Bloomberg reports that investors are starting to argue Nintendo should ditch its Nintendo-only stance and offer games for other platforms:

“Smartphones are the new battlefield for the gaming industry,” said Ohki, a fund manager at Tokyo-based Stats Investment Management Co. “Nintendo should try to either buy its way into this platform or develop something totally new.”

I’ve criticised Nintendo quite a bit recently, but I also suggested the company has multiple options regarding how to continue. One of them would be to do a Sega and go multiplatform, but that would almost certainly kill Nintendo’s (usually) profitable hardware line dead. The Nintendo ecosystem is a differentiator, an Apple-like take within the gaming industry. It’s potentially a benefit, not detrimental. The problem Nintendo faces is Apple itself’s now a competitor, and so the Japanese gaming giant needs to repsond to a changing market.

I don’t think this means suddenly releasing iSuper Mario Bros. or iMario Kart (although if Nintendo did, Angry bloody Birds would be off of the top of the charts for good), but it does mean changing its stance relating to game distribution and embracing more indies. Ultimately, Nintendo needs to stop remembering the good ol’ days of expensive bits of plastic and figure out how to rip off the App Store. Make Nintendo games cheaper and more easily accessible and ensure there are more of them, and there’s a good chance the 3DS’s successor won’t be the hardware equivalent of throwing in the towel. But carry on with ‘more of the same’ and trying to convince handheld gamers to part with 30 to 50 quid for a single game in 2013 and you’ll be on a hiding to nothing.

Epic Games President Mike Capps, talking to IndustryGamers:

I think that’s the real challenge for us now, rather than worrying about the difference between a couple consoles and some order of magnitude, whether 3X or 4X. It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8… if you watch where the gamers are going that’s where they are. Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound. So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles?

iPhone 8? I’ll be amazed if this doesn’t happen with the iPhone 5, since gaming over AirPlay is already possible (if sometimes a little laggy) with the iPad 2. I don’t think next-gen games consoles will vanish overnight, simply because they are, relatively speaking, much more affordable than an iOS system (which would require several devices and an Apple TV for wireless gaming streams), and also because Apple still doesn’t entirely get gaming itself. However, should Apple add AirPlay mirroring across its entire line, the Apple TV would go from being a niche concern to, potentially, a 101-quid add-on that turns any iPod touch, iPhone or iPad into a games console. At that point, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony would have a massive fight on their hands.

From the LA Times:

The San Mateo district attorney’s office has opted not to charge Gizmodo and writer Jason Chen for buying an iPhone prototype from a man who found it in a bar last year, months before the device was made public.

What the fuck?

Chen and Gizmodo’s decision to pay $5,000 for the lost iPhone was “not motivated by financial greed,” said Morley Pitt, San Mateo County’s assistant district attorney. “His claim was that he was undertaking a journalistic investigation.”

What the fuck?

Yeah, sure Gizmodo was all about the journalism when buying stolen property. It was in the public interest to buy stolen property and report on it, because the world would have been DOOMED without that particular story. It had NOTHING to do with financial motivations, such as the fuck-ton of page hits Gizmodo got from reporting on the stolen device, and yet, brilliantly, still missing a ton of the new things Apple had added to the device, rather suggesting the ‘investigation’ part of ‘journalistic investigation’ was a bit rubbish.

Still, hey, all US journos: be happy! Precedent has now been set, and it’s absolutely fine to buy stolen property and perhaps even try to blackmail the owner, as long as you write an article about it! PHEW! *headdesk*

There’s a certain amount of “the sky is falling” hackery surrounding the iPad right now. Apple commanded a massive 94.3 per cent of the market not that long ago, when it was pretty much the only game in town. Now, according to sources such as T3, Apple’s share has dropped “as Android soars”.

The figures state Apple’s going to end up with 61.3 per cent of the market during Q2/11, with Android on 30.1 per cent. It’s notable that most Android figures appear to involve units shipped rather than sold, but let’s ignore that for a moment; let’s also ignore the fact that 61.3 per cent of the market is still massive. For me, the most interesting news is from HP, which has dropped the TouchPad’s price by $100.

When so-called ‘iPad killers’ first appeared, they were like little clones and also aped the iPad’s price, matching it as closely as possible. “Look! We’re just like the iPad in every way,” the rivals claimed, despite some of them being a wee bit smaller than Apple’s model (Engadget has a rather nice photo of the Galaxy Tab atop an iPad).

With the TouchPad, I think it’s a pity HP is attempting to fight the battle on price, because webOS is in many ways a very good system. But it’s an inevitability if a system doesn’t have the critical acclaim, popularity and ecosystem enjoyed by the likes of the iPad. Expect those rivals that haven’t dropped their price to follow suit soon; but when they do, bear in mind Apple’s been using its billions to buy up major components for tablets at the best possible price. This means while Apple could feasibly cut its tablet’s price and still make a massive profit, that’s certainly not the case for most other companies. And while in the world of PCs, massive sales sometimes led to at least some profitability, if you’ve only got a smallish share of the tablet market and are making naff-all profit per unit, you’re pretty much done for.

Yeah, I know. Everyone and his dog is banging on about Apple briefly topping Exxon to be the world’s most valuable company by market-cap. According to 9to5Mac:

1:19PM EDT, Apple’s market cap is at $341.53B while Exxon Mobile’s [sic] is at $341.51B.

Exxon regained the lead, presumably to a whoop of joy from Michael Dell, whose statement in 1997 (“What would I do [about Apple]? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders!”) will forever haunt him. But it’s clear Apple’s going to battle for that lead again; and given where the company was in the 1990s, the rise is truly astonishing.

My first Mac was a PowerMac 8600/250. It was then a shiny and new model, with ‘AV’ ports that enabled you, when the computer behaved, to import 320 x 160 videos at about 12fps, which I duly used to work on multimedia projects. (Back then, I was an art student, but already heading towards digital work, largely through the influence of the hugely talented and, frankly, slightly bonkers Paul Granjon.) Most of my friends thought I was nuts and wasting money on a computer made by a company that would be dead before I finished my course.

But the only thing that died was the computer’s hard drive and also its built-in Jaz drive (oh, Iomega—how I don’t miss you in the slightest), although between the two they just about survived until I finished my degree. The Mac was soon duly repaired and, later, I decided to grab another Mac, which I recall being a G4 tower. Most of my friends thought I was nuts and wasting money on a computer made by a company that would be dead before long.

And so it went, until about five or six years ago. Suddenly, quite a few people became curious about Macs. Programmers were excited about OS X being based on Unix and no longer derided the Mac as a ‘toy’. Web designers were stoked at the fantastic dev tools available to Mac users, along with the built-in server. And home users became interested in the Mac’s stability and lack of viruses.

The tide turned. Now, as many people I know own Macs as don’t; and those who don’t at least no longer ridicule the idea of the Mac. The press often still don’t get it. They don’t understand why Apple keeps products under wraps until the last minute, despite the flurry of clones flying around once Apple does something revolutionary. They don’t get why people buy ‘overpriced’ Apple kit when you can grab a PC laptop for 300 quid, even when that laptop falls to bits in no time. They struggle to see how anyone can be happy with an iPad that doesn’t run Flash and Windows. And Apple is far from perfect in a whole number of areas, not least in some of its handling of the App Store and the way it’s often blinkered to the world outside of the USA; however, that decision back in the 1990s is one I’ve never regretted, and one for which I’m increasingly vindicated.

There are, of course, critics who relish Apple taking the lead and losing it. Once you’re number-one, the only way is down. But at least Apple made it (however briefly), and, in doing so, provided an astonishing number of innovative and exciting products along the way.