I’m not an iPhone or iPad user. It’s not as though I don’t love the design and the features. Samsung has done a bang up job with design. I will admit, though, that sometimes I get iPad envy at meetings. But I’ve been very happy with my Android phone for both work and play.

Then, something happened a couple of weeks and I realized I’d made the right choice (at least for now). I was meeting with someone about a position at Mobixell and she wanted to show me something on our website, mobixell.com. She pulled out her iPhone 4 and browsed to the site. Then she stopped on the home page and told me how weird it was that there was this great big white patch in the design at the top of the page. After my double-take, I realized what the problem was. I explained that the site was fine but that her iPhone was ignoring the Flash animation at the top of the page.

I browsed to the site on my Samsung Galaxy and showed her how it was supposed to look.

That experience was frustrating on several levels. First of all, it hadn’t occurred to me that there are elements of our own website that are affected by the Apple iOS restriction on Adobe Flash technology. (With 200 million devices running Apple iOS, that’s a lot of frustration.) She was frustrated that her really really cool iPhone didn’t perform and she didn’t know whether to blame the site, the phone or her network. From the Mobixell point of view, it seemed crazy that there was no way to get her iPhone to play the animation without paying for an app or some other workaround.

It was, however, an opportunity to practice my pitch about a new feature in Mobixell Seamless Access that we were about to announce which gives mobile operators the opportunity to deliver Adobe Flash video content on all iOS devices. I explained that the Flash animation would also be supported in an upcoming version. She expressed her hope that her operator would install Seamless Access. So, it wasn’t all frustrating (at least for me).

We’re going to be updating that banner on our site soon. Adobe Flash is the perfect tool for designging what we want. But as a marketer, I’m still concerned about all those iPhone and iPad users whose operators aren’t using Seamless Access yet. At least I have my Android phone.

(BTW, click here if you want want to watch a short video about Flash content on iOS with Seamless Access. And here’s a link to an announcement that went out yesterday.)

Seth Greenberg
Director, Corporate Marketing
Mobixell