Not an hour goes by without someone firing some stupid at the internet regarding the iPad 3, so I thought I’d smash out a quick post to help tech journalists (or journalists writing about tech—despite not really using tech—because their editor heard that this “iPad thing is probably going to be quite big, and can therefore get us page views, even though it’s not really a perfect fit for Pretty Gardens Monthly”) about the revamped device.

Here’s what we currently know for sure about the iPad 3:

• It almost certainly exists and will most likely be revealed on Wednesday.

That’s it. Anything else you care to write about is pure conjecture and you’re fuelling the rumour mill. Worse, you’re getting people’s hopes up by spreading rumours that they will then use to smack Apple with once the realisation dawns that the engineers and designers in Cupertino aren’t in fact wizards conjuring unicorns, but are instead folk simply figuring out how to make a really great tablet.

And here’s what we don’t know for sure:

• The device’s name. iPad 3? iPad HD? iPad 2S? We simply don’t know.
• The amount of storage the device will have. We simply don’t know.
• The screen the new device will have. 1024-by-768? 2048-by-1536? We simply don’t know.
• The form factor and what buttons the device will have. We simply don’t know.
• What connectivity the device will include. We simply don’t know.
• What OS the device will run and what new features it will have. We simply don’t know.
• The full model line-up and whether it will include the iPad 2 at the low-end. We simply don’t know.
• What quality cameras the device will include. We simply don’t know.

And so on.

Some of these guesses (and until we see the device unveiled, that’s what they are—guesses) are more likely than others. A ‘Retina’ display is a logical evolutionary upgrade that would bring the iPad into line with other iOS devices, in terms of the smoothness of displayed content (which is particularly great for reading, but also for games and many apps). Conversely, I think it’s staggeringly unlikely that we’ll see major changes to the device’s form factor and physical components—its dimensions, the Home button, and the bezel, for example. But the thing is we simply don’t know.

I’d have more respect for publications that simply admitted this simple fact, rather than continually churning out coverage of every tiny rumour that’s spat out by unreliable and anonymous ‘sources’, then conveniently forgetting poor track records (both of the sources and their own articles) when the next Apple device update looms.

Via Curious Rat, Huffington Post’s piece on the Sony Tablet P.

Are 2 Screens Double The Fun?

Or twice the hassle?

Two is better than one, as the old saying goes,

Depending on what you have two of. Two pay cheques that you get to keep: better! Two yummy pastries instead of one: better! Two screens on an ill-thought-out tablet: *not better sadface*

and Sony has put that old saying to the test with a tablet with two screens.

*not better sadface*

The Sony Tablet P is a dual-screen, foldable tablet that can be yours for $399

Still, that’s not a bad price-point.

with a two-year contract on AT&T

Oh.

The Tablet P’s two screens each measure about 5.5 inches — think two Samsung Galaxy Note phablets welded together at the ends

Man, there I was, thinking I was almost certainly going to buy an iPad 3 in a week or two, but “two Samsung Galaxy Note phablets welded together at the ends”? SOLD!

and the clam-shell tablet runs a special version of the Android Honeycomb operating system that allows for dual-scren-tailored applications [sic]

Which I’m sure devs are just going to flock to, because if there’s one thing devs love, it’s fragmentation and designing apps specifically for an unproven device that’s probably going to vanish from the face of the planet within a few months.

Sony says in a press release that you’ll be able to watch video on one screen and use the other as a remote control, or read email on one screen while using the other as a keyboard.

Unlike on a 10-inch iOS or Android tablet, where you could, say, watch a video full-screen and bring up controls only when you need them, or read email on half the screen while using the other half as a keyboard.

If you’re a killjoy, you can also just fold it flat and turn it into a single-screen slate.

A single-screen slate with a MASSIVE HINGE through the middle of said single screen.

The Tablet P has been available in the United Kingdom for a few months now

It has? I… well… I’ve not seen that many of them in the wild. Nor, in fact, even heard about it until today.

and it will land in America exclusively on AT&T and its 3G HSPA+ network.

Exclusive deals with a single carrier—that’s a great way to ensure a tablet is wildly successful!

[Each] screen is 5.5 inches and has a 1024 x 480 resolution. […] It also only gets up to 7 hours of battery life, according to the Sony website. That’s far less than the iPad 2 (10 hours) or the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (9 hours), though with two screens running simultaneously, you might expect this thing to be a power hog

Two screens that offer… pretty much the same resolution as the iPad and Galaxy Tab 10.1.

