Trust Adobe to hold a regional briefing on Flash on the day the Apple iPhone 4 was launched. The date, of course, had added significance now that Steve Jobs and co. have decided not to support Flash at all in any of its iPhones or iPads.

Despite that, Adobe predicts that 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones to ship by 2012 will sport its Flash software to show off multimedia websites on the small screen. Currently, only 9 per cent of the less than 50 million smartphones have Flash.

This is a daring prediction, given that only a small number of Android Froyo 2.2 handsets – mainly the Google Nexus One – support Flash on the go. Other Android handsets such as the Motorola Droid/Milestone and HTC Desire are being updated in the coming months.

Adobe’s director for technology strategy and partner development for Flash, Anup Murarka, said at a media briefing yesterday that it expects other platforms to support Flash soon, including those on Nokia and Blackberry.

Asked by Techgoondu on if the bold prediction counts Android’s recent rise in popularity and public derision for Apple’s rejection of Flash, he carefully sidestepped the issue, pointing that the iPhone has only 43 per cent of the share on smartphones worldwide, and was “not dominant”.

As such, he added, the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash would not hamper it as much as many see it.

On HTML5 as a rival technology, he claimed Flash complements it. He pointed to the fact that previous versions of HTML had co-existed side by side with Flash.

More convincing though was his argument that HTML5 would not be universal (think Internet Explorer 9 rendering HTML5 differently from Apple Safari). Browser fragmentation, as before, will make it hard for developers to create websites that fit all browsers, which will lean them towards Flash’s cross-platform and familar embrace, he suggested.

Daring predictions, as we said earlier. Let’s see who’s the winner after the dust settles in the coming months.

As official details of Google’s new smartphone OS finally came from the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco yesterday, it must have dawned on most users – including Steve Jobs and his cult of ardent iPhone lovers – that this was a key turning point in smartphone development.

While the iPhone, through good tech and not a little hype, has drummed up interest in smartphones among even non-techies in the past two years, the arrival of Android 2.2, known as Froyo, from June this year clearly pushes Google-based phones ahead of the early leader.

As Mashable describes it, it is a “slap in the face” for Apple.

In a nutshell, Android 2.2 makes Google-based phones faster and more powerful with added features.

Never mind if you don’t like Flash, Froyo has it. It even has HTML5, the rival Web content standard that Apple leader Jobs prefers, and it does it faster than the iPhone.

Froyo also makes existing Android phones run faster – up to 4x faster, according to early reports. Other useful features that the iPhone doesn’t have: native Wi-Fi and USB tethering and native Web apps (seven reasons why Android 2.2 is better).

In comparison, Apple seems to have fallen into a comfort zone in the 18 months that Android has been on small screens, happy that its closed system of apps and cool hardware will bring in endless revenue as it seeks to keep competition out.

A sign of its playing catchup: Apple only recently ‘demo’d’ multi-tasking on its upcoming OS 4.0, a good five months after current Google Nexus One users started switching between a browser, Twitter, Facebook and SMSes seamlessly.

To rub salt to Apple wounds, Android-based phones have overtaken Apple’s iPhone to be the no.2 smartphone behind Blackberrys in US sales charts.

So, how has it come to this, and why is this a good thing for consumers?

Open vs closed
Two years ago, the iPhone was heralded as the biggest thing in the tech world, by both your usual Apple fanboys and an Apple-loving media (though the two are often indistinguishable). Today, the same magic toy is seen as a locked down piece of gear that kills consumer choices.

The main reason: people have seen through the rhetoric and found an alternative to Apple’s closed system. Jobs and co. decide how you interact with the phone, they decide what software you can use and they decide to brick your “jail-broken” phone through updates.

Is it so unreasonable for users to desire a keyboard (like on the Motorola Droid/Milestone) as an alternative to a touchscreen? Why can’t you have root access to your phone to do what you like with your device? Why can’t you run software not sold by a central store controlled by Apple (and we don’t just mean porn, Steve).

And let’s come to the one debate that has crystallised the difference between Google’s open-source, bottom-up approach and Apple’s iPhone/App Store: Flash.

It’s not just about how good Flash is, or if it’s proprietary to Adobe. Why should users need to choose HTML5 from Adobe’s Flash, which powers much of the Web’s multimedia elements now?

