Nexus One Flash 10.1 Video Demo

It's still not yet publicly available for Nexus One owners, but that hasn't stopped at least one demonstration of Flash 10.1 running on Google's "superphone".  We came across the modified Nexus One here at Mobile World Congress 2010 this week, and shot some video of the SlashGear.TV media player (which is, obviously, Flash-based) along with YouTube.  The good news is that it works; the bad news is that it doesn't work especially well.

Videos embedded into a webpage will play, certainly; the problem is that the Flash 10.1 plugin isn't optimized for hardware acceleration.  As it was explained to us, "it's not fully hardware accelerated, so that means you won't get the same frame-rates and you don't get the power saving."  It all adds up to stuttering, jittery playback – and that's on one of the fastest devices currently on the market – together with rapid power consumption.

Of course, we'd expect Adobe to make some tweaks to that before any public release takes place, given smartphone owners generally aren't too pleased with software that drains their batteries any quicker than regular use manages it.  Still, we're not yet altogether convinced that Flash has a place on the Nexus One; there are potentially better ways to manage streaming video, and we could live without in-page adverts blinking at us.