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Wednesday 13th February 2008

Flash on iPhone and touch "very soon" 11:34AM, Wednesday 13th February 2008

Apple is preparing to add Flash support to the iPhone and iPod touch, according to the website that accurately broke the news of the most recent update to the mobile OS X platform.

Gear Live reports that support for the Adobe multimedia format "should be coming very, very soon", possibly when Apple unveils the iPhone developers' kit that it promised to deliver this month.

The website says that it

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is "business negotiations", not battery and performance issues, that have delayed the introduction of Flash. Nonetheless, Apple must ensure that Flash does not adversely affect the loading speed of web pages in the same way that it can slow down rendering on desktop browsers. If it should, plug-ins can be tuned off via iPhone and iPod touch Safari Settings screen.

The lack of Flash support did not prevent Apple from providing access to he web's most popular Flash-reliant site, You Tube. A deal with its owner, Google, means that You Tube videos are available via a standalone application using the H.264 codec, a core component of OS X. Partly as a result of the higher quality that H.264 affords, YouTube on the Apple mobile platform is arguably a better experience than it is on the desktop.

Adobe subsequently added H.264 support to its Flash Player software, thought the codec is not yet used by the desktop version of YouTube.

Simon Aughton

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