The recently released Motorola Droid 2 is the first Android 2.2-based phone to come with Flash 10.1 pre-installed. Because much of the web contains Flash, this was a welcomed addition, allowing the smartphone to view the web as it was intended to be viewed; with all its Flash-y goodness as seen below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-_iQDZnOI8

However, LAPTOP Magazine’s experience with Flash 10.1 on the Motorola Droid 2 sounds a lot different from what is seen above.

Video

When attempting to view video content from websites such as ABC.com and Fox.com, Piltch experienced a myriad of problems, including long load times, freezes, error messages, and incompatibility issues. Even after leaving the web browser, the Droid 2 was unresponsive for a second or two. However, some video, found using Adobe Flash showcase for mobile, reportedly played smoothly.

Games

Gaming proved to be an equally frustrating experience for Piltch. Many popular Flash games on websites like Addicting Games were made with PC input in mind, requiring the user to click the left mouse button or press CTRL. Though the Droid 2 has a physical QWERTY keyboard, Piltch found that pressing the CTRL key had no effect on the game. Even games made specifically for mobile use did not function correctly.

Web

One of the biggest arguments for Flash on mobile devices is that it would enable websites to be viewed as they were meant to be viewed. But, as Piltch discovered, many flash elements on websites simply did not function correctly or caused the Droid 2 to lag. The “empty boxes”, as Diana Helander says in the above video, seems like the lesser of two evils when the other evil is a phone that can barely function.

“I actually found that some Flash sites had more difficulty loading on the mobile browser when I had the plug-in enabled. At one point, for a period of about 45 minutes, I was inexplicably unable to load either New York Times home page or LAPTOP’s home page as the Droid 2′s browser got stuck at the point where it was trying to download some Flash ads and a Flash video player.” – Avram Piltch

Apple’s iOS Devices

Back in April of 2010, CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, composed a lengthy synopsis, titled “Thoughts on Flash“, on why Apple has not integrated Flash into its mobile devices. Jobs stated,

“Flash was created during the PC era for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards all areas where Flash falls short.” – Steve Jobs

With this in mind, Piltch responded:

“After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.” – Avram Piltch

So what’s the alternative? Apple’s iOS devices support HTML 5, which has become increasingly popular. It is a format that works on nearly any device and is a more open standard that allows videos and content to be viewed on mobile devices just as they would be from a PC or Mac. Piltch noted that it was hard to distinguish between a smoothly played Flash video and an HTML 5 video, but HTML 5 seems to be more reliable. Also, many websites already support HTML 5, such as Vimeo.

“Adobe needs to have a better answer to whether or not Flash is still relevant in a world where other technologies have rapidly started displacing it.  Based on my early experience with Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, it could soon join the floppy drive in the tech graveyard, something else Steve Jobs helped kill.” – Avram Piltch

Via LAPTOP Magazine

Motorola Droid 2: Poor Flash Experience is a post by Carter Sprunger from Notebooks.com.

Well, Adobe CEO  Shantanu Narayen decided to answer Steve Jobs’ letter with an an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal. WSJ has video of the interview online, using the Wall Street Journal standard video format, Adobe Flash.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are “really a smokescreen,” Mr. Narayen says. He says more than 100 applications that used Adobe’s software were accepted in the App Store. “When you resort to licensing language” to restrict this sort of development, he says, it has “nothing to do with technology.”
• Speaking about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, Mr. Narayen says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system.”
• Mr. Narayen calls accusations about Flash draining battery power “patently false.” Speaking about Mr. Jobs’s letter in general, he says that “for every one of these allegations made there is proprietary lock-in” that prevents Adobe from innovating.
• Responding to a question about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is a closed platform, Mr. Narayen chuckles. “I find it amusing, honestly. Flash is an open specification,” he says.

Basically, it seems that Mr Marayen has an answer for each issue Steve Jobs presented.  Are the answers really concrete facts in this whole case?  Not entirely.  It looks more like a blame game between two children caught doing something wrong.

