Although it at the time of writing only has 260 backers, the GameDock for iPhone, iPad and iPod is over 80 per cent of the way to funding its Kickstarter project. As hard as I try, I just don’t get the point of the device. I last year wrote about iOS controllers, which at the time were fragmenting wildly. Today, the majority of controllers are iCade compatible, and yet the devices I’ve tested still exhibit massive fragmentation, largely due to the manner in which buttons are mapped.

Much of the reason for this is down to the original iCade’s set-up: a joystick and eight action buttons. Developers made their own decisions regarding which buttons mapped to which controls. You therefore find some games work with the left-most buttons and some with the right-most ones. For the original iCade and iCade Core, this doesn’t matter a great deal. The worst-case scenario is one rapidly aborted game with your on-screen guy getting killed as you figure out which buttons equate to jump and fire. iCade-compatible mobile devices, such as the iCade Mobile and Gametel aren’t nearly so lucky. With only four action buttons, many games become unplayable, substantially reducing the already smallish compatible selection. (Games aren’t automatically compatible with iCade—developers must specifically add support.)

The GameDock further reduces the number of action buttons to two, and so it’ll be a small miracle if many games work well with it. Additionally, the controllers are clearly modelled on NES controllers, which is a pretty good way to get sued by Nintendo, and the entire system is based around wires. You plug a wire from the GameDock into the TV, for video output, and the controllers plug into the dock itself. This might be kitsch and retro, but it also feels like a step back. To my mind, the future for iOS and gaming remains AirPlay and the Apple TV. It’s still not there yet—it’s too common to get just enough lag for games to feel wrong—but it makes more sense to me to use this system than one so solidly rooted in the 1980s.

I yesterday wrote about Tap! magazine, largely about the editor’s belief that you can’t just review iOS apps in a few minutes. However, he also showed off the accelerometer-aware cover. Sure enough, one of the commenters got all angry about this:

It’s “accelerometer aware”…. who actually gives a **** about this? It “organically appears” … please, just show the damn content! What a bunch of pretentious bollocks.

One of the best things about Tap! is the manner in which the team has experimented with a new medium. Sure, you don’t need to have an accelerometer-aware cover. Similarly, last issue, the in-house guys didn’t need to animate my Plants vs. Zombies How To Win feature and Graham Barlow’s cover feature on apps and games for kids. But these things are nice-to-haves (similar to—although not identical to—layout flourishes in print magazines that go beyond pure readability), and Chris Phin in the video comes across like a proud craftsman, showing off his team’s work, the result of their trying new things and experimenting with a nascent medium.

Sure, the video could have just flipped through every page, which would have been boring as hell, much in the same way Tap! could have reformatted itself as ‘Instapaper with pictures’, which wouldn’t have been nearly as appealing as a magazine that begs to be interacted with and that’s trying to do something new rather than remain rooted in the past of magazines and newspapers.

Editor Chris Phin previews the latest edition of Tap! magazine on YouTube, but along with showing what’s inside, he also provides some thinking on iOS reviews in general:

It actually really annoys me when I see people reviewing iOS apps badly. It’s easy to just read an App Store description and tag on a mealy-mouthed, not very definitive verdict at the end of that.

This is something that I’m finding’s becoming increasingly common. I’ll often see reviews of iOS games and apps that make judgment calls that only relate to a few minutes’ use. In Tap!, Chris notes that we don’t do this (I’m the games editor, as regular readers here will know), spending hours with games and apps, to make sure we provide a verdict that comes from extended use, not just a quick look. In some cases—*cough*Hero Academy*cough*—we perhaps spend a bit too much time on a single product, but there you go.

Still, this isn’t the only thing that annoys me from a Tap! perspective. People still bang on about magazines being rubbish on the iPad (something I wrote about in March) and, more recently, argue the iPad’s corner in terms of content creation. Bizarrely, Tap! almost never gets a mention, despite being a magazine designed specifically for the iPad and that’s actually put together on an iPad and in the iPad simulator on a Mac. (More on Tap!’s creation can be found in this YouTube video.)

It frustrates me that Tap! isn’t more well known, but delights me when I receive feedback from readers, which is almost universally positive. If you own an iPad and fancy checking out Tap!’s reviews, features, and the developer section (by the amazingly talented Matt Gemmell), grab a copy from http://tapm.ag/appedition. Individual issues are three quid, but there are a also a few previews that let you try before you buy.

