As reported here before, Henry Blodget has argued a number of times that the iPhone is dead in the water. His main reason is that there can only be one winner in any single tech field:

Technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Given that even the ageing iPhone 3GS is still outselling many new Android devices in the USA (All Things Digital), it’s increasingly clear (if it wasn’t before) that Blodget is talking crap.

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has ushered in similar comments, with people calling Microsoft bonkers to splash out $8.5 billion on a service that’s clearly going to be crushed by Google at some point. But Ben Horowitz offers a different take in his article that provides background on Andreessen Horowitz’s acquisition, 18 months ago, of the service from eBay.

Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust [and we] soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.

These attacks were Google’s free competitor to Skype, aggressively marketed to Gmail users, and Apple’s FaceTime, heavily advertised and baked into iOS devices and Macs.

Horowitz reveals the result of these two titans attacking Skype:

Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google’s launch, culminating in:

500,000 new registered users per day

170 million connected users

30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently

209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010

[And] 50 million users have downloaded Skype’s iPhone product since the release of Apple’s Facetime.

But, yeah, technology platform markets tend to standardise around a single dominant platform.

The Telegraph claims, in an article that sounds unlikely to me, that mobile phones could soon be charged by talking into the handset:

Electrical engineers have developed a new technique for turning sound into electricity, allowing a mobile to be powered up while its user holds a conversation.

The technology would also be able to harness background noise and even music to charge a phone while it is not in use.

If true, this is also good news for The Telegraph itself. Assuming we really can generate electricity by talking hot air, the newspaper’s HQ could become the Middle East of generating electricity by the power of regularly spouting garbage at volume.

Harry Marks on ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough:

Google’s philosophy: “How much stuff can we cram into this thing that works well enough?”

Apple’s philosophy: “We can’t do everything, but what features can we perfect so they’re easy and fun to use?”

Apple’s far from perfect, and it has some seriously questionable desktop UI ideas in the upcoming version of Mac OS X (including an absolutely hideous new ‘skin’ for iCal), but it often works hard to get the details right.

Justin Williams on trading an iPad for a Xoom:

Honeycomb as an OS supports rotating the device into both portrait and landscape, but rotation is not nearly as fluid and instantaneous as on iOS. In fact, it is so slow I often wonder if the device has registered that I changed the device’s orientation. After several days, I ended up just setting a preference to disable rotation on the device and have it stay in landscape permanently.

When Apple dropped the rotation lock from the iPad, I was annoyed, but only because I wanted the option to periodically lock it. However, to think of a device almost forcing me to lock its orientation because of poor performance is just crazy.

Mind you, it remains to be seen whether ‘good enough’ will do regarding tablets. It certainly has when it comes to PCs, but less so with smartphones—many users seemingly demand a good experience now. I hope that this will be the case in the tablet space, not so Apple can beat Google, but so Google will strive to better the experience and so challenge Apple to keep bettering its products too. The worst-case scenario is when ‘good enough’ wins the day and companies continue shovelling out third-rate crap, enabling everyone—including the field’s leaders— to become complacent and lazy.

Greg Sandoval for CNet.com on Google Music:

While Google and Levine have negotiated to obtain licences from the four top labels for over a year, the service will appear first in beta without licensing from the labels.

That’s sure to go down well with record labels, just like Amazon’s cloud service is going down well with them. And by well, I mean ‘well’ in the sense of ‘not well at all, due to them spitting fury and going GRRARRGGHH’. Apple’s trying to get record labels on board for its cloud music service, so will record labels go with unlicensed models just to screw the big evil (Apple), or will they finally recognise that Apple’s domination in the digital music space is also making them money? I wouldn’t bet on the latter, sadly.

It’s also worth noting that these online services appear in part to be relying on fair-use laws. This is why they are rolling out in the US. In the UK, they’ve a much tougher battle, given that the UK essentially lacks even basic fair-use law. For example, it’s not legal in the UK to copy any media, even for personal use. The only exceptions are time-shifting of television content and backing up software, although more recent legislation demands that the second of those things not circumvent copyright protection. That the BPI has in the past been quoted as saying it won’t sue people for ripping CDs to use the music on iPods is irrelevant, because that’s very different from legal precedent.

The CNet.com article also quotes Google exec Zahavah Levine:

While the service is still in beta, users will be able to join by invitation only. Initially, to access the service, users will require a browser that supports Flash — that means no Apple devices — or on any Android device that’s version 2.2 or higher, Levine said. Currently the service will start off in the United States only and will be free.

Sounds great. I can’t wait to get stuttering music playback on a Flash-based browser. Still, luckily for Google, Amazon hasn’t updated its own cloud player so that it works with iOS, or Google’s decision to run with the ‘open’ technology of Flash for the future of music playback outside of Android would look a bit stupid.

*cough*Amazon Cloud Player works on iOS devices all of a sudden (9to5 Mac)*cough*

Oh.

Previously on iOS Gaming Shit-storm:

Plucky developers Semi Secret Software wow the internet with Flash endless-running/jumping game Canabalt, which makes the leap [pause for laugh track] to iOS, and kick-starts a genre. After raising $25,000 for charity during an indie sale event, Canabalt goes open-source, with the caveat that

Canabalt-specific game code, game art, animation, music and sound effects are all proprietary, and protected by our copyrights and trademarks.  That is, you can copy-paste our engine code (any of the Flixel stuff, which is most of the good stuff anyways), and even sell it on the App Store, but you can’t distribute or redistribute our game code, art or sounds

Idiot developer PLD cunningly copies Canabalt (as Free Runner), even cloning its App Store description, and Apple approves it for sale (Pocket Gamer), THE FOOLS!

And now, the shocking twist in our latest episode:

I think Apple was right to approve the app.

“BWUH?” you might have just uttered, especially if you know how much of a fan of indie gaming I am, and how I spent quite a lot of time writing articles that told everyone what a dick Tim Langdell was being in 2009, attacking every game that had the word ‘Edge’ in its title. (Langdell was eventually defeated when EA decided to use its powers for good.)

The reason Apple was right to approve the app is because it cannot be the copyright police. There’s no way Apple can check a game against the 40,000 that already exist with any degree of consistency, also looking into the background of whether a ‘clone’ was authorised or not. If that was part of the app approvals process, we’d be back to the bad old days of games taking months to appear after submission. Instead, developers must be vigilant and Apple must be swift in reacting to cases like Canabalt/Free Runner, removing the clone and—where relevant—nuking the dev account responsible for the infringement.

This time I believe Apple got everything right. The game was initially approved, but then removed from sale within a day (Pocket Gamer, again), after a complaint was made. And, in an odd way, it might have even benefitted Semi Secret, in getting its ageing game a little extra PR now that myriad similar and superior games exist and are getting all the column inches.