Looking to fight an apparent outbreak of FUD, Adobe's Flash evangelist Mark Doherty has posted some hard numbers (and accompanying video) on the effect
Flash 10.1 has on the
Nexus One -- and put simply, it really doesn't appear to have much effect at all. To back up his cause, Doherty plays a 17-minute embedded video in the full YouTube site then pops over to Android's built-in battery use utility, which indicates that only 6 percent of the juice has gone to power the browser (of course, leaving the screen on to watch the video is another story altogether). He says that the company's tests suggest they can get about three hours of H.264 playback over WiFi, which is theoretically enough to watch a movie or two; obviously the proof is in the pudding here, but this is a promising sign that these guys have taken battery optimization very, very seriously for this mobile push. Video after the break.
posted February 24th 2010 7:59PM
@Techjunkie
I switch and I never look back. Beside Android apps is second to none, most came from iphone developers, which is great. Shazam!
@WindowsPhone
I read recently, maybe here, can't remember, that a big block for Flash on touchscreen phones was that there is essentially no "hover" or mouseover ability on touchscreens, unless you consider Windows based tablets and the special stylus. Could it be that the trackball on Android devices is why Adobe is developing Flash for Android?
Android's built-in battery use graph is an inaccurate estimation of power use, and using it to estimate the apps processor power usage is totally inappropriate . The driver in the Linux kernel that enables it is called htc_pwrsink, and here is a description of it from Brian Swetland (head Linux kernel developer for Google/Android):
What is htc_pwrsink infrastructure? Some kind of power accounting
infrastructure for better battery estimates?
Yup. It's an HTC specific thing -- some of their devices don't have a
battery gauge IC and estimate current drain based on hints provided to
the baseband from the apps processor. I'm not particularly thrilled
with the interface, but without it the battery level estimation is
flakier.
I wonder how many times a day the proper noun "Jobs" is spoken or written on these tech blogs
@WindowsPhone
hmm pretty sure samsung omnia had a trackpad....
btw ur the biggest fanboy because u come on here and talk shit about an OS....gtfo
yea these people need to get some Jobs...
great can I get it now? has anyone one the nice rom building figured it out?
@IHateStupidAppleFanboys
Remind me, this proves what, precisely? Even allowing for a WiFi connection Flash seems to halve your battery life even when it is handing off work to the GPU. Given the choice between a non-Flash video feed and a Flash one, guess which I'd prefer?
Terrific - we can have Flash as an option to halve our battery life and feel that we are seeing great performance. How marvelous.
While I fully support those people who want the option of having Flash on their mobile device, I honestly hope that no one installs this horrendous software so that we can accelerate the death of Flash.
its amazing how many folks think flash actually reduced battery life by 60% based on 7 hours video play time.
BTW when is flash coming out of beta?
@shawman
it's amazing how you don't provide any reasoning to the contrary.
Guys i tested streaming some porn in MP4 format to my iphone, it lasted 2hrs 54 mins before dying over 3g and 3hrs 10 mins over wifi.
i only watched 4 minutes of it......
@doomlordis
just a test
@visualskyman
recurssive test
Flash is not the battery killer here you morons , its streaming that does it.
The point is that there are some videos out there on the internet that aren't easily accessible in an app. It's not like people are going to use their phones to watch videos for as long as their battery will run. Most people don't even do that in their laptops. The average person will watch maybe a handful of short clips, or maybe a TV episode or two at a time at the most. And judging by the performance of the Nexus on that video, Flash will be just fine for casual use.
i love it how they fool people, there is a slight difference between flash video playback and actionscripted flash and inline animations or hey... even a better flash banner, so i guess it's time for a farmville, restaurant city or a flash mmorpg checkup :)
Very cool. Adobe's market place is the whole internet.
If you forget the apple and Adobe issue, this is a move in the right direction for all mobile platforms, would love to see the day when limitations of hardware or software would not effect the experience, from watching movies or streaming music, or simply watching a youtube video.
Regardless of what side you are on, we all want the full rich experience on a portable device we carry every day
Speaking from a programming/optimization point of view, Are you certain that from the perspective of playing video that flash is the bottleneck for power use?
