Andy Ihnatko on the iPad – what that guy said. I had a post drafted about the iPad from a few weeks ago but it didn’t seem to add much to the talk at the time. Despite initially feeling underwhelmed, the product quickly made sense. Traditional computer interfaces don’t work on small screens (they barely work on 12” screens let alone 10”), and rather than start from scratch Apple is building upon the touch OS that when you think about it is already quite an achievement in usability, much more so than the Mac OS. There are a lot of super-non-nerds I know who recently got iPhones and they understand it in minutes. In a couple days they are showing off their new apps. This never happened with the Mac or Windows.

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Here’s an article by Shawn Blanc about iPhone feed readers. I find him pretty forgiving. I’ve tried NetNewsWire, Byline, and Fever, and am now using GReader’s mobile interface because none of the others did it for me. All of them are slow, Byline has interface problems, NNW is (was?) buggy, Fever… Just not a good iPhone solution is how I’d put it. I quite like GReader mobile. It’s fast, and as you’re probably going to be bouncing things to the browser I don’t mind the web-app-ness as much as I often do. Also, it’s fast.

I would like to try Reeder, though. Maybe when I haven’t blown my iPhone app budget on plants, zombies and waaaay too many to-do apps.

44 days, to be exact, when I was still evaluating the PS3. Since then it basically went Demon’s Souls – Uncharted 2 – Dragon Age – Little Big Planet (PSP). I didn’t finish Demon’s Souls, but hope to someday. I totally loved it, and would consider it one of the better games of the year. Many have said that of Uncharted 2, and I can see why, as it has great writing, excellent pacing, and plenty of gameplay variety. However, it seems a little old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s me personally rather than the industry as a whole, but I feel like we’ve moved on from linear story-based games that are trying to be like movies. The game does not allow you to make any choices other than which order to shoot the bad guys. I realize this was the case with Halo as well, and many other A-list games. But my tastes have gradually shifted.

Oh yeah, Halo ODST. Almost forgot about that one, as it was a bit of a flash in the pan. It’s interesting to note that said linear storytellers Bungie actually shifted to a non-linear, architectural model for the sections of ODST. It was certainly well-made, but short, and not really worth a full game price. Had a few epic sessions of firefight though – one game lasted two hours. Damn.

Not that it’s much different from what Bioware has been doing for years, but Dragon Age is more where I see the future of games, where every aspect of the game (gameplay, story, etc.) changes based on the player’s choices. It’s a party-based action RPG with excellent writing, mission design, and an extremely detailed world to explore. Sure, it’s elves and wizards which is a little played out, but despite that the material is strong. I’m nowhere near finished it, but still plugging away.

I rarely buy full-price PSP games, but I made an exception for Little Big Planet for some reason. I’ve never played more than the demo of the big boy PS3 version, so I don’t know how the portable game compares, but I’ve really enjoyed my few hours with this one. It’s generally a pleasant, relaxing experience playing through the story missions – I’m not a huge platformer fan but this is good stuff. I’ve played very few player-made levels, and haven’t tried to create them yet myself, but I aim to, and that’s all that counts, innit?

All the while I can never resist buying and barely playing iPhone games. The iPhone is an amazing games platform, blah blah. Great, your game uses all your batteries and then your phone is dead. A phone call interrupts your game and when you go back, it didn’t save. Or the game takes five minutes to load. Or the touch controls suck, again. Or it’s a dumbed-down version of what would be decent on another platform. I’ve definitely played some great iPhone games, but most of them I never spend more than half an hour with.

Not sure why I keep buying them.

The latest is Rogue Planet, gameloft’s attempt to rip off Advance Wars. Gameloft is like the iPhone’s Asylum studios, churning out cheap knockoffs of well-known franchises. Some of them are good in a workmanlike, the-gameplay-is-engaging sort of way, but they all feel soulless, with no originality or inspiration to be found.

It’s december – there are a million games out, and no time to play them. I’m hoping to try out the new Zelda, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands and even Modern Warfare 2, but I probably can’t do everything I want to between now and the release of Mass Effect 2 and whatever the latest Final Fantasy is. But whatever – when it comes to video games, too much of a good thing is still a good thing.

