Hat-tip to Craig A. Hunter, who posted the following image to his blog.

Sadly for RIM, when Amateur Hour was over, all they had to show for it was the PlayBook! *

OHO!

 

* which should not be compared to a ham

Apple has issued a Q&A on location data. Looks like Alex Levinson was largely right, and that Marco Arment (who I concurred with), who said the data retention was a bug, was also right.

The major take-homes, if you don’t want to read through Apple’s piece:

• Apple’s not tracking you, you paranoid crazy person.
• Apple’s in fact ‘crowdsourcing’ a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers, to make your iOS devices more rapidly and accurately calculate their locations when they need to.
• The data doesn’t include your actual location itself, but may include locations up to 100 miles from your device. (This may be a minor problem if your property is, say, a small country, but otherwise you can stop panicking now.)
• A software update due in a few weeks will reduce the cache from a year’s worth of data to a week’s worth, delete the cache entirely if you turn off location services, and cease to back-up the cache.

Compared to the Sony PSN disaster (where even credit card details “may” have been stolen), the Apple story’s looking rather damp-squibbish now. What will be interesting is to see how Apple’s rivals in the smartphone space respond, seeing as some of them also track and retain location and other data.

The Loop reports:

The white iPhone 4 has been promised by Apple for almost a year — today it officially arrived.

It’s like the iPhone 4, but in white! And it’s, apparently, “beautiful”!

The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful. We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right

said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, neglecting to mention why the hell a colour variation has taken almost a year to get to market.

And, man, with the iPhone 5 not showing up and being delayed until September or later, we needed something to distract everyone in the meantime. MWAHAHAHAHA

he didn’t go on to say, under his breath, while he thought no-one was listening.

 

Not too long ago, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget said the iPhone was dead in the water. Apple then went LOOK AT OUR CASH MOUNTAIN and developers continued to moan about Android fragmentation and—SHOCK!—said they’d rather develop for the supposed dead-in-the-water device from Apple (Mac Daily News).

But our friend Blodget won’t be defeated. He’s now written an entirely original (read: not that original) article about the battle for mobile and it’s entitled: IT’S OFFICIAL: Android Clobbering Everyone, iPhone Dead In The Water.

(Aside: Judging by this, if we don’t all agree with him this time round, it’ll be all-caps next time, in an article entitled LOOK, IPHONE IS DEAD IN THE WATER, BECAUSE I SAY SO, OK? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

So! Argument time!

A few weeks ago, when Comscore’s mobile survey showed that Google’s Android smartphone platform had blown past BlackBerry and iPhone to dominate the US market, Apple fans temporarily panicked.

I panicked. But that was because I lost my keys that day, and, man, I hate losing my keys. On those figures, I want “yeah, whatever” and definitely didn’t panic. And then when Apple mentioned that it was making money hand-over-fist and couldn’t get iOS devices out the door fast enough, I still didn’t panic. And then when devs started going on about Android fragmentation, I still, heroically, managed to hold myself back from panicking. And then when various parties noted that Android in and of itself is effectively a bunch of different platforms being lumped together, and that RIM and iOS are doing rather well when you take into account hardware manufacturers rather than OS alone, I resolutely managed to avoid panicking.

Maybe I’m just a calm kind of guy. (Note: I am not a calm kind of guy.)

It was the 1990s all over again!

Because in the 1990s, Apple was a hugely profitable company with a market-leading mobile platform and— wait a minute. What?

Nielsen’s numbers suggest that, of all the smartphones sold in the US in the past six months, fully 50% were based on the Android platform.  Meanwhile, only 25% of buyers bought an iPhone, and only 15% bought a BlackBerry:

Wow. Only 25 per cent. (And in the USA, because no other country exists, according to Blodget.) Apple must be gutted. There’s no way Apple could ever make any money with such a tiny share of the market.

Now, these numbers extend back beyond February, when Apple started selling the iPhone through Verizon (which helps). And another Nielsen survey, of purchasing intent, suggests that going forward the sales may be more evenly split.

Phew! That’s a weight off my mind, Blodget. Let’s hope you follow up this reasoned piece of savvy insight with a perfectly balanced comment, rather than one that makes you look like a troll.

So Apple looks poised to regain some share, at least relative to RIM and other also-rans.

Ah.

After the initial Comscore numbers came out, Apple fans also made the perfectly reasonable point that, if you’re assessing platform market share, you should also include iPod touches and perhaps even iPads when looking at Apple’s numbers. And, certainly, if you include both of those, Apple’s overall share looks better. But, globally, if you add up iPhones and iPod touches, Apple still lost share to Android year over year.

