Maximum PC

Many new cool devices like iPod Touch, or Archos 604 Wifi come with WiFi and some sort of internet browser, yet none of the once that I had support Web Flash plugins. I'm just curious if anyone knows the reason. Is it because Flash is very CPU intensive, or could it be some licenses issues with Adobe?

Too CPU intensive.

How much processing power does an iPhone really have? I think my Blackberry Curve 8320 should be capable of handling youtube.

Did your Curve come with the Roxio Media Manager?


I've been pulling movies/clips off YouTube and dumping them onto my 8830 which has had no problem playing them (once Roxio converted them to MPEG4)

Yeah, it did. With my unlimited data plan though I'd like to be able to watch youtube or any other flash video while out and about. I installed the Opera browser for a better internet experience but I've still found no flash player.

It's probably limited to whatever the hardware based decoder chip is capable of playing.

The n800 may suit you. I recently got one since they're going for ~$225. Bought mine off dell.com. been playing around with it - pdf's, web, movies some games.

It does work with flash. running os2008 (a debian derivative) i get workable flash performance - it's not flawless, but it's acceptable youtube performance for me.

flash is complex - so it depends on general purpose chips to implement its instructions. the 400mhz chip in the n800 is good enough, but can be very sluggish with complex flash games.

chip is a texas instruments arm derivative - currently really the only way to get this much power/batterylife in devices. you simply cannot expect x86 derivatives yet to suffice (give atom a few generations).

This was typed on my n800. it's just convenient to use in bed/watching tv/john...


note : the n800 is not a phone, but can use one via bluetoooth for data. there's also the n810, but it's main advantage in a slide out keyboard.

iv herd the n800 can be very slugish and only good for web browsing is this true? Is it true that it has three mem cards?

imo, that's mostly where it's slowish - but it's still faster than a lot of other devices. On disabling flash, everything is a lot faster. It will render flash, and youtube is watchable, but not nearly so enjoyable as a real pc. If watching picture heavy site, it can run out of memory (mozilla memory leak?). but a quick restart of the browser keeps things going.

For most purposes, It handles my browsing easily enough.

It has onboard memory (not much) and room for 2 memory cards - so I don't worry about space - and when a relative takes pictures that I want, I can copy it off right away

Certain video formats may play a little sluggish, but it handles most of my dvd conversions and tv episodes very very well. I've gone through southpark and ugly betty (:P) on this without a hiccup. While other players dedicated to multimedia play better, this supports more formats (gimme a cowon a3 if I were just into video though!).

the archos 605, and 705 supports flash 9.

have no trouble watching youtube with my hp ipaq 2495b which is a pretty aged pocket pc...i think the processor is a 520 xscale, not sure how that compares to the ones youre talking about but having a hard time seeing how aged hardware can handle something so easily and with such low battery drain that newer technology couldnt do

A 520Mhz arm is pretty decent. Note that while ARM isn't evolving a whole lot, It's quite adaptable. The latest not yet quite out there incarnation is an 800MHz texus instruments OMAP3 unit that ought to be a nice boost. The nokia internet tablets use a 400MHz OMAP2. It's very difficult to truly guage the speed of arm chips of different families, even though some of their basic architecture is similar. Especially when the native os of the device is taken into account.