Both Adobe and Google have been talking about how Flash on Android will give it a competitive advantage over iPhone. And every Android phone released recently highlights “Supports Adobe Flash” in their news release. Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs released a statement earlier this year stating that Apple won’t allow/support Flash on iPhone platform, as Flash for mobile devices is bad for performance and battery life. In reply, Adobe’s CEO announced that they will show how good Flash is on Android platform to prove Apple wrong.

Well, Flash has been out for Android devices for quite sometime now. And we can find out which of the two CEO was right. Personally, I have used Flash on Nexus One for about one hour in July and the Flash videos that we tried to play on the device were choppy at the best. Also, in less than one hour the battery went from 95% to 35% on the device. However, as I wasn’t able to play with the device and Flash for longer time I never wrote about it.

Now Gigaom’s Kevin Tofel has done detailed testing of Flash on Nexus One to find out, how good Flash video actually performs on the Nexus One? And his conclusion was “Shockingly bad”. He used Nexus One with Android 2.2 over WiFi network with 25Mbps FiOS connection for Flash video playback on popular websites. And his experience was same as mine with choppy video playback.

Kevin watched Flash video on ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe. On ABC, Flash player froze and didn’t work. On Fox, the Bones episode seemed more like a slideshow than an actual video. And, on Metacafe Resident Evil film was semi-viewable. Kevin wrote at the end:

In short, Steve Jobs was right in not allowing Flash on iPhone. If someone does battery life comparison for movie playback on Android device with and without Flash. It will be interesting to see what kind of battery life penalty Flash puts on the device. Don’t forget to checkout the video of the test above.