Via The Loop, Trusted Reviews pits the iPad 3 [sic] against the Microsoft Surface. It comes to lots of conclusions, raving about the Surface’s kickstand and smart cover/keyboard, thinness (0.1 mm thinner than Apple’s now clearly far-too-thick iPad), ports, and specs. There’s just one snag: the person writing the article hasn’t actually used the Microsoft Surface, in the same way that almost every single person raving about the Microsoft Surface hasn’t used one. One of the most telling parts of the Trusted Reviews piece involves comparing the screens of the two devices:

We’re still not sure whether the 10.6in Surface RT will only be offered with a 1,366 x 768 resolution or whether the Full HD res found on the Surface Pro will also be an option

In addition, we’ve no idea about specs, almost no idea about how well the keyboard cover actually works, and absolutely no idea how the device is in extended use.

This might sound like sour grapes. You might well be thinking, “Well, you’re such an Apple fan-boy that you’re bound to slag off Microsoft.” Actually, my increasing hatred for such ‘reviews’ has been exacerbated by my new iPad, but not in the way you might think. Apple’s device absolutely looked the part during the keynote and it is in many ways an impressive device—the screen in particular is excellent. But it gets a bit too warm and it remains a bit too heavy. I still like my iPad a lot and I don’t regret buying it, but it certainly doesn’t live up to the initial coverage online—and that’s something you only realise and can only tell after extended use, not through seeing a couple of pictures online and a keynote video.

And at the end of the Trusted Reviews piece:

It might be too early to call a winner

You think‽

Everyone in the tech blogging sphere, from major publications to anyone with a WordPress install (hello!) is still banging on about the 7-inch iPad, but there remain fundamental problems with the reporting.

A 7.85-inch iPad would work with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, so devs wouldn’t have to do anything.

This has most recently been trotted out by Joel Bernstein and others but isn’t a new argument. I called bullshit on it back in March, and no-one has changed my mind since. While a device of that size might technically enable well-authored apps to work within a ‘comfortable’ range for touch interaction, most devs design for the current form factor and how that feels, not for specific numbers. Games and apps are designed for hitting targets on a ten-inch device. A quick ’n’ dirty comparison here between an iPad and a smaller version (admittedly, in this case, 7 inches, not 7.85) shows how Apple’s own GarageBand would be affected if not reworked for the smaller form factor. At best, the app would be fiddlier, harder and less fun to use. Couple that with a display that’s reportedly not going to be ‘Retina’ (Daring Fireball said it could use the same display ‘sheets’ as the iPhone 3GS), and you have a device that’s by default worse to use than the larger iPad, requires additional development time for devs, and worse to look at.

Sounds much like the competition, not the iPad.

A 7-inch iPad would be just like the iPod mini.

No it bloody wouldn’t. The iPod mini arrived into a market that only had the original iPod for company from an Apple standpoint. Right now, there are already two existing ‘mini’ iOS products: the iPod touch and the iPhone. A better analogy here would be that a 7-inch iPad would be like some kind of halfway house between the iPod and the iPod mini, an iPod sort-of-in-the-middle, if you will. (And, yes, I get that some—although far from all—people are referring to the iPod mini as an example of Apple expanding the market sectors it aims at, but one can easily argue that retaining the iPad 2 did that, in enabling a lower-priced iPad to be sold.)

Apple has to respond to the growing threat of other 7-inch tablets.

Anyone writing something like this, please either do a tiny bit of research on what makes Apple tick, or do us all a favour and just stop writing articles about tech. Thanks.

Note that I don’t doubt Apple could make a 7-inch iPad. In fact, I’d be amazed if prototypes of that size didn’t exist from day-one in Cupertino (along with a range of sizes beyond the original iPad’s form factor). But if Apple releases one into the wild, it’ll have a lot of questions to answer surrounding usability and quality, and I’d hope there would be something in the device that makes it more than a me-too product beyond it being an iPad.

The one thing that makes me cautious on dismissing the 7-inch iPad rumour entirely (if not much of the writing about the device) is that iPod touch sales are in the toilet and that line continues to decline. Perhaps an iPad mini could be a replacement of sorts—a new, more powerful small(ish) iOS device. Apple’s happily killed products before, to ensure it didn’t stagnate (including the original and popular iPod mini, which was unceremoniously dumped in favour of the iPod nano), but the company has also regularly evolved existing products. So while we could see a new iPad, there’s the possibility the iPod touch will grow a bit, in terms of screen size and/or feature set, and perhaps be rebranded; although the first of those things would still require dev work for fully optimised apps, it could with a Retina display still look really good (if not as pin-sharp as the iPhone and existing iPod touch), although there remains the issue that ‘phablet’-sized devices hardly set the world alight when they came from other vendors.