No watered-down Internet. No sacrifices. That's the promise Hewlett-Packard Vice President and CTO Phil McKinney offered consumers in a blog post about the PC giant's upcoming tablet computer. HP's iPad competitor, he promised, will offer a full web browsing experience in the palm of your hand.

McKinney's blog even posted a demo of HP's upcoming tablet computer running Adobe System's Flash player and its Air application that lets Flash run outside of a browser. The video doesn't compare to the polished Apple commercial showcasing the iPad during the Oscars, but it does offer a sneak peak of what consumers can expect later this year -- including Flash capabilities.

HP's partnership with Adobe on the tablet flies on the face of Apple's iPad strategy. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided not to include Flash support in the iPad, insulting Adobe and opening the door for the software maker to find partners to rival Apple in tablets.

A Flashy Tablet Argument

"Flash performance, while critical to vast number of web sites, is not typically a subject whose interest extends much beyond concerned developers and their beleaguered spouses," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "But given the enormous interest generated by the iPad, the issue became something of a cause célèbre among Apple's fans and foes, Adobe's buddies and enemies, and nondenominational Internet aficionados."

No matter what one thinks of Flash, King said it seems odd to close the iPad, a device designed largely for media consumption, to some of the Internet's best-known media sites. However, Jobs doesn't have a reputation for suffering fools gladly, even when the fools are asking perfectly reasonable questions, King said.

"Beyond whatever Jobs might have hoped to achieve with his comments, we doubt that Phil McKinney's blog post was among his goals. In essence, Jobs' blanket attack on Flash offered two of Apple's largest, ablest and most dangerous opponents -- HP and Microsoft -- a chance to say, in essence, 'No problems with Adobe here.' This, in turn, cast unspoken doubt back on Jobs and his company's vaunted engineering staff: If HP and Microsoft can successfully deal with Flash, what's Apple's problem?"

Will Jobs' Flash Comments Backfire?

Will Jobs' shunning Flash backfire on Apple? King said opening up a broader discussion of the iPad's media capabilities also provided HP the opportunity to offer views on exactly how the market for tablet computing is evolving. In a recent interview, McKinney drew a line between the HP slate, which is about delivering a full computing experience in a light and highly mobile form factor, and smartbooks, which are about cloud-based media consumption.

King noted how McKinney went to some lengths to describe the benefits of each for its likely and intended users but, not surprisingly, also cast smartbook devices as significantly more limited than Apple and its supporters have described the iPad.

"Who 'wins' this argument is, truly, a nonissue. At the end of the day, by voting with their wallets, consumers and businesses will determine the actual winners in the marketplace," King said. "But by ignoring a pervasively widely used technology like Flash and treating its parent company with disrespect, Jobs opened a door he must have preferred to leave closed: Providing his competitors the opportunity define these devices, technologies and markets far more clearly than he himself has done."

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