Flash is faster, better, stronger than HTML 5 on phones?

Fortune reports on a blog post by Adobe’s John Nack which appears to show that Flash is faster and much more efficient than HTML on mobile phones. These statements are conclusions based on a benchmark test by web developer, Chris Black. He tested HTML 5 running the same animation on an iPod touch 4 (same for iPhone 4), and a Nexus One, but also ran it in pure Flash on the Nexus one.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFax1oYyBE&w=480&h=385]

The HTML 5 animation ran at 24 frames per second on the iPhone 4 and at 40 fps on the Nexus One. The same animation running on Flash on an Nexus One ran at an unprecedented 57 frames per second. This is more than double the frame rate of Apple’s offering and is still 17 frames faster than the HTML 5 version on the same Nexus One. The post also claims the Flash version used half the battery but it is not clear as to what the battery life of flash is being compared to. We presume it is being compared to the HTML 5 running Nexus One.

Update: The original Author chimes in in the comments:

Hey everyone, thought I might chime in as the author of the blog post being criticized. The code was engineered to be as equal as possible between the two demos. Full source has been provided to show this. The code posted by wolever is not scalable but raises some interesting points. The physical dimensions of the canvas being rendered does matter. Scaling the demo down to 300x300px yields 40fps on the iPod Touch. I’ll be doing an updated blog post on this tomorrow showing results at different sizes. I’m not sure why anybody thinks canvas is limited to 24fps. My post tomorrow that wrong. And no, I don’t work for Adobe. I complain about Adobe almost as much as Apple and I much prefer running my own company at the moment. You might find this post a bit more interesting,http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/19/css3-excels-on-ios-but-lacks-on-android/