Hate to say this, but pretend you’re talking to a 10 year old. No, scratch that, the average 10 year old probably knows more about computers than I do. I use this I-pad to read books, search the Internet and post on some sites. Every so often I come across a story or picture or video that is blank or has a small blue question mark in the center. I click on it and it says (not a direct quote, it’s not in front of me right Now) “adobe reader and flash cannot be viewed on I-pad” Are you telling me there is some other way I can view this stuff on my I-pad? Are you saying I can convert it to a different format?
Ah! OK. Now I understand. It's not Adobe Reader. It's Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash is a proprietary video and animation format that is a resource hog that really does not work well on ANY touch devices. At core it relies on keyboard input and mouse over events to trigger menus and actions on the screen... Touch screen devices don't, as a rule, have mouses or physical keyboards. Also, to provide long battery life, Apple has determined that Flash, with its heavy resource demands, is unnecessary, when other, open source formats such as H.264 video compression can do much the same thing without the severe overhead hit on the device and battery. The vast majority of Flash content are advertisements. There are also some on line games written utilizing Flash scripting. But those can also be accomplished using non-proprietary standard HTML5 code.
Adobe, of course, wants the continued use of it's product because it profits from the sale of the creation software and licensing. The other standards H.264 and HTML5 are free to use.
By the way, there is a version Flash 10.1 player for touch devices for the Android system. It's not perfect... And it still drains the battery I hear.