TechRadar bungs up a balanced, positive, in-depth review of the iPhone 4S, but, on page 5, gnnhhhh:

Oh, and let’s not forget our favourite refrain for an Apple iPhone review – the lack of Flash video. We’ve no idea how Apple has managed to survive all of these years without adding in some kind of Flash support, but those little error boxes strewn all over the internet still grate a fair bit.

HTML5 video support is built into the iOS browser, but that’s still a long way from being an oft-used video format for the web, so iPhone 4S users will have to put up with a substandard internet performance compared to their Android counterparts when it comes to web video.

The browser in iOS 5 has superior JavaScript performance to that on Android. From a usability perspective, it’s also superior. Also, the majority of web video is now HTML5, and so while you do get those blank boxes now and again, they’re becoming less common. Oh, and many Android devices choke so badly on web video that it’s like watching a slideshow. But even on those devices that manage to play web video acceptably, I’m not sure we’re really talking about “substandard internet performance” compared to Android. On balance, the pros and cons cancel each other out.

Still, now Microsoft’s nixed support for Flash and other plug-ins in Windows 8’s Metro version of Internet Explorer, Flash’s days as a broad internet presence are numbered. Increasingly, it looks like the tool will become like Director, an authoring environment for rich media and games. Whether that’ll be enough to stop people bitching about next year’s iPhone still not including Flash support in its web browser (the horror!) remains to be seen.

A couple of weeks back, the Tap! app went live. I had nothing to do with it, so I got the same experience as everyone else on grabbing it and downloading a copy. It’s hard for me to not be a little biased (given that I’m a contributing editor to the magazine), but I think it’s all kinds of lovely, with a great UI, issue pricing that’s way cheaper than buying the printed mag, and components that take advantage of the medium (such as video previews of games).

Now iOS 5 has arrived, Future Publications has made a big deal about its 50+ Newsstand-compatible apps, and the reviews have been flooding into the App Store. They’re so diametrically opposed that they would be comical if they weren’t so utterly depressing. Take Tap!, for example. At the time of writing, it has eight reviews on the UK App Store. These break down as follows:

5/5: Four

1/5: Four

The negative reviews appear to be one general grievance (a guy who likes the app but, for whatever reason, hates the content), and a lack of demo content (which I think is a fair point—and I imagine that will arrive soon for those mags that don’t yet have it). I’m not sure the latter warrants a 1/5 review, though, instead of a letter to the mag itself, and the sad thing is, these are the best of them. Trawling through Future’s other app reviews and you stumble across a slew of entitled ‘reviews’, complaining that—gosh!—someone downloaded a free app and yet they then had to pay actual money for magazines! One particularly inane review complains that since they bought an iOS device for hundreds of pounds, they should damn well get free magazines! (Just like when I bought an expensive new TV, I automatically got free DVDs and Sky+ forever. No, hang on…) Others simply whine that when an app says ‘free’, it should mean ‘free’, despite in-app purchase being for a long time now a major part of the iOS app ecosystem. In perhaps the worst example, someone who clearly has an axe to grind against a certain publication lets loose with a spew of almost libellous garbage.

I posted about this subject on Twitter yesterday, and despite it being a Sunday there were plenty of replies. Some sided with me (“The app is free, the content isn’t. How hard is that to understand?” complained a friend of mine who works on the iPad version of a major newspaper), whereas others said that labelling an app as free cements an expectation that it isn’t something that you should end up paying for. One guy suggested these kinds of apps should be badged in a different manner, with ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘free’, although it would obviously be down to Apple to implement such a solution and could cause further confusion with mag/newspaper apps that enable you to buy single issues rather than enforcing a subscription.

The thing is, I’ve seen these problems dozens of times before when working on iOS games. Almost every time a dev drops the price of a game to free, the 1/5 reviews flood in. Some complain that the game “doesn’t work”; others whine when the game has IAP to add extra content; many just moan for the hell of it.

