GigaOM’s website, NewTeeVee.com, posted an article today demoing Flash running on Android via a Nexus One. In the article they end up describing Flash for Android as ‘shockingly bad’. This raises an important question to all people using Flash 10.1 on Mobile Devices; should we expect all Flash on the web to run perfectly on our mobile devices. Here is the video demo in question:
The presenter is a guy name Kevin Tofel. I see a key flaw in Kevin’s experiment. The flaw being that he has tested Flash in just about the worst examples for mobile possible. Here is my reasoning:
- The players are very complex and power hungry. Specifically designed for use with desktops and powerful laptops.
- The videos are not in any way optimized for mobile viewing. This is in a number of ways; resolution, quality, and even the shear size of the file that is being loaded.
Some people may say that these points should not matter. Adobe and Google said that they would be releasing a ‘full’ Flash player for Android. Neither company ever mentioned in their keynotes that we should expect not to be able to view every single Flash element from the web on our devices.
However, I beg to differ with that argument. While Adobe and Google didn’t warn us about the lack of quality in high performance Flash players, this is surely to be expected with such a small piece of kit. If you had a 10 year old laptop with Windows XP on it you wouldn’t expect ABC’s Flash Player of today to run like a dream on it, why expect a Nexus One or Desire to either?
Simply to load a desktop optimized player on a mobile device will take up most of the processing power that the device has to offer. That is even before we get to the issue of loading the content and rendering it.
A great example of how the web should be viewed on a mobile device with Flash 10.1 comes from the UK on the BBC’s online video player. They have created both a desktop high quality version of all their videos, and then it’s equivalent mobile optimized versions. There is also a striped down version of the full player to load the mobile optimized videos. Watch the following video I created to see this in action:
What are your thoughts on this discussion readers? Should we have to compromise with our web experience now that we have Flash 10.1? Or is it fine to settle for mobile optimized versions of players? Should Google and Adobe have better explained the possibilities of Flash for Android in their Keynotes? Use the comments section below to discuss.
[via newteevee.com]
Comments