I bought my iPhone almost a year ago, shortly after it first became available in Canada. At first, ‘available’ was an exaggeration. I didn’t pre-order because at first I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to whether I could get an iPhone; I have a flat rate, legacy Fido plan called City Fido that Rogers hates, and at first it appeared I couldn’t have both City Fido and the iPhone. After the confusion passed, I was able to get the thing, but by then they were few and far between. Those of us who wanted them were calling random stores, getting on waiting lists, wandering around obscure malls. A friend at work got lucky in the basement mall of an office tower, but no joy for me. Eventually I did the boring thing and ordered over the phone. I got my phone some time in August.

The thrill of the brand new iPhone lasted quite a while. A smartphone virgin friend of mine just got an Android phone and emailed me to say “I feel like James Bond”. John Gruber called it “our flying car”. You can suddenly do things you couldn’t do before. Some of these are old things in a new context, like surfing the web on the streetcar, and some are simply radically improved old things, like texting without needing T9 input. But the most interesting things are things you have never done – following your moving location dot on a map, which I still find myself doing whenever I’m in a cab. Using Shazam to get the phone to identify songs. Google Voice Search. That shit blew people’s minds, mine included.

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The iPhone is a great platform for games. Sure, it’s a little clogged with amateurish puzzlers, and the lack of any buttons at all can be challenging at times, but there are already so many great games on this thing that even keeping track of the releases can get time-consuming, let alone playing any of them. That’s where I come in, see? I’m a total iPhone game junkie, and here are a few I’ve tried recently. Herewith: Zen Bound, iDracula, Eliss, Galaxy on Fire.

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On the 18th, TUAW reviewed the just-released SimCity for iPhone and found it to be good, saying

This is one of those games that will help make the iPhone be viable as a portable gaming unit alongside the Nintendo DS and PSP. For those hesitant to try out games on your iPhone, give SimCity a try. You won’t be disappointed.

One week later, they re-review it, and find it to be bad. It crashes every five minutes, it takes two minutes to load, the controls are bad, and it “keeps draining the battery even after connecting the iPhone to a power source”.

Not that game journalism in general has very high standards, but iPhone game journalism in particular is setting some new lows. Yet another reason to avoid TUAW like the plague. (via funkaoshi’s iphone blog)

As I’m sure we’re all aware, the iPhone (and its shy cousin the iPod Touch, pictured above) represents the newest, most promising games platform. The hardware is at least as powerful as the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP, and the unique input controls present the possibility for new gameplay forms. So inevitably the App Store is swimming in games, some great, most horrible. The bulk of the games are casual, which is probably as it should be, but traditional gaming genres (racing, sports) are filling out gradually.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is price. The most money you will pay for an iPhone game is $10, generally reserved for “A-list” titles from the large publishers like EA and Sega: Super Monkey Ball, Spore Origins, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, Star Wars the Force Unleashed. In the broader context of video game pricing, these are absolute steals – top shelf DS and PSP titles go for $30 to $50 CDN, and games for the 360 and PS3 can go above $60. However, the iTunes store has a hell of a lot of free apps, and many games in the $1 to $5 range which often rival the more expensive games in quality. Also, the cheaper games tend to show up in the “Top Paid Apps” list, which appears at the top level of the iTunes Store, and must generate great traffic and thus sales. As a consequence, games seem to be getting cheaper, and gimmicky sales are now the norm.

Anyway, it’s impossible to be exhaustive about this on account of the hundreds of games now in the store, so I’ll just make mention of the games I’ve tried enough to be able to comment on. Prices are moving targets, I can vouch only that these were the prices at the time of writing.

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There don’t seem to be too many iPhone app reviews out there, so I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. Here are some reviews of everything I’ve tried so far.

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Finally received my iPhone. I wasn’t going to line up overnight before launch day, I figured I could stroll into a store the next week and pick one up. Unfortunately that was nowhere near the case. Two, three weeks after launch, it was still next to impossible to find a 16gb iPhone in the city. So I finally ordered one over the phone around the end of July, and it has just arrived (coinciding, it seems, with ample supplies in-store as well).

