Adobe Continues To Slam The IPad Over Flash By Robert Scoble Expert Author Article Date: 2010-03-23 There's a ton of chatter on Techmeme today regarding iPad and Flash and HTML 5. Again. In particular don't miss posts from ReadWriteWeb regarding Flash vs. HTML 5 speed and PC World's comparison of HP's new Slate vs. the iPad and how the focus will be on Flash. Yesterday I sat down with top execs from Adobe's Flash team. I filmed two videos: 1. A video demo of a variety of things Adobe announced at the Mobile World Congress, including a new Flash player for Android and Palm Pre (I played with it yesterday, very nice). 2. A response to Apple about Flash's appropriateness for including on iPhone and iPad. Why won't the iPad have Adobe Flash technology? Anup Murarka director of technology strategy and partner development for the Adobe Flash platform and Aaron Filner, group product manager of Flash platform, focusing on AIR, answer some of the reasons why Steve Jobs doesn't put Adobe Flash onto the iPad in one of the videos I filmed yesterday when I visited Adobe's offices in San Francisco. Things like: 1. It will chew up battery. 2. It will crash or be buggy. 3. It doesn't work with touch interfaces. 4. It won't perform well enough. They take on each of these complaints about Adobe Flash and explain what has changed with the Flash 10.1 player. My thoughts? I'm buying an iPad anyway (we're even having a party at the Palo Alto store all night on the evening of April 2nd) and I have iPhones. My life would be better if Flash shipped on iPad, but it doesn't look like that will happen. So, developers are going to be forced to build two versions of their web pages if they care about reaching me as a customer and one of those versions will need to have no Flash or Silverlight (Apple is also resisting including Microsoft's Silverlight platform). But Adobe is doing a pretty good job of keeping Flash developers' skills relevant. You can build apps for iPhones or iPads in Flash and compile them using some new tools that Adobe has been showing off and will ship before July. Even Adobe's own Photoshop app on the iPhone was built in Flash and compiled using these new tools. That's a compelling story. I have to admit, though, that I will be checking out other competitive devices from Google and others. I already have a Droid, which will use the new Flash 10.1 player just fine and I expect I'll check out the new HP tablet and, especially, ones that will come with the Google Chrome OS later this year. Those, I expect, will support Flash and that could be a big deal in future device decisions. How about you? Will you decide not to buy Apple products just because they won't run Flash in Web pages? Comments About the Author: Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development. Go to Scobleizer ...