But, it looks like Adobe is getting in the last word on this fight. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch announced on their blog:

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.

So, it seems that Adobe is still alive and kicking in this fight.  They may lose the deskop and laptop wars, but they have a more than fighting chance on the smartphone and portable device markets.

Adobe CEO fires back on Steve Jobs is a post by Amy from Notebooks.com.

Hardware video decoding allows Flash Player to offload H.264 video decoding tasks from the CPU to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead, improving video playback performance, reducing system resource utilization, and extending battery life.

To use the new version of Flash Player, a.k.a Gala requires one of the following graphics card hardware: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M, the or GeForce GT 330M. The types of Mac hardware supported right now:

• MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
• Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
• MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
• iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

There are limitations right now for this beta:

• Some resolutions are not supported. Specifically YouTube does sometimes provide a resolution of 864 * 480 pixels for their 480p content which forces a software fallback.
• Resolutions smaller than 480 * 320 pixels are not accelerated on NVIDIA GeForce 9400M based Macs. On NVidia GeForce 320M and GeForce GT 330M the threshold can be a bit higher. These choices are picked by Apple and balance power usage of the CPU vs. GPU for their particular hardware. Remember that using the GPU for video decoding does not always result in overall power savings. This is something you can only decide on based on the exact type of hardware combination and the content you are trying to play. Playing video has a fixed baseline cost in the GPU for instance which is not the case when you decode on a CPU.
• The software decoder in Adobe Flash Player is more forgiving when it comes to improperly encoded video files, it works around many issues. The hardware decoder can not handle some of these cases. You might notice that some videos will have ‘jumpy’ frames, i.e. frames are out of order (we have seen that with some files uploaded to YouTube). This is usually because Composition Time Offsets are not properly set up.
• The hardware decoder is limited to 2 instances at a time. This limit is total to the system. If you have more than 2 videos open at the time the 3rd one will fall back to software decoding. This is even the case when a video is on a hidden tab (This is another reason that hardware decoding is reserved for high resolutions).
• In the current release of Mac OS X 10.6.3 hardware accelerated decoding will sometimes stop to function until you restart Safari. We are in process to resolve this issue with Apple. But if you can reproduce this consistently with a specific URL please let us know.

How do you know if your new version of Adobe Flash Player is working? If it is working properly, a small white square will appear in the upper left corner of the video.

From Mac Rumors

To try the new version, you can download it from Adobe Labs.

Preview for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X available is a post by Amy from Notebooks.com.

A recent  technical note Apple has posted describes how third-party developers can tap into hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video on compatible graphics cards via the video decode acceleration framework.

The framework provides developers with low-level access to the GPUs of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M video cards.  It allows them to tap into the hardware directly to accelerate the decoding of H.264 videos. This is something Apple has never done before.  They have traditionally not allowed developers to get that “deep” into the code base of OS X to get to those APIs or frameworks.

Ideally, this will help Adobe overall with the upcoming Adobe Flash Player 10.1 that tech pundits and the media have been discussing.  It will also make for much happier Mac users who want to view Adobe Flash content on their desktops and laptops.

Thanks to Boy Genius Report and Mac Rumors for the information on this new Flash development.

Mac OS X gives Adobe Flash a hardware boost is a post by Amy from Notebooks.com.

Google has just announced on its Chromium Blog that they are going to build in Adobe Flash support into their Chrome browser.

As a first step, we’ve begun collaborating with Adobe to improve the Flash Player experience in Google Chrome. Today, we’re making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.

We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:

• When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.
• Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.
• With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.

…Developers can download the Chrome developer channel version with Flash built in here. To enable the built-in version of Flash, run Chrome with the –enable-internal-flash command line flag.

This will make Chrome a lot more consumer friendly since they are already familiar with using Flash in Internet Explorer and Firefox.  It also will put Microsoft Silverlight under the spotlight to see how they will answer this new update.

