WinMo 6.5 might still be a month out, but that hasn’t stopped the mobile folks in Redmond from spilling the beans on an upcoming (albeit foreseeable) addition to WinMo 7 – MS’s own Flash killer competitor, Silverlight 3.
The good word comes from Brian Goldfarb, a marketing director for Microsoft’s Silverlight team, who told the Seattle PI that WinMo 7 will indeed come integrated with Silverlight 3.
“We are 100 percent dedicated to seeing Silverlight across all three screens – PC, TV and mobile,” he said.
Theoretically, the inclusion of SL3 means future WinMo 7 devices could support Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, bringing tons of your favorite content right to the comfort of your 3″ display-equipped mobile phone.
This is also a direct jab at Adobe, who has been notoriously slow (er, uninterested) in porting Flash to the mobilesphere in any meaningful way (read: No Flash for iPhone). Sure, they ported Flash to Android (but it doesn’t really work all that well, as seen on the Hero), and there is Flash Lite, but unfortunately, until Flash and Flash Lite files become interoperable, it seems as though MS actually has a leg up with Silverlight 3.
[via MobileTechWorld]
Uninterested? That’s rich! It was Apple who stopped Adobe from publishing Flash for the iPhone (makes many nice 3rd party apps available that the Apple control freaks have no influence over).
As for the other platforms, we’re soon going to see full Flash on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Web OS and the new Maemo 5. So forget about Flash Lite which was indeed an unfortunate experiment that was necessary only because of the very limited resources that most mobile phones offered at that time.
So if it doesn’t run well on the Hero it’s probably mostly due to the crappy chipset used in that phone. The MSM7200A just doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t have been used for a 2009 phone in the first place. Run Flash on a Cortex A8 and you will see those Youtube Videos run just fine in standard quality.
By the time Windows Mobile 7 comes out, MS has again worked hard to earn the “too little, too late” label for Silverlight. They may use it for the OS and some exclusives, but other than that it’s an exercise in futility.
Actually Flash runs like junk even on my Core 2 Quad desktop with nVidia GeForce 8800 so I think it’s time to stop blaming the hardware. Adobe is not exactly renowned for it’s performance.
For me, well… Flash sucks on Ubuntu x86, but it runs just fine in Windows. I guess it depends on your luck. But yes, I’d like to see Silverlight catch on.
… like Silverlight would do better under Linux :P
I am running both Ubuntu and Windows 7 x64 on my end and never had any problems whatsoever. Adobe may not have a reputation to put out the most optimized software, but if Flash doesn’t run without problems on a Quadcore then something HAS to be wrong.
As for blaming the hardware, the MSM7200A is just crap (at least in 2009) and Adobe can do what they want, full Flash will never run without problems on that platform.
That said, competition of course never hurts. I just don’t see it coming from MS and Silverlight but rather from HTML 5 and embedded audio / video streaming.
It’s interesting the ubuntu crowd keeps commenting on Linux and silverlight, especially after this..
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Microsoft-Intel-Team-to-Put-Silverlight-on-Moblin-Linux-436718/
I’m planning to learn silverlight.