Perhaps the most frustrating thing about gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch is how close it is to perfection. Apple’s ecosystem is excellent, providing a low barrier to entry for developers, which encourages crazy, innovative ideas full of fun and novelty. For the consumer, dozens of great games arrive on the App Store every day, and are often priced at a third of 8-bit budget titles for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64—from 1985.

However, there’s a fly in the ointment that continues to defecate everywhere—Apple’s lack of providing any means of backing up game save/progress data. In Apple’s world, deleting an app means pretending you’ve never used it. Spent ten hours battling through Peggle or GTA? Accidentally deleted a game, or removed a huge app on purpose, to get something else on your device? Too bad: next time you boot the game, it’ll start from scratch.

In the modern era, this simply isn’t acceptable at the best of times. For Apple, it’s an embarrassment, since it aligns this aspect of its gaming alongside the cheapest and nastiest Nintendo DS carts, which don’t offer any kind of battery back-up. With news that iPhone OS 4 would scrap the equally dreadful ‘rate on delete’ dialog box, I was hoping it would be replaced with a dialog that would enable you to save your progress for the app being removed. iTunes would then offer to restore your app’s data the next time you installed it.

With iPad gaming, this issue’s only going to get worse. Looking at the App Store, it’s clear apps in general are going to hugely increase in size—interactive book The Elements: A Visual Exploration clocks in at a whopping 1.74GB (US iTunes Store link). With the iPad screen being much larger than the iPhone’s, games will of course follow suit, due to the huge increase in asset size.

In the long run, iPad users will be faced with a stark choice: delete a game and all the progress they’ve made, in order to buy something new, or just avoid buying anything further. Already I hear from people with iPhones doing the latter, and that will eventually impact on Apple’s sales—unless it has the common sense to provide some way of saving progress for later restoration. Perhaps Game Center, Apple’s gaming social network in iPhone OS 4, will include such functionality. If not, it’ll remain clear that while Apple’s continuing to aggressively target gamers, it certainly doesn’t understand them.

The iPad is now in the wild in the US, and devs are frantically updating iPhone apps to take advantage of the new hardware. However, many are taking advantage of eager consumers, excited about their new device and keen to use some products on it that they already recognise as great.

There are essentially three paths a developer can take, other than doing nothing, relying on the iPad’s ability to run most iPhone apps via scaling—but this isn’t an option for good developers, because the resulting graphics and UI don’t work well. All other paths have compromises, but only two are acceptable. Unfortunately, many take the third way.

The first option is to create a universal app. This means the app works on both iPhone and iPad, and it optimises itself accordingly. The compromise here is that people only owning iPhones will end up with a larger app for no added benefit. However, I think this is a good route to take—it’s very fair on consumers, and for anyone considering buying an iPad it’s great from a value perspective. Some devs have taken to raising the price of universal apps by $1, to cover the extra work involved, and I think that’s also fine.

Example: PCalc, which now boasts a glorious iPad-specific interface, and costs precisely nothing extra. (App Store links: PCalc, PCalc Lite.)

The second option is to create an upgraded iPad app. In this case, the app is iPad-specific and doesn’t work on the iPhone, and yet it’s based heavily on existing content. The important thing here is to add plenty of extra value. Games are a popular kind of product to update in this manner, and many iPad reworkings of iPhone games offer not only a better experience in terms of controls and graphics, but also new features and levels. Again, I consider this a fine way to rework iPhone content for iPad.

Example: Flight Control HD, which builds on the original game and offers co-op/battle and split-screen two-player modes, and a bunch of new levels. (App Store link: Flight Control HD.)

The third option—the bad option—is to update the graphics, charge loads of money, and do nothing else. This is a surprisingly common option right now. Games especially appear to be arriving in ‘HD’ forms that merely offer higher-resolution graphics over the iPhone originals.

James Thomson, who resolutely avoided this route with his calculator app PCalc, finds this ‘third way’ problematic. “I think the right to charge again for an iPad update to an existing iPhone game depends entirely on how much work has been done—just setting the iPad flag and doing a recompile certainly doesn’t justify it,” he says. “Just imagine a Mac game developer wanting to charge you extra to change the resolution from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 728. If there’s significant work done to the graphics, or new features added, then I think it’s more palatable. There’s a line somewhere, and the market will decide exactly where it is.”

I agree and fully understand that extra work is required to optimise any game for iPad, but it’s also clear that certain devs are simply taking advantage of the iPad’s launch frenzy and not considering their existing customers. I suspect such devs don’t realise that there’s going to be a backlash against their products. Classic iPhone games such as Soosiz and Angry Birds are already getting poor reviews in their HD incarnations because they don’t provide great value—something iPhone gaming had become synonymous with.

I’m hoping over the coming months that more devs go down one of the two higher-value routes and that consumers act with their wallets and largely ignore apps remade with little or no regard for added value. However, time will tell if that’s the case, and if people flock to apps that merely up the resolution but otherwise charge for the same content, that’ll set a nasty precedent, tempting to anyone wanting to make a fast buck off the back of existing popular titles.

I’m not a huge fan of The Times, and I’d be happy if Rupert Murdoch got trapped in a cave and had to spend his remaining years munching moss and repenting for his sins. However, I’m nonetheless disappointed by the general reaction to The Times’s plans to start charging for web content (source: BBC).

