Well I wanted to go out and buy one, than just for a coincidence I found out that Iphone doesn't support Flash content. I was astonished to discover that, I can't see a reason why is it so. I'm sure is not due to technical reason, perhaps political ones ?

Actually, part of it is a technical reason. Adobe has ported flash to iPhone and iPod touch from what I have heard (i could be wrong though), but Apple possibly wont use it until they get the CPU usage way down to prevent the device from getting too hot. Running flash takes a substantial amount of processing power, which in turn means more electricity flowing through the CPU and thus more heat generated.

There were patents filed recently though which showed the good ol' flash logo in the document, with "Media Content" outlined next to it, so it's possible to say that a future update to iPhone OS will contain flash support. Either that, or the patent was outlined for iPhone OS 2.0 where flash content would be linkable to the YouTube.app (hence only pages with YouTube flash video's embedded would be linked), and flash wont ever actually be supported.

It's up in the air, anyone's call.

Battery life, battery life, battery life. That's the only reason Apple doesn't want to do it. Early tests of Adobe's iPhone Flash version decreased the battery life on 3G to a measly 3 hours of browsing time...that's really unacceptable, even for me.

Luckily, the good folks at Episodic (episodic.com) have made watching your favorite flash web videos (like us, Wallstrip!!!) possible on your iPhone! We're really excited about this and you can find out more on our blog: http://www.wallstrip.com/2008/07/28/the-mo...-most-exciting/

well yes, battery life I agree, but it is not that you are watching Flash sites ALL the time. I mean, I find it reasonable that if you surf on Youtube and watch movies then after 3 hours battery are dry. I assume the same happens if you watch a movie right ?
So let's say that in "normal" use, or average use, battery life shouldn't be a concern, because not all the sites have flash content.

If a LG viewty can do it, an iPhone should be able to do. No no. Apple are c**** when it comes to stuff like this. Don't expect flash anytime soon in my view.

This is a statement from Adobe date 19 March (here is the source: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/19/ado...ash.on.iphone/)

"Despite Adobe's positive-sounding statement yesterday, CEO Shantanu Narayen clarified that he meant Flash on the iPhone would require more than just the iPhone SDK to pull off successfully. Since Flash requires a very close relationship with Safari – something Apple is normally very hesitant to allow – Narayen says it would need to work closely with Apple to develop a satisfactory implementation of Flash for the iPhone, according to CNET.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has panned both official releases of Flash: Flash Lite for mobile devices and its standard computer equivalent. According to Jobs, Flash Lite is too feature limited, while the standard Flash player is too robust for the multimedia device."

So it does seem to be a political matter afterall. Naughty naughty ...

It doesn't matter whether you're watching a flash video or not, flash is _always_ running whenever Safari is open.

It's loaded in memory, but is not running. Infact, you can notice that CPU usage runs higher when you actually play some flash content, when you are just browsing simple html sites the player plugin is idle, therefore it doesn't imply battery consumption.

More RAM usage == More battery life consumption.

+16k maximum RAM makes no difference. And that's unoptimized for the phone. An optimized version may use only 7-8kb.

Hi, there is a way how to play the flash videos on the iphone. Try this tutorial:

How to play flash videos on the iPhone?
http://en.vimjak.cz/iphone/how-to-play-fla...s-on-the-iphone

i thought they were just being lazy about but good looking out, a friend of mine that owns HTC windows mobile phone is capable of watching flash content from his web browser, we can only sit back and wait for the day when we are able to do the same. Hoping there are no bugs with the release

oh, it's complicated about kinda this rivalry... adobe, apple, flash, iphone...

you can refer to some rumors and my opinions about this event here:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/...obile-business/

:-)

Seems most mobile devices don't support flash... not even the newer phones.

You can watch many things like that