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.

I last month covered Atari’s spat with the people behind Vector Tanks. In short, an indie makes a Battlezone tribute, which, to be fair, was pretty damn close to Battlezone, and tries to licence the original property but Atari remains silent. The dev then devises a sequel, which is to Battlezone what Galaga is to Space Invaders: a superficially similar game but one that actually feels very different. Atari finally notices Vector Tanks and has both games removed from the App Store, citing IP infringement. At the same time, it rampages about the place, forcing devs to change the names of games with ‘pong’ in the title. The company had previously, during its first (and brief) foray into iOS, also attempted to get bat-and-ball games (i.e. Breakout derivatives) removed from the store, albeit with less success.

Sites all over the web are now saying that Atari’s being the good guy regarding indies, through its Pong Indie Developer Challenge¹. It’s a great opportunity for indies to rework a classic game, and get up to $100,000 for their efforts, they say! Well, right until you bother to read the terms and conditions, which were expertly covered by Brian Robbins on Gamasutra yesterday.

It’s spec work, pure and simple. This isn’t so much an opportunity for indie devs as exploitation—a way for Atari to potentially get dozens of game ideas and not have to pay for them (since all submissions become Atari’s property, regardless of whether the submitter wins the competition). Despite its aggressive stance on the App Store, Atari has supported indies in the past—the recent remakes of Breakout and Asteroids were both farmed out to small developers rather than being done in-house. Had that been the same here, great. It would have been a way for Atari to again say: “Look! We do care about indies.” However, spec work is something I cannot celebrate, and so I find it difficult to see the Pong Indie Developer Challenge as anything more than a cynical attempt by a major publisher to get videogame ideas on the cheap.

¹ And the choice of game also presumably explains Atari’s blitz of App Store games with ‘pong’ in their names. Although since Pong is an Atari trademark, that’s not something I consider bad form from Atari.

Slide to Play reviews the PlayStation Vita:

The battery lasts about four hours, which isn’t great.

[The] overall interface is cluttered and somewhat unintuitive.

The touchscreen also feels occasionally unresponsive on both the home screen and in games.

The main cameras are definitely not up to par with the quality of the iPhone’s

The Vita is also rather bulky—especially next to an iPhone

It’s like a shopping list of ‘gnh’, and it feels as if Sony’s living in a little bubble where Apple and Android devices don’t exist, and where no-one’s switching to iOS and Android devices for all-in-one entertainment. Note that the review shows Vita does have some good points—it’s powerful, has a great screen, provides some innovation in the form of a rear touch panel, offers GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth, has cloud sync for progress, and you can also control a PS3 with the handheld; but this next bit makes me slam my head into the desk with such force that it breaks in half and the sides fly up and hit me in the ears:

Probably the biggest complaint is Sony’s insistence on using a new and completely proprietary memory card format. The 16 GB card is about $60 and the 32 GB is $100, and unlike the standard Micro SD card that virtually every other device uses, these tiny cards are only for the Vita.

Really, Sony? Really? Did you not learn your lesson with UMD? Good grief. Still, at least the system is, according to Slide to Play, “very focused on online commerce thanks to Sony’s beefy online store”. Although whether people will be happy paying out for “$10–$50 Vita games” when iOS and Android equivalents are a fraction of that remains to be seen.

I suspect a core number of gamers will inevitably flock to the Vita, but I do wonder if the day of the dedicated gaming handheld is coming to a close. Even with Sony’s admission that apps beyond games are necessary on its console, adults and children alike enjoy the scope more ambitious devices bring them. It wouldn’t shock me to see a situation in a few years where PlayStation becomes a brand on Android devices and Nintendo becomes a Mario-flavoured version of Sega, releasing games for a range of devices that it didn’t create itself.

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.