Despite claiming to offer a full internet experience, as all good tablets should, the recently launched Apple iPad came complete without Adobe’s Flash. The massively popular hardware giant has a long standing dislike for Adobe and not only because it doesn’t integrate well with their devices.

According to Apple CEO, Stece Jobs, the iPad didn’t figure Flash because it’s slow and wastes incredible amounts of battery life. Currently the iPad’s battery lasts up to 10 hours, without the software, but this would be reduced to 1.5 hours if it came replete with or integrated smoothly with the software giant’s popular internet multimedia program.

Adobe who brought you Photoshop and its ensuing creative suite, have released an interview whereby they claim to be using the same video hardware and graphics hardware as all of Apple’s devices. CEO Anup Mura mentioned that Adobe are also moving more things off the CPU into hardware acceleration. The next version of Adobe (10.1), attempts to resolve some of the time delays in displaying websites rich in multimedia.

They’ve optimised flash to suspend any content that is displayed off-screen so that there’s no wasted processing happening on content that isn’t being viewed. Mura goes on to say that “ it’s not just about what can we do in the runtime and using hardware better, but also be thinking about how the application or the webpage is being rendered, and what is being rendered on the screen, where are we in memory.”

This however may not be enough for Apple to adopt Adobe’s programs. Apple still maintains that HTML5 standard will replace Flash in the future and that it will prefer this to Adobe in the meantime.

The Apple iPad is now available in South Africa through WantItAll.