When we discussed the iPad and whether it was worth giving in to the peer pressure and pre-ordering it, a commenter decided to remind us of his reason for resisting: No flash. And yes, it can make things look sad. More

Say it ain’t so! OCZ Technology — a mainstay in the storage realm but an outfit that tends to serve the performance (read: affluent) market first and foremost — has just dove headfirst into the value-priced SSD segment. Debuting today, the Onyx SATA II 2.5-inch SSD is the company’s most affordable MLC-based solid state storage solution to date; it packs 64MB of onboard cache, up to 125MB/sec read speeds, write rates of 70MB/sec and an MSRP of under $100 for a 32GB version. You know that hasty boot drive you’ve been looking for? Look up. OCZ breaks into bargain market with ’sub-$100′ 32GB Onyx SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:15:00 EST

With the release of the iPad, among other things , HTML5’s been pitted against Flash as the savior of web video. It might be! (Or not!) Either way, a crucial arguing point is that it’s more efficient . So, uh, is it? More

Adobe’s got a video out that proves the HP Slate can run Flash and AIR just fine, thankyouverymuch. To which we say: no kidding! It’s a Windows 7 device. What’s of some concern might be HP’s own marketing clip: The Adobe clip shows real-use situations with Flash, and it looks great. The HP clip, though, is totally rendered: screen, hand, everything fake. There could be lots of reasons for that, of course. But hopefully it’s not that HP doesn’t trust its Slate enough yet to film actual behavior

In today’s Remainders: laughs. The Onion riffs on Google’s privacy issues; Virgin America’s triumphant claim of going Flash-free is sort of a joke; a clever Chatroulette user pranks people into looking at themselves, and more. Grounded Yesterday Virgin America announced that they were actively ditching Flash for an all HTML website, explaining that it would make the site more accessible for mobile users. The media made it out to be a pretty big deal—which it might have been, had it been completely true. We visited Virgin’s brand new site yesterday and what did we find? Flash! So that’s strike one

You’re probably relatively confident in your various machines’ integrity against hackers. Repeat Pwn2Own hacking competition victor Charlie Miller would like you to know that you’re wrong—especially if you have Flash. In an interview with OneITSecurity , Miller picks off questions about hacking and security with just enough ease and nonchalance to make me queasy. Like, you know how Mac OS exploits are supposed to be tougher to root out than Windows exploits? Not quite! And they’re both vulnerable: Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default).

Flash is coming to Android phones, and for this, some of you are grateful. So when is it due? For some new handsets, the ” first half of this year .” But the rest? Probably never. There are two factors that’ll determine whether or not your phone is ready and able to run Flash, whenever it becomes available. First, you’ll have to worry about software: As far as we know, Adobe is only planning on supporting Android 2.0 and up, meaning that unless you’ve got a Droid or Nexus One , you’re shit out of luck—unless, of course, your phone gets treated to an upgrade

Flash is coming to Android phones, and for this, some of you are grateful. So when is it due? For some new handsets, the ” first half of this year .” But the rest? Probably never. There are two factors that’ll determine whether or not your phone is ready and able to run Flash, whenever it becomes available

If this leak is true (and it’s boring enough to be true), then it means webOS 1.4 should be hitting soon ( like we thought ). Nothing on here is stuff we didn’t already know, including video capture, Flash 10 support for the Pre, improved speeds and a bunch of small fixes and upgrades. [ Precentral via Everything Pre via Engadget ]

After all the talk of Flash Player 10.1 and what it does to gadgets’ battery lives, the folks at FlashMobileBlog decided to take the old-fashioned approach to finding out how the Google Nexus is affected: Playing a lot of videos. They found that “video can be played for well over 3 hours over Wi-Fi from YouTube in H.264 (Baseline 1.2).” One’s gotta wonder whether this is acceptable battery consumption or not, but the big idea is that we can extend that time by playing with configurations (backlight, Wi-Fi vs 3G, etc) and encouraging the availability of optimized content. You can read more about what content providers can do to optimize content and about the various configurations tested by FlashMobileBlog at their site. [ FlashMobileBlog via Carolyn Penner ]