It’s Matt Rosoff’s turn to fire some crazy juice into your brain. For Business Insider, he says:

The only way WebOS will survive is if HP licenses it to the big handset makers who are suddenly stuck between Microsoft-Nokia and Google-Motorola.

I remember people arguing the same about Apple in the 1990s, and look where that got the company during the short period where Mac clones did exist.

Of course, the mobile market is very different to PCs, but it’s arguable success is coming either for players who release really tight software/hardware integration (well, player; well, Apple), and whoever can fire their wares over the widest area (currently, Android). The problem with the second of those things is it usually results in gaining the low-profit area of the market, which really isn’t where HP needs to be scrapping. Instead, having found itself in an Apple-like position, HP should be pushing that all the more. It should make WebOS devices better than Apple’s equivalents, and the only chance it has to do that is if it keeps hold of everything itself. Licensing WebOS would just be a bag of hurt for the company.

What’s that, every tech blog on the internet? The iPad 3 has been delayed, possibly due to “Retina display issues”? Would this be the iPad 3 that Apple hasn’t bloody announced yet, let alone offered a release date for? The one that DigiTimes and other papers with an accuracy rate just shy of a golfer using a loaf of bread instead of clubs said would arrive in September? Or maybe November? Or maybe whatever month they hit on their calendar with a dartboard, to get you to report on their story that carries no weight whatsobloodyever?

How about the iPad 4? Has that been delayed too? What about the iPhone 7? The only thing that’s been delayed is the tech industry’s return to common sense and reporting on news rather than rumours.

From the Google Blog and other sources, Google is to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn. Naturally, Larry Page’s note bangs on about how great Motorola is and how terribly unfair everyone’s being regarding so-called “anti-competitive patent attacks on Android”, along with, laughably, saying the “acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform”.

Like hell.

Google has already been tightening its Android ship and this will further continue to do that. At best for Googorola’s competitors, they’re now going to be competing against a company that has the potential to produce something Apple-like in its integration of hardware and software. Bar the low-end market (unless Googorola goes for that too), they’re screwed if the new superteam gets that right.

But I think this acquisition is good news for everyone aside from existing Android vendors. It should ensure better Android devices in the future and also give Apple a kick up the bum regarding improving iOS and iOS devices. It’s also further vindication that Apple’s got the business model right: control the hardware and the software and you create a better user experience. HP gets this. Google now, seemingly, is starting to understand this. All we need now is another big press release that Microsoft has bought or merged with Nokia and we can look forward to a hugely entertaining scrap as the smartphone and tablet vendors aim to better each-other.

Update: Note, of course, that this could also be a patents land-grab, which would be a massively missed opportunity for Google. I’m being more optimistic than that, though. I think Google’s starting to understand that its ‘open’ system is merely open to being screwed up by vendors, and so it wants to put a stop to that. If not, that shows a stunning lack of vision. However, quotes by Android partners saying they are behind the deal mean nothing. Their businesses largely rest (at present) on Android’s success, so they were hardly going to respond with “screw you, Google”, although there is also some truth in this acquisition potentially safeguarding Google and Android to some extent against the Apple/Microsoft patent threat.

After yesterday’s flurry of posts, today’s clearly been a whole lot quieter on Revert to Saved. As magazine and website deadlines lurk menacingly, I’m unsure whether I’ll be writing anything today; I therefore thought this would be a good opportunity for me to make some recommendations of other tech blogs you might enjoy if Revert to Saved doesn’t make you want to gouge out your eyes with a spoon. (That is, I like these blogs, so you might, too.)

• Technovia: Infrequently updated, but essential when it is. Written by Ian Betteridge, who’s one of the smartest guys in tech.
• Curious Rat: At a glance, Harry Marks’s blog comes off a bit like Daring Fireball’s earlier days, but Marks’s voice is fresh, and his ongoing commentary is always enjoyable to read. (i.e. read, don’t glance.)
• Ignore the Code: Extremely smart UI concepts and opinions by UI clever-clogs Lukas Mathis.
• Matt Legend Gemmell: iOS coder WITH A HAT offers guidelines, general cleverness and quite a lot of hatness.
• Bigmouth Strikes Again: Gary Marshall’s blog. Gary is officially 47% funnier than I am at any given moment, writes great op-eds for .net and also penned Coffin Dodgers, which currently costs only 99p on Amazon. Don’t buy it and I really don’t want to speak to you.
• Fraser Speirs: He said: “Let there be iPads!” And everyone was happy, as long as they were people who studied in his school and not idiot publications accusing him of wasting money on ‘toys’. His reports on dealing with dozens of devices have been fascinating.
• The Brooks Review: Occasional commentary by Ben Brooks, and lots of handy links, along with a quote of the day, usually from someone terribly clever.

