Flash would trash the iPad battery, says Jobs

The war of words between Apple and Adobe around Flash has continued to heat up thanks to statements made by Apple's CEO at a recent iPad demonstration to Wall Street executives.

During the demonstration, Steve Jobs claimed that running Flash video on the iPad would slash its battery life to 1.5 hours.

These are strong claims and while Jobs could be correct, the accuracy of his claims come down to which version of Flash would be used on an iPad.

If the hypothetical iPad Flash version was able to make use of the video acceleration hardware onboard the iPad, Flash's impact on battery life, would be nowhere near Jobs' claims.

Jobs, however, is probably right because Apple Mac users are stuck with a version of Flash that doesn't have access to graphics acceleration hardware because Apple doesn't allow access to the appropriate API code that hooks into the hardware.

In a nutshell, it appears that Steve Jobs has concocted a hypothetical version of Flash without hardware acceleration to create hypothetical battery life claims as part of his pitch to Wall St.

Critics of the iPad have slated its lack of Flash integration citing Flash as being one the key requirements for surfing a sizeable chunk of interactive web content. Jobs's has also been quoted as saying that they ditching Flash was "trivial." and that HTML5, which is expected to eventually replace Flash, is the future. Whilst there is certainly a measure of truth in what Apple are saying, the devil is in the detail.

As a standard, HTML5 will eventually garner widespread browser and website support, but it'll take years before it really gains critical mass.

Meanwhile, iPad users look set to find themselves stuck out in the cold, unable to access Adobe Flash applications online.

Regardless of hypothetical battery life and HTML5, the real issue not being talked about is that prospective iPad purchasers are not being given the choice to make up their own minds by Apple,