If the Apple [AAPL] iPad was to run Adobe Flash to run on it’s OS then the best battery life the iPad would get is 1.5 hours… well, that’s what Steve Jobs told the guys at WSJ recently in a meeting.
This is based on Flash running hardware acceleration although the Max OS X version for desktops did not run this.
Well, yes and no. Jobs is picking and choosing here between hypothetical versions of Flash. If the iPad version of Flash were to have hardware acceleration, which Flash 10.1 offered up for desktops (though not OS X), that wouldn’t be remotely the case. If Flash on the iPad were to support hardware video decoding where available, it wouldn’t require nearly as much CPU. You’d lose battery life, sure, the same way you lose battery life watching any type of video on any system, but nothing near as dramatic as 85%.
Although claims of an 85% loss in battery life would result from using flash on the device, I guess that’s the absolute worst case scenario. To me it just seems for some reason he doesn’t like the idea of Flash running as it would allow flash developers to just run apps through the browser which in turn would take people away from the app store etc… As we’ve seen with the iPhone though, a lack of flash in that device hasn’t really had an impact on sales and I suspect the iPad will be the same in that people will just get the iPad anyway regardless of what it cannot do.
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