BlackBerry chief executive officer Thorsten Heins has growled menacingly (well, spoken to some tech hack) about how RUBBISH the iPhone is and how AMAZING BlackBerry is. To be fair, it’s not like he’s the only CEO to do this, and Heins does at least give Apple device a backhanded compliment:

Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market … They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that

He then followed up with:

And that’s why, for the most part, we’re copying Apple as much as possible.

Ha! Only joking! What Heins really said is Apple is doomed, he tells you, doomed. Here’s why:

History repeats itself again I guess … the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly.

Ah, the old ‘Apple isn’t innovating but everyone else is—at light speed’ claim. Or, in this case, ‘Apple did innovate once, in June 2007, but has not remotely innovated since, the lazy gits’.

The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.

Which would be terrible if that were entirely accurate, because, as everyone knows, it’s much more fun when interfaces radically change every six seconds, rather than improving through gradual and reasoned iteration. I for one am looking forward to my BlackBerry car, which replaces the steering wheel with a gestural system that requires me to mimic exciting karate moves, and eschews a gear stick in favour of an innovative Whac-a-Mole system, which is “far more fun” than just yanking a stick.

Paul Smith, Financial Review’s scribe for the aforelinked piece stopped quoting at this point, but nonetheless summed up another Heins nugget:

Mr Heins said one area that the new BlackBerry phones had surpassed the iPhone was in the ability to multi-task—running multiple apps at once—meaning that users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop.

There’s part of a good point in here. iOS is great for focussing on tasks, and its ability to perform certain basic tasks (audio playback, say) in the background but freeze others so to not kill battery life is useful, but it’s clear some people need a more traditional computing experience while working. On an iPad, having two-up app views could definitely be handy for performing certain tasks, although the user interface could take a kicking from a simplicity standpoint. But here’s the bit where it goes a bit squiffy for Heins:

… users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop

How big are these new BlackBerry devices? Do they have a battery the size of a truck?

Different devices solve different problems, and although an iPad or other tablet can conceivably be considered a laptop replacement if you’ve the right apps and services, the mind boggles that anyone could consider a smartphone a laptop replacement. And even if you get pedantic and argue Heins was merely saying BlackBerry would allow people to work similarly to how they do on a laptop, user experience isn’t always (or even often) about giving people what they want, but what they need.

Then there’s the reality of the system’s multitasking, which, when you do a direct comparison, doesn’t appear significantly different from multitasking on competing platforms anyway. Versus iOS, it appears there’s more potential to keep entire apps running in the background (a battery drain), gestures to move between them (available on the iPad, but not the iPhone—yet), and live thumbnail previews in the BlackBerry’s equivalent of an app switcher (versus iOS icons in the admittedly not very discoverable and very basic multitasking tray—something Apple could do with improving).

So it’s not very laptop-like and, from what I’ve seen so far, is really a case of gradual and reasoned iteration—exactly what I like in technology. Quite why Heins felt the need to trash iOS and claim it never evolved, then, is beyond me.

Also, to all commentators that are yelling about how BlackBerry’s now going to give iOS and Android a kicking, you might be wise to realise that companies do not sit still and let rivals take a lead. You can bet if Apple or Google has some improved multitasking ideas waiting in the wings (and, in Apple’s case in particular, if they don’t compromise the overall experience of the system), we’ll see them soon enough; any lead Heins thought BlackBerry had will be short-lived. Still, at that point I’m sure we can look forward to tech hacks running with a billion stories a second on how Apple ripped off BlackBerry (and precisely no stories if Google does the same, because that doesn’t get people rapidly clicking on links, in order to get annoyed about what they subsequently read).

Wired today has a small article on the three things Samsung needs to overtake Apple. Writer Christina Bonnington explains that Samsung is “almost there” in overtaking Apple (admittedly in part due to its substantially larger marketing budget, which Apple could match if Tim Cook acquires a penchant for flinging shit at walls and seeing what sticks). All it needs are the following three things:

Industrial design

Complete control over the consumer experience

Brand power

Sadly, the list appears to be missing a fourth entry, which is “a sneaky copy of Apple’s roadmap, so Samsung can copy what Apple’s going to do, before Apple does it itself,” along with a fifth entry, which is “figure out how to sell it to people without accidentally forgetting that it’s no longer the 1950s”.

