August 25, 2003
Flash my PDA, please.
Macromedia once tried buidling a Flash player for Palm devices a few years ago. Word on the street was that the devices were too slow, so playback performance was unacceptable and they delayed development.
Macromedia has released only ONE player for a PalmOS line of devices, the Sony Clie series, which run the PalmOS 5 operating system.
Handspring has a new Treo which is about to be released, the Treo 600, which also runs the PalmOS version 5. So hopefully, Macromedia will release a player for these devices.
I am personally left out in the cold, as I just purchased a Treo 300, which runs PalmOS 3.5, and it looks like I'll never see a Flash player for my pda/phone. Maybe with all of the new speed improvements made in the Flash player 7, I can wish for someone at MM to try and apply these fixes to the Palm player, and give it another try on the Palm OS3.5 devices.
Please?
(Maybe I should have just bought a PocketPC with phone features instead)
Posted by andy at August 25, 2003 11:44 AMYeah unfortunately those devices seem a little slow. The sony has a 200 Mhz CPU compared with the Trio 66 Mhz. Pocket PCs have 300+ Mhz now.
:(
Posted by: Dave at August 25, 2003 05:01 PMthe excuse that palms are a little slow is a bit too tired... i have owned a tungsten t for close to a year now and at 144mzh and 16mb built-in ram, speed for appz like avantgo is fairly excellent... but chuck that... what about the tungsten c? 400mhz but 64mb all juice--plus all the bells and whistles--my best bet... there's a player coming out that supports more palmOS devices
Posted by: eokyere at August 25, 2003 08:24 PMMy Treo 300 only has a 33MHZ Dragonball processor, so I doubt that I'll ever be able to run Flash apps on it, even if they DID make a player, unless the new speed improvements prove me wrong. I just didn't want to sink a lot of cash into a more advanced phone like a Tungsten. I was giving up my color Handspring Visor with Visorphone module, which cost me a fortune 2 years ago. I wanted something smaller, but not expensive... which is why the Sprint $99 deal was so appealing to me.
Posted by: andy makely at August 26, 2003 10:32 AMI agree that it's tired now with the new Palms. A 400 Mhz CPU (Isn't an ARM CPU) will be able to run Flash very nicely. You will start to see many more apps coming out for the platform that are more CPU intensive. If I remember right the minimum requirement for Flash 3 was a Pentium 150 or 200.
If macromedia did release a general Flash player for Palm many users would complain about the performance right now.
Posted by: DAve at August 26, 2003 12:43 PMflash on pocket pc alone is pretty slow... almost unusable for any serious app. even with lightweight components and optimized routines. ppcs need to get faster for flash to play well.
Posted by: eric dolecki at August 26, 2003 06:51 PMCPU speed has nothing to do with it. If you look at the last quarterly figures from Macromedia, you can see that the return for licensing the Flash Player is a significant proportion of overall revenue. Macromedia is serious about the licensing revenue for the Player in the portable markets, and given that Sony has the player implemented in the Clies, it's more to do with the fact that Palm doesn't want to pay the license fee, rather than Macromedia holding out. If you can get the Flash Player on the Nokia Communicator, which is far slower than a Pocket PC, the CPU on a current generation Palm should be at least on par.
- Ian
Posted by: Ian Chia at August 26, 2003 08:39 PMExactly right Ian. I doubt if Macromedia could stay afloat by selling a few thousand copies of Flash MX or Dreamweaver or whatever. We have gotten into a "chicken or egg" situation with regards to Flash on Palm. Palm won't pay up till there is good content. Developers won't create content till Flash is running on Palm. Others will disagree with me, but I think that Pocket PC, stuck at 240X320, is just not a good platform for serious Flash content(IMHO). The T3 is a near perfect platform. If only!
Posted by: CleveWaterman at October 5, 2003 03:36 PM