What the Tablet P lacks in battery life, however, it sure makes up for in its unique two-screen design. It’s not the first dual-screen tablet to hit America, however: Acer had a $1200 dual-screen 14-inch Iconia “touchbook” tablet in early 2011, but that never really caught on.

Surprise!

Sony hopes for a better fate with its Tablet P, and its employees, at least, are enthusiastic

Surprise!

One Sony spokesman told HuffPost via email that the Tablet P was “legitimately SUPER cool.”

And legitimately DEAD IN THE WATER.

[Marvel] at this two-screened wonder

Me, I’m marvelling at Sony thinking the child of a ‘phablet’ and a Nintendo DS is a sensible product to release on to the market.

Via Daring Fireball, a couple of app galleries: Android niceties and My Favorite Metro Apps. Android has a reputation for poor, ugly design when it comes to apps, but that’s clearly not the case with these examples, and Metro showcases its slick, modern aesthetic. But one thing struck me about these designs: they all look rather similar, polished, shiny and slick, but they lack character, heart and soul.

I’m a fan of minimal design, and so these information-rich, no-nonsense designs do appeal to me. However, on seeing these apps as a gallery, it makes sense why Apple continues to take a very different route when it comes to interface design, regularly aping real-world items or, at the very least, adding some visual texture to apps. I don’t really like it—iCal on the Mac is, for example, horribly ugly, especially when sat next to the simpler, sleeker Mail—but there’s a certain familiarity and warmth generated by more texture-oriented design that no amount of flat colours, subtle gradients and considered typography will ever bring, no matter how often graphic designers cross their fingers and pray to the god of Pantones.

Via Daring Fireball, Trevor Gilbert’s The Curious Case Of The (Cr)apps That Make Money:

Apple has a serious problem on their hands […] the proliferation of scamming apps.

Gilbert talks about Anton Sinelnikov’s many rip-offs, clearly designed to con buyers into thinking they’re downloading the likes of Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, and he interviews developer Paul Haddad about solutions to the problem. Haddad argues Apple needs to clamp down on scam apps, not send the developer any payment, refund those who bought the app, and

curate the Top 100 list beyond automating it based on sales.

It’s not entirely clear what the last of those means; the clarification in the article is:

This would dramatically decrease the number of copies that are sold, while at the same time covering Apple’s bases while they wait for an official takedown notice.

My assumption is he means removing potential scam apps from the charts. I’m not sure that would always help, since innocent apps and games could easily get caught in a takedown spat, such as the one Edge found itself in a while back. However, if Apple can figure out a way to more clearly identify scam apps (copied/recoloured logos, clearly infringing IP, names obviously riffing on popular apps, and so on), I’d be all for that, because otherwise the App Store will end up edging closer to the dross you find in the Android Market.

Gilbert’s conclusion is particularly interesting:

[The] original purpose of screening applications was two fold: security and quality. With one of these missions fulfilled, Apple should start paying attention to the second.

I recall Steve Jobs saying something about App Store curation being required to ensure good apps aren’t surrounded by amateur hour. But amateur hour is precisely what’s happened. The harsh reality is you don’t get half a million great apps for any platform—when the numbers get really high, the majority of releases are crap. But what sets Apple’s store above others is the top tier of apps and games—both from large companies and indies. Generally, buyers can trust that what Apple recommends and, most often, what’s in the charts, is worth downloading*. As Gilbert hints, should that trust be broken, the App Store, developers, users and Apple alike all suffer. Ultimately, whatever Apple’s doing right now regarding its app review process simply isn’t enough. However much time each app is being given needs to be increased, and part of the approvals process must include some kind of search regarding various types of IP (names, characters, icons, imagery). Even in such scenarios, scam apps will still get through, I’m sure, but it’s one thing to have the odd bad egg sneak on to the App Store, and it’s another entirely to have dozens of the things stinking up the place on a regular basis.

* That’s not to say apps and games not in the charts aren’t any good—I regularly cover good apps that haven’t charted highly or at all, such as in my Hidden Gems feature for iGamer. But the point is those apps people are actively encouraged to buy via Apple or its algorithms must not break trust.

Back in January, I complained about the user experience of shiny disks and also the manner in which the TV and movie industries continue to be dicks. It wasn’t a particularly unique piece of writing, and yet it struck a nerve, rapidly becoming one of the most-read articles I’ve ever written for this blog.