I’d love to rattle on about it, but I’m a little late to the party. I’m not sure what I could add that you haven’t already heard. A lot of the apps seem too buggy and crashy, but I’m sure that will be sorted. There are a lot of complaints like that (battery life!) that really pale in comparison to the majesty of the Mobile Safari browser. That, and I couldn’t believe how many different activities I was juggling while riding the streetcar. It was a big change from staring at the floor listening to music.

I’ll probably write a bit more later about some of the apps I’ve tried out.

The iPhone App store launched friday with 41 games available for it. As MTV Multiplayer notes, the DS launched with 11 games, and the PSP with 24. The hardware is no slouch when it comes to gaming, either. As roughly drafted puts it:

The iPhone is in a significantly different class of performance, has far more internal resources for games, and is equipped with a variety of other hardware–from its camera to its ubiquitous (if slow) mobile network to its multitouch high resolution display and accelerometers–all of which have to power to unlock entirely new classes of games and other more serious applications.

The iPhone launch games include offerings from Sega (Super Monkey Ball) and EA (Tetris, Scrabble). And there are already even more games than at launch – it’s hard to find an exact number, but over a hundred easily.

But how do they really stack up? There are 16 different sudoku games, some old school arcade ports, some racers, many card and puzzle. Even a text adventure. But not one RPG, not one strategy title. For sure, the hardware is idiosyncratic; shooters may not work too well. But if the DS’ touch screen is any indication, it’s still possible, and genres like RPG, strategy and even RTS can work very well.

You can’t blame developers for going casual when it comes to games on a phone, but all the same, Orcs and Elves on this thing would kill. And when we start seeing the games that take advantage of the networking and even GPS, we’ll start seeing some crazy things.

So, then… the iPhone, eh?

OK, here’s how I look at it. This plan is good, at least the data part: 6 gigs is esentially unlimited, so the $30 rate is comparable to the US $30 for unlimited. So, no question I’ll be getting one. The three-year contract length is loathsome, but it’s pretty much standard fare in Canada.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems. You will still be nickel and dimed, Rogers-style (loonied and toonied?). Visual voice mail is $8, and there are obviously extra charges for texting, voice mail, caller ID etc. – all stuff that should be included in the base plan. And let’s not forget our old pal the “System Access Fee,” Lord of Arbitrary Charges.

But it is the sheer impermanence of the 6GB for $30 plan that is the biggest problem. As soon as labour day rolls around, it will vanish like a dream in the morning, replaced by the harsh ringing of the disputed, horrible plans that Rogers originally announced.

Essentially, Rogers is buying the nerds off.

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Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan.

It ain’t unlimited, but it’s waaaay better compared to what they were originally offering, and to other Canadian rates. Here’s a Globe article.

Here’s the executive update on what’s happened since our last post. (July 7 – now even more updated!)

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When I try to access the newsmaking anti-Rogers petition site, I get a 403 forbidden error. However, I’m still seeing referrals coming in from it, so some people are getting through. Hordes of angry commenters are assuming that Rogers themselves are blocking the site, which is hilarious but probably untrue as I’m on Bell and can’t get through. I’d assume the traffic took the server down, and then it was misconfigured upon return, but that doesn’t explain how people are still visiting it. Hmm..

UPDATE: It’s back, and it was a server issue.

No, not that Neil Young. Rather, an ex-EA man who had a hand in Majestic, Facebook games and Boom Blox, and Gamasutra has an interview in which he explains the appeal:

The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.

Frig yeah! That GPS is gonna spawn some interesting augmented reality games.

The Rogers & Fido monthly iPhone plan details are now out and, well, they suck. The degree of their suckitude in your eyes will depend on your level of resignation to the ways of the Canadian wireless tri-opoly.

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One of the more interesting announcements from yesterday’s Stevenote was MobileMe, the .Mac replacement, now taglined as “Exchange for the rest of us”. That is, it features ‘push’ syncing between devices, eliminating the need to manually sync. The idea being, your data lives ‘in the cloud’ (man a lot of quotes going on here), and is accessed from whatever device you happen to be using at the time, any Mac or PC, iPhone or iPod Touch. The web app versions of mail, iCal, iPhoto etc. are particularly refined.

