The battery on my HTC Radar 4G is definitely not lasting as long as it used to, and the phone doesn’t realize that it’s charging the battery (I’ll eventually have to restart it before it shuts itself off thinking that the battery is empty. It’s full when it turns back on, though!) I do still enjoy this phone, as well as the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system. Nowadays, ‘One does not simply’ replace a battery in a phone (say that with Mordor’s voice, lol). I found out that I actually have to take the phone halfway apart with a Torx screwdriver just to get to the battery. Considering many things, such as the fact that I’ve had it for about a year and a half, that I won it at an event (Thanks, Microsoft and Klout!), and that currently my only other alternative is a 2 1/2 year old Samsung Vibrant with worse battery life, I think it’s just time to upgrade. What should I get next? A Windows Phone 8 device? Go back to Android? Or join the millions of iPhone owners? Not exactly sure what I’m going to do, but I’m really liking that Google Nexus 4. I hope they have a full stock when I’m fully ready to make a decision.
One thing is for certain: whichever device I go with will not have Adobe Flash. At one time, this was a feature that I was definitely looking for when purchasing a phone. I was late to hear the news that Adobe decided to pull the plug on any further development of Flash for mobile devices, and that Google has removed it from future versions of Android. They even recently removed it from their Play Store. This is even more significant because Flash was once a selling point for getting an Android phone (it was highlighted in the Motorola Droid commercials). You could truly run almost any website on an Android device. That was something that couldn’t be said for Apple, which completely disregarded Flash in the first place for iOS. Steve Jobs’ main argument against Flash was that it was buggy and used too many resources, which used up too much battery power. Looking back to about 2009 or 2010 when Adobe Flash appeared in the Android Market (now the Play Store), it could only be ran on newer and powerful devices. My T-Mobile G1 with it’s 528 Mhz processor was not given the option to run it, while the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant I bought the following year had much faster hardware and was allowed to run it. Although more mobile operating systems from various companies were coming and going, Android was the only operating system that fully and widely supported Flash, and they were still second to iOS (who refused to adopt it) in terms of sales and devices in use. That being said, Adobe made the announcement late in 2011 that it was ending support of Flash for mobile devices. That explains my title to this blog post.
The reason mobile Flash is dead is not just because of performance reasons. In 3 years, we have much more powerful and longer lasting devices. One reason it’s gone is because of better and more widely used technologies in HTML5 and Javascript. Some websites are slowly adapting to this change and sending Flash content to desktops and laptops that have it, and HTML5 content to others. Again, another reason to blame for Flash’s departure is Apple choosing not to support it. Apple devices sell like hotcakes, and when a major player decides not to support something, sometimes their competitors follow suit. The latest version of Android, Jellybean, won’t give you the option to download Flash, although you may or may not be able to install it by other means. Flash was never factored into Windows Phone 7 and 8 to begin with, and it’s very doubtful that it will appear in the new Blackberry. Factoring all that in, it’s best to keep that in mind when building or updating a website since more and more people nowadays are away from the conventional keyboard, mouse and monitor when accessing the internet.
Oh, and don’t worry when embedding Youtube videos. They switched to HTML5 years ago.
