Thursday, May 6, 2010

Adobe Flash Delays ARM Notebooks

Adobe's delayed release schedule for its Flash plug-in targeting Lenovo's new ARM-based mini-notebook is causing delays in Lenovo's release of ARM-powered notebook hardware, according to ARM's marketing VP Ian Drew.

Apple's decision not to allow Adobe to sit between users and content on Apple's ultraportable platforms seems quite rational. Imagine Apple waiting on Adobe to launch a phone based on a custom Apple chip for which Adobe doesn't prioritize optimization. Hmm. I'll just stick to imagining the phone with the Apple chip.

To think about Apple products suffering from third parties not bothering to dedicate optimization resources is s0 1996.

UPDATE: Opera's Philip Grønvold has weighed in on the HTML v. Flash debate, saying that "Flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage et cetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that." Opera will continue to support Flash, "But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology." So it's good news for Lenovo: in a couple of years, Lenovo will be able to sell whatever ARM-based or other alternative hardware it wants, without worrying whether Adobe sees fit to optimize Flash adequately for users. In the meantime, though, it's nice to be Apple ....

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