The media had a field day when UK iPad preordering arrived. The low-end iPad came in at a wallet-busting £429, way more than the US price of $499 after a swift currency conversion. What nasty people Apple are, yelled lots of people, ripping off anyone outside the US. All true, unless you take into account triffling little matters like VAT (added by default to UK prices, but not to US ones, since taxes there vary by state), after which point the UK’s being ‘ripped off’ to the tune of $13–$41, depending on the iPad model you buy.

Still, said analysts, the device will be a failure! It’ll be a niche product, they yelled, utterly failing to explain why if this was the case everyone and his dog’s announcing they’ll have an ‘iPad killer’ out at some random date in the future that, for some reason, they can’t confirm just yet, because, presumably, all iPad killers currently amount to CEOs having written ‘Get proles to make an iPad killer’ in biro on a to-do list.

Whether the iPad becomes a success in the UK remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: the ‘high price’ clearly hasn’t put that many people off. Already, the shipping date for new orders has shifted to June 7, meaning the initial batch has sold out.

My advice? If you don’t have £429 (or more) to spare, avoid the iPad at all costs. You might not think you want one, but you sure as hell will once you start playing with one.

The iPad is now in the wild in the US, and devs are frantically updating iPhone apps to take advantage of the new hardware. However, many are taking advantage of eager consumers, excited about their new device and keen to use some products on it that they already recognise as great.

There are essentially three paths a developer can take, other than doing nothing, relying on the iPad’s ability to run most iPhone apps via scaling—but this isn’t an option for good developers, because the resulting graphics and UI don’t work well. All other paths have compromises, but only two are acceptable. Unfortunately, many take the third way.

The first option is to create a universal app. This means the app works on both iPhone and iPad, and it optimises itself accordingly. The compromise here is that people only owning iPhones will end up with a larger app for no added benefit. However, I think this is a good route to take—it’s very fair on consumers, and for anyone considering buying an iPad it’s great from a value perspective. Some devs have taken to raising the price of universal apps by $1, to cover the extra work involved, and I think that’s also fine.

Example: PCalc, which now boasts a glorious iPad-specific interface, and costs precisely nothing extra. (App Store links: PCalc, PCalc Lite.)

The second option is to create an upgraded iPad app. In this case, the app is iPad-specific and doesn’t work on the iPhone, and yet it’s based heavily on existing content. The important thing here is to add plenty of extra value. Games are a popular kind of product to update in this manner, and many iPad reworkings of iPhone games offer not only a better experience in terms of controls and graphics, but also new features and levels. Again, I consider this a fine way to rework iPhone content for iPad.

Example: Flight Control HD, which builds on the original game and offers co-op/battle and split-screen two-player modes, and a bunch of new levels. (App Store link: Flight Control HD.)

The third option—the bad option—is to update the graphics, charge loads of money, and do nothing else. This is a surprisingly common option right now. Games especially appear to be arriving in ‘HD’ forms that merely offer higher-resolution graphics over the iPhone originals.

James Thomson, who resolutely avoided this route with his calculator app PCalc, finds this ‘third way’ problematic. “I think the right to charge again for an iPad update to an existing iPhone game depends entirely on how much work has been done—just setting the iPad flag and doing a recompile certainly doesn’t justify it,” he says. “Just imagine a Mac game developer wanting to charge you extra to change the resolution from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 728. If there’s significant work done to the graphics, or new features added, then I think it’s more palatable. There’s a line somewhere, and the market will decide exactly where it is.”

I agree and fully understand that extra work is required to optimise any game for iPad, but it’s also clear that certain devs are simply taking advantage of the iPad’s launch frenzy and not considering their existing customers. I suspect such devs don’t realise that there’s going to be a backlash against their products. Classic iPhone games such as Soosiz and Angry Birds are already getting poor reviews in their HD incarnations because they don’t provide great value—something iPhone gaming had become synonymous with.

I’m hoping over the coming months that more devs go down one of the two higher-value routes and that consumers act with their wallets and largely ignore apps remade with little or no regard for added value. However, time will tell if that’s the case, and if people flock to apps that merely up the resolution but otherwise charge for the same content, that’ll set a nasty precedent, tempting to anyone wanting to make a fast buck off the back of existing popular titles.