 

Kotaku’s Mike Fahey has decided to copy and paste a commenter’s whine-fest and has entitled it:

iPhone Games Just Aren’t Any Fun

Maybe not, but this teardown is sure going to be.

I can’t count how many demos or $1 games I’ve bought since I got an iPod Touch back in 2008. Every day I was looking for new games to try out, be it on the poorly-organized App Store charts or on mobile gaming-dedicated websites. If it was free or cheap and looked half-way decent, I’d add it to my Touch and keep it around for a rainy day, or a slow day at work.

I downloaded lots of games, but only free or cheap ones, and, as everyone knows, every other system’s best games are the ones that are free or cheap!

Puzzle games, adventure games, RPG’s, Angry Birds. They all provided minutes of fun. And then I’d delete them.

I have the attention span of a — SQUIRREL!

Download a demo. Play it for a life/round/minute. Delete.

Also, I have zero staying power, because I’m not invested in the games. Tsk, eh?

Download a $1 game. Get the point. Delete. Actually have some increment of fun playing something. Never come back to it again. Delete.

Strangely, I never thought that maybe I was downloading the wrong games.

I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of it. These ‘experiences,’

I like scare-quotes. They enable me to belittle iOS games really easily.

many based off similar ‘experiences’ from other companies selling similar Apps, are lifeless. Sure, Tiny Wings is beautiful to look at, but after getting to level 6 and having the sun set, I stop caring.

Also, those classic, highly focussed arcade games, such as Robotron, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender and Missile Command? All rubbish.

Sonic the Hedgehog? Sorry, touch-screen controls for platformers can disappear along with the US economy. Hero of Sparta made me both stop caring AND curse the controls at the same time.

For some reason, I thought games specifically designed for other systems would work well on the touchscreen. In other news, my microwave is rubbish for frying eggs.

To be blunt, iPhone games aren’t fun.

To be blunt, I AM TEH HARDCORE GAMER!

When I look at my iPod Touch as a gaming device, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. It’s not a gaming device.

I’m slightly obsessed about the ‘hardcore gamer’ thing. And a little weird.

It’s a music player.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’.

If it was an iPhone, it would be a music player and a phone.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’ and ‘Phone’.

I have used it for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment’ (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment’ (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment’ (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain. It’s a moment of brilliance which is rare, and after three years of trying to find it amidst the mass of pointless, moronic, copycat, or just plain impossible-to-control ‘games’ on the iPhone platform, I’m done looking for it.

There are no good games for the iPhone at all.

No more wasted time trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Every other system has 100 per cent great games. Phew!

It’s beyond a needle in a haystack now. The App Store is a wasteland that I no longer feel the need to trudge through. There’s so many things wrong with it that the occasional mildly-amusing cheap game that I may be missing won’t matter.

I hate the future.

I’m going to make a prediction: games on the App Store will suffer their own market collapse at some point in the next five years.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

Be it through lack of innovation or consumer indifference, the store will cease to be the money-printer it is right now.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

How many times can people pay $1 for a game they’ve already downloaded fifty times under a different title?

No other games company and system ever recycles IP.

How many in-game lives must be lost to horrible touch-controls that can only be rectified by actual buttons?

I don’t understand multitouch, nor how to avoid games with rubbish virtual controls.

How many minutes must be wasted downloading and installing the next mini-game, only to delete it minutes later because you’ve seen all there is to see?

The Civilisation series is rubbish—there’s just this guy, standing on a field, surrounded by inky blackness. I DELETED IT RIGHT AWAY.

My time is more valuable than that.

Yet not valuable enough that I can’t spend some time writing a poorly thought-out rant about iOS gaming.

I’m not against indie games, or even spirited re-imaginations of existing games

Unless they’re on the iPhone.

but I am against the devaluation of games as fun.

Because if you ignore the thousands of fun iOS games with plenty of depth, there are no fun iOS games with plenty of depth.

The iPhone is a great device (when people don’t drive with it), and kudos to Apple for innovating in a space that had become stagnant with boring cell handsets, but games shall no longer grace my iPod Touch, or my iPhone if I ever get one.

I’m a gamer. I play real games. On real systems.

REAL MEN USE BUTTONS! AND PLASTIC CARTRIDGES! AND PAY OVER THE ODDS FOR BOTH!