The first one is a teaser ad from HP but make sure you watch the second video! Adobe’s Alan Tam shows the device in action! No CGI tricks here! Alan shows Adobe AIR and Flash in action on the device: Video playback from MTV.com; A Spongebob Squarepants game (most casual games on the Web run in Flash); photo editing at Photoshop.com and reading the digital version of the New York Times. Now that is the web experience I want on a slate device! I’m ordering this the minute it becomes available!
Tag Archives: Video
It’s great to see all the excitement about Flash Player 10.1 coming to mobile devices! Though some people need to learn to get their facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
Number 1 on my wishlist: HP’s slate device
I already blogged about how excited I was about HP’s slate device a few weeks ago. These two new videos make me want it even more!
Flash Player 10.1 and battery life on mobile devices
It’s great to see all the excitement about Flash Player 10.1 coming to mobile devices! Though some people need to learn to get their facts straight before jumping to conclusions.
One of the biggest improvements in Flash Player 10.1 is the memory and CPU consumption which obviously also has a big impact on the battery life. Battery life on mobile devices is very important and thus always top of mind for the engineering team!
There was a lot of commotion around the video that my colleague Michael Chaize published. He showcased a number of Flash based apps to show off the performance of FP10.1. Some of the applications he showed are CPU intensive and thus also potential battery drainers.
Mark Doherty posted a great follow up post with some background information on how we test battery consumption and performance internally. He also recorded a 17 minute YouTube video which resulted in a 6% battery drain. That results to being able to watch over 4 hours worth of YouTube video over WiFi using Flash Player. I can’t even do that on my brand new MacBook Pro (which is supposed to be able to give me 8 hours of battery life)… I’m not even sure I can do that on my Apple phone using their native YouTube app…
Today, Michael posted a follow up video where he plays a 26 minute video and plays a Flash based game for 12 minutes.
He noted a 10% battery drain after the playing the video which calculates down to 4.3 hours of video. Playing the Flash based game for 12 minutes resulted in a 4% drain which boils down to 5 hours of continuous gaming in the browser using Flash Player 10.1.
Those numbers are pretty impressive to me! Especially when you consider that this is still a pre-release version of the Flash Player running on a pre-release version of Android.
Kudos to the Flash Player team! Flash on!
Happy birthday Photoshop!
Even though you (usually) don’t see it, Photoshop is used just about everywhere you look. From the billboards you see in the streets to the magazines you read and the movies you watch. Worldwide about 10 million creative minds like photographers, graphic designers, architects, advertisers and publishers use Photoshop every day. Even doctors and 3D artists use Photoshop these days.
Recently the founders of Adobe Photoshop – John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman – came back together to tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.
There are a number of exciting activities going on around the world to celebrate this occasion and here are 3 things for you to do to join the celebration online:
- Photoshop 20th anniversary site: The site shows you all the innovations in Photoshop since version 1.
- Special Layer Tennis Match, Photoshop 20th Edition with commentary by John Nack.
- Photoshop 20th Celebration Tab on Facebook: Add it to your profile page, and share with friends and colleagues.
Happy birthday Photoshop!
BlackBerry community very excited about the Flash Platform
Earlier this week (can you believe I really have no idea what day it is today? :)) I joined Adobe’s David Wadhwani and RIM’s Chris Smith on stage at the BlackBerry Developer Day Keynote. Afterwards I asked a couple of BlackBerry community members and application developers about how they feel about the Flash Platform coming to BlackBerry devices. The video is now available on Adobe TV.
Android catching up fast!
Google is selling 60.000 Android devices every day. According to MobileCrunch, that works out to about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21.9 million per year. And the rate is growing rapidly, according to Eric Schmidt who kicked off the Mobile World Live Keynote initiative yesterday.
Android is also not just about handsets anymore. I’ve seen a bunch of tablets running Android as well. The Android OS is free and open source and most of all… you’re in complete control of what you install on it and how you use the web on the device. Very soon you’ll be able to grab Flash Player 10.1 and AIR from the Android Market and install it on your Android device to not only get a full web experience in the device’s browser but also get the power of AIR for standalone applications.
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt talked about why this is important in his Mobile World Live Keynote while Eric Tseng (Senior Product Manager for Android) demoed Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One. He actually summed it up very nicely by saying: “The line is blurring between mobile phones and desktop computing… One of our main goals when we embarked on smartphones at Google was to really mirror the desktop web browsing experience – but for many of you and you know who you are – there’s been a critical component missing – Flash!“. But you don’t have to take my word for it… You can watch it here yourself!
