Point well taken, but those devices only handle Flashlite, not Flash proper (Flash 6,7,8,9 and 10+). The spirit of the question was regarding a Flash Player capable of running the actual Flash-based websites we see from day to day when browsing from our desktops, not the small handful of highly specialized, scaled-down, mobile Flashlite apps or vertical market Flashlite apps, as cool as those may be.
As others have said, those are not actually Flash encoded videos, but videos re-encoded at YouTube in an h.264 format that leverage a specialized h.264 decoder on the iPhone. But the real reason hits to the heart of Flash itself. It's still not optimized, or scalable enough for mobile (as-of-this-writing) in three key ways: General execution speed, memory footprint, and video acceleration performance. Remember, it was only version 9/AS3 that introduced a more native VM to run the compiled code, version 10 that's not even public yet that brought the first hint of hardware acceleration, and as for memory footprint, it's still a beast. Adobe created Flashlite to circumvent these issues. We're likely to see that first. Currently, Flash is still a bloated pig with legacy code and graphic routines still rooted in the late 1990's before hardware acceleration became standard, it's great for many things, but not for a mobile device, as it stands today. Even if Adobe could get it to run, it would be agonizingly slow and suck the life out of the battery for all but the simplest of sites. Adobe would need to tweak this "arm" version of the plugin to leverage the, albeit low-powered, hardware acceleration features of the iPhone. We would ultimately be compelled to make scaled-down versions of our websites just for the iPhone, if we're going to do that, it might as well be AJAX, which also runs somewhat sluggish (but runs) on the current generation iPhones. Ultimately, it gets down to power-consumption and heat dissipation. Once a new battery technology emerges, or a chip becomes even more power efficient (or both), this will all be more feasible. In the meantime, the iPhone is an amazing device for doing what it does, and with the battery life it has.
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Point well taken, but those devices only handle Flashlite, not Flash proper (Flash 6,7,8,9 and 10+). The spirit of the question was regarding a Flash Player capable of running the actual Flash-based websites we see from day to day when browsing from our desktops, not the small handful of highly specialized, scaled-down, mobile Flashlite apps or vertical market Flashlite apps, as cool as those may be.
As others have said, those are not actually Flash encoded videos, but videos re-encoded at YouTube in an h.264 format that leverage a specialized h.264 decoder on the iPhone. But the real reason hits to the heart of Flash itself. It's still not optimized, or scalable enough for mobile (as-of-this-writing) in three key ways: General execution speed, memory footprint, and video acceleration performance. Remember, it was only version 9/AS3 that introduced a more native VM to run the compiled code, version 10 that's not even public yet that brought the first hint of hardware acceleration, and as for memory footprint, it's still a beast. Adobe created Flashlite to circumvent these issues. We're likely to see that first. Currently, Flash is still a bloated pig with legacy code and graphic routines still rooted in the late 1990's before hardware acceleration became standard, it's great for many things, but not for a mobile device, as it stands today. Even if Adobe could get it to run, it would be agonizingly slow and suck the life out of the battery for all but the simplest of sites. Adobe would need to tweak this "arm" version of the plugin to leverage the, albeit low-powered, hardware acceleration features of the iPhone. We would ultimately be compelled to make scaled-down versions of our websites just for the iPhone, if we're going to do that, it might as well be AJAX, which also runs somewhat sluggish (but runs) on the current generation iPhones. Ultimately, it gets down to power-consumption and heat dissipation. Once a new battery technology emerges, or a chip becomes even more power efficient (or both), this will all be more feasible. In the meantime, the iPhone is an amazing device for doing what it does, and with the battery life it has.