Adobe Stocks slammed after their announcement to forgo mobile flash development

[kjk]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Kjk, would you be so kind as to name one single advantage that a battery that is not user-replaceable has for a user?

My iPad 2 gets over 10 hours of battery life, and is .34" thin.
My Kindle 3 is .33" thin, gets weeks of battery life, and slides into my coat pocket.

Thinness/great design. Great battery life. No fiddly battery doors. Those are advantages for me.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

We consumers are asking to be taken for a ride, and yes, other device manufacturers have joined the party, but they didn't start this nonsense. The power of marketing.

"We consumers"? Please stop including everyone in your diatribes. Not everyone is asking, nor feels, that they are being "taken for a ride" at all.

Some of us understand the tradeoffs/benefits of what companies are offering, and purchase accordingly.

It isn't just marketing, and it isn't nonsense. We all have different needs for what we want our products to provide for. Apple provides products for just one subset of consumers. And most customer satisfaction polls seem to indicate that their users are happy with their products.

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I think a more accurate statement would be that the average user has been "trained" by phone sellers to think of batteries as something that can't be exchanged. For the benefit of manufacturers, not of phone users. If you look back only 5-6 years, I remember every single cell phone user I know carried a backup battery. Even those whose phones could go for a week on a charge.

Well I cannot recall once ever seeing someone carry a spare battery. Maybe it's a cultural thing.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I think a more accurate statement would be that the average user has been "trained" by phone sellers to think of batteries as something that can't be exchanged. For the benefit of manufacturers, not of phone users. If you look back only 5-6 years, I remember every single cell phone user I know carried a backup battery. Even those whose phones could go for a week on a charge.

I used cell phones for a decade before I got an iphone. They all had replaceable batteries, but I never bought an extra battery, and I never knew anyone who did. Seriously, not one person.

The advantage of non-user replaceable batteries is that can get more power in a smaller area because the battery is custom made for the phone.

[petermillard]

I don't know anyone who's ever carried a 'spare' battery just in case their phone dies - at least, not since about 1987 when batteries could barely make it through a working day. I have bought an extra battery for a mobile phone, though as a replacement rather than a spare - but again, this was late 80s/early 90s, so relatively ancient battery technology - and I seem to remember it costing not that much less than a new phone...

One benefit of having no battery compartment or card slots is that the case can be sealed far more effectively; pre-iPhone my mobile phones had to be regularly stripped apart and cleaned out because of dust ingress through working on building sites, and in my company we lost a couple of phones/SIM cards a year due to damage cause by dust alone.

[kartu]

Adobe is crazy doing this, if they actually want to keep flash business.
Note that they aren't making money on Flash itself, but only on tools to create it.

If they want to make money selling HTML5 authoring tools instead, uhm, that's very optimistic of them, good luck.

Originally Posted by Dylrob

What Apple did really was mainstream the smartphone. Since then these devices have been shifting away from the techie crowd, dropping features which the majority of consumers will never use. For instance they never swap their batteries.

It is very arguable, whether we wouldn't have smartphones without apple. They might have accelerated it a bit, but only that. Look at Nokia Maemo line of phones, at dates in particular.

I'm old enough to remember microsoft pushing tablets end of 90th. At that time, they cost a fortune, so they've failed.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

The advantage of non-user replaceable batteries is that can get more power in a smaller area because the battery is custom made for the phone.

Another advantage is forcing user to buy a new phone more often.

Originally Posted by kjk

My iPad 2 gets over 10 hours of battery life, and is .34" thin.
My Kindle 3 is .33" thin, gets weeks of battery life, and slides into my coat pocket.

Thinness/great design. Great battery life. No fiddly battery doors. Those are advantages for me.

My galaxy S plus has replaceable battery. It is still very slim and has battery life typical for normal smartphones.
Lithium batteries lose up to 20% of capacity every year. My last phone served me for 6 years.

Most people tend not to buy replacement batteries, since they get subsidized phones every couple of years. (in case of my company it is even cheaper, new phones cost 1 Euro, new battery 20-40 Euro)

[kjk]

Originally Posted by kartu

Adobe is crazy doing this, if they actually want to keep flash business.
Note that they aren't making money on Flash itself, but only on tools to create it.

If they want to make money selling HTML5 authoring tools instead, uhm, that's very optimistic of them, good luck.

Well, Adobe was pretty clear on this-they were losing money on supporting mobile Flash on so many platforms, and didn't see a future scenario where they could stop losing money.

In other words, the cost of supporting the "free" mobile Flash was much higher than the earnings from providing the tools/server side business.

The advantage of providing HTML5 authoring tools is-they don't have the financial burden of also being the sole supporters of a proprietary platform.

Instead, they can focus on helping to guide an open platform, and provide the best-of-class tools for creating for it, similar to how they are working with ePub.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by petermillard

I don't know anyone who's ever carried a 'spare' battery just in case their phone dies. . . .

