Farmville (and Flash games) struggle on smartphones

These days, at least as many people can't live without their smartphones as can't live without their favorite social games. But combining these two life-sustaining technologies has been tough, since most smartphones don't support Flash, the engine behind many of the most popular social games, including Farmville, Pet Society, Restaurant City and countless others. The upcoming release of Flash 10.1, slated for the first half of this year, aims to fix this problem by making Flash games and application easily playable on smartphones the world over.

So how will the Farmville experience translate from a 17" monitor to a 5" phone screen? The answer for now seems to be: not perfectly. A writer over at Redmond Pie got an early version of the upcoming Flash player running on Google's Nexus One Android phone and tried playing a bit of Farmville on the diminutive device. The results, as you can see in the video above, are less than perfect. The phone seems to have trouble removing the title screen from behind the super-zoomed image of a 3x2 farm area, and takes a few moments to load menu items and respond to even basic button presses. It's definitely playable, but just barely.

These problems will definitely get better once Flash 10.1 is actually released and social game developers create versions of their games specifically meant to be played on mobile phones. For now, though, the dream of playing Farmville on your smart phone will have to remain a dream little while longer.

[Via TechCrunch]