Blogs Does Flash Really Sap Your iPhone Battery?

Famously, you can do almost anything on an iPhone apart from run Adobe Flash; a move that Apple has always defended on the grounds that Flash isn’t finger-friendly and that it drains the battery life too much.

According to IT Pro, this firmly held line has led to ‘one of the most bitter and unresolved disputes in the technology industry.’ What's more, the site has also undertaken some testing to discover the truth about the iPhone Flash video and battery life debate...

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2011/01/25/does-flash-really-sap-your-iphone-battery/

 

I think users should still have the choice.

 

VLC on iPhone isn't the best implementation. when using it, it makes my iphone feel warm. whereas watching encoded-for-iOS videos is perfectly fine.

what i suspect is happening is that VLC is using inefficient CPU to decode while we all know GPU decode is far more efficient in terms of speed and power consumption.

only real conclusion i think we can draw from this is that on from results on Galaxy Tab:
FLV 6h30m
H264 6h58m
H264 is easier on battery life, by a tiny little bit.

 

What Apple is doing is more or less like Microsoft from prohibiting OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice from running on Windows because they claim its minor incompatibilities might "damage the user experience"... it's an obvious and utterly absurd excuse to try to justify what is clearly an anti-competitive practice. My guess is Apple were upset that Adobe wouldn't give them further concessions (and possibly even refused a takeover) and so are trying their best to simply beat them down using underhanded and petty tactics.

 

Flash is about more than just videos though.

 

I think this is a badly executed article. As they have shown, there isn't much difference between flv and h.264 in when played in the same player. They have completely missed the point that the problem with flash video is the player rather than the compression format. Watching flash video in an embedded player in a webpage makes my MacBook Pro get hot, playing the same file in FLV is much faster, smoother and less power hungry.

Bad journalism.

 

@sear Remember Hanlon's razor
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Or in this case, Apple are determined to sell to part of the market who can't be bothered to learn how do use a computer. Instead Apple sell them a dumbed down/easy to use phone.
You could even argue that it's a pro-competition move because their competitors can just point at their devices and say "unlike the iphone, it runs Flash".

I don't care, I've still got months of a bottom of the range nokia before I can upgrade, and when I do, it won't be an iphone even if I could afford it.

 

I always thought this was more over the fact that Adobe changed their primary OS design to windows rather than Mac? Although the battery life thing always seemed like it was hiding the real story.

 

its about choice

 

openoffice runs on windows without any problems...
it does on my windows 7 computer at least

 

Considering FLASH player crashes on a daily basis on each of my browsers (CHROME & Firefox), I hope apple keep Flash away from their products.

 

If it is a 30 minute difference then it is not really that much. You would not be watching 6 hours of video on the thing anyway.

 

I've been flashing for years and never once felt like a sap.... Being a professional flasher isn't easy, I was thinking of retiring but thought I'd stick it out a while longer.

 

You must be going to the wrong websites...

I don't have an iPhone so I don't have a clue, but does the VLC app not play H.264 as well as flv? Surely that is the only fair comparison to be made. All we learn here is that first-party programs are more efficient (shock horror!).

 

Same here, I got a win7 64-bit PC and the current version of open office and i've never had any problems getting it to run. It's quite smooth actually!

 

You're misunderstanding sear's point - what he's saying is that Apple banning Flash is similar to if Microsoft were to ban OpenOffice from running on Windows - not that they have banned it.

It's curious that Apple have gone from bemoaning Microsoft's anti-competitive practices to doing the same thing that they accused MS of doing...it's amazing what being a market leader does to your business practices

 

Or rather: It's curious what being a market leader does to public perception of said practices.

You can fully decode H264 via HW without overhead which (kind of) equals better battery life and performance. I gather that if Adobe had been out a lot earlier with built-in support for 90% of the HW-decode chips out there it would have been an entirely different game.
Adobe have been incredibly late in the game wrt GPU video acceleration. As far as flash being able to take advantage of decoding HW / HW acceleration...? Has anyone even heard of this?

 

It's about choice, but also about attribution. If something crashes or glitches on our system we won't rest until we identify the culprit, analyse the fault and resolve it. If it happens to a muggle they blame the obvious, usual suspect: it is either a virus or Windows (or the iPhone).

It is never that dodgy piece of pr0n they downloaded, or that wonky program they installed by curious coincidence just before the fault occured, or (like happened with someone I know) the fact that you cannot continue using the Internet when you've just unplugged your WiFi router to free up a socket for an iron. So rather than getting undeserved bad press, those who cater to muggles try and make their stuff idiot-proof.

 

I gathered that Apple has abandoned Flash because it was old (or at least ageing) tech. It would make sense for Adobe to up their game a bit so that their software is more efficient and user friendly.

 

Huh? I don't know how people can be so stupid as to fall for Apples BS PR. There is one reason and one reason alone why flash is not on the iPhone; the app store.

Having flash support would kill off apples #1 source of revenue, most of the apps on the App store are just iPhone versions of free flash apps / games that have been around for years.