“But globally, if I ignore the iPad entirely and stick my head in a bucket, I have decided Apple is doomed! Doomed, I say.”

Why do Android’s gains matter?

They don’t.

Can’t Apple just hold onto the “premium” segment of the market?

Along with, frankly, quite a lot of the rest of the market. The iPod touch is hardly ‘premium’. The iPad is among the cheapest tablets, not the most expensive. Even the iPhone’s hardly alone in its price sector.

The Android gains matter because technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Hang on, didn’t you say this last time? Mind you, he’s right. After all, there’s zero competition in games consoles, cars, televisions, hi-fis and— WAIT A MINUTE!

And the more dominant the platform becomes, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it becomes to dislodge. The network effect kicks in, and developers building products designed to work with the platform devote more and more of their energy to the platform.

Which must be why all those developers are saying they’re more interested in iOS than Android, because, uh, no, you’ve lost me again.

The reward for building and working with other platforms, meanwhile, drops, and gradually developers stop developing for them.

Yes. Yes, back in head-in-a-bucketland, you’re probably right, Blodget. Nurse! We may need another bucket! Buckets for everyone!

But wait! Blodget has noticed people calling him out on this, presumably due to some advanced installed-in-his-head-bucket radio receiver:

This has not happened yet. Developers are certainly gearing up to develop for Android, but most say that they develop for the iPhone first.

Yes, this is true. That must be what John Carmack meant when he said:

Every six months I’d take a look at the scope of the Android, and decide if it was time to start really looking at it. At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space.

As we all know, developers HATE making money, so they’re queuing up to develop for a platform where Google’s cunningly made everyone prefer ‘free’, over iOS, where Apple’s trained its users to pay for apps. Right?

It’s hard to make a rational business decision to say I want to take resources from something else and put them on this. We did actually hire a person to be our Android guy, but it looks like he’s going to get stuck on iOS development!

Oh.

Blodget returns! Hurrah! More from Blodget:

And Apple’s app distribution and payment mechanism is still far superior to Android’s. But lots more developers now develop for Android than they did two years ago.

And more developers now develop for iOS than they did two years ago. Your point?

Importantly, it’s not a question of which platform is “better.” (This is irrelevant.) It’s a question of which platform everyone else uses.

Let’s ignore the question of “which platform can developers make money from?” because that’s clearly totally irrelevant.

As we’ve said before, Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought–and lost–in the 1990s.

As John Gruber says, Apple lost that war and in doing so is now the most profitable PC maker in the world, the poor dears. This, of course, has nothing to do with not having to pander to the lowest common denominator, and managing to avoid competing on price alone. Because that OBVIOUSLY doesn’t happen with Windows (what with PC manufacturers only offering the hardware and relying on another company for the OS), and it would certainly never happen with Android devices (what with Android device manufacturers only offering the hardware and relying on another company for the OS).

Phew!

It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them.

Those idiots! All that’s left them with is platforms that come highest in user experience and satisfaction surveys, enabling the company to become massively rich. WHAT WENT WRONG, APPLE?

This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are “better,” but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s, Android now).

Apart from, you know, competing in the sense of making a ton of money and huge profits. Other than that, Apple’s doing really badly.

As we explain here, two important things are different about the current Android – iPhone battle as compared to the Mac – Windows war in the 1990s. First, Apple is maintaining price parity (or better) with the leading Android phones. (Macs were always priced higher than PCs). Second, Android is still a fragmented platform, which significantly reduces the benefits of “interoperability” across multiple manufacturers.

But presumably, Blodget, Apple’s soon to be DOOOOOMED, right?

Google is working to fix the second problem, though–enacting much tighter rules about how Android can be used. And if the platform is to become dominant and ubiquitous, it will likely continue to tighten these rules.

If? I thought you were saying ‘when’? And, yeah, Google is working to tighten those rules, rather like a stablehand closes the stable door after the horse has bolted and run on to the motorway, only to be hit by a truck.

And Apple’s price parity certainly does not appear to have stopped the Android juggernaut so far.

Luckily the iPad isn’t by far the biggest touchscreen tablet on the market, nor the iPhone a leading unit in terms of sales, or Blodget’s claim there might look a little silly.

And the reported delay in the release of the iPhone 5 until September won’t help.

It’ll help you, Blodget—it gives you another five months to keep churning out garbage and yell that Apple’s “dead in the water” to everyone within earshot. Lucky everyone.

Wired:

Nintendo was caught unawares by surprisingly slow sales of the 3DS, the company said Tuesday.

