Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

I admit. One of the biggest reasons I bought a N810 was because of its Adobe Flash support up to Flash Player 9. Which was quickly replaced with the recently released Flash Player 10 which has cool 3D effects et al.

But the announcement of the upcoming N900 having "Flash 9.4 support" has bothered the living hell out of me. It's not 10.x, and it's a very small step above the 9.0 that's already on the N810/N800... which is honestly only version 9.0.124 from my understanding and not the existing 9.0.48 that we already have.

And in this part, I could be wrong. But all information gathered from the internet points me to be right.

Even that isn't enough though. Some things that come from Flash Media Server still isn't supported at this level... namely the H.264 and AAC (streaming media) portions.

Why not support it all the way up to 10.0.32?

Is this Adobe or Nokia... or both not wanting to support the newest version on the Maemo platform? Does the upcoming Open Screen Project mean it'll update to 10.x at a future date?

As it stands, this is a huge hindrance for me. Anybody know anything more?

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

Sincerely, I don't mind the Flash support on this device and 9.4 seems huge for me. Perhaps I would prefer Flash Lite support since it seems more suitable for this kind of device (a mobile computer).

And as far as I know, the rivals don't support Flash at all!

I could find Flash useful for for some environments, but for web content, I hope/wish web developers take into account accessibility and mobile web content guidelines...

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

Flash Lite doesn't support AS3 yet. That's a major problem for me since I don't develop for mobile platforms - and having limited AS support bothers me since I'm in Adobe Flex, which means AS3 only mostly.

Having the full-blown Flash plugin is a boon to the Maemo 4 (Chinook/Diablo) platform, and seeing such a baby step in Maemo 5, bothers me.

The rivals in this case would be Android... and it supports Flash Player 10 - such as the HTC Hero and continuing forward.

Now accessibility and 508 compliance... you truly wouldn't use Flash - it's possible but lord it's a pain.

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

Flash 10 on HTC Hero ? Care to provide a link ?

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

According to the following press release from November 2008, Flash 10 on ARM (ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11 family and the Cortex-A series of processors) is expected to be available in the second half of 2009.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pres...dobeFlash.html

Chances are it was too late for integration and testing with Maemo 5/Fremantle, or it wasn't sufficiently stable to be considered for Maemo 5 and could have significantly marred the Maemo 5 experience, so was dropped in favour of Flash 9.

Finally, according to the following press release from April 2009, a pre-release of Flash 10 should have become available in the summer optimised for OMAP, with a view to production release in Q1 2010 and rolled out to devices in H2 2010.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pres...obeTIOMAP.html

Obviously Nokia wouldn't want to risk a pre-release Flash 10 on Maemo 5/Fremantle, or it arrived too late to integrate into Fremantle, or both.

I suspect there's a good chance Flash 10 will arrive as an SSU (non-optimized first, followed by OMAP optimized) sometime late in 2009, with more updates later in 2010. The OMAP optimized Flash 10 should be available for Harmattan.

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

thanks Milhouse

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

Adobe Press Release (June 24 2009) announcing Flash on HTC Hero:

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pres...toAndroid.html

---EDIT---
What I find confusing about the above PR is that it doesn't specifically say that Flash 10 is on the shipping devices, only that Flash is on the device and that

so I don't think this is Flash 10 on the HTC Hero, but some sort of 9/10 hybrid variant. In fact, this video made by an Adobe Flash developer pretty much spells it out - it's not the full Flash Player 10, just something that satisfies 80% of the content on the web (which is better than zero percent as was the case previously on Android).
---END EDIT---

I suspect it was all down to timing with the ARM build of Flash 10 (non-optimized version) either arriving too late for Fremantle or it wasn't good enough (not stable enough) and Flash 9 was the safer bet.

Flash 10 will come... when it's ready. :)

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

I actually have the HTC Hero right here (great phone, by the way), and I've been wondering about the flash too. What I'd really like to get going is Facebook's Scrabble app, which requires Flash 10 as far as I know, and that doesn't work. So it clearly is not full Flash 10. If somebody can name a few pages that don't work on the N810 due to flash, I'd be happy to test them here...if somebody's interested.

Bottom line: I was kind of disappointed with the N810's flash and I'm disappointed with the HTC Hero's flash too. But in all seriousness, I don't use a lot of flash pages...I just wanna play Scrabble =)

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

you have an HTC Hero?

http://flashplayerversion.com - I'm curious as to your version of the FP on that device.

Milhouse, I've suspected the same, it was more hybrid - the 3D portions will be left out as will bitmapcache and other niceties but yet to fully confirm.

Re: Nokia N900's Flash 9.4 announcement... and why it bothers me.
 

If support is not performance related I wouldn't be worried:

Nokia is sponsor of Open Screen Project.