I would sooner point a finger at the display being on or the actual codec being used and it's complexity (Obviously, flash is not using actionscript for it's codecs so video playing will likely be one of the least cpu intensive).
My opinion is that when it comes to playing video html5 and flash are likely very close to the same. There will be some overhead in both languages. The browser will be interpreting html5 while the flash player will interpret what to do with the flv. There would be minimal overhead and the bottleneck here would be the codec. Now, this does not apply to flash animation (swf) which does not use a codec. Nor would it apply to flash based applications (yes, flash is not just for animations and video folks.). These 2 uses would heavily use flash's internal animation routines as well as it's actionscript interpreter.
That said, If you were to do the equivalent using html5 and a scripting language like javascript then you will end up with the same issues. The browser would be in place of the flash player. It would parse the html5 and it's javascript interpreter would interpret the javascript.
Do I think that HTML5 would be faster or less complex? No. The HTML5 parser in the browser would be likely be slightly faster as it lacks the complexity of flash animation but Javascript parsers are notoriously slow. Thus I think the outcome would likely be very similar. You are simply replacing the more flexible flash player with the somewhat less flexible html5 + scripting language combo via the browser.
(There is also a code portability problem here as generally different browsers produce slightly different results. But that is for another time.)
Now, would I rather wait for apps written in html5/javascript or use the perfectly good flash apps out now? I'm going with flash. It will probably be a few years before html5 content even begins to match what exists in flash.
I would also note that Steve Jobs' comment on the battery life on the iphone being negatively affected by flash is completely ridiculous. If he didn't want applications to use the entire power of the processor why didn't he put a less powerful one in the iphone. For example, If I were to release a video editing/processing app tomorrow would he disallow it from the app store because it used too many processor cycles. Not likely. Maybe if it was released by Adobe who he has been having a feud with for some years now (Something about windows and photoshop I think?).
I think Jobs just would like to keep flash off his mobile gadgets because of the app store and the threat the millions of free flash applications would pose to Apple's app store income. Don't get me wrong, I love the iPhone but this flash argument it just crap. An quick excuse to hide the real somewhat less publicly favourable reason. What he really means to say is 'I don't want the public to play online free flash games and use free flash applications instead of buying them from the app store."
Now can we just end this flash battery life debate. It is ridiculous. If I want to run an application on my phone that uses it to its full potential I don't think that should be a problem. Its not like the only thing I'm going to use is flash. I just want a complete browsing experience. This includes flash now and in the future will *ALSO* include HTML5.
Remember also that flash does not run at all times on the phone. It runs on demand. I see comments all over where people seem to think that unless they disable it it will reduce their battery life even when they are not using flash. Not so.
Hmm. Didn't really start this comment with the intention reaching essay length. Sorry to all those who hate reading/learning.
@casanovacoconut
The codec being used is H.264. My iPhone has no problem playing H.264 movies for 6+ hours.
@Jack
Indeed. I know the codec is H.264.
What I am saying is that the question of flash's performance is not properly tested by playing video. The codec is the same regardless of the player and will have been coded for the platform in the language of the platform (in the case of your iphone Obj. C).
So playing H.264 video on your iPhone using HTML5 or flash is likely to consume similar resources since the decoding, the main perfomance hit, is done by the codec code which in both cases would be Obj. C.
A proper performance test of flash would include non-video elements of flash. Which would need to be compared to the same using HTML5 + a scripting language. My point is that they would likely consume similar processor resources for the same job.
This still sucks ,iPhone doesn't need flash .Oh yeah ,and iPhone better then nexus or whatever.iPhone still FTW
@facethefire
Then why are you even here? Oh yeah, you must be the typical apple socialist that wants steve to make all your decisions for you, but at the same time want everyone else to be confined by the same stupidity on the off chance they end up with something better and make you feel a little less cool inside. Feel free to defend your precious iphone if it gets a feature that android users come out and attack out of jealousy. But as of now, I'm pretty sure there aren't any.
H.264 encoded video? What's the point?
Try some FLV streams or banner filled pages instead.
It never fails. Somehow this always comes back to Apple vs Android. This is getting so old.
No one ever talks about WebOS or the Palm Pre. lol! :)
YESSS this is why im getting an Android phone...
nice