During the Apples' shareholder meeting on Tuesday, Steve Jobs explained why the iPhone does not offer Flash support. This means that the iPhone users are unable to view the online videos that are played with Flash Player, an Adobe product.

The full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and a mobile version called Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web," Jobs said, according to CNET.com. “There's this missing product in the middle," Jobs concluded.

Shortly after Jobs expressed his thoughts about Flash support on the iPhone, AppleInsider.com explained in detail the technical limitations.

“The iPhone is a very different product. It's a fraction of the size of a laptop battery and uses a low power, embedded ARM processor that works unlike the Intel Core or PowerPC processors used in Macs and PCs that can run Flash. In order to develop a Flash plugin for the iPhone, Adobe's proprietary software would need to be recompiled and optimized for the ARM architecture, which isn't something Apple could easily do independent of Adobe”, explained Prince McLean.

However, there is no sign that Adobe will collaborate with Apple to develop some kind of Flash support for iPhone.

Last month, when GearLive run a story called “Flash on iPhone is just around the corner”, Ryan Stewart, Adobe's chief spokesman for its Internet-based applications, posted on his blog his opinion about the rumor.

“I assume someone at the high levels of Adobe knows what the status is but I don't and everyone I talk to doesn't. That's because only Apple really knows anything about it. If you want Flash on the iPhone I'd keep bugging Apple. I'm really stoked about what's going to come with the iPhone SDK and believe me, I want Flash on it just as much if not more than most of you. But no one aside from Steve Jobs has any idea if/when it's coming”, Stewart said.

Also after Jobs’ speech at shareholders meeting, Stewart wrote on his ZDNet blog, that tjere are already 450 Million flash enabled devices out and “we’re looking at 1 Billion devices with Flash by the 2010”.

“I’d even go as far as to say that the web experience isn’t complete on the iPhone until some kind of Flash support is added”, he added.

Until Apple will solve (or not?) the problem with Flash support, the online videos for iPhone should be delivered in a player that supports the MPEG 4 H.264 video standard. YouTube is offering a special section with videos for iPhone.

Tomorrow, Apple will held a press event to unveil the first details about the long-awaited iPhone SDK. For the moment it’s still unclear if Steve Jobs plans to release a completed version of iPhone SDK or just beta, but during shareholder’s meeting he said that “there will be a lot of apps out there this summer”.

According to the rumors, Apple plans implement some kind of approval process for the commercial applications created with iPhone SDK. The applications that will gain Apple’s approval will be distributed via its iTunes store. However, there are sources that claim the free applications for iPhone won’t require Apple’s approval.