Chrome getting Adobe Flash support built in is a post by Amy from Notebooks.com.

We’ve gathered up the HP Mini 311 reviews and hands on experiences to give you a good look at what you can expect from the little powerhouse.

The HP Mini 311 looks impressive but how does it actually stack up to real world tests? Our own Xavier Lanier had some hands on time with the HP Mini 311 and provides a good introduction to the new HP Mini 311 netbook.

Reviews:

CNet: “The real payoff is in the Nvidia Ion, which, while not a true discrete GPU, offers enough power to play HD video files smoothly (a sticking point for Netbooks), as well as do some basic gaming. For nongraphics tasks, it won’t affect performance much (and GPU support for Flash video, such as Hulu, is still a work in progress), but it does solve some of the frustrations associated with Netbooks, without driving up the price.” – Dan Ackerman

PCWorld: “By netbook standards, the HP Mini 311 is reasonably priced and offers features most netbooks lack. You’re paying a small premium for a netbook that has an HDMI port and can drive 1080p resolutions to a bigger display. Though it didn’t deliver on 1080p playback, it handled 720p and 1080i videos better than netbooks with Intel-based graphics. For those who were hoping to make a gaming netbook out of this, think again. High-end 3D games are still best played on full-fledged laptops.” – Cisco Cheng

Blog.laptopmag.com: “The design, the bright and beautiful screen, and the price all make this netbook a head-turner.” … “The trackpad is very smooth and our fingers glided easily across it. We also like that the two mouse buttons sit underneath instead of on the left and right sides. The bottom of these buttons is flush with the edge of the chassis, a nice design touch.” – K. T. Bradford

LaptopMag official Review: “With the Mini 311, HP has broken the netbook mold; no longer will users be limited to simple activities on these small systems, nor will they have to pay upwards of $600 for portability and performance. At its $399 price, consumers in the market for an inexpensive system can’t go wrong with this notebook. While we would have liked a better touchpad, the Mini 311 offers dramatic performance benefits in comparison to traditional netbooks while still offering nearly six hours of battery life.” – Michael A. Prospero

Laptop Magazine was so impressed with the HP Mini 311, that despite having issues with the trackpad, it was given an “Editor’s Choice Award”.

If you want to know exactly how the Mini 311 stacks up to the competition in all kinds of benchmarks including 3dMark, battery life, file transfer speed and much, much more be sure to hit up the detailed comparison at LaptopMag.com.

Notebooks.com: The Nvidia ION GPU that earns the HP Mini 311 high marks from pretty much anyone who lays hands on it also gives the Mini the ability to transcode files much faster than similarly spec’d netbooks without the Nvidia Ion. In this video you can see just how fast the mini transcodes a movie file compared to a Lenovo S12 without an ION GPU.

The Mini 311 is already impresses reviewers with Windows XP installed and it looks like things will only get better when Windows 7 arrives.

According to Liliputing.com on October 22nd you will be able to purchase the Hp Mini 311 with an 80 GB SSD 2-3GB of Ram and a full Nvidia ION GPU. By replacing the Nvidia ION LE, which is available now, with a full version users should experience better HD processing and will gain DirectX 10 support which will bring greater game compatibility.

Another improvement coming to the HP Mini 311 in the near future addresses the ability of the HP Mini 311 to play Flash video without looking like a bad kung fu movie. When Adobe releases Flash 10.1 this year it will be able to use the Nvidia ION GPU to provide stutter free streaming HD Flash Video.

Overall the reviews are positive with the trackpad being a point of contention between the Laptop Magazine blogger and the official reviewer. Even with shorter lasting battery life than many competitors the ability to do more including watch HD content, play games and, when Flash 10.1 comes out, watch Hulu more than makes up for this shortcoming.

This is one netbook I can’t wait to get my hands on once Windows 7 and the additional options come out, even if they do bump the price up into notebook range.

