Has apple missed the cart? (no flash on iphone)

Adobe announced today that full flash 10 will be making its beta release in october on the ARM architecture. Support will be available up-front for Windows Mobile, Google Android and Symbian.

Great! That's the majority of smartphones and upcoming ARM based smartbooks covered. But what about the iphone?

According to this, Apple claims that the iphone is under powered - from a processor perspective - to cope with flash. At the same time, Adobe has said that Apple are working to their own schedule on flash. (hang with me here - I'm making a point). A third observation is that NVIDIAs tegra (which has a very similar ARM11 processor to the chipset used in the iphone prior to the Iphone 3Gs) makes a delightful rendition of flash. So why can't the iphone?

The processor - even in pre-3GS days - looks to be sufficient, even if NVIDIA have re-written chunks of the flash player to run on their GPU. The iphone chipset pre-3GS had a graphics processor - couldn't Apple be bothered to do the same thing? Or maybe they were just too early to market to have access (under the open screen project) to be there in time to do anything about it.

But now that they have the iphone 3GS, with it's superscalar Cortex-A8 processor and GPU, surely this announcement of support on every ARM mobile platform EXCEPT iphone puts Apple at a disadvantage?

Were apple caught with their pants down? I for one think they have got a version of flash being readied within their walls in cupertino, and that it would be a good thing for Steve Jobs to announce when they next do an update of the iphone OS.