“Nintendo 3DS has not been selling as expected since the second week [of availability in the United States and Europe], and this is not just in the Japanese market but also in the United States and Europe,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said during an investor briefing in Tokyo. “Therefore, we recognize that we are in a situation where we need to step up our efforts to further promote the spread of Nintendo 3DS.”

I used to swear by Nintendo handhelds. In the particularly bleak period of gaming from the late 1990s and into the early 2000s (when the Dreamcast died, taking fun with it), everything had to be 3D with as many polygons as you could fit in. Too many games had to conform to pre-defined genres, and as budgets escalated, risk and innovation all but disappeared.

Nintendo’s handhelds were the last place where the kind of excitement and drive of early 1980s arcade and home gaming thrived. Lower budgets meant you got crazy little games like WarioWare that just weren’t—at the time—feasible on TV consoles. But Nintendo’s handhelds—like all its consoles—always suffered from the same problems:

• A launch line-up weaker than everyone was expecting;
• A surprisingly short period of A-list games—releases soon turn into churn garbage for children;
• Expensive cart-based systems, which make each purchase a risk.

It took a while, but iOS eventually obliterated these issues. Since the platform regularly evolves, there’s no launch line-up, but there is a constant stream of titles. Most of them are utter crap (much like on any other system, ever), but I find something new I’d be interested in playing every single day. And because the system uses digital distribution, prices are lower and risk for the consumer is reduced. This also knocks budgets, forcing developers to innovate and rely more on gameplay than gloss.

These are the things that got me hooked on iOS gaming, to the point that I’m now the guy who deals with Tap! magazine’s games section, but anecdotal evidence beyond my own experiences made me wonder if a wider pattern was emerging regarding a transition away from Nintendo and towards Apple in the handheld space. I first became aware of a shift on interviewing an ex-Atari developer a couple of years ago. He told me his home was full of gaming kit—his children had access to every console available; but since iOS arrived, his daughters and their friends pretty much only ever played with Apple kit. “The DS,” he told me, “is dead”. The reason was that an iPod touch provided access to similar quickfire games to those they’d played on Nintendo consoles, a few titles with depth, but also offered internet access, enabling kids to mess around on Facebook.

As time moved on, more people told me that their kids were becoming fascinated by iOS, playing games on iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, all but ignoring handheld Nintendo kit from that point on. With youngsters, the intuitive nature of a touchscreen beat the relatively complex buttons of a traditional handheld; for older kids, the range of cheap games made some of their parents keen to embrace iOS, rather than paying 30 quid for a piece of plastic that could get discarded within minutes; and for teens, the importance of access to content other than games was increasingly of paramount importance. And with an entry-level iPod touch being anything up to 30 quid cheaper than the 3DS and having games that cost a fraction of the price, I wondered how Nintendo would fare this time round.

Perhaps things will change for the 3DS in the same way that they did for iOS. According to Wired, Iwata argues that it’s a

challenge to get users to understand the appeal of the [3D] screen even when they get their hands on a unit.

This was certainly the case with iOS. Many gamers I know considered iOS devices useless for gaming, right up until they experienced them. (Hell, back in 2008, I wrote—with an amusing lack of prescience—Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac, an article I subsequently countered when I had a year’s experience of the platform.)

That said, some people I know with a 3DS rarely use the 3D component, because they find it painful. And it’s also interesting to note that the majority of 3DS owners I know are also so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers. During the last-generation handheld scrap, Nintendo’s presence went across the board, from pensioners to children, from gaming newbies to dedicated fanatics. Sony fans would yell from the sidelines about Nintendo kit not being for ‘proper’ games, but Nintendo fans would smugly note that they actually had a range of titles and the best of everything. Right now, Sony’s almost irrelevant in the handheld space, and Nintendo appears to have taken its slot. Whenever I question Apple’s surprising rise in gaming and suggest it’s at the expense of Nintendo, the response is identical to the one Sony fans argued years ago. Nintendo, they say, is now the preserve of ‘proper’ games, unlike those ‘throwaway’ and ‘casual’ titles on iOS—the ones Nintendo in part used to thrive on, and that attracted the audience outside of core gamers that gave Nintendo so many DS and GBA sales.

It remains to be seen if the 3DS sales slump is a temporary glitch, and even if the console isn’t a massive hit, that certainly doesn’t mean Nintendo is in any way doomed. Like Apple, it’s managed to be profitable at almost every point during its history, even when one of its consoles only had a minority share of the market. But Nintendo could for the first time find itself ousted as the default company synonymous with handheld gaming—and that would be a pretty major shake-up for the entire industry.