I use macs at home, will definitely get an iPhone in a month, and have to use a PC at work, so these sorts of cross-platform syncing tools are something I keep a keen eye on. I’m quite happy with Google’s suite, with a few exceptions (no to-dos, no cloud document storage other than office docs). There are a few holes in MobileMe too (no notes or to-dos?), and some big questions (can you use your own domain?), so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I like the direction things are going though.

So there was the big WWDC keynote today. There were big announcements – 3G iPhone for $199, app store not ready yet, .mac is now Mobile me and looks actually worth the money now maybe – but the biggest for us in the .ca is this page. iPhone coming to Canada July 11. It’s listed in the Canadian Apple Store site, but it doesn’t let you buy it, just says it’s available at Rogers and Fido locations. There’s still one big question: data rates.

Apple gave details of the new iPhone software developer’s kit today. 3rd party apps have only been possible as web apps so far, but now devs can make all kinds of stuff, and it will be distributed through the iTunes store.

A couple test games were demonstrated, one by Apple and one by EA. This could be pretty big. It’s not just the touch screen, the iPhone also has an accelerometer that detects the movement of the device – so for games, it’s like a DS crossed with a Wii. Even more interestingly, the iPhone can figure out its position in the world via cellphone tower triangulation, opening the door to some pretty crazy potential big game action. It’s a whole new platform!

Inside the iPhone Gray Market, from Business Week. One of our writers has a grey market iPhone (do I name names? It’s not illegal). Anyway it strikes me that this article misses the point, wondering as it does why apple tolerates all the unlocked phones. Hell, Apple gets paid no matter how you use it – that’s the beauty of selling hardware. It’s the carriers and the negotiations therewith that prevent the legit iPhone from gracing us with its perfectly legal presence, but the article doesn’t mention that.

I’m thinking about getting one. Thinking pretty hard about it. But it’s the mobile internet that really interests me – I don’t need portable video and I already have an iPod and a phone. I heard about Rogers’ unlimited plan and got all excited until I realized it was a pretend unlimited plan. And I don’t want to jump on an unlocked iPhone and then have it locked out when the legit iPhone shows up.

Again I say, it’s hard up here for a nerd.

Those lucky Americans have already gotten their iPhones. Here’s John gruber’s first impressions, and those of Steven Frank. Combine those with the critics’ takes that I linked to during the week, and… dude. It sounds pretty good, that’s for sure. There are weaknesses, such as the speed of EDGE and the virtual keyboard, but nothing deal-breaking.

We don’t even have a date for when this thing launches in Canada. No earlier than the fall, and it could be a lot longer than that. Also, Rogers’ data plans – and voice plans for that matter – are on the exorbitant side ($130 a month for a blackberry? no unlimited plans?). So we will all admire from afar. Which is not the worst thing in the world, seeing as the iPhone will definitely be revised within a year. Although the only things I’d be hoping for, realistically, would be faster data speeds, larger memory, GPS and third-party apps.

Oh, and I’ll do like the title says and shut up about the thing now. Maybe. It’s hard, it’s in my geek DNA.

The issue of whether third-party developers would be allowed to write apps for the iPhone is a heated one. Steve Jobs threw some wood on the fire by announcing to Mac developers today: sure you can! Make web apps with AJAX!

Frankly, I consider that a better answer than many do, since I’ve been of late pleasantly surprised by Google’s excellent posse of apps. And hey, there are some nifty widgets out there, and those are just li’l web apps too (sorta). And we assume there is some work being done on getting web apps to work offline. Which is one of their huge disadvantages, and if it’s solved in some meaningful way, one would have even less reason to hate Jobs’ latest statement.

But isn’t it a bit odd for a maker of platforms (PC, iPhone, iPod) to argue in favour of web apps? Aren’t web apps the things that make platforms increasingly irrelevant? If you made an awesome web app for the iPhone, people could conceivably use it on their PCs or Windows Mobile phones. Wouldn’t Steve be better off advocating iPhone-only apps?

Yes he would, and he will. This is only a stopgap. But its presentation leaves something to be desired. Presumably the motivation for the AJAX announcement is to give developers something to work with now – having heard them clamouring to develop for the iPhone, he threw them a bone (kinda). But the way he announced it, without stating that a proper SDK is on the way, makes it sound like he lamed out on them.