Whats the deal with flash and cell phones?

[elitejp]

Im sure this has been asked and discussed but i still figured that I would get a more complete answer to this question more-so than what ive read up on it already.

So my friend brought a smartphone into work where we have a very good wifi connection. And since im in china i figured that i would jump on a couple web sites and watch a movie streamed from the internet. Well I soon realized that you couldnt because the movie was using a flash player. The more I researched it the more I saw that cell phones/pads etc dont get along with flash. I did see a google refferel to a youtube vid that supposed to have a way to work around this, but alas, i am in china and there is no youtube for the chinese folk. So what do the experts here have to say or recommend?

 

[_Aurel_]

It's the most over-hyped and underutilized feature in actual use-case scenarios. If your phone is capable of flash, you actually want to disable it from automatically loading on websites because it can be a performance and battery detriment. When you actually do want to run flash, it's often-times choppy, and touch input/implementation is poor and not very responsive.

You need a phone with very beefy/powerful specs to be able to run flash acceptably on it. If you pick up a phone with under 1 Ghz processor, don't even bother.

 

[elitejp]

thats kinda what i was reading. The phone I was using used a 600mhz cpu so its not a cutting edge device. I was just really really surprised that flash seems to be such a pain in the rear for cell phones. I just was not expecting to not be able to watch flash based streamed videos.

 

[shortylickens]

Flash is a great big buggy bloated mess. And for your computer thats OK cuz you have bandwidth and processing power to spare. In fact thats part of the reason people havent been too motivated to find something better.

But for your phone its not good. Your phone is running a much slower CPU with much less RAM and MUCH less network bandwidth. All of a sudden something so inefficient is a serious pain. In fact Flash is so bad most smartphones dont even bother to support it.

I actually applaud Steves move to deliberately not include it. I like that someone is trying to force it out.
Ditto Bill with WP7.

 

[vshah]

flash only works on android phones natively. It doesn't work PERFECTLY, and you probably need a 1ghz processor minimum, but once the plugin is all loaded, and you manage to get it fullscreen and playing, it plays videos fine.

Playing flash games on the other hand, is a torment.

Actually, where I find it is most useful is navigating restaurant websites that seem to universally use flash.