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Adobe’s Flash animation/video player, missing from the 3G iPhone that Apple unveiled last week, could still make its way to Apple’s phone sooner or later, via the iPhone’s third-party apps program. If Apple lets it get there.

During Adobe’s Q2 earnings call Monday, chief Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe had tackled some of the technical challenges to getting Flash to work on the iPhone:

We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.

Sounds promising. But once the technical work is done, Adobe (ADBE) still has a big business hurdle ahead: Convincing Apple (AAPL) to let Flash onto the iPhone. Apple boss Steve Jobs has been critical of Flash for the iPhone in the past, suggesting that the mobile version of Flash isn’t powerful enough for the iPhone, and that the Mac version is too bloated for mobile gadgets.

The easiest solution, which Adobe could do on its own, is to make a standalone Flash player, which people could use to watch Flash video files or animations by themselves. To get that into the market, Adobe would just need to submit it for inclusion into the iPhone apps store.

But that wouldn’t be anything like the way Flash works on a computer, where it (mostly) seamlessly displays animations, videos, user interfaces, and advertising into the design of a Web site — because it has been integrated into a Web browser.

Adobe could independently achieve that on the iPhone, in theory, by commissioning/building its own Web browser with built-in Flash software — even one using the same Webkit guts as Safari. But assuming this is possible, it would also be very cumbersome. And there’s no guarantee that Apple would allow a Safari competitor into the apps store.

The most elegant solution: Figuring out a deal with Apple to include Flash as a plugin of sorts for the iPhone’s Safari browser. But that would require a much different business relationship than Apple has with the other companies making software for the iPhone apps platform. And even if Adobe aces Flash for the iPhone and makes it the most efficient version of its plugin ever, the business part of the process could hold things up for a while longer.

Will we ever see Flash on the iPhone? For Adobe’s sake, we hope so: We think there’s a bright future for the iPhone platform, and if Flash isn’t a part of it, Adobe is missing out. We admit that the Flash plugin on our Mac isn’t the most polished software we’ve ever used. But there’s certainly some parts of the Web — Hulu, for example — that rely on Flash, and that we’d love to use on the iPhone.

Source: AlleyInsider

Google 1998 ^^

Google managed to spank the rest of the mobile search world during the first quarter of 2008, according to data from Nielsen Mobile. The search giant managed to capture 61 percent of the mobile search market in the first four months of the year, with Yahoo! taking a very distant second at 18 percent. MSN sat at third place with a measly 5 percent.

The data comes almost four months after Google said that the number of mobile searches coming from iPhones was 50 times higher than any other handset. The discrepancy was so large that the company had engineers double-check the logs to make sure it wasn’t a mistake, but it turns out that it was all true. Despite the fact that smartphones have existed for far longer than Apple’s, it seems that—according to Google’s data—folks hadn’t been using the Internet (and, in turn, search engines) on their mobile devices like they are in the post-iPhone world.

Surely this is part of the reason why Google has skyrocketed to the top of Nielsen’s mobile search list. Google is set as a factory default search engine on all iPhones, with Yahoo! being offered as a secondary option (no Microsoft search product is available as a default on the iPhone, although users can navigate to the pages on their own if they so please).

Speaking of default search settings, however, Nielsen’s statistics are still surprising in other ways. For one, with the sheer number of Windows Mobile phones in the wild, why don’t Microsoft’s search options (MSN and Live Search) have a larger share? Windows Mobile 6 offers Live Search as a home screen option in its browser, and yet the search engine didn’t even make its way into third place; however, WM6 owners can also install Opera Mini, which offers Yahoo as a default search engine. Anecdotally, Opera Mini tends to be quite a popular browser alternative among friends who use WM6 and BlackBerry devices, which could be part of the reason why Yahoo managed to creep into second place on Nielsen’s list.

Another fairly major mobile search option that didn’t make the cut is the mobile version of Ask.com. With basically zero phones offering Ask.com as a default search engine, it’s all but impossible to capture any significant share until mobile Internet use becomes as commonplace as desktop Internet use.

Although Google and Yahoo! dominated Nielsen’s charts, they are still not without vulnerabilities. Less than half (44 percent) of mobile Google users rated their experiences toward the high end of the scale, leaving a lot of room for improvement. Yahoo! users were similar, with about 40 percent rating the search engine relatively high. The majority of both users were searching for general information on their mobile phones, although 29 percent of Google users and 24 percent of Yahoo users were looking for local listings. With increasing GPS and location-aware capabilities of today’s mobile phones, both search engines should be able to offer more targeted, local search results to users who are on the go.

Source: ArsTechnica

5th Avenue, NYC on original iPhone Launch day

The iPhone 3G will launch on July 11th, and we’ve consolidated a few tidbits about launch day. In the meanwhile, readers are organizing regional meetups for launch day.
- iPhone will launch in 20 countries on July 11th: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US. (France and Belgium launches have been delayed)
- In the U.S., the iPhone 3G will be sold at Apple Retail or AT&T stores.
- iPhone 3G sales time is rumored to be 6PM on Friday, July 11th
- If all countries launch the new iPhone at the same local time (6pm), then New Zealand will be the first country where customers will have 3G iPhones in hand. This corresponds to 2am Eastern time on July 11th.
- Both Gizmodo and Engadget have posted FAQs which address the basic questions about the iPhone 3G.
- Reports of required in-store activation in the U.S. remain, but one unconfirmed tidbit we’ve heard is that customers with existing iPhones will be shunted to a separate line and will simply need provide the new IMEI number (printed on the outside of the box) from their iPhone 3G. Activation will reportedly then be completed at home after switching your sim card to the new phone and plugging into iTunes. If true, this would speed up sales for those upgrading their existing phones and also leave the iPhone 3G’s packaging intact (to the relief of many).
We expect more confirmed details to emerge in the weeks leading up to the launch.

Source: MacRumors

Set a Guinness World Record Enjoy a Better Web
Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

Link: Official Download Day Page
View: Time Zones of the official download time