This time, Flash will be great, honestly.

I know that when it comes to Apple/Microsoft/Google/Nokia/HTC you can never realistically have a sensible discussion of one methodology/ideology versus another. Team X will never admit team Y were right, and team Y genuinely can't understand why team X think they're right. It's human nature.

Baring in mind that I own several Apple devices and can not therefore be considered an impartial observer. However I read with interest the first brief Engadget review of Abode's Flash player 10.2. Allow me to highlight a section from one paragraph in particular;

With our trusty Droid 2's 1Ghz OMAP3 chip, we saw a slight but noticeable boost in framerate when playing a YouTube trailer at 480p, which admittedly only took took that particular video from "unwatchable" to merely "fairly jerky." With the Tegra 2-toting Motorola Xoom, however, 480p videos ran perfectly smooth, even as the tablet had trouble rendering 720p content as anything but a series of images.

The whole topic of Flash on mobile devices has reached a level of zealotry generally reserved only for wars of a religious nature. Apple decided not to support or even allow Flash on iOS for a number of reasons, claiming Flash was buggy, power hungry and would put a key part of the user experience in the hands of a third party developer with a history of poor support for OS X, but when the iPhone was announced Adobe said they were very close to having Flash working on the iPhone if only they had some support from Apple.

In 2007 the iPhone sported a processor running at 400Mhz and could easily cope with all but the highest resolution youtube videos. Four years later Abode have just release a version of Flash on Android that can play 480p videos "perfectly smooth" on a dual core 1Ghz device, but still can't play 720p videos.

Yesterday Evening Andy Ihnatko, a Chicago Sun Times technology columnist, tweeted the following

After playing just four "Funny Or Die" videos, Adobe Flash Player 10.2 on the Xoom chose the latter. (Still: a positive install)

So, still buggy, and despite four years of additional development time and a substantial step up in mobile device performance, Flash still can't do what Abode claimed they were close to achieving when the iPhone 1 shipped. Care to wager what it does to battery life?

There are many people who insist that for a full web experience you need Flash, and others who disagree. That discussion will continue for months/years to come and I can see both sides of the argument, but regardless of where we stand in that discussion, can team X and team y at least agree that Apple's doubts about Flash's abilities as a mobile platform had some validity? (that was a rhetorical question, the answer is of course no).

I sit very firmly on one side of this fence, but the question I want an answer to is this. What have all those people who insist we need Flash on mobile devices being doing for the last four years? Because it seems to me that after all this time Flash still isn't working properly on the mobile platforms that do support it.

Anyway, it's almost time for the Rugby, and if there's only one thing we can all agree on it's that Rugby is better than Soccer, and it has better battery life!