4 ms·

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

39 points by anderzole 16y ago

nl 16y 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 16y ago
  Maybe it's surprising because the iPad does not run flash.
raganwald 16y 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 16y ago
  Exactly. I'd really like to see what sort of battery life they get out of that, for example.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I suspect Adobe's definition of "flawlessly" is approximately equal to, "hey, it boots! hasn't crashed yet!"
- catch23 16y ago
  Vista ran "flawlessly" in demo videos too... but we all know how that turned out when it was released.
- davidedicillo 16y 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 16y 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 :)
    - bruceboughton 16y ago
      They are neither Air apps nor Flash movies so are irrelevant to what Adobe are showing off here. This is about the performance of the Flash/Air runtimes, not the Flash CS5 cross-compiler. Apples != Oranges.
melling 16y ago
Google is moving to HTML5 on YouTube so there is no benefit here: http://www.youtube.com/html5 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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- guelo 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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-tournament-on-nvidia-tegra-2/ http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-to...
ck2 16y ago
They must have h.264 hardware acceleration in effect because running a flash video full screen pegs my desktop CPU.
- windsurfer 16y ago
  The latest mac flash beta fixes a lot of cpu issues.
  - KirinDave 16y ago
    I think I have that beta. It hasn't changed that for me.
  - buster 16y 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!
    - texel 16y ago
      Shenanigans. I can watch HD Netflix streaming on my Mac Mini without a hiccup with CPU to spare, but 480p Lost on the same machine makes it cry for mercy. Pretty Microsoft doesn't have access to any super secret APIs that Apple saw fit to hide from Adobe.
      - buster 16y ago
        Mh, as a developer i can see that it can be a totally different thing then just "here it works, here it doesn't". Software architecture is not as simple as you seem to think. Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-accelerate-flash-video-using-new-apple-api.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-acceler...
va_coder 16y ago
Steve Jobs has always been great motivator; first for the engineers at Apple, and now for the Flash engineers at Adobe.
- Terretta 16y ago
  He even gets them to ship ahead of schedule. If only he enjoyed Duke Nukem...
  - eipipuz 16y ago
    or despised it...
- dbz 16y 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 16y ago
Is it just me, or is this redirecting to thetvsquad instead?
- deleted 16y ago
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- deleted 16y ago
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- deleted 16y ago
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- akrito 16y ago
  Since they're both AOL properties, I bet something's wonky with their reverse proxy/load balancer.
- dc2k08 16y 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=ttn1G0Kw62o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/adobe-shows-off-prototype-android-tablet-running-air-and-flash/&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___IE358 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
pavs 16y ago
All aol blogs are redirecting to tvsquad, including engadget. From their Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436 http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436
zweben 16y 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 16y 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.
- catch23 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.

39 points by anderzole 16y ago

nl 16y 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 16y ago
Maybe it's surprising because the iPad does not run flash.

raganwald 16y 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 16y ago
Exactly. I'd really like to see what sort of battery life they get out of that, for example.
mkramlich 16y ago
I suspect Adobe's definition of "flawlessly" is approximately equal to, "hey, it boots! hasn't crashed yet!"
catch23 16y ago
Vista ran "flawlessly" in demo videos too... but we all know how that turned out when it was released.
davidedicillo 16y 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 16y 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 :)
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    They are neither Air apps nor Flash movies so are irrelevant to what Adobe are showing off here. This is about the performance of the Flash/Air runtimes, not the Flash CS5 cross-compiler. Apples != Oranges.

melling 16y ago

Google is moving to HTML5 on YouTube so there is no benefit here: http://www.youtube.com/html5 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.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
guelo 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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-tournament-on-nvidia-tegra-2/ http://armdevices.net/2010/02/15/flash-support-and-unreal-to...

ck2 16y ago

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

windsurfer 16y ago
The latest mac flash beta fixes a lot of cpu issues.
- KirinDave 16y ago
  I think I have that beta. It hasn't changed that for me.
- buster 16y 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!
  - texel 16y ago
    Shenanigans. I can watch HD Netflix streaming on my Mac Mini without a hiccup with CPU to spare, but 480p Lost on the same machine makes it cry for mercy. Pretty Microsoft doesn't have access to any super secret APIs that Apple saw fit to hide from Adobe.
    - buster 16y ago
      Mh, as a developer i can see that it can be a totally different thing then just "here it works, here it doesn't". Software architecture is not as simple as you seem to think. Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-accelerate-flash-video-using-new-apple-api.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-acceler...

va_coder 16y ago

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

Terretta 16y ago
He even gets them to ship ahead of schedule. If only he enjoyed Duke Nukem...
- eipipuz 16y ago
  or despised it...
dbz 16y 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 16y ago

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

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
akrito 16y ago
Since they're both AOL properties, I bet something's wonky with their reverse proxy/load balancer.
dc2k08 16y 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=ttn1G0Kw62o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s4MyX8vqo cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/adobe-shows-off-prototype-android-tablet-running-air-and-flash/&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___IE358 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

pavs 16y ago

All aol blogs are redirecting to tvsquad, including engadget. From their Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436 http://twitter.com/engadget/status/13402674436

zweben 16y 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 16y 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.
catch23 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.