[Mr. Blonde]

That is just as possible as Ford being sued by a race car driver because his fuel efficiency is not on par with what was on the window sticker :-)

So every computer user is a power user? Not a good comparison to the average user. I'm tempted to take a poll of my friends who are majority iPhone users and see how many can even tell me what Flash is much less the pros and cons of having it on the iPhone. I would be shocked to get a majority. However, if it were allowed and the battery life gets shot, who would be blamed, you think it would be Adobe?

If you haven't had a freeze and had to restart a smartphone, you are one lucky individual.

I seldom pay attention to popular opinion, it is often wrong. It's too easy to coax the public into believing whatever you want them to believe.

You don't have to, but as a business trying to make money it would be smart for Apple to heed public opinion. Having the public view their product as high quality is in their best interest.

The market for iPhones isn't saturated at this point. They still are only on one carrier in the US. Look through iPhone threads and start counting how many people say they are getting one the day it is on Verizon. Not to mention the desire to upgrade to new versions. As soon as the subsidy comes back around I'm sure a lot of people will be ready to upgrade. And I would again contest the knowledge of the average iPhone or even mobile phone user on how knowledgeable they are about how locked down the iPhone is. Beyond being exclusive to AT&T I doubt many could tell you much.

[Greysard]

However, if it were allowed and the battery life gets shot, who would be blamed, you think it would be Adobe?

Apple could simply require that any iPhone application in normal use must not use more than so many mW of power. Easy to verify, and if Adobe's Flash doesn't meet the requirement, back to the drawing board it goes.

As it stands, Flash is banned regardless of how optimized it is. I'm sure if Adobe releases an app called "Flash" that does nothing and exits immediately it would be still banned, just on the basis of its name. On the other hand, if I put together a Tetris game that has twenty infinite loops in twenty threads (do they have threads?) and burns power like crazy, that would be just peachy with Apple.

If you haven't had a freeze and had to restart a smartphone, you are one lucky individual.

I restart my PDA maybe twice per year, and not because it locks up (it never does) but because its Bluetooth stack has a known licensing bug. There is a fix from Dell, but I never bothered to apply it. My phone (LG CU515) never locks up.

Look through iPhone threads and start counting how many people say they are getting one the day it is on Verizon.

It may be that Apple shot itself in the foot when they signed the exclusive deal with AT&T, I think it will expire only in 2012. Android will have plenty of chances to prove itself. Many people use Verizon because of its superior coverage. In several [rural] locations AT&T phone had no coverage, but Verizon phones worked fine.