iPad 2 beats Android 3.0 Honeycomb Xoom, Galaxy Tab in HTML5 savvy - Page 3

I was at a Samsung tab launch tonight and played around with the honeycomb 10.1, showed the Samsung guys the prominent ad for the iPad in Angry Birds (launches here in Australia in two days) and flicked to some Android news application with a prominent story on HTC's newest, needless to say they weren't amused.

I found Honeycomb to be alright but I expected more going by the constant stream of garbage spewed out by Android trolls on tech sites all over the web, there was really nothing that couldn't be done equally as well on an iOS device.

AVM+ is not 'Flash Player', not even nearly so. AVM+ (aka Tamarin) is just the ActionScript Virtual Machine. Comparing AVM+ to FlashPlayer is like comparing a JavaScript engine to a full-blown HTML5 browser. Flash Player itself is so much more than just the AVM+ you can't even comprehend how much work would go into rolling your own Flash player. Just look at Gnash or SWFdec, the most active and most popular OSS Flash player projects. They are still stuck at a partial implementation of the Flash specs from 5 years back, and publicly acknowledge that they will never be able to write a feature-complete Flash player, for the simple reason that it's too much work, the specs are not complete, and some of the technology used in the Flash player is patented.

The fact that the specifications of the SWF format (which is just the container), ActionScript and FL4/FLV are publicly available is nice, and the fact that anyone is allowed to write a Flash player looks all great and mighty reasonable from Adobe, but none of these imply that you would actually be able to do it, if the specs are incomplete or opaque (where they refer to other specs which are _not_ open).

As 'open standards' go Flash is a lot like Microsoft's OOXML: the file format is known, but to interpret and implement certain things in it, you need more specs, some of which are not availabl. Such as the binary blobs in OOXML that can contain data generated from older Word versions which is verbatim copied into the OOXML document for backwards compatibility. Large parts of Flash, such as the DRM, video and audio codecs, probably font rendering and PDF functionality etc, are not documented and/or patented.

In other words it doesn't matter how much Adobe says you are 'free to implement your own Flash player without restrictions', you would simply not be able to do so, at least not up to the level of Adobe's own player.


You are comparing 'specification' with 'implementation' there. Even though HTML4 is already 10 years old, browsers have been progressing like crazy to make themselves better at rendering it, with faster JavaScript engines, hardware accelerated rendering, better font rendering, better scrolling and zooming, extensions to view and operate on all kinds of aspects of the DOM (think Greasemonkey) and so on, and so forth. Flash and the Flash player is nothing like that. Yes, Adobe throws in some new features every now and then, but they rarely actually make the player better at what it already did. It's frankly nothing but pathetic and laughable that it took them until last year (mid 2010), to *finally* improve their video decoding engine so it could use GPU accelerated decoding, and even today (2011) it *still* only works well for some codecs, at some resolutions, on some operating systems.

Every time I see how my Linux-based HTPC with a paltry single-core, 1st-generation Atom at 1.6Ghz plays 1080p MKV's buttery smooth by using the GPU, even if it's playing Youtube through its own decoder (XBMC with youtube plugin), I remember how playing full-screen, 480p SD Flash content from YouTube through the Adobe player is like a 5fp slide show on that same machine. How come my iPhone 3GS with a 600Mhz ARM CPU plays HQ Youtube (720p) through HTML5 absolutely perfectly, yet a 1.6 Ghz Atom doesn't even pull off the same file at 480p?

All this tech discussion is interesting...but, it just doesn’t matter.

To date, between the iPad and iPad 2, Apple has sold probably 16million+ units...

The product works well, very well and the build quality is outstanding. Apple’s marketing is superb and the iPad has huge brand-recognition and consumer appeal.

No one is waiting on line for hours for any tablet product from the “competition.”

People can argue about what features the iPad does or doesn’t have and/or should have…but, the bottom line is that, it is going to take a vastly superior product, in terms of competitive cost, hardware, and software, for the majority of potential tablet consumers to even consider buying another product over an iPad….and like it or not…that vastly superior product is nowhere to be seen in the present market, or any time in the near/distant future…

Apology in advance...

I'll see your daren't and raise you a shan't and two dasn'ts.

lol not sure what your point is? Daren't is a perfectly good contraction.

Thanks, I've been looking for that for 4 years!!

...and it's still not a final release for tablets.

Here it is: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...0&postcount=60

Stories like this make me laugh so hard at Apple fanboys.

Anyone notice how html 5 really doesn't matter yet? When it does, Google will focus on implementing it better. Get over it. This is software, it evolves.

They over hype it, and you undersell it. In the end it's not as good as what they say, and slightly better than you're admitting

What an inane comment!

HTML is what runs the world wide web. Without html, there wouldn't be a www. Even though not many places are using the latest version of html, html is the basis for the www - and the ability to run it better than the competition is most certainly relevant.

Flash is a useless add-on... or should I say 'ad'-on?

Do you want to explain which part of the HTML5 specification you think is more useful than Flash as a whole?

