…No thanks.
From Engadget, a review of the JooJoo tablet computer.
Money quote:
…[R]egular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. In one of the biggest moves of irony, JooJoo has actually implemented a hack for YouTube where you can view a video in Flash or in “JooJoo” mode which is a straight playback of the MPEG video file every YouTube video harbors. What does this remind us of? HTML 5, albeit with a less elegant implementation.
This is a classic Apple trade-off – the choice between offering something that doesn’t have a good user interaction, or just not offering it. In this case, Apple chose not to offer Flash, banking on the assumption that in the long run HTML5 is going to be a better experience. Personally, I think it’s a safe assumption.
This isn’t to say that it isn’t a risky assumption. To an extent, it is. Early success of the iPad is partly predicated on what you can do with it now vs. what you might be able to do with it later. And the public wants instant gratification.
But I look at what happened with the iPhone. The iPhone had a web browser that didn’t load Flash. And what happened? A lot of major web sites were reformatted so that video could be viewed by iPhone users. Apple banked on the rest of the web changing, and a substantial portion of the web did in fact change.
The same thing will happen with the iPad. The current web (and application marketplace) has not realized the potential of what the iPad can do. But, in time, it will.
Video of the Flash experience on JooJoo below.
(h/t Gruber)