The plan is for users to pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription. As far as I can tell, the generation response is: wah wah wah, not fair, wah wah, I’ll go elsewhere to the other bajillion sites that offer free news, wah wah, everything should be free! *throws toys out of pram*

Here’s the thing: there aren’t that many places that offer well-researched and professionally written journalism, and many of those that do are largely opinion-based rather than investigative. There are, of course, exceptions, but the bulk of them are online offshoots of print publications losing up to £1m per week, and it’s clear they won’t last long. (Indeed, anyone crowing about how great this model is might ask whether a Russian billionaire would have had to buy the Indie for £1 if it wasn’t losing money hand over fist.)

Times columnist Caitlin Moran has been responding to people on Twitter about her publication’s plans, and her tweets sum things up nicely. “Wow – loads of people asking what I think about the forthcoming Times paywall. I think, ultimately, my position is: I have a mortgage,” she says. “I love the freewheeling, anarchic, infinite-information aspect of the internet. I just need to ally that with paying for food and shit.”

Unfortunately, too many people have a warped sense of value these days, and think all creative content should be free, whether it’s news, music, movies or videogames. But when the creators don’t make money (whether said creators are companies or individuals), here’s the thing: they stop creating or, at best, dumb things down and drop the quality. News is already there. Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.

Perhaps The Times’s experiment will be a massive failure and the future really will be ‘free’ (or ‘freemium’), but, as Jörg Tittel noted to me on Twitter earlier, it’s time the industry stopped trying to justify ‘free’ over ‘paid’ for good value. So, despite the fact I don’t care for The Times and think Murdoch would be better not seen and not heard, I hope the website makes huge wodges of cash, enabling other publishers to follow suit.

Opera’s having fun with Apple. After months of ‘will they or won’t they’ uncertainty regarding Opera Mini’s status, the company has finally submitted the app, and has placed a cheeky ‘countup’ timer on its website. Almost immediately, Mashable fired up its bullshit machine, with Stan Schroeder stating the following in the article Opera Mini Submitted to Apple’s App Store. Your Move, Apple:

Opera is playing a somewhat odd game with Apple. Their Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers are great mobile browsers, but the iPhone already has a great mobile browser — Safari.

This fact alone wouldn’t be that big of a problem if Apple’s rules weren’t prohibiting other apps to duplicate the functionality of their own apps. Simply put, if Apple doesn’t suddenly change that policy, Opera Mini, which Opera has now officially submitted to the App Store, doesn’t stand a chance of being approved.

I don’t dispute the fact Apple has in the past used the ‘duplicate functionality’ excuse to block apps, but it’s been rarely used of late, and to suggest it’s policy is bullshit. Either that or Weather Pro and PCalc on my iPhone (which clearly duplicate functionality of Apple’s own Weather and Calculator apps) are figments of my imagination. Also, there are dozens of web browsers on the App Store. Sure, they’re all WebKit-based, but if Apple blocked all Safari wannabes, none of them would be available for download.

No-one knows (bar, possibly, some senior staff at Apple) what’s in store for Opera Mini, but if it does get denied a place on the App Store, it won’t be because of duplicate functionality (unless someone on the App Store review team is being an idiot)—it’ll be for some other reason, such as APIs used or the funky means by which Opera Mini serves content: through Opera-run proxy servers, returning pages as images in the OBML format, and entirely removing end-to-end security from the equation.

Since I was at school, I’ve been accused of being a Mac fan-boy. In the old days, this was down to me having the audacity to suggest that Macs were actually pretty good and rather usable. Detractors suggested Macs were toys, and the Mac OS was for people who didn’t know how to use a ‘real’ computer (rather than people who just wanted to get things done). “Real men,” I was told, “use the command line.”

Not a million years later, Windows evolved from a piece of garbage into something that was actually pretty good (Windows 95), largely by ripping off the Mac OS. “A-ha!” I’d say, only to have fan-boy-accusers say that now it was obviously OK to have a GUI, because [insert spurious reason that only makes sense ‘because’]. Right.

This pattern has continued into my professional career. Of late I’ve been called an Apple fan-boy on an increasingly regular basis, due to my love of iPod gaming and taking the royal piss out of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series efforts. Shots that have been fired my way echo Paul Thurrott’s contradictions that were nicely summed up by Chris Grande a couple of days back.

When iPhone OS arrived, Thurrott derided its lack of copy and paste, saying it was “unreal” that such a feature was “inexplicably missing from the iPhone”. Anyone arguing the toss (either that the feature wasn’t really necessary, or agreeing with Apple’s stance that’s it’s better to do something right, even if that means taking longer to deploy it) was a Mac fan-boy.

Fast forward to the present day and Microsoft’s stated its Windows Phone revamp will lack copy and paste (and there’s no consensus on whether the company is working on a solution—some claim it is, and others say the opposite). Thurrott now states: “No matter”. I’ve experienced pretty similar reactions from people on the Apple/Microsoft scrap. According to some, Apple’s closed ecosystem and lack of third-party multitasking were the most stupid things in the history of tech, but now Microsoft’s doing the same, they’re somehow fine. Anyone defending Apple’s stance before was a fan-boy, but anyone attacking Microsoft for taking up the same position: also a fan-boy.

I find this a strange, somewhat deluded and often hypocritical argument, but there is of course one major difference between today’s mobile space and the early 1990s desktop PC ‘war’: the positions have been switched. Microsoft’s still using its photocopier and playing catch-up, but this is all the more apparent now it’s the underdog with a lower marketshare. It’ll be interesting to see how the two companies fare over the coming year or so. I’m hoping Apple wins the long game for the first time (and also that other rivals—Google, Palm—force Apple to innovate rather than just cloning Cupertino output)—the company cares more about experience and design than marketshare and dominance. I’m sure this stance will have me branded ‘fan boy’ for years to come. So be it.