Disappointed

I've had my iPad for a little over a month. Other than my iPod, it's my first apple product. I've just recently learned that I can't use adobe flash player, which means that many of the reasons I got the Ipad no longer apply. I can't watch the work videos I need to among many other things. This is just so inconvenient. As cool as the ipad is, I am just SO disappointed in it now and wish I hadn't purchased it. Does anyone know any way around this ?

The lack of flash in iOS is pretty high profile. If that's why you were buying it I would think you would have tested it first (and learned of that limitation) That said, it does about a million things that aren't flash that are simply amazing.

Helpful, no really

Seems like such a common sense feature to include since it's so widely used. Of all the things I expected to be different and/or lacking and thought I needed to research , this is not one of them! Still.....disappointed.

Flash is the new floppy drive.

Beach bum said:

Does anyone know any way around this ?

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Sell it!

Sorry to hear of your disappointment. Not to put salt in your wound, but I'm also quite surprised you didn't research a little more before making such a major purchase. It is very widely known that iOS devices do not run Flash and that Steve Jobs has a great dislike of Flash.
But now that you're a member of these great forums, you have a very handy research tool at your fingertips. Just be sure to ask around and get a good idea of what you need/want before your next Apple/Mac purchase.
Perhaps you could call and talk to a Manager at the Apple store and let them know of your sincere disappointment and ignorance of the issue. 50/50 chance he/she will be nice enough let you return it regardless of being more than 30 days since you purchased. You never know, worth a shot. If not, sell it on craigslist or e-bay and use the $$$ to put towards a Macbook instead. You can view Flash websites on a MB.

I thought a truce was in the works...

Beach bum said:

I can't watch the work videos I need to among many other things. This is just so inconvenient.

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Do these work videos come in a Quicktime format? Can you download the video file and sync it with your iPad through iTunes?

What you could do is install airvideo on your ipad and work computer. This should be able to stream the video out to your iPad and do the conversion either on-the-fly or before sending it. I use this for my iPhone and it seems to work very well. There is a free version if you want to test it.

Most of the big webvideo services (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion) use alternatives (mainly HTML5) to deliver video on devices that don't support Flash (which includes almost every smartphone available, btw, so we're talking tens of millions of devices before you even start looking at Apple). I don't know where the OP is getting his videos from but this should not be a big issue (and isn't for most people, as sales figures attest).

I wouldn't have checked to see if an iPod, iPad, or iPhone played Flash either. I would have assumed it, since it is an industry standard and since the iPad is advertised as being perfect for web surfing.

Try the streaming thing mentioned above, and if that doesn't work, sell it before the next generation comes out and kills your resale value.

Take some more money and buy a MacBook; you won't regret it. It sounds like that's what you really need anyway, if you're going to be doing work on it.

Beach bum said:

Does anyone know any way around this ?

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Buy/use a computer?

Beach bum said:

Does anyone know any way around this ?

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Don't buy an iPad ;P

I believe if a product or service wants to be viewed or available on the net they will find a
way to make it happen on the iPad it is still one of the hottest selling gadgets since the iPod and I don't believe they will ignore that market potential if they plan on moving into
the future.

This makes me wonder if somebody is on a fanboy hunt.

It's not entirely surprising that the iPad/iPhone don't have flash. App developers would go nuts of suddenly you could get all your entertainment from addicting games.com. More importantly though, Apple wants to keep their user's experience positive. I have yet to see an android phone that runs flash as good as a computer. Apple would rather have people complain about the lack of flash than its bugginess/reduced functionality on a touchscreen.