Some disheartening news came about during Apple’s event today: it doesn’t look like the new iPad will support Flash any more than the iPhone (not at all). Several times during today’s keynote, we saw the blue lego with a question mark — evidence that the machine is not currently running Flash. One of the greatest criticisms about the iPhone is its lack of Flash playback in the mobile Safari browser. I don’t personally miss flash as it causes more issues that it’s worth. It’s a resource and battery hog so I say good riddance with my iPhone. But on a device like this, why wouldn’t it be there?

First, the hardware should be able to handle it. I’m not saying it’ll playback HD Flash videos perfectly, in fact, that might suck terribly… but it should at least be able to handle some quality of Flash.

Second, the software has gone without Flash for far too long. That’s one of the biggest issues with the closed eco-system like the iPhone OS: you can’t do with it as you please. For example, a lot of TV networks are using the Move Media Player for their episode playback… it can be integrated into Flash, Silverlight, or HTML environments, and you can rest assured that most environments are Flash. Will we ever be able to watch streamed TV on our Apple devices? Probably not.

The iPad in hardware and features seems to be pretty limited. Its built-in software is amazing and probably the only thing that will get people to buy it. Yay, Apple!