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Chris, Ed, and Rene talk Apple value, RIM's latest results, the uptake of Android, webOS going open source, Microsoft's mobile chances, HTML5 platforms, the future of LTE, and the year ahead. This is Mobile Nations Stock Talk.

Hosts

• Chris Umiastowski
• Edward Zabitsky
• Rene Ritchie

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Credits

Thanks to the Mobile Nations network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Danny Winokur, VP and GM, interactive development at Adobe, confirms earlier rumors that Flash Player mobile is getting scrapped.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Good for Adobe. Flash, like ActiveX before it, filled holes in the browser HTML was simply incapable of filling on its own -- at the time. But time marches on. Now with Adobe, Google, RIM, et al, no longer wasting time in petty competitive feuds with Apple, HTML 5 can move on further and even faster than before.

Source: Adobe Featured Blogs

ZDNet, citing developers who'd been briefed on the plans, claims Adobe is getting ready to pull the plug on mobile Flash Player for Android and BlackBerry Playbook.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

For Flash, this could be the end of a long, tortured existence. When the iPhone debuted in 2007 Adobe immediately complained they weren't on there, despite it taking until 2011 for them to even begin to roll out halfway decent mobile plugins. Back and forth feuding with Apple didn't get Flash onto iPhone or iPad, since Apple believed Flash to be a dead technology, and Steve Jobs announced they'd not support it. And the plugins Adobe did roll out for Android only supported video, not Flash app, and always felt like a McGyver effort at best. (Frankly, if Google, Palm, and RIM hadn't been playing a silly games with Adobe against Apple, we all could have been a couple more years ahead in HTML 5 apps by now.)

For Air, it's a mixed bag. Cross-compilers, which Apple initially banned and then un-banned from the App Store, can make life much easier for developers but can also lead to lowest-common-denominator apps that don't take advantage of platform-specific features and lag behind native SDK's in their support. For games it rarely matters, for regular apps it can be more of a challenge.

For HTML 5 this could be a huge win. Adobe is great at making content creation tools and distractions like the Flash runtimes and Omniture analytics have led to a split focus and failure to embrace emerging technologies fast enough. If this rumor pans out, it will be great to see if Adobe can make HTML 5 tools a first class citizen, finally, in their creative line up.

Somewhere, Steve Jobs' Force Ghost is smiling.

Source: ZDNet

Google has announced via twitter that it now has an HTML 5 iOS optimized web app for its Google Music service. Google Music is currently a beta only service available solely in the U.S. If you already have an account, you can try it out and get access to all your content in this well designed web app. The web app works on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch running iOS 4.

Music Beta users - try the new mobile web app for iOS4 and listen to your music on the go: http://music.google.com

Do any of our readers use Google Music? Have you tried out the HTML 5 web app? Let us know what you think!

[The Next Web]

Google has recently announced that they're removing H.264 -- the video compression open standard used by everything from iPad and iPhone to YouTube and Netflix -- from their Chrome browser. Up until now Google has been the only company to support all the major video codecs, including H.264, OGG Theora, and their own, newly open-sourced WebM. Apple supports H.264, as does Microsoft, and Firefox supports only OGG Theora.

Why the sudden change? Some might say to hurt Apple, whose iOS and iTunes depend heavily on the technology and have shown no signs of slowing down even after Google decided to stop so much partnering and start much more competing with Apple directly in the mobile OS and media services space. Others might say it's simply to give Google a competitive advantage and push adoption of their own WebM format. Neither motives are mutually exclusive but again put the advancement of standards-based web technology on the back burner -- something Google once championed. (Hey, you know it's bad when Microsoft is chiding you over lack of standards support, okay?)

Google claims they don't want to support proprietary formats like H.264, which rings decidedly false since they still do -- and have gone out of their way to expand -- support for Adobe's just-as-proprietary Flash plugin. Yes, H.264 carries licensing fees for commercial content but to say those amount to little more than a rounding error when compared to Google's monthly, never mind yearly profits is an overstatement. H.264 is a an international and open standard, supported by hardware acceleration in chipsets and file format compatibility in an increasing amount of consumer video creation and playback gear. It was on its way to becoming the video equivalent of MP3 (which Google probably won't drop support for either). Yet with native H.264 support taken away from Chrome, only Adobe Flash H.264 support will remain (because Flash is packaged right into Chrome, and Flash uses H.264 for a lot of their higher quality video). So in order to watch it, you'll have to use Flash.