As Mashable put it:

The choice to view Flash content is one example of this “openness.” Although Google vigorously supports HTML5, it’s maintained Flash support because it allows them to serve the needs of users; it’s “do as you like,” not “do as I say.” The company loses no developers and alienates no users with this strategy.

There you have it. Google is winning because it has given consumers and developers choice – something that Apple has eschewed in its all-consuming need for market control.

You’d think Jobs has learnt his lesson from the old Apple Mac days. Why the Wintel PC won was not because it was technically better, or easier to use. Rather, there was choice for consumers, whether they wanted to buy from IBM or Compaq or a Funan Centre brand called Pineapple.

The one thing Apple has going for it now is its apps, which are still more numerous than Android’s. But it’ll be no surprise to see developers jumping on the Android bandwagon because it is more flexible, powerful and open.

To be fair, Android has its share of problems, like fragmentation. Developers will incur cost and time coming up with apps for different versions of Android, which now include version 1.6 for the likes of the Motorola Dext as well as many devices that will run on Android 2.1 for a while (most high-end models except the Nexus One).

But developing for different OSes is nothing new to developers – just ask how they did when Symbian was on top.

It’s also rather sad to see Apple fans bringing up the idea that one OS for all – theirs – makes things easier for developers to focus. If that’s true, shouldn’t everyone be on the Windows 7 bandwagon instead of the Mac OS?

What happens now?
Much now depends on how well Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 does when it is launched with the upcoming iPhone, which has garnered no little bad press in revealing Apple’s draconian ways in dealing with leaked information.

From what everyone has heard now, the OS 4.0 will play catchup to Google’s Froyo, which will be rolled out from next month on the Nexus One. HTC has said its phones launched this year will have Froyo in the second half of this year.

By that time, you’d also start to see more of Gingerbread, Go0gle’s update to Froyo (short for frozen yogurt, by the way, as part of its food-based code names).

This means Apple needs to come up with a killer iPhone fast. Its halo gone, now that its “closed” model so-loved just months ago is being lambasted, it will find it tough swimming against the tide that has come in the shape of Android.

For consumers, this is good news. It’s an end of one company’s domination of the market (and hopefully, the endless ra-ra in much of the media), and it’s the beginning of more choices for smartphone users.

Like before, Jobs and co. have forged new ground with some good tech. But developers and users are far better off without their “my way or the highway” method of doing business.

Google has done it, so why not Microsoft? Just hours ago, the software giant unveiled two self-branded phones aimed at getting the non-techy crowd on social networking services on the go.

Called Kin One and Kin Two, they look a little like a miniaturised Nokia N97 mini and a Blackberry with a slide-out keyboard. But hey, why change a proven design if rivals have made it work?

Both phones feature a Windows Phone OS that reminds one of the Zune HD interface, and will hook up to the music service seamlessly. But the OS – not Windows Phone 7 – looks like a hugely simplified affair, going by images and reports out so far.

Large icons of contacts and  their social media postings dominate the main screen, which seems a smart thing to get the non-techy crowd onboard. After all, they must first be able to see what the fuss is about Twitter or Facebook to be convinced, right?

Both phones sport handy slide-out keyboards – a pre-requisite, I believe, for winning over a group of users who are probably still toting candy-bar phones with traditional dialpads and are not familiar with a touch-screen (even though the Kins do support a touch-screen as well).

What I don’t like, going by what is known about the phones now, is a lack of a native instant messaging client. It also doesn’t sync with Outlook and doesn’t have an app store to hook up to.

Another piece of bad news for those of you reading this in Asia: I’ve just been told the Kins will not make it to the region. They will only hit the shelves in the United States and Europe next month.

The Nokia E72, the followup to last year’s E71 sleeper hit, has gone on sale here for S$750 (without any subscription contract).

Featuring the same large screen + Qwerty keyboard layout in a skinny frame, this will likely be a hit with the Blackberry crowd as well as existing E71 users looking to upgrade to a new phone that’s sans touch-screen .

What we like most: 10.2Mbps 3.5G downloads – great for downloading those huge attachments or when surfing the Net for football scores, of course. Other useful features: an optical navi key, as well as a decent 5-meg camera (not bad for a “business” phone).

Of course, going with Nokia means you have to live with the Symbian OS, which is a plus to some but minus to others (mostly Android fans like me).

Still, outside of Blackberry, there were not many phones that did mobile messaging better than the original E71 last year. The E72, with some new components under the hood, should appeal to the same group of heavy messaging users.

