The flash thing that existed for symbian was not "Flash", it was "FlashLite", a very different plugin that supported exactly 0 of all the .swf files I tried to throw at it, including even super simple animations.
> Flash existed for Symbian OS (think Nokia smartphones) way before there was iPhones, and those devices naturally had even lower hardware specs.
I'm well aware! I had an HP iPaQ "Pocket PC" for a long time, and you could run a stripped-down version of Flash on it. But it ran slowly, and it only really worked for simple animations. You couldn't use something like YouTube on it, and it's things like YouTube that were the killer app for Flash.