A few months ago I finally upgraded my cell phone and went for a Samsung Omnia from Verizon. Before I bought it I read some reviews on it and tinkered around with others in the store and it was one of those “lesser of two evils” things where I couldn’t find anything that was perfect so I picked something that sucked the least.
One of the things about the omnia that I didn’t like was it came with Flash Lite 2.1.. after 3.1 was released. Ah well. So I tinkered around some with packaging some little apps that I created and got 3.1 on it that way.. but it’s basically the “stand alone” player and not used for the browser. I don’t develop mobile apps for my day job, so this sub-par Flash support was more of a nuisance when I was browsing for fun and not something I really needed.
Well, last week I got around to looking at upgrading Opera and saw loads of articles hinting that the beta version would use Flash Lite 3.1.. I downloaded and installed it.. and it still had 2.1. oh well.. In the process of looking for info on the Opera beta I stumbled upon Skyfire. It gives me full Flash 10 (10,0,22,87) support on my little mobile phone. It has some pretty big quirks as far as UI (like entering text in Flash apps), but it’s nice to have another option.
So just for kicks I dug around and looked at some of my old performance tests and some other tests out there on the web.. and whoa.. I was shocked. My cell phone ran the tests faster than my old XP rig (which I was playing Half Life 2 on not long ago..). But on the graphics heavy tests it kind of freaked out.. an example is when I ran this test my little omnia was chugging along at 25fps and then sometimes it would jump to 30 or 35. It wasn’t smooth at all. When I added more objects for it to spin around things would get really exciting. The graphics would freeze up, then the Flash Player would rush to display everything. If I put 7 objects on there it would drop to 10fps for a few seconds, then zip up to 40fps, then stabilize at about 30fps for a few seconds, then drop back. But.. . . the ability to run Flash Player 10 on something I can fit in my pocket? Wow.
Now if the Omnia would just work a little better as a phone.. hehe.
