Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash 'flawlessly'

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/adobe-shows-off-prototype-android-tablet-running-air-and-flash/

by anderzole • 16 years ago

39 36 16 years ago

engadget.com

nl• 16 years ago

The most surprising thing there is that engadget found it surprising:

a) We know Android tablets are coming - we've seen them before b) We know Adobe is porting Flash to Android/ARM

It appear logical that it would run better on an Android tablet that a phone given the processing power available.

The tablet is probably a Tegra2 based thing (since you can buy the dev boards and they run Android well) or possibly Android-on-Atom.

Both Tegra2 and Atom are much powerful than the Cortex-A8 (Snapdragon/Apple A4) processes found in phones (and the iPad)

apphacker• 16 years ago

Maybe it's surprising because the iPad does not run flash.

raganwald• 16 years ago

I'd like a little more detail on what they mean by "flawlessly." It could be that Steve's idea of "flawlessly" involves things like being thrifty with battery-hogging system resources, playing nicely with the upcoming multi-tasking in 4.0, and having a culture around writing applications that feel "native" on their host platform.

There's nothing wrong with having a different definition of "flawlessly," I'm just wondering what Adobe means.

ptomato• 16 years ago

Exactly. I'd really like to see what sort of battery life they get out of that, for example.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I suspect Adobe's definition of "flawlessly" is approximately equal to, "hey, it boots! hasn't crashed yet!"

catch233• 16 years ago

Vista ran "flawlessly" in demo videos too... but we all know how that turned out when it was released.

davidedicillo• 16 years ago

I agree. Steve Jobs never said that Flash can't run on the iPhone/iPad. I'm sure he even tried prototypes for it himself. 30 seconds videos doesn't make a solid product.

rayval• 16 years ago

Actually there are 100 apps written with Adobe's Flash compiler on the App Store, and no one has complained.

That is, they seem similar to all the other apps on the App Store: simple, quickly written, drain battery life, crash often. Just like native Objective C apps :)

melling• 16 years ago

Google is moving to HTML5 on YouTube so there is no benefit here:

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Android should just do h.264 video. There is less overhead.

Also, won't apps written directly for the native (Java) APIs on Android provide better results? Aren't "native" Windows or Mac apps usually better on their respective platforms? AIR is a nice idea but adding one more layer on a phone with limited resources has to cost something in terms of app performance, battery life, and/or usability. It's good that Google is supporting Flash. However, I think they just need to be careful to make sure that there are a lot more "native" Android apps.

guelo• 16 years ago

1. flash != video

2. Android does do h.264 and most Android devices have hardware decoders.

3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.

andreyf• 16 years ago

3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.

Uh... which market? The cell phone market? I hate to break it to you, but most people don't buy their phones after considering whether or not the apps they might be interested in will be running natively or using an intermediate platform. To most people, phones are about communicating status more than anything else.

tvon• 16 years ago

I expect Flash to run well on tablets eventually (if Apple hasn't motivated Adobe to make this happen then nothing will). I'm not exactly sold on this demo though, show it working "flawlessly" on a shipping device with a price tag and published specs.

edit: Engadget commenter Charbax says:

This looks like the development kit based on Nvidia Tegra 2, I think it's for sale for like $400 without the screen. I filmed these demos a couple months ago: http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-to...

ck2• 16 years ago

They must have h.264 hardware acceleration in effect because running a flash video full screen pegs my desktop CPU.

windsurfer• 16 years ago

The latest mac flash beta fixes a lot of cpu issues.

KirinDave• 16 years ago

I think I have that beta. It hasn't changed that for me.

buster4• 16 years ago

I hate how people blame Adobe when videos run slow, it seems to work out well for Apple...

People on this world: If flash videos on your mac have been slow in the past, it is because Apple, as a closed and proprietary platform, didn't expose the proper API for hardware video acceleration and thus, Adobe wasn't able to use hardware acceleration! This is not Adobes fault!

va_coder• 16 years ago

Steve Jobs has always been great motivator; first for the engineers at Apple, and now for the Flash engineers at Adobe.

Terretta• 16 years ago

He even gets them to ship ahead of schedule. If only he enjoyed Duke Nukem...

eipipuz• 16 years ago

or despised it...

dbz• 16 years ago

I don't think it is fair to say Steve Jobs motivated Adobe. Yes, we've all seen the hundreds of articles basically saying "Steve Jobs thinks flash 'sucks' for various reasons and will never run on the iPhone OS;" however, it is clear that other companies, like Google, Nokia, ect., have an interest in Flash. Flash will run on the Android phones (for example), and I know Google has been "motivating" Adobe to get moving.

All in all, I would say it is safe to say Google has been a great motivator for the engineers at Adobe, not Steve. I would guess the engineers at Adobe could care less what Steve says, for they won't be helping him with his iPhone OS.

asnyder• 16 years ago

Is it just me, or is this redirecting to thetvsquad instead?

akrito• 16 years ago

Since they're both AOL properties, I bet something's wonky with their reverse proxy/load balancer.

dc2k08• 16 years ago

The copy:

Well, here's something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0 Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that, according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps "flawlessly." Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired's Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup, although we'd definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttn1G0Kw62o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo

cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

pavs• 16 years ago

All aol blogs are redirecting to tvsquad, including engadget.

From their Twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436

zweben• 16 years ago

This will be an interesting test of Steve Jobs' reasoning on why Flash should be kept off the iPad.

My predictions of Jobs' accuracy:

-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.

-I think he'll be right about made-for-PC flash interfaces being awkward on a tablet, (e.g. problems with hover states).

-I think performance will be acceptable for video but poor on most non-tablet optimized games.

-I think he will be mostly wrong about Flash holding the platform back, because I think most devs who are making content for the tablet will use native code or web apps.

Overall, I think people will be pretty disillusioned with the idea of Flash on a touchscreen once they use it and its limitations become evident, but I do think that it will still be seen as an advantage over the iPad among tech-savvy people, if just for the ability to use flash-reliant websites and to play non-youtube videos.

swombat• 16 years ago

-I think battery life will indeed be an issue. 10 hours has certainly set the bar high. I think people are going to expect significantly better battery life on a tablet than on a laptop now.

It's probably worth pointing out that the Macbook Pro line has about 10 hours of battery life. It's only the so called "equally good laptops for cheaper" that struggle on with a couple of hours of battery.

catch233• 16 years ago

Also, I think there's going to be a ton of flash apps that won't have updated their apps to properly use flash's touch apis. I'm sure there's going to be a whole bunch of apps on yahoo games that just won't work and the owners of the tablet won't understand why.

thenbrent• 16 years ago

Showing a 12 second demo without a crash makes a product flawless?

Every dodgy piece of software ever made just earned a "flawless" reclassification.

Someone tell Microsoft: Vista was flawless after-all.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Why people are so stupid? (a stupid rhetoric question =)

The same crap designed to run on x86 CPUs with heavy FPU usage even with hardware GPU acceleration on Windows, cannot run smoothly on ARM CPU without any acceleration or comparable FPU. That is all marketing bullshit.

Even on Linux i386 they use no acceleration at all. Do ldd libflashplayer.so and try to |grep nvidia or something like that. Then try ldd mplayer and compare.

Flash sucks as technology, and Apple understand it. Of course, they want Flash on their devices, but it just broken. By definition.

The same shit with JRE. Dalvik VM in Android or that on Google App Engine is not the same as JRE, and you cannot, and never will be able to run some bloated spring+hibernate+swing crap on ARM.

Just face it: ARM is a completely different platform. Their favorite mantra "Code once, run everywhere" does not work anymore.

Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash 'flawlessly'

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