Adobe just released a new demo video that shows a peer-to-peer video calling app called FlashTime. Sound familiar? Of course it does, since Apple’s FaceTime feature is probably as good a reason as any to dump your 3GS for the new iPhone 4. This one runs on Android though, since Apple’s iDevices won’t run Adobe’s Flash platform and we don’t expect that arrangement to change anytime soon.
Here’s a new video from Adobe, showing Motorola’s upcoming Droid X running Adobe’s Flash 10.1. Besides showing that yes, you get more of what the web has to offer on an Android 2.2-based phone while the iPhone will show you a small blue box in spaces where Flash-based games and streaming videos would have been.
Never mind the Blackberrys, Symbian-based Nokias and Palms; it seems the smartphone world is currently being overrun by either Android-based phones or iPhones. It’s been a back-and-forth over the past year, with the new iPhone 4 set to fight off an army of ‘droids. This could help turn the tide for the bots: Adobe just released Flash 10.1 player on the Android Market for any phone capable of running Android 2.2 (Froyo).
HP has just put out a new video that shows they’ll be working with Adobe for Flash support on their upcoming Slate device. The move is seen as a one-up move over Apple’s iPad (and Apple’s insistence on skipping Flash support), allowing HP’s portable to show Flash-based websites such as Hulu, along with a rather large percent of the top websites that use Flash animation and Flash-based video streaming. So take that, Apple. Or not. Since, you know, Jobs doesn’t care much for Adobe.
Still no word on when HP’s Slate will come out, although it does look pretty cool from where we’re sitting. The interface isn’t as polished as Apple’s, but it’s a Windows 7-kind of cool. Which is pretty much our way of saying “hey, at least it’s a full-featured porta-PC.”
During a town hall meeting with Apple employees after the big iPad launch, Steve Jobs got quite a few big cheers from the crowd when he gave out some quote-worthy answers to questions about the competition. According to the Wired report (who apparently got the quotes from someone who was there but can’t be named), Jobs had this to say about Google:
“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them,” he says. When the topic was about to go another direction, Jobs continued his rant. “I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra, it’s bullshit.”
