It will be interesting to see what happens when the iPhone is launched. *NOT* because it competes with the N800 (it doesn't) but because apparently the iPhone will be ARM based (Samsung or Intel/Marvell [XScale] CPUs and between one and three cores according to the Wiki). OK, so the iPhone is an ARM based Linux computer, big deal - but did you know that the iPhone doesn't support Adobe Flash?

Maybe it will never be supported (because of the Apple Inc "not invented here" mentality) or there simply hasn't been enough time for Adobe to port Flash 9 for the first iteration of iPhone. Hopefully it's the latter, as before the advent of YouTube I'd have said the Web could live without Flash, but nowadays any device designed with Internet surfing in mind that doesn't support YouTube will suffer because of it.

So, what am I babbling on about? I'm hopeful that a version of Flash for the iPhone is in the pipeline and that this will be the latest version of Flash - ie. Flash 9. The iPhone is a huge mass market opportunity (10 million+ units, quite unlike the N800!) for Adobe, and once Flash 9 is ported to the ARM/Linux platform it becomes a no brainer for Adobe to keep it up to date and licence it to the likes of Nokia and other vendors. Conceivably Apple could have taken a port of Flash 7 but it's either too limited, lacking in performance, too buggy or any combination of the three - but my bet would be that for a premier device such as the iPhone only the latest and greatest will do. Fingers crossed!

Talking of the iPhone, it's interesting to note that Apple ported their own browser rather than relying on a third party (Opera) to do the job for them. Nokia, take note!