Since then, we’ve seen Matt Gemmell write a piece called The Piracy Threshold, where he blames piracy on the “incredibly short-sighted, greedy and stupid” media industries, and The Oatmeal’s amusing take, I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened. Both articles summed up my earlier thoughts on the piracy debate:

If your studio isn’t making content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

Note that this isn’t advocacy of piracy—it’s the reality of the market we find ourselves in, with industries desperate to cling to old business models. Some people, though, have a different take. Harry Marks, notably, has strongly reacted against people he terms ‘entitletards’. On the Oatmeal comic, he responded:

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and realized downloading it illegally was doing fuck-all to help the situation.

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and decided to wait two weeks until it came out on DVD because I don’t have the patience of a toddler.

He also responded to Gemmell’s piece with a retort that blames the users and not the studios for piracy, arguing that people are now too used to instant gratification, and that there are plenty of services you can use to access legal content. However, the majority of these remain US-only, and it’s perhaps easy for someone in that country to have a skewed viewpoint when it comes to the availability of legal media. Again, Marks and similar thinkers might consider anyone complaining about that whiners or ‘the entitled’, but the fact remains we now live in a connected world. If I can now chat to people all over the planet in an instant, it’s rather absurd that I can’t legally watch a US TV show—even a topical one—for many months (or longer) after its original broadcast date, by which point I’d probably know what happens in it anyway through spoilers being found accidentally. This, of course, helps no-one: I don’t get to watch the show, and the studio doesn’t get my money.

On Twitter, Marks, I and others also got into a row over another key argument in the current debate over piracy and rights: format shifting. Fair-use/fair-dealing laws vary by country, but it’s currently illegal in the UK to format-shift pretty much anything, including CDs to your computer (as MP3 or some other digital format). The law on this might soon change in the UK, providing a personal-use exception, but studios will almost certainly fight hard against such changes in any country; recently, for example, the MPAA attacked a proposal in the USA to provide a legal exception for DVD ripping, because the studios make a lot of money reselling content.

Part of the aforementioned Twitter discussion turned into one about constant rebuying. If you own a CD or DVD, should you rebuy that content digitally, or should it be legal to rip to digital for personal use? Some will argue, morally, they’ve already paid for the content, so why can’t they do what they want with it? Others will equate the same action to effectively grabbing a free digital copy when you merely already own a copy of something on vinyl or VHS. And yet what if the content you want access to simply isn’t available digitally? Should a favourite album or TV show remain out of reach, because the studios no longer care about it? In part, the solution in the future might be massive services along the lines of iTunes Match and Netflix, but there will always be gaps in the catalogues, even if you’re signed up to all of those available.

I’d also argue that the problem in any forced-rebuy model is that such notions have historically led to planned obsolescence and restrictions—a lack of flexibility in media specifically designed to keep having you buy the same material again and again. For the studios, this can be great, and it’s one of the things that caused the media sales spike during the shiny disc era. But for users, it always comes back to the same thing: the user experience is weaker than it should be. With shiny discs, there are all kinds of problems that I mentioned in my earlier piece; with digital, the main issues are ease-of-playback across owned devices (in this often not being possible) and availability, with studios semi-randomly pulling content from services and often ignoring any country that doesn’t happen to have a ‘U’, an ’S’ and an ‘A’ in its name.

Marks concludes his piece with the following:

I don’t care what your reason is. I don’t care that you don’t like how things are. Bottom line: there is no justification for piracy.

I happen to agree with the last bit of that. But I also happen to think there are reasons for piracy that can relatively easily be fixed by studios, if they have the will and the foresight. There is, of course, a chunk of the market forever lost—those that will never pay for anything. But as Apple and others have proved, it’s possible to ‘train’ people back into buying media, as shown with music; that industry was once thought doomed, but Apple rose to prominence through offering a strong user experience and making content readily available and affordable. And if any service is good enough, we’ve seen how technology creates a halo effect, with a small number of advocates having the potential to drive a disproportionate number of sales. I just hope the studios are listening, watching and reacting accordingly.

Update: Gary Marshall points to a piece talking about both sides of the argument by Andy Ihnatko. Within, he also mentions the sense of entitlement angle, and I should note that I see the Oatmeal comment more as a general statement about the industry rather than a scathing criticism of a specific show. Ihnatko does also say “If a distributor shows up […] with a product we want, we’ll buy it,” which is rather my point.