The iPhone not being able to view Flash video - how big of a deal is that? (when considering buying a smartphone)

I haven’t even noticed it. I’m sure it depends (at least a little) on the sites you visit. But nowadays MANY sites are making a mobile version.

Again, I’ve had an iPhone for about three years, and I never thought (not once) “damn i hate this no flash.”

It’s not a big deal at all except to people trying to sell phones that are not iPhones.

As much as we may hate to admit it, Steve Jobs knows what he’s doing.

Jailbreak allows flash videos :-)

I never noticed a problem with my iPhone. I’ve recently switched (for work) to an Android phone, which has Flash support, but it hasn’t made any difference in my blogging.

A lot of sites are mobile now, so it would only matter if you wanted to watch videos on websites that aren’t youtube, like dailymotion for example.

Why it be designed like that? Is it a design flaw?

@flo yes, flaws in Flash that make it unappealing to Apple. Steve Jobs said that most Mac crashes are caused by Flash issues, and that if Flash made their product better, he’d consider making it functional on the iPhone. Unlike computers, you can’t just have a phone crash when someone needs to use it.

(My flash plugin has caused me to have to restart my Mac on quite a few occasions)

@mrrich724 okay. I know nothing about this but couldn’t Apple create a Flash or something of their own that could detect and filter out the problems? I suppose that would increase the price?

Well they could, but Apples approach to things like this in the past have been in developing and supporting competing technologies. B/C rather than continuing to work on something they believe is flawed, why not just work with something that they think will be better.

Apple did away with the floppy drive before others did, the floppy went extinct. They do this not too infrequently with tech. that is thought (by Apple) not to add to the future as they see it. So some even think this will happen with Flash b/c of Apple’s actions.

The competing tech. in this circumstance is HTML5 . . . Apple’s stance is that HTML5 “is the future”

There Is a browser for sale in the app store called Skyfire. I believe it is 1.99 for the iPhone. It plays flash on most websites on the iPhone.

@mrrich724 thank you.
Not everything about computer technology is improvemement on old technology. Can I give you an example about going backward? While viewing a VHS tape we can stop it mid-short sentence, if not mid-word, but we can’t do anywhere near that with a video clip. Am I right?