Jason Gilbert for Huff Post Tech Argle Wargle (a couple of those words might be wrong, but they somehow get the direction of the site across better) argues Google are huge idiot-faces for making a Gmail app for Apple’s iPhone, a phone that, note, is somewhat popular.

One of the biggest advantages of owning a Nintendo (or Super Nintendo, or N64) when I was growing up was Super Mario Brothers.

Ooh, ooh, let me guess: you’re going to make a half-arsed analogy about the advantages of device lock-in for goodies, despite, you know, Google generally (and, lately, sometimes failing to) advocate openness?

[argle wargle bargle…]

Checking your Gmail on an Android phone carries with it a similar sense of superiority. For all the disagreements between Fandroids and the Apple partisans, there should be no dispute that the native Gmail for any Android phone is far, far better than however you’re checking your Gmail on an iPhone. It is one of the great selling points of Android devices over iPhones: The ability to star conversations, the real-time push notifications, the feeling that the inbox was truly integrated to the phone. If you were only buying a smartphone to check Gmail and surf the web, you would be crazy not to get an Android phone that fit your specs.

Also: you’d be crazy. Anyway, Gilbert is surprised that Google might be able to unleash an iOS client.

Which is why it is so surprising that Google is apparently going to release a Gmail app for the iPhone.

See?

Why is Google doing this?

Why indeed? TELL US, GILBERT! WE NEED TO KNOW!

Why, after three and a half years of ignoring the App Store,

Ignoring, obviously, its 11 apps that are currently in the App Store…

and after surpassing iOS with their own mobile operating system,

With lots of low-cost devices made by manufacturers thinking that the 1990s and 2000s was a great time to build Windows PCs, because everyone made SO MUCH MONEY…

would Google relent and give up one of its great, tangible, unarguable advantages over Apple’s iPhone? You’re in a vicious, ugly, man-on-man tussle with Apple, trying to win over every customer you can to your operating system. Apple doesn’t have a weapon in this fight, and you’re going to let them borrow your knife?

It doesn’t compute.

Perhaps because Google is an advertising company and everything else it does is a means to an end? Or perhaps because Google’s board aren’t complete dicks and recognise that  because iOS is a massive market, Google can ultimately make more money by working with it as well as fighting against it?

Argle wargle fargle bargle.

Yes, well, that’s quite enough of that.

Update: Or perhaps Google really does hate iOS. Twitter dev Loren Brichter says on Twitter:

The Gmail app is a fucking web view. Even the list of messages. Why?

Personally, I blame Jason Gilbert.

Digital magazines still have adverts non-shock, a response to Marco Arment’s Double dipping, where he complained about adverts in iOS magazine apps, was one of the most-read and commented-on (and also divisive) things on this blog for months. Those in the publishing industry backed my stance, and readers tended to offer a range of opinions, from siding with Arment to agreeing wholeheartedly with me.

Arment has since followed up, clarifying some points and linking to an article by Nicolas Barajas, who attempts to guess at some costs and how digital magazines without adverts could be funded. Barajas initially has some good news, at least in theory:

With [my] figures — a staff of 29, 22 illustrations and five contributed works per issue — the bill due at the end of the year is $3,642,200. You’ll need just over 20K subscribers to break even.

I say “in theory”, because 20,000 subscribers would wipe out a fairly large chunk of the UK’s niche magazine industry in one fell swoop. In the US, magazines sometimes start panicking when circulations dip under 100,000, but UK niche mags rely less on subscriptions and more on retail, hence being able to survive with lower readership levels.

Anyway, Barajas then admits:

But in order to make the numbers a lot neater, I’ve eliminated a lot of basic things: There’s no talk of renting space; we haven’t actually built a website, iPad app, or content management system; maintenance and support costs for a server and subscription model haven’t been touched. We’ve assumed our writers submit nothing but flawless prose, thoroughly fact-checked and without a single typo or grammatical error.

And that is a problem. To be honest, for many of the mags I write for, the guesswork Barajas makes for editorial staff is a little excessive, but the lack of taking into account infrastructure of any sort means you’re talking 20,000 subscribers always being around to fund just the editorial content of his imaginary digital New Yorker—and that’s a big ask. Throw in infrastructure as well and that subscriber base would have to be much higher. That’s a bigger ask.

Arment’s response has been to change tack slightly:

[…] the bigger issue is that I actually don’t want all of that content. Obviously, this is a personal detail, and it’s not The New Yorker’s problem, but I skip the Goings On section and most of the Reviews. I don’t need most of the Talk, and I wouldn’t notice if half of the illustrations were missing. Less than half of the proposed staff is working on content that I’ll read: mainly, the feature articles.

He and others have hinted at magazines opening up their content and allowing cherry-picking. You’d pay just for the features you want to read, or for specific sections. In a sense, that’s more or less a commercialised Instapaper, so it’s no wonder Arment likes such an idea. It’s not something I’d dismiss out of hand, but I do wonder where that would leave the industry as a whole. There would certainly be a danger of