Oh dear.

No, seriously. Oh dear.

Sony’s decided to fight back against iOS gaming (having lost a huge chunk of handheld marketshare to Apple), and it’s doing so by spraying bullshit at you from your television.

The above two links both lead to the appalling advert Sony’s running. If you don’t care to watch it (and I won’t blame you if that’s the case, since it might make you want to punch things—such as whoever came up with the idea and whoever signed it off, along with your screen, JUST TO STOP THE PAIN), here’s what happens:

Moron on a bike says “Dear PSP, check out this sweet game I got”, holding up a device that doesn’t at all look like an iPhone and yet has graphics worse than any iOS game I’ve ever seen. (And, believe me, I’ve written enough ‘best 10 free iPhone game’ articles now to have seen dozens of very bad iPhone games.) SCREEN PUNCH #1!

Hip kid on a bus (you can tell he’s hip, because he wears his hat in a manner that makes it look like it’s sliding off his head—COOL!) says “That ain’t built for big-boy games”, “That’s built for texting your grandma and calling your girl”. SCREEN PUNCH #2!

It’s pretty clear at this point that hip kid, who is, apparently ‘Marcus Rivers, Deputy of Great Game Deals’, is clearly a colossal idiot. If you have an iPhone, chances are you like convergence. You like being able to ‘text your grandma’ and ‘call your girl’; but you also like the fact it does a whole bunch of stuff other than just playing games, although it does that rather well, too, and there are tens of thousands to choose from.

The thing is, I seem to remember a certain other device was once heralded as the King of Convergence. I’m pretty sure it was by Sony and called the PS… something.

Anyway, on with the ad!

Hip kid shoves a PSP into the camera, and yells that for only $9.99, you could be playing THIS! and THIS! and THIS! At this point, I nearly set fire to all my iOS devices before realising that for more than even the most expensive high-end iOS games, hip kid was telling me I could instead buy aged, budget PSP titles! Hurrah! (Incidentally, THIS!, THIS! and THIS! turn out to be GENERIC-O-RACER, RUBBISH-O-QUIZ GAME and CARTOON GOLF GAME. Man, if only the App Store was full of racing games, quiz games and the likes of Let’s Golf!) SCREEN PUNCH #3!

Moron on a bike now gets confused and excited, and hip kid makes everyone’s built-in ‘black person stereotype detection device’ explode in a mixture of overload, fury and SCREEN PUNCH #4! Presumably, Sony’s marketing is aiming to snare dim people who’ve teleported in from the early 1980s.

“Step your game up,” concludes the advert (rather obnoxiously trademarking the phrase). It’s advice Sony should itself take to heart, rather than spewing garbage about the competition. Amusingly, the final logo is Sony’s own, with ‘make believe’ under it. It may as well say ‘away with the fairies’ or ‘WE HAVE TOTALLY LOST IT! PLEASE SEND HELP RIGHT AWAY! NYYYAAAHHHH!’

CrunchGear reports on the Axon Logic Hackintosh tablet, with the headline ‘Axon Logic Hackintosh Tablet May Just Out-iPad The iPad’. So, how’s this device planning on doing this? Well, it’s been “designed from the ground up to be compatible with any Darwin OS”, which means it’ll support (unofficially, natch) Mac OS X.

So, CrunchGear says this will beat the iPad by using Mac OS X, an operating system not designed for touch. Furthermore, the touchscreen is resistive, so wave bye to multitouch. Wow, that really sounds like it’ll out-iPad the iPad to me!

Quick tip to everyone in the journo game: the way to out-iPad the iPad is to make something better and more usable than the iPad, so stop reporting otherwise. Don’t just get all excited by a spec list, because the vast majority of users don’t care. Get excited by a system that is more intuitive, and that is better designed for touch. By all means advocate something more powerful for advanced tasks, or with USB ports, or with a card reader welded to it. But ensure the device is better from a usability and user-experience standpoint; don’t just prattle on about a desktop operating system glued to something vaguely resembling an iPad and call it an ‘iPad killer’.