I was telling a few colleagues earlier that I wish I could take a few weeks off and just build Flash/AIR apps for Android. Because now I can use the skills that I already know to create apps for these devices… Android really is the first mobile OS that can really compete with Apple’s mobile OS and the fact that it is going to have Flash Player and AIR very soon is just the cherry on top! Flash on!
HP’s CTO talks about the HP slate. Can I have one now please?
As I already mentioned before, I won’t be standing in line to get an Apple tablet. If it was running the full OS X, I probably would have but the limited OS they’re putting on the device is just too restricted and not flexible enough.
I recently bought an HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet/notebook to replace my EEE PC netbook. I wanted something small (-ish) to browse the web and watch video on while being on vacation or traveling. While Windows 7 does take some getting used to (especially after using a Mac for the last 7 years or so) I am really impressed by the performance and even more by the price. A lot of people seem to like the pricing of Apple’s tablet but I wonder if these people looked at what is out there today? I paid around $800 for the HP TX2. So the price is similar to Apple’s 64GB 3G/WIFI tablet but my HP has a 12′1 inch screen, 320GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 4GB RAM, DVD drive, 3 USB ports, 1 4 cell and 1 8 cell battery and an AMD chipset powerful enough to even do hardware accelerated Flash Video up to 1080p! And since the TX2 has Windows 7 on it, I can also install every single app and/or plugin I want. I can run my Twitter client when I’m watching a video and most of all I’m not tied to one single store to buy my music, apps and video content. The only problem is its form factor. It’s still a bit bulky but that’s just a minor issue.
Enter the HP slate. While there’s no news yet on how much memory it’ll have, how fast the processor is or how much disk space it’ll have, it does run a full Windows 7! In the video below, HP’s CTO Phil McKinney talks about their slate device. The video also shows the New York Times Reader AIR application (as shown in the screenshot above) and HD video on YouTube using Flash Player. Now that’s a real magical experience! Can I have one now please?
The future of magazines?
I came across this video on Ubergizmo and I wish this was real today…! The video demonstrates a multi-touch tablet to read magazines in full color with video, audio and online capabilities. The video is created by The Wonder Factory and other than that, there really isn’t any more information out there. While it’s only a concept today, I really do hope we’ll see some of this in the future. Maybe we’ll even see it on an Apple tablet in the not too distant future?
UPDATE: Wow… I’ve just read that this is actually a real product. They’ve even showed a working prototype to the press last week. What’s even cooler is that it’s built with AIR & Flex!
The gallery: HBO Imagine
Just about every week, I come across many cool sites and applications. To showcase these apps and sites, I’ve created a new category on my blog: The Gallery. The Gallery will be a place to showcase cool and innovative Flash applications and sites.
The HBO Imagine site is a great one to kick off this new category. HBO Imagine is an interactive movie. You’re not only the director in this movie but you also need to solve the crime. Great work by The Barbarian Group and BBDO showing off high quality Flash Video in a 3D environment.
HD video (720p) on a netbook? With NVIDIA & Flash Player you can!
If you’ve toyed around with netbooks, you know that they are not the fastest machines you can get these days. Playing HD video is out of the question… or… WAS out of the question. Today German site Notebook Journal posted a video showing a demo of a netbook running a new NVIDIA (partner in the Open Screen Project) graphics chip. The NVIDIA ION chip does hardware acceleration for Flash Video and – as you can see in the video below – does an amazing job at it.
The video starts by showing an HD clip on a device not using hardware acceleration. Around the 1:20 minute mark, you can see how big the difference is when using NVIDIA’s new chipset.
[Via CrunchGear & Engadget]
Caught on video: Intel set-top box running Flash Lite
At Intel’s Developer Forum Engadget recorded a demo of an Intel (an Open Screen Project partner) based set-top box running a Flash based user interface and Flash based applications. The heart of this set-top box is Intel’s CE 3100 Media Processor which according to Engadget “combines an 800MHz Pentium M core with a proprietary video processing core all on one chip. That’s about as much power as a 1.2GHz Atom…“.
The video demonstrates the Flash UI on top of a Linux operating system. It shows how you can add Flash based applications on top of a video signal coming from the tuner and run full screen Flash based applications. The future is bright for the Flash Platform! Flash on!
