CUPERTINO, CA – Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash media player — arguably the most ubiquitous browser plug-in in the world — won’t be making an appearances on Apple’s iPhone anytime soon, chief executive officer Steve Jobs told shareholders Tuesday.Why? The technology doesn’t meet Apple’s exacting performance standards, Jobs said. The version designed for personal computers is too slow on the iPhone, and the version ported to portable computer operating systems “is not capable of being used with the Web,” according to reports from Dow Jones and CNET.
iPhone’s insane popularity and adoption rate have not made it immune to criticism about the way it handles video. Although the device can display video across the entire surface of its 3.5-inch screen — which is much larger than the screens on most cellular phones — it is able to interact only with Quicktime videos online, not those in Flash or Windows Media formats. That makes it the iPhone less than practical as a portable media player or social-networking device, critics say. The majority of videos on YouTube, for example, are of the Flash variety, so they won’t play on iPhones.
Adobe is among the critics.
“I’d even go as far as to say that the Web experience isn’t complete on the iPhone until some kind of Flash support is added,” Adobe spokesman Ryan Stewart wrote in his blog on Tuesday. He added that 450 million other mobile devices are Flash-enabled.
Jobs is hoping Apple’s pending release of iPhone SDK, a software development kit designed to allow third-party developers to create applications for the device, will increase iPhone’s video-relevance.
In the meantime, Apple’s bitter rival Microsoft is hoping its new Silverlight media player will take over from Flash as the dominant mobile video technology. Launched for PCs in April 2007, the software recently was ported to the Symbian smartphone OS, which powers the majority of handsets worldwide. Handset maker Nokia already has agreed to incorporate Silverlight in its devices, which composed 53-percent of the 35.5 million devices shipped in the fourth quarter of last year.
