Given Apple’s recent guidelines stating that developers must not mess with hardware controls for fear of confusing users, it’s a pity to discover Apple’s killed the screen rotation lock on the iPad. Numerous sources, including The iPad Guide, state that iOS 4.2 changes the lock button to a mute switch.

Apple’s argument will probably centre on hardware consistency, rather than legacy consistency—the iPhone 4 uses its equivalent button for mute, but I think Apple’s making a mistake. On a phone, the need for muting is common; on an iPod touch—a very portable mobile system—one might make a similar argument. However, on the iPad, muting is not such a common requirement, but the screen rotation lock is regularly used, especially in-app, notably in browsing environments (Safari, Instapaper, Reeder, etc.) and when reading electronic books.

At present, you can lock the screen rotation temporarily, whenever you need to, moving the iPad in and out of the locked-screen state as and when required. All this needs is the click of a button. As of iOS 4.2, the process will change to match that on an iPhone or iPod touch:

1. Double-click the Home button, to access the multitasking bar;
2. Swipe right to access controls;
3. Locate and tap the rotation lock.

Even for seasoned users, this is ungainly, awkward and time-consuming. Worse, for newcomers to the platform, these controls are twice hidden: not only do users need to know that the multitasking bar exists, but also they need to be able to find the controls by swiping to them. I suspect that many will never see them, reducing the usability of the iPad. (For muting fans, it’s also worth noting that the iPad currently provides fast access to mute by click-holding the volume-down setting of the volume rocker switch.)

I hope Apple provides some kind of option for users regarding the functionality of the soon-to-be-mute button. Losing the rotation-lock option by default wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if I could get it back with a quick trip to the Settings app. Sadly, this isn’t the way Apple rolls, and so I guess we’ll all be waving goodbye to a great piece of iPad functionality come November.

Oh my. The BBC reports that all is not well at Pope HQ. Senior adviser and old git Cardinal Walter Kasper, when recently interviewed, referred to the UK as a “Third World country” marked by “a new and aggressive atheism”. Hole dug, the Vatican then said that the cardinal had not intended “any kind of slight” (oh, so that’s OK then), and was referring to the UK’s multicultural society (oh, so that’s—what? Wait a minute!). Kasper’s comment had in fact been “when you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country”. Nice.

The UK’s got all sorts of problems when it comes to tribalism, but, by and large, it doesn’t do too bad. This island’s been a melting-pot nation of immigrants for centuries, and that’s part of what has made it great. To criticise the UK on the basis of its multiculturalism shows up Kasper and co. as being an even bigger shower of arseholes than most Brits thought in the first place.

TechRadar reports that Angry Birds is to get a new Mighty Eagle character. Available only as an in-app purchase, it changes your weapon to a sardine tin, which upon landing causes a gigantic eagle to come down and obliterate everything. Rovio argues that this will aid users who cannot get past certain levels.

Since Angry Birds has several difficultly walls—levels that abruptly require an insane level of precision to complete, despite being surrounded by far more forgiving ones—adding a paid-for cheat is a pretty loathsome tactic. It’s a band-aid to cover up for poor level design and a rather cynical way of generating revenue (rather than adding value with extra levels, which would be worth 59p).

Still, at least Rovio hasn’t broken Angry Birds in terms of scoring. Using the eagle doesn’t enable you to get a full three-star quota for the level it’s used on. Compare this to Bejeweled Blitz, totally ruined by PopCap when it added ‘boosts’ that can be bought using Facebook credits. With these, PopCap rendered its online high-score tables largely irrelevant, since players no longer start on an even playing field. It’s the rough equivalent of pitching two Pac-Man players against each other, only in one case a player’s yellow dot-muncher is accompanied by the Ghostbusters and a priest. Here’s hoping Rovio stamps on the brakes regarding ‘cheats’ before Angry Birds suffers the same fate.

Register Hardware reports that Vue has gone totally batshit bonkers and is contemplating banning mobile phones from its cinemas. At present, says the article, Vue “forbids punters from taking ‘sound and video recording equipment’ into the auditorium. Vue reserves the right to search visitors to prevent them from sneaking such kit in”, and may, presumably, smother them with extortionately expensive popcorn if they fail to comply.

Currently, Vue bans video-recorders, but also, somewhat oddly, laptops and tablets like the iPad—which conspicuously lacks a camera of any kind. Worryingly, a bloke from the linked article who recently visited Leeds Vue was told that “staff should have confiscated his iPad and camera too, for the duration of the showing”.

OK, two things. First, there’s no way in hell I’d trust a Vue employee with my iPhone or any other electronic kit, and I suspect Vue’s terms would be such that you’d leave your device(s) with them at your own risk. Similarly, I won’t leave my iPhone in my car, because I’m not fucking stupid. But I also won’t leave it at home, because, you know, having a mobile phone on you when you’re driving about in a tin-can with wheels is handy for when the tin-can suddenly decides it doesn’t want to go any further while you’re surrounded by picturesque fields and a distinct lack of housing and telephone boxes.

Secondly—and this bit is quite important—I really wish cinema chains would shut the hell up regarding people recording films. I recently saw Scott Pilgrim and had to sit through yet another patronising piece of tosh where some actor or other told me that ‘camcordering’ (hrng) films is ILLEGAL and BAD and EVIL and stuff. I know. I just spent an inordinate amount of money on two tickets to see said film. GO AWAY! And the fact remains that the vast majority of bootlegs are from promo/preview discs that subsequently circulate—the days of someone downloading a film recorded by some muppet at the back of a cinema are mostly long gone.

If Vue thinks extending its ban or policing it more thoroughly, removing iPhones and similar kit from punters, will help it in any way or protect the film industry, it’s sadly deluded. If someone is stupid enough to start recording a film on their smartphone, fine, kick them out of the screening; but don’t ban the rest of us from entering the screen in the first place. If you do, you’ll suddenly find quite a lot of people won’t bother visiting the cinema at all; and far from protecting the film industry, a chunk of those tech-aware people might suddenly be more drawn to torrenting preview discs.

The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.