The most prominent and common features of HTML5 seems to be the <video></ video> element. This has allowed mobile devices with relatively very slow HW and very limited batteries to play videos with ease. Its also saved a great many machines with desktop OSes from becoming too hot, spinning up noisy fans and wasting their batteries for no other reason than to have the Flash plug-in loaded. Seems like that is a great addition to the speed and efficiency of the web, and one that was quickly and widely adopted.


PS: Are you ignoring all of CSS and JS, or just trying to discredit HTML as a useful part of the web?

I've not seen any benchmarks that say that HTML5 video playback is more efficient (and thus less of a power drain) than the same video inside a Flash container. If you know of any, please post them here, I think it would be very relevant to this thread.

I'm also not ignoring anything. I'm just confused by people who claim that HTML5 is some sort of legitimate replacement for Flash, when clearly it doesn't offer anything close to that functionality right now. I'm well aware of what CSS and JavaScript are and are not capable of doing.

We can look forward to the day when we need one less plugin in our web browser in order to experience all that the web has to offer, but I think the following things need to happen before many internet users can begin considering surfing without Flash:

• A non-Flash and non-plugin based way of embedding DRM protected video is developed
• A development tool offering tools that are familiar to and usable by designers is offered
• This development tool can be operated without any knowledge of HTML, CSS or JavaScript
• Companies willing to pay the cost of retraining staff in producing content without using Flash
• SVG supported much more widely and with far better compatibility across browsers and operating systems
• A significant reduction in the number of users running older browsers, such as IE6

Until these things become a reality, I would be concerned about buying a device that didn't support Flash. If you don't want to run Flash then that's great and it's up to you, but I can 100% understand people who say that they won't buy an iPad because it doesn't even give them that option.

1) Have you been in a coma for the last decade? There are countless article you can find from a simple Google search that show graphs, videos and more of Flashs poor performance, crashy nature, and detrimental laggy performance it can bring to desktop and mobile browsers.

2) How the frack have you missed Adobes fervent effort to finally get off their asses and make Flash viable for the desktop and actually create it for mobiles. Its too late, they lost, but theyll trying to run up that hill with all that baggage they cant shake.

3) Why does HTML5 (Ill give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you also mean to include CSS and JS) have do EVERYTHING Flash can do before ANY OF IT is viable or useful? Thats such a BS strawman argument.

1. I must be doing something wrong because I can't find any. Could you post a link?
2. I don't know if you tried 10.2 yet but I haven't seen a crash, hang or other problem since I installed it. I have a friend at work who is now able to watch the videos on BBC News website on his Nexus One. Very cool when our other iPad owning colleague can't see any of them.
3. You should probably read my post again. I didn't say that. Of course it is useful. However, whether it is viable for a company to invest time and money transitioning
and retraining staff is another matter.

I just installed the BBC News app for iOS and can stream the videos just fine.

So after waiting a full day, you or any other number of Flash-Fans, can't come up with even ONE website where Flash is needed.

Please see the post above regarding your lack of watching BBC video. See. One more elegant way to step around needing the Flash plug-in.

Please do take the time to show and/or tell what you need Flash for... at all. I'm curious.

(sorry couldn't delete this post)

Adobe's expertise as regards Flash is that they currently have a niche for (granted, short-sighted) developers. But maybe there is no need to entirely retrain all those Flash die-hards.
What needs to be done is to replace the generated code under the hood with something non-Flash, such that the expertise of the Flash developers stays in place.
Those Flash developers are currently dragging their feet, because they will eventually be able to propose to their clients to redo the work (when everybody starts recognizing Flash is really dying), so there remains a brief window of opportunity for Adobe.

• Maybe the first step is the Flash-to-something-else converter that they now propose for the iOS platform. (The advantage may be that existing Flash apps may be upgraded without much additional work to get rid of the Flash code).
• Maybe the next step is to generate something-else directly instead of Flash from the same environment.

Otherwise, byebye Adobe. I think they better move to modern technologies and kick the baggage ASAP.

Really? You started looking for flash for Android before an Android phone was even released? Strange concept...

Yep, but you're extremely limited in what videos are available. Try streaming a video from a local news story, for example.

just tried the local network website for news videos on my iphone. EVERYTHING is available for my iphone at local affiliates for cbs, nbc abc and fox.
Try making an argument that hold water, for example

Tons of people are now looking for iOS and Android developers. I'm experiencing it too. I will have to learn mobile development sooner or later, whatever the OS... Or HTML/CSS rendered on mobile devices etc. Specialising in Flash over the next 10 years is not something you would want to do unless you have a particular niche or good ad agency contacts (they are the ones still flogging the stuff).

The tough part though - do a global search for an actual full semester or even diploma or degree in iOS and Android development. Tell me if you find more than 5 quality universities anywhere in the world offering these courses. (Remember, not just one or two week "intensives" or online video)

My brothers android tablet (Advent Vega, also based on the Tegra 2) runs the dolphin browser, when scrolling rather busy websites you could see elements scrolling with lag behind the rest of the page and it beginning to stutter. There must be something seriously wrong with the software if my A4 based iPad can render pages with far more spit and polish than an Android device with a technically superior Tegra 2.

I was specifically referring to the BBC News application, which has only a very limited number of videos available.

I think if they did the tests properly and corrected for the openness of the platform, they'd find that but...but...but Andwoid wuns Fwash!