A touchscreen with a tactile keypress. That’s probably the most strikingly unique feature about RIM’s first touchscreen device – the BlackBerry Storm … aka its 9500 series.

The concept of its “SurePress” touchscreen certainly sounds good … on the screen – a capacitive touchscreen that you can not only tap, double tap, flick and drag your finger on, but also click on.

Click on a screen? Hmm. But will it make typing faster and easier?

While the idea of a clickable touchscreen sounds great, in reality, it didn’t quite click with me. The touch and tap aspects of the screen were great – you could highlight, copy and paste, swipe your finger to scroll etc. But when it came to typing, which I’d imagine you’d do a lot of on a messaging-centric device like a BlackBerry, that’s when the idea of a clicking screen started to come apart. First, it takes some effort to click the screen – more so than needed for a light tap on the touchscreen. And closer to the edges of the screen, the clicks needed even more effort. Will it have worked better if the screen required less effort to click? I think not.

So with all those milliseconds more that you need to click to type on the Storm’s screen, it simply ended up taking more effort – and slower than a plain old touchscreen. Sure it felt good to be able to click, but it didn’t add any speed or accuracy. And speedwise – it certainly was no where near typing on a qwerty ‘chicklet’ keypad like that on my Nokia E71 or the “normal” BlackBerries like the Curve or Bold. If you’re a real (not virtual touchscreen) qwerty keyboard user like me (Treo 650 to iPhone for a while and back to Nokia E71), forget about the Storm. There’s no way you could get used to this.

While I had no love for the keyboard, hiding the virtual keyboard really showed off the Storms big and bright 3.25″ screen.This is where it really goes one up on the competition. Sporting a HVGA+ (did they just invent this display “standard”?) 480 x 360 resolution screen like that on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (which is higher than the 480 x 320 on the BlackBerry Bold) the large and high resolution screen made watching vodcasts and other videos truly practical on a screen this size.

You’d have thought that the combination of a nice big display and a touchscreen would have made surfing on the Storm a great experience. Unfortunately, the built-in browser is a little clunky and slow in rendering pages. I often ended up with “Requesting script” and “Running script” messages at the bottom of the browser – it just doesn’t seem to handle scripting well. However, it did make using Google Maps a joy – reiterating the fact that it was the slow browser that was spoiling a potentially good surfing experience.

Another area which the Storm could do with improvements is the lag in the operating system. It’s like the OS was trying to play catch up. Some times after unlocking the screen it will need an extra few seconds to get back into application where you last left it at. You still could get to your applications with a little patience, but you’d certainly not describe the experience as nippy.

But all this brickbats aside, this Storm must be every telco’s dream device. It does a great job with the multimedia experience (audio, video) – which suck up big packets of data – but it doesn’t let you do that for free as it does NOT have a Wifi connection. Probably one of the only messaging smartphones without a Wifi connection, this leaves you only with its HSDPA/3G connection for data access. Which means if you don’t have an unlimited data plan, or a boss paying for an unlimited data plan, you should just forget about it.

Even if I had an unlimited data plan, I ran into another problem. I get a spotty signal at some corners at home and the data connection sometimes switched back to a slower EDGE connection. Now what CAN you do about that? Ask the telco to put in another base station? But even with a good HSDPA connection, the connection’s still slower than Wifi – and why would you want a slower connection in a new phone?

And if you’re into video calling, you better take note that there’s no secondary camera (the one that faces you) on the Storm.

The few days with the Storm did make me miss the touchscreen experience. I’m convinced touchscreens are great – even many digicams come with touchscreen LCDs. Which brings me to the question of what makes it so difficult for all these non windows smartphone makers to come up with something with a touchscreen AND a real qwerty keyboard – something like an updated Treo 650? Now I’m imagining a BlackBerry Bold with a touchscreen – that would be close to perfection! HTC does churn out a nice range of smartphones with touchscreens and a qwerty keyboard but they run Windows Mobile and that’s another story for another day.

So after a few days with the BlackBerry Storm, on loan from the good people at RIM in Hong Kong, I concluded that I’m riding out this Storm.

No pricing available yet from the telcos here – they’re taking pre-orders for now. “Water goods” or parallel imports of the Storm are going for about HK$3,500-3,800.

I met up with the Nokia folks recently and got my hands on the upcoming Nokia E75 messaging phone, which we wrote about at its launch in February 2009.

