Engadget’s review of the JooJoo Linux tablet:
But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA’s Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video (or for doing… something). Unfortunately, the software just isn’t there yet. Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won’t have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a “work in progress” by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. In one of the biggest moves of irony, JooJoo has actually implemented a hack for YouTube where you can view a video in Flash or in “JooJoo” mode which is a straight playback of the MPEG video file every YouTube video harbors. What does this remind us of? HTML 5, albeit with a less elegant implementation. This of course only works on YouTube right now, though JooJoo says it plans on supporting other sites in the future.
They’ll probably eventually get hardware acceleration working and get this straightened out, but there’s a larger point here. Platform vendors shouldn’t have to rely on the good graces of an outside company to make key elements of their user experience not suck. Even if this gets fixed on Linux/Atom tablets, it will only crop up again with some other new platform in the future.
The notion of a key piece of web infrastructure being proprietary software controlled by a single vendor was only sustainable within the homogeneity of the traditional desktop world. Now that computing is seriously moving beyond the desktop — now that the industry is actually interesting again — it’s all falling apart for Flash. Apple is just hurrying things along a bit.