Since I was at school, I’ve been accused of being a Mac fan-boy. In the old days, this was down to me having the audacity to suggest that Macs were actually pretty good and rather usable. Detractors suggested Macs were toys, and the Mac OS was for people who didn’t know how to use a ‘real’ computer (rather than people who just wanted to get things done). “Real men,” I was told, “use the command line.”

Not a million years later, Windows evolved from a piece of garbage into something that was actually pretty good (Windows 95), largely by ripping off the Mac OS. “A-ha!” I’d say, only to have fan-boy-accusers say that now it was obviously OK to have a GUI, because [insert spurious reason that only makes sense ‘because’]. Right.

This pattern has continued into my professional career. Of late I’ve been called an Apple fan-boy on an increasingly regular basis, due to my love of iPod gaming and taking the royal piss out of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series efforts. Shots that have been fired my way echo Paul Thurrott’s contradictions that were nicely summed up by Chris Grande a couple of days back.

When iPhone OS arrived, Thurrott derided its lack of copy and paste, saying it was “unreal” that such a feature was “inexplicably missing from the iPhone”. Anyone arguing the toss (either that the feature wasn’t really necessary, or agreeing with Apple’s stance that’s it’s better to do something right, even if that means taking longer to deploy it) was a Mac fan-boy.

Fast forward to the present day and Microsoft’s stated its Windows Phone revamp will lack copy and paste (and there’s no consensus on whether the company is working on a solution—some claim it is, and others say the opposite). Thurrott now states: “No matter”. I’ve experienced pretty similar reactions from people on the Apple/Microsoft scrap. According to some, Apple’s closed ecosystem and lack of third-party multitasking were the most stupid things in the history of tech, but now Microsoft’s doing the same, they’re somehow fine. Anyone defending Apple’s stance before was a fan-boy, but anyone attacking Microsoft for taking up the same position: also a fan-boy.

I find this a strange, somewhat deluded and often hypocritical argument, but there is of course one major difference between today’s mobile space and the early 1990s desktop PC ‘war’: the positions have been switched. Microsoft’s still using its photocopier and playing catch-up, but this is all the more apparent now it’s the underdog with a lower marketshare. It’ll be interesting to see how the two companies fare over the coming year or so. I’m hoping Apple wins the long game for the first time (and also that other rivals—Google, Palm—force Apple to innovate rather than just cloning Cupertino output)—the company cares more about experience and design than marketshare and dominance. I’m sure this stance will have me branded ‘fan boy’ for years to come. So be it.

“You can not update this software since you have not owned the major version of this software”

A year ago, I asked: when will the App Store learn to count? This question came from me getting App Store update notifications in iTunes and on updating ‘everything’ discovering that updates were still available. In the end, I tracked this down to there being multiple accounts on my machine—in order to see the updates for each account, I had to sign into the account, select Applications from the Library sidebar, and click ‘Check for updates’ at the foot of the Applications page.

For Apple, this is a pretty cumbersome process, but then a lot of things relating to iPhone and iPod touch sync are utterly dire from a UI standpoint (not least the dreadful Applications and Films tabs when you’re managing content on your device). However, I should have kept my mouth shut, because things just got a whole lot worse.

As of iTunes 9.0.3 (at least in my case), all ‘free updates’ for apps are now listed on a single page, but iTunes isn’t intelligent enough to figure out which accounts the apps come from. Therefore, ‘Download All Free Updates’ now cheerfully tells you ‘You can not update this software since you have not owned the major version of this software’ (nice copywriting, Apple). iTunes doesn’t bother saying which apps the dialog relates to, and so you have to click ‘Get Update’ on each individual app, to see if iTunes will enable you to download an update.

Presumably, Apple’s made this change to discourage multiple iTunes accounts on single machines. In my case, I have a US App Store account to redeem promotion codes so I can review apps and therefore promote them and the App Store. For reasons unknown, Apple has yet to realise that people outside of the US might like to have access to promo codes. However, plenty of other people use one Mac with several accounts, and so this change will trip them up, too.

So: well done, Apple. I’m hoping this is a bug, rather than a deliberate decision, but given Apple’s recent history on bizarre decisions relating to the App Store, it probably isn’t.

Thanks, Apple, for not noting which of my dozens of app updates I’ve ‘not owned the major version’ of. Also: sack your copywriter and whoever made this dialog.