But that’s the problem with ‘free’: anyone can review, because anyone can download an app, without making any investment whatsoever. Typically, when people have paid money for something, they are more considered. And in making an app something other than free, you filter out the idiots. I’m not sure what the solution is for mag apps. I’m sure Future Publishing (and others in a similar situation) did a ton of research before deciding on the ‘free app and paid content’ model, realising what the risk would be. But I wonder if a lowish app price (say, £1.49) that bundled the current issue would be beneficial from a feedback standpoint. Of course, that isn’t necessarily beneficial for the consumer, because you’re ‘forcing’ them to buy the current issue, even if they don’t want it. But as is often the case, consumers en masse don’t always know what’s good for them and so end up with inferior solutions; I wonder if that’ll be the case in the medium term with mag apps, especially if the negative reviews keep flooding in.

Update: on the ‘free issue’ front, Ian Betteridge writes: “Mens Health has really suffered: they got lots of 1/5’s for “no free issue!” when there’s quite clearly a free (old) issue.”

Update 2: On Tap! specifically, read editor Christopher Phin’s response in the comments below.

Update 3: Tap! now has a free sampler edition, featuring content from the October issue.

Businessweek has a lengthy feature on Scott Forstall:

The iOS chief is a lot like his mentor Steve Jobs: brilliant, presents well, a tenacious infighter—arguably just the taskmaster Apple needs to stay on top

The feature has depth and good writing, and yet it falls short in parts through being seduced by ‘sources’, like so much other press these days:

Then there’s the other Forstall, the one former colleagues say wielded his relationship with Jobs as a bludgeon to expand his authority, and sent other talented execs packing. These include iPod chief Tony Fadell, who they say left Apple after clashing repeatedly with Forstall, and Jean-Marie Hullot.

‘They’ in this case are, note, former colleagues who aren’t speaking on the record and who aren’t named. Skip to the end and you get this:

Fadell’s Statement
“I inherited the competitive iPhone OS project from Jon Rubenstein and Steve Sakoman when they left Apple. I quickly shuttered the project after assessing that a modified Mac OS was the right platform to build the iPhone upon. It was clear that to create the best smartphone product possible, we needed to leverage the decades of technology, tools and resources invested in Mac OS while avoiding the unnecessary competition of dueling projects.”

Still, at least Businessweek put up that statement/correction—too many sites these days don’t.

The Loop quotes The Seattle Times, interviewing Gabe Newell, head of Valve:

Newell expects Apple to disrupt the living room platform with a new product that will challenge consoles, although he doesn’t have any particular knowledge of that new product.

“I suspect Apple will launch a living room product that redefines people’s expectations really strongly and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear,” he said.

I don’t think Apple will offer a new product specifically for gaming, because the building blocks already exist in AirPlay and iOS devices. Firemint’s recently showed off Party Play for Real Racing 2, which works over AirPlay to an Apple TV, enabling four-player split-screen racing on an HDTV, using iOS devices as controllers.

Here’s how I think things will play out for Apple in 2012:

• The next iPod touch revision will include an A5 chip and, with that, video mirroring/AirPlay gaming support;
• The Apple TV will retain its price point or perhaps even drop in price;
• More games devs will take advantage of AirPlay, offering TV modes and multiplayer.

You then end up in an interesting and seemingly somewhat absurd reversal of traditional gaming. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have affordable consoles and fairly cheap controllers. With Apple, you have a cheap ‘console’ (the Apple TV, priced similarly to the Wii, but cheaper than an Xbox or PS3), and expensive ‘controllers’, in the shape of iPods, iPhones and iPads. The Apple system isn’t one you’d buy from scratch, but once you realise families will increasingly own several iOS devices, Apple’s system becomes less crazy.

I’m not sure Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will be significantly challenged by this model, should my three assumptions come to pass, but then people argued iOS wouldn’t get anywhere in handheld gaming, and it’s since punched the DS and PSP squarely in the face.

Earlier today, I was noting that Apple rumours tend to be bull. And then I happened across a whopper, courtesy of John Dvorak at PCMag.com:

Data indicates that early Christmas shoppers are preordering the Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet faster than you can say “Tickle Me Elmo.” Various tablet computers will top nearly every Christmas wish list. Therefore, it is very likely that—

A hack will make a really stupid guess?

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Oh no you didn’t.

*rechecks*

—Apple will roll out the iPad 3 by the holiday.

Dvorak tries to argue his case with extra lumps of crazy, in part involving immediate part shortages forcing “lines around the block”. Um, yeah. To be frank, he could have written a slightly more sensible article by copying and pasting the following 500 times:

Argle wargle iPad bargle fargle fweeeee.