Sick Chirpse reports on footballer-turned-boxer Curtis Woodhouse tracking down a Twitter troll. The short of the story is some twonk on Twitter had a go at Woodhouse, and Woodhouse then asked his followers for the troll’s address. There then followed a bit of to-and-fro, with original twonk getting increasingly cagey and boxer bloke showing his grown-up, professional sportsperson demeanour with such lovely outbursts as

i cant wait!! im give him a right pasting!! [sic]

and

right Jimbob im here !!!!! someone tell me what number he lives at, or do I have to knock on every door #itsshowtime [sic]

—that second one, complete with a picture of the street where increasingly frightened twonk lived.

The episode is spreading round Twitter and the web, with people generally on the side of Woodhouse. How great, they argue, that some stupid little troll got what was coming to him. Personally, I find the entire episode despicable and chilling.

I hate Twitter trolls as much as the next person, and I’ve also experienced several runs of prank phone calls, including one lovely soul who’d ring up daily and rant down the phone about what a wanker I was and how everything I do was shit. (Presumably, they weren’t an Apple fan, nor, clearly, a fan of my writing.) But the Twitter mob mentality is worse. If someone’s making a genuine threat, make a complaint to the proper authorities; but if someone’s just being a dick, don’t form a little online posse and have a boxer drive to the troll’s house, to, in the boxer’s own words

give him a right pasting!! [sic]

Sometimes the internet is a thing of pure magic—one of those inventions that is almost as revolutionary as penicillin or the car. But this skirmish also shows that it can be an enabler of the worst of humanity, where bullies bully, and the bullied become just as bad as the aggressors, while an audience looks on, baying for the most explosive outcome. It’s not funny—it’s just sickening.

It’s no secret Twitter has a client-hostile approach. Recent terms restrict any one app to a ‘token limit’ of 100,000 users. Naturally, this limit doesn’t take into account pirated versions of paid apps or those that are abandoned by users who move on to something else. The Guardian’s written about the impact of this policy: Android app Falcon had to hike its price to stay on Google Play and Windows 8 Tweetro was pulled; elsewhere, well-regarded client Tweetbot arrived on the Mac with a $20 price-tag, solely because of Twitter’s arbitrary limits.

I’m still unsure why Twitter hasn’t banned third-party clients outright, although perhaps doing so would unleash the kind of negative PR the service wants to avoid. Better to have the clients gradually and slowly die, until the point where Twitter can proudly note that 99 per cent of people on the service are using official clients anyway, and so killing off those few clients clinging on is no big deal. The thing is, what, in the long run, will be an official Twitter client?

The latest update on the TweetDeck blog has announced that along with pulling Facebook support, the AIR, iOS and Android versions of TweetDeck have been canned. Instead, you’re encouraged to use the web app or Chrome app (which adds notifications). The post states:

We think these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first, followed closely by our Mac and PC apps.

The inference is clear: the web is where Twitter wants you to be for TweetDeck, because it’s there where Twitter can control its client and roll out updates whenever it wishes, not restricted by the whims of users who might choose to not upgrade, or the vagaries of app stores.

But what of the standard Twitter client? Well, the TweetDeck announcement claims the web focus for TweetDeck is specific to usage for that product:

In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices.

The post also notes an “increased investment” in Twitter for mobile, most obviously with enhanced search and photo filters, but I wonder if this is a short-term solution. Twitter wants the ability to control its products and update them whenever it wants. Right now, third-party clients and the app-focussed mobile ecosystem are getting in the way. My guess is that this year will see Twitter finally pull the plug on all third-party clients, and next year will find the company pushing its web offering extremely hard. Whether users will come along for the ride is another matter.

This is an updated article. It previously did not include note that the move has been ‘faked’.

As reported by Macworld and others, The Pirate Bay has claimed it has moved to North Korea. The company’s press release states:

A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

I’m not sure irony is the right word here. What the press release does showcase is The Pirate Bay’s ethics—or lack thereof. Sure, it’s crap that the media industry is playing hardball all of the time, but it’s also naïve to suggest The Pirate Bay is mostly used for anything other than spreading copies of copyrighted films, television, music and games. But this battle does not justify talking of moving the entire operation to a country with dire human rights records and practically zero freedoms and tolerance.

It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do.

No, because those internally who make threats tend to end up here.

When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand.

You get the feeling if Stalin was still alive, The Pirate Bay would have talked of taking his hand, too, had he offered a chunk of bandwidth and some lovely terms for spreading films and TV on the internet. Still, what do human rights abuses, civil liberties, persecution and freedom of expression matter? What’s really important is ensuring people still have rapid and free access to the latest Game of Thrones, regardless of which network is enabling that.

(As it happens, it looks like The Pirate Bay is talking crap, but even the justification in its PR leaves a sour taste.)