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The stand-off between Apple and Adobe over Flash is becoming a staple of industry events, and both companies are obliging this week. Apple CEO Steve Jobs told The Wall Street Journal that Flash is a "CPU hog" that would reduce the new iPad's battery life to 1.5 hours from "up to 10 hours". Meanwhile, Adobe's mobile evangelist, Mark Doherty, said at last week's MWC event that Apple will be forced to allow Flash onto the iPhone and iPad, with seven million users already requesting it.

Doherty, outlining Adobe's latest cellphone strategies, said: "Recently seven million or so iPhone users have actually come to our player download centre to download Flash Player because they didn't know it wasn't available. So now we have a special page up telling these visitors that Apple is restricting open technologies like Flash."

But Jobs' comments to the WSJ team, reported on the Valleywag blog, included a dismissal of the Adobe flagship technology as "full of security holes" and "old technology". Discussing content for the iPad with the WSJ, he apparently pushed the newspaper to adopt H.264 video compression instead. Recently, he told Wired magazine that Adobe was "lazy ... They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it."

Like Google, Apple believes the world will move to HTML5 for rich web media, making plug-ins like Flash redundant, but unlike Google, it thinks it can do without Flash - which powers most video sites like YouTube and lives on just about every non-Apple smartphone - in the short term.

Back in Barcelona, Doherty told telecoms.com: "We have done a lot of work to build Flash Player for the iPhone, but Apple at this time haven't decided to have Flash on the iPhone. We encourage them and have demonstrated that it works really well on other platforms and at some point in time the apple user base will start demanding the full internet. Today 70% of games on the web are Flash-based and 75% of video is played back through Flash Player. Apple just seems to want to have some control over their ecosystem and effectively tax their developers."

Doherty was demonstrating Flash 10.1 and AIR on Android and also joined the LiMO Foundation. AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime, will appear on the Google OS later this year - it is the key product of the Open Screen Project, an industry initiative set up by Nokia and Adobe. AIR is a runtime for standalone apps, offering developers a way to build apps outside the browser and across multiple operating systems. AIR draws on features from Flash Player 10.1 to take advantage of the phone's native capabilities, as seen in apps like the Twitter browser TweetDeck. It ties in with the hybrid experience that will dominate the smartphone for years to come - combining open web streaming with standalone, downloadable apps.

Flash Player 1.0 is in beta release for mobile developers and should go on general release before midyear. It is the first consistent runtime release from the Open Screen Project that supports rich web media across any screen, including PCs and consumer electronics. AIR supports multitouch, gesture input, accelerometers for motion and orientation and geolocation for position apps. It will run on Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, webOS and Windows Mobile.

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