Rating: Luckily we discover that RIM’s BB10 can support it
Yesterday [October 10th 2012], GoMobile News was visiting RIM and asked the company’s tech guru to prove that BB10 very definitely supports Adobe’s mobile Flash. If you want a quick and easy test to see if your handset supports Flash correctly, try the GoMobile News litmus test. Visit this site – www.helpmechill.com and you’ll see a sentence at the top which reads … “Click to listen live with.” Click on the option which says ‘Pc player’. If Flash is supported, it will work. If not – and especially if you are a Brit, you are in deep trouble.When RIM tred our test, initially it didn’t work. After a few moments of fleeting panic, RIM’s BB10 guru found the browser settings and discovered that support for Flash was actually turned off. Switching it on meant it did work.
Phew! But those with the very latest Android tablets may not be so lucky.
At RIM, enabling that Flash setting meant that the page on helpmechill (a UK internet radio station) worked.
It worked so well, in fact, that the page reported it couldn’t stream the music to the BlackBerry test handset (5,000 of which are in developers hands right now) because it was obviously foreign. Must have thought we were Canadians.
Whilst on the subject of Flash support, GoMobile News has found the definite answer for those with Android handsets. Go to this page on Google Play. It should take you to Adobe Flash Player 11 (the very latest version).
In our case, it clearly shows that our loan Motorola RAZR XT910 is supported whereas our loan Motorola RAZR i XT890 is not because it is newer.
So Adobe isn’t fooling when it says at the top of the Flash Player page on Google Play … “Note: Flash Player is no longer being updated for new device configurations. Flash Player will not be supported on any Android version beyond Android 4.0.x ”
Why do we care so much? Well us Brits cannot use the BBC’s iPlayer media player without Flash 10.1 or above installed. So if anyone knows how to force an installation of Flash 10.1 on Android, let us know.
We’ve noticed that RIM is encouraging those developing for BB10 to utilise the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR.
So we presume that is supposed to replace Flash but it doesn’t help with the millions of web pages which have already been built with Flash.
Here’s an interesting way of working out just how well your mobile’s browser supports the all important HTML5 standard. Just point your browser at this site html5test.com.
We tried it with a PC version of Google’s Chrome browser and it scored 437. That’s out of a total possible 500 points.
GoMobile News saw what the BB10 browser scored and it was a lot higher than that. Sadly the company won’t let us print the exact score because the browser is still under development and the hope is it will achieve an even higher score on release.
These things just go to show that the guys working on BB10 at RIM really know their stuff.
