That's where we veer from the technical realm firmly into the world of politics. The Web is saturated with Flash, used by everything from banner ads to full-on games featuring animations, video, and sound. Web-based video is commonly delivered via Flash, with popular sites such as YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, and Flickr all depending on it.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by Apple, which has long been pushing its own QuickTime technology as the go-to choice for online video and audio. The company wouldn't exactly cry over Flash's demise, especially if that meant the tide of Web multimedia shifting toward QuickTime, and that's one reason Apple's in no hurry to implement Flash on its wildly popular mobile device. The company convinced YouTube to re-encode its video library in the H.264 video format for use in the iPhone YouTube app. Other content providers, such as Major League Baseball--which uses Microsoft's Silverlight on the desktop--have also opted to provide video in iPhone-compatible formats, showing the clout that the iPhone's prominent position can command.

With the ball in Apple's court, the question becomes just how desperate Apple is to have Flash on the iPhone. "It's [Flash] been cited as one of those things people are missing out on with the iPhone," says Interpret's Gartenberg, but he qualifies that, "At the end of the day, most of the uses for Flash are for video like YouTube and the iPhone already has YouTube. It's not exactly critical."

That answer would seem to be "not very desperate at all." The iPhone is more a year and half old at this point, and while there does seem to be a constant low-level buzz about the lack of Flash, that absence doesn't seem to bother users nearly as much as other shortcomings, such as the lack of copy-and-paste functionality or even picture messaging. And with iPhone sales of 17 million and rising, it's hard to imagine that there are a bevy of potential customers holding out for Flash support before they buy Apple's phone.

Some suggest that Flash is necessary to give the iPhone experience parity with desktop computing. But these days, the capabilities of other Web technologies such as AJAX (which involves a combination of dynamic HTML and JavaScript) can accomplish a lot of the functionality that used to force Web developers to turn to Flash. Plus, AJAX has the benefit of being compatible with all major browsers, including MobileSafari, without the need for plug-ins and it costs little in terms of overhead.