I read ZDNet’s article on RearType a couple of days ago, but it’s remained in my mind, right next to a 500-metre-tall neon sign that says, in all-caps, WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

I’m all for innovation, and I fully understand that some people hate software-based keyboards on tablets, but Microsoft Research’s answer is to split the keyboard and put it on the back of the device. Never mind that this will require a ton more retraining and muscle memory shifts than using a virtual keyboard; never mind the fact that it will cause RSI sufferers to scream and non-RSI sufferers to become RSI sufferers and then scream; never mind that this makes the device itself unwieldy, ugly, and also forces it to be used in a specific orientation (unlike, say, the iPad, which doesn’t care which way up it is).

I was half expecting the white paper to be dated April 1, and the introductory text to be “fooled you, idiot-face”, but, no, it’s dated September 2010, which is presumably the same date every single person involved in the project took leave of their senses.

On Every time someone buys a Mac, Steve Jobs drowns a kitten, ‘blair’ commented: “It is amusing that they refer to it as PC vs Mac, rather than Windows vs Mac, as if they own the PC world. I own a PC, but it runs Linux, not rubbish Windows.”

This nicely highlights one of the problems Microsoft has when trying to fight Apple. Apple owns everything, so it can advertise a complete solution. Because Microsoft is peddling software, it can’t. That’s presumably the main reason why Apple’s website has loads of pictures of shiny computers running its software, and Microsoft’s equivalent has a strange woman who looks like she wants to leap out of the screen and bite off your nose.

That said, it’s curious that Microsoft offers this many screen grabs of Windows 7 on its anti-Mac page: none at all. Words are all very well, but showing why you think your stuff is best makes more sense, unless, of course, your arguments stop holding up when you try to do so.

The title of this post isn’t strictly true, but then neither is much of Microsoft’s bonkers new PC vs Mac page, which tells you “what you need to know” if you’re “deciding between a PC and a Mac”.

What you need to know, apparently, is that Macs do not allow fun, are complicated, don’t work in school and business environments, don’t enable you to share documents, are incompatible with almost everything, and don’t provide you with any choice.

Specific warnings from Microsoft include “the mouse works differently” (the site doesn’t elaborate—presumably, mice for Macs, including ones you can use on your PC, need to be used vertically or something to work with Mac OS X), the need to “buy a separate hardware dongle to plug your Mac into a standard VGA projector” (from the Stone Age), you needing to “manually set up printer sharing” (clicking a checkbox is, after all, terribly hard work), and the ‘fact’ that “Apple’s productivity suite file formats won’t open in Microsoft Office on PCs”. Amusing that Microsoft couldn’t bring itself to mention iWork, nor note that it happily exports to PDF and Office file formats.

The sad thing is, there are some decent points within the mess. Snap is briefly mentioned, and it’s a genuinely handy UI feature Mac OS X lacks (unless you buy Cinch or SizeUp from Irradiated Software). PCs are also far superior for games, a point almost glossed over due to Microsoft’s desire to spread as much disinformation as possible.

What the site also says to me is that Microsoft is fighting the wrong battle. This is the campaign it should have launched at least two years ago, when Apple was happily flinging its awful ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ ads everywhere. But like with its smartphone operating system, Microsoft seems content to clone something Apple did two years ago. In the meantime, Apple itself has a much smarter offering than Microsoft: Why you’ll love a Mac.

Apple’s website looks much, much nicer than Microsoft’s effort; it shows off the kit and the OS, and the front page has quick, simple bullet-point-oriented reasons why Apple thinks Macs are superior, most of which are to do with differentiation rather than defence. Importantly, Apple only rarely feels the need to dismiss the ‘opposition’. So when the site talks about multitouch trackpads with four-finger gestures, it doesn’t feel the need to go “and you don’t get that on most PCs, which, incidentally, are rubbish and mostly smell of cabbage”. At the most, the site simply says features are unique to Macs, or notes that third-party PC solutions are required for the kind of accessibility features that are bundled with a Mac.

Microsoft could and should learn from Apple’s latest effort—and it might be a good idea this time to not take two years to respond.