Why does this matter to iPhone and iPad users? Because if Google (and Palm and RIM) hadn't chosen to compete against Apple by cozying up to Adobe's Flash the amount of battery draining, phone heating web video content would be lessened today and the H.264 share would be even higher. In other words, we'd have even more iOS-friendly videos and less sites we couldn't access on our iOS devices.

Remember, Flash existed to fill a void in web technology, much like ActiveX in Internet Explorer 6, and like ActiveX (and Real) the advent of better, more efficient solutions would have led to Flash's gradual decrease until it was back to what it was ideally and originally suited for -- efficient frame-based animation.

Apple, famously, doesn't support Flash on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Apple TV and doesn't even install the plugin by default in Mac OS X. Do we really want Google to be more like Apple?

I've promised to be nicer to Google this year but they're making it hard right out the outset. Still, I'm not going to complain about this as a competitive business decision, and I won't vomit even a little at how they once again disingenuously and insultingly wrapped their competitive business decision up in the cloak of openness in an attempt to pander to open software advocates. (They know better.) I'll just hope Google changes their mind before those self-same FOSSies turn on them. Beware the faboys scorned.

But even if they don't, what will happen? Will YouTube go through the massive re-encoding effort to switch to WebM? Will Netflix? Will iTunes? Probably not, so as usual it will just be us users who suffer. Or switch back to IE...

A new reports suggest that 54% of all video online is now HTML5 compatible (mostly H.264), which means it's iPad, iPhone and iPod touch compatible as well. Here are some of the discoveries from MeFeedia:

• 54% of web video is now available for playback in HTML5, with H.264 being the dominant video format. Mobile is driving HTML5 video adoption. HTML5 video is the most common format for mobiles, including iPhone and iPad.
• Publishers and platforms now offer iframe embeds, allowing them to switch players dynamically depending on the access device.
• Alongside mobile growth, we expect that most video sites will follow this trend.

This is awesome news for iOS users, and signals a dramatic shift in online video playback from just 10% penetration in January of this year. Looking at the numbers a bit further, HTML5 video has more than doubled in numbers since May at just 26%, and further suggests a rapidly growing trend of major online outlets integrating HTML5 video into their sites.

Although Flash is still the dominant video playback method, could HTML5 video soon be overtaking Adobe in the streaming video space, and will it be driven mostly by iOS devices? Daring Fireball points to an interview between Robert Scoble and Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett, where Starbucks chose to go HTML5 rather than Flash simply to support iOS devices.

Does knowing this make you miss Flash on the iPhone any less, or do you still want your Flash video and want it now?

[MeFeedia]

by Andrew Wray

The MPEG LA licensing group has announced that their H.264 video codec standard would be going royalty free in perpetuity for free-to-end-user use. Why does this matter to us? Well, if you're using an iPhone or iPad, you're using the H.264 video codec. If you buy video off iTunes, you're using H.264. If you're using Safari on iOS or Mac OS for that matter, you're using H.264 because it's the only HTML 5 video standard Apple supports. Google and Microsoft support it as well, along with others. Firefox has chosen not to support it for philosophical reasons, however, which has potentially stopped H.264 from becoming the one true HTML 5 standard to unify them all.

Will this change by MPEG LA be enough to get Firefox and everyone else on board? Will it lead to an H.264, HTML 5 video web? Will it relegate Flash to non-video content that requires that level of runtime support (and resources)?

Who knows, but it's another tiny little step in that direction, and good news for anyone rendering free content for iPhone and iPad support.

[Macworld]

Well, at least kill the need for Flash on the iPhone? Daring Fireball says a simple "yes" to Yahoo! Tech's question.

The idea is that a standards based technology, open and broadly used, could make redundant proprietary and sometimes bloated and buggy plugins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

Apple's Safari, including Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and Mozilla Firefox are already supporting HTML5 features. Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- so far -- isn't.

The article gives pros and cons for both sides of the debate. Since Apple is introduction the third generation of their iPhone software tomorrow, and still no Flash in sight, we likely have a good idea which way they're leaning already...