HP Mini 311 Review Roundup is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

In order to get this kind of Flash video experience on a netbook you’ll need a GPU and the new version of Flash, which will be released later this year. The HP Mini 311 and IdeaPad S12 with ION are two examples of netbooks that will benefit from the update.

I got a chance to see demos of both in action at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference last week and can assure you that the improvements are very noticeable. Here’s a quick video I shot of a 1080p Flash video streaming on a Mini 311:

Here’s the official press release from Adobe:

Adobe and NVIDIA Deliver Rich Web Experiences on Netbooks and Mobile Devices

GPU-Accelerated Netbooks from HP, Lenovo and Samsung Support Full Flash Player

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 5, 2009 — At Adobe MAX, Adobe’s worldwide developer conference, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq:NVDA) today announced that both companies are bringing uncompromised browsing of rich Web content to netbooks, smartphones and smartbooks built with NVIDIA® GPUs. The companies have been working closely together as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and dramatically improve performance of Flash Player 10.1 by taking advantage of GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices. NVIDIA customers embracing Flash Player 10.1 for their new devices include HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, Asus and more. Users are expected to be able to download a beta of Flash Player 10.1 before the end of the year.

The combination of NVIDIA GPUs and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 enables device manufacturers to deliver uncompromised Web browsing of rich applications, interactive content and HD video with substantially decreased power consumption. With the support of the NVIDIA GeForce®, NVIDIA IONâ„¢ and Tegraâ„¢ products users will be able to enjoy a much smoother viewing experience when accessing rich content built with the Flash Platform including HD and SD video from popular sites like Hulu.com or YouTube. For more information on Flash Player 10.1, please see the separate press release issued today.

Consumers want the best whether it’s a mobile device in their pocket or a netbook at the coffee shop,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of NVIDIA. Our engineers have worked closely with Adobe to make this a reality.”

The most innovative and expressive Web sites use Adobe Flash technology,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. By working together to further leverage the power of graphics processors, Adobe and NVIDIA are able to provide breakthrough Web experiences on a wide range of devices. This new development brings us a step closer to putting the power of a PC in your pocket.”

NVIDIA ION-based netbooks and nettops like the HP Mini 311, Lenovo IdeaPad S12, Samsung N510, Acer AspireRevo, and Asus eeeBox EB1012 and others are shipping today and once Flash Player 10.1 is available, they can take advantage of GPU-accelerated video decoding to deliver the kind of smooth Flash technology based video previously found only on higher-end PCs. Tegra processor-based smartphones and smartbooks that start shipping later this year will accelerate vector graphics and video to enable feature-rich, full-screen Internet video and animation.

HP is pleased to work with NVIDIA and Adobe to give customers a compelling high definition video experience,” said Kevin Frost, vice president and general manager, Consumer Notebooks, Personal Systems Group, HP. The recently introduced HP Mini 311 supports stunning HD video using Flash Player 10.1.”

As the biggest online video Web site in China, Youku.com believes in providing superior user experiences because fast video play-back is essential, said Allen Zhu, vice president of Youku.com. Now, with the new Adobe Flash Player 10.1, video decoding for the first time is enabled through NVIDIA GPUs, we can greatly enhance the speed of video playback for the great quantity of HD videos hosted on our Web site. This would enable our users to enjoy a smooth and stutter-free HD video playback experience.”

The new version of Flash Player 10.1 will help deliver smooth, full-screen HD and SD video on the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q110 nettop and IdeaPad S12 netbook with NVIDIA ION graphics,” said Stephen DiFranco, vice president, North America Channel Partners Organization, Lenovo. As more and more consumers connect online for their entertainment, GPU acceleration with NVIDIA will enhance this experience, whether it’s on the go with a Lenovo netbook or at home with a tiny desktop PC.”

To view a video of Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder, president and CEO of nVidia, discussing the collaboration with Adobe visit: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/open-screen-project/nvidia-ceo-on-flash.

Smooth HD Flash Video Coming to Netbooks w/ NVIDIA ION is a post by Xavier Lanier from Notebooks.com.