Let’s start by saying this ain’t your average slim phone. In fact, placed next to my HTC Touch Diamond, it is much thicker and bulkier. But that’s not exactly the best comparison, as you’ll see soon after getting a feel of it for the first time.

If I hadn’t told you this was a phone with a slide-out keyboard, you might just be fooled. Now, if you consider that a full-sized Qwerty is hidden in that shiny frame, would you still consider this a thick, ugly phone?

Nope, I didn’t think so. It’s actually pretty small for a device with so much packed in.

The Qwerty keyboard feels natural to type on because the keys are big – obviously, much bigger than the popular and well-made Nokia E71 – and thus easier to avoid typos. The keys, for the sake of sliding smoothly under the front section, are perfectly flat – in other words, no “tiny pillows” like on the E71 for easy finger-typing. But you won’t miss them, as the keys are big enough and you’ll avoid typing the wrong keys most of the time.

How does the much-vaunted e-mail offering Nokia do? I’d say I’m impressed at how easy it sets up push-mail. It’s almost, dare I say, Blackberry-like.

All that’s needed is your e-mail address and password and you’re good to go (I got my Yahoo account up within a minute). With that information, Nokia’s middleware servers over the Net basically does the job of hooking up to your mail server and from there on, pushing your messages from your mail service provider to your inbox automatically.

The e-mail interface is generally user-friendly as well. I’m a fan of Blackberry’s e-mail interface – they always manage to make the most badly-formatted HTML e-mail messages appear readable on the small screen – and Nokia comes close to that experience.

During my tests, one potentially problematic HTML e-mail came through pretty neatly in text form. I had a choice to read it in HTML, which was rendered perfectly, except that in this rich form, I had to scroll across the screen to read stuff, which was a drag.

Which brings me to this: The E75 is best used in horizontal form (that is, with its Qwerty keypad extended), so that you don’t have to keep scrolling down a long, narrow screen (in default “phone” mode). This is how Blackberry screens – at least the large Qwerty-based ones – have been such wonders to use.

While I’m on the topic of swapping modes, I should also say that the the phone switches from portrait to landscape mode effortlessly, without much lag. Another thing to point out – a nice contextual menu is available when you are viewing your list of messages. Just select “right” on the D-pad and a pop-up menu lets you reply/forward/delete the message. It’s a nicer, prettier alternative to the Blackberry’s Options key.

So, what’s my goondu take on this? I’d say this is a niche phone done pretty well. I don’t particularly like the overly-obvious metal frame, which seems a bit too bling to me, though the metallic back-cover, similar to what you get on the E71, is great. Still, as a Qwerty phone, this is one of smallest and most pocketable.

But for e-mail – Nokia’s main reason to get this phone out – I am still not sure this will unseat the new Blackberrys, which are becoming prettier even as they have become easier to use, like with the Bold and Curve 8900. And we’re still awaiting the touch-screen Storm in the coming weeks.

Strangely, I actually wanted a touchscreen on the E75. Yeah, I know it already has two keyboards, but scrolling around a large HTML e-mail message made me miss the nifty touch-screen zoom in/out functions on my HTC Touch Diamond.

Bottomline: If you always liked Nokia’s E-series or its S60 platform, this is the slide-out Qwerty phone you’ve been waiting for. Messaging junkies take note too that Nokia push mail will be free on this device (though the price for the service is not out yet).

But with the Blackberry Storm round the corner, I’d like to check out that little gizmo and size things up before sinking my money here. (Hint: look out for a hands-on on the Storm here soon!)

While it’s not yet officially launched here, parallel import versions of the Storm (some which are Vodafone labelled) are surfacing at about HK$4,000 or less. Just do a Hong Kong Yahoo Auctions search for it here. Or if you’re here, go check it out at the (in)famous cellphone/computer malls.

I’ve only managed to have a cursory touch and feel of the Storm which belongs to one of my colleagues and my initial immediate impression was that it really had some weight, and it feels kinda chunky. Specs put it at 155g – the iPhone 3G weighs in at 133g so that explains it.

Its much talked about ‘tactile’ touchscreen does indeed seem to work pretty well and the big, bright 3.25 inch screen should make it THE multimedia BlackBerry. And they thoughtfully included a ‘normal’ 3.5mm audio jack.

But since unlimited data here still ain’t cheap, I think its lack of Wi-Fi will leave it in the hands of folks who have their companies pay for their unlimited data BlackBerry lines.