Was Apple right to dump Flash on iPhone?

Fresh in from the historical inevitability department comes news of a failed Adobe Flash demo — and an all-new video clip showing what the proprietary multimedia standard can do on an Android phone.

Last week’s FlashCamp Seattle saw Flash Platform evangelist Ryan Stewart demo Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One phone during his opening keynote. It didn’t go well, wrote blogger, Jeff Croft.

Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site’s progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed. Ryan said (paraphrasing), “Whoops! Well, it’s beta, and this is an intense example — let’s try it again.” He tried it again and got the same result. So he said to the audience, “Well, this one isn’t going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they’d like to see running?” Someone shouted out “Hulu.” Ryan said, “Hulu doesn’t work,” and then wrapped up his demo, telling people if they wanted to try more sites they could find him later and he’d let them play with his Nexus One.

Contrast that clear disaster with this latest video clip which shows Flash working on a pre-release build of Android 2.2, set to ship near May 19. Ryan again does his demo and shows it browsing CBS, games and more, and it all seems slick.

All the same, given the time this is taking, many commentators are beginning to ask, ‘Was Apple right to refuse Flash?‘