Ah, the perils of anecdotal evidence. I own a spare as well as an extended battery for my Galaxy S, and I know three people at work who've bought them for other phones as well (and those are only the people I've spoken to about it). Saying a feature is useless because no one you know happens to use it could be construed as a wee Hank conformist (though I'm not accusing you of that). And a non-conformist by *anecdotal* definition is not necessarily a "techie."

It would be nice if we could lament companies' excuses for not implementing features without being reduced to zealots for one platform or the other. Flash compatibility is a feature (or was until this announcement).

So is a replaceable battery, and I wish my Sony and Amazon eReaders had that feature. It's a feature that becomes steadily more important if you don't want to be a good little consumer and buy each new iteration of a product. And continued development would mean the continuing slimming down of batteries whether removable or not.

[Daveoc64]

Originally Posted by HarryT

ie, what are you going to lose by playing your videos through HTML5 rather than Flash?

Content.

There is no way that HTML5 Video is viable for playing copyrighted video in the mainstream.

It lacks any form of DRM and implementing one would be absolutely impossible given the openness of HTML5.

While it would be nice to get rid of DRM completely, a large amount of content that people stream online is either rented or borrowed - they don't own it.

Flash Player works well for this purpose, simply because it's closed source.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by kartu

Another advantage is forcing user to buy a new phone more often.

Or charge something like $150 for a new battery with labor for those of us who don't buy the phone on contract. And, as has been pointed out by others, the idea that you cannot make a slim form factor with a battery that lasts just as long as a "built-in" one is a myth. It costs a little more to design a good removable back and they can indirectly force users to upgrade or shell out a lot of money when the battery dies.

So, given the same phone, same size, same looks, same battery capacity -- how is having a user replaceable battery not an advantage? You may not think you need it, but I don't think a reasonable argument can't be made that it won't provide additional value with no drawbacks for many users.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by petermillard

One benefit of having no battery compartment or card slots is that the case can be sealed far more effectively; pre-iPhone my mobile phones had to be regularly stripped apart and cleaned out because of dust ingress through working on building sites, and in my company we lost a couple of phones/SIM cards a year due to damage cause by dust alone.

Now here we have a real argument. Though now I can offer my personal "anecdotal evidence". I have traveled the back roads of Vietnam's countryside many times a year on motorcycles for over 10 years (you can't get much dustier than that) and never had to replace a phone, never even cleaned the inside of one. Seems they are not very susceptible to dust damage.

Besides, the SIM must always be in a slot where it can be removed? So SIM damage should still be happening, if that was the real problem.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by kjk

My iPad 2 gets over 10 hours of battery life, and is .34" thin.
My Kindle 3 is .33" thin, gets weeks of battery life, and slides into my coat pocket.

Thinness/great design. Great battery life. No fiddly battery doors. Those are advantages for me.

You can have the same thinness and great design just the same. And yes, it is a little more difficult to design a great battery door. Don't you think Apple would be up to the challenge? But since you would never remove it, anyway, you would never mess around with it in the first place.

[ScotiaBurrell]

I have one in my car and at my work. All covered.

[ScotiaBurrell]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Or charge something like $150 for a new battery with labor for those of us who don't buy the phone on contract. And, as has been pointed out by others, the idea that you cannot make a slim form factor with a battery that lasts just as long as a "built-in" one is a myth. It costs a little more to design a good removable back and they can indirectly force users to upgrade or shell out a lot of money when the battery dies.

So, given the same phone, same size, same looks, same battery capacity -- how is having a user replaceable battery not an advantage? You may not think you need it, but I don't think a reasonable argument can't be made that it won't provide additional value with no drawbacks for many users.

I buy blackberry replacement batteries on Amazon less less than $10.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

I buy blackberry replacement batteries on Amazon less less than $10.

I got a replacement battery for my Mytouch3g, for $5 off ebay. Took me a grand total of 20 seconds to take the protective cover off, remove the back, remove battery, insert the new battery, and put the covers back on. iPhones with their non user replacable batteries are much more expensive, require special tools, and take more time to do (either the time taking it to someone and having them do it, or you doing it yourself).

No, I don't carry a spare with me, but it was great having my ailing (as in, no longer wanting to charge) battery replaced in seconds, instead of spending a good amount of time and money to replace it.

On the DRM argument, please, obscurity is not security. While HTML is an documented standard, so is actionscript, and swf packaging. I can easily reverse engineer any flash app, I have tools that strip everything into its original parts nearly instantaniously. That doesn't mean I can break the DRM on the content easily. Knowing out things are encrypted, or decrypted, doesn't make it easy on how to reverse the process. For this, I use the example of the paper shredder. You have 100% of the content, you know exactly how it was broken up, but you still have to spend a lot of time and effort, as well as trial and error, putting things back together. Without knowing all parts of the equation, it will be impossible to quickly get to the content. For the papershredder, it where in the ball of paper each piece is, and for DRM it is the key used to lock, or salt, the encryption.