is a research device - a public prototype. This was even more true of the N8x0 (which almost no one had heard of before the N900). With each release the platform matures and gains more features.
Speaking as an N900 owner, it is a great device that is completely open. The only time I have ever met constraints with it is when I tried to do things one would not normally do with a phone. e.g. RDP/VNC (works fine, but the high res screen is a disadvantage for this) and printing. (Also, the keyboard can be a little fiddly at first.) Most of the builtin features can be easily replaced with better performing and more functional alternatives by installing free apps from a Debian-style repository, including the kernel.
I'd recommend against getting one right now though, since Nokia is close to releasing it's successor. Personally, I won't be upgrading since the N900 is flexible enough to meet all my needs (and can easily be extended to do so).
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Bitmap and canvas stuff sucks big time on webkit browsers too, especially Safari.
The implementation is still pretty basic, you can only dream of doing most of the things you can do in Flash, and the performance isn't any better.
It's a good thing to have such capabilities right in the browser in an open standard implementation, but there's still a looong way to go.
Having video playback decoupled from a big and complex plugin and sent straight to decoders optimized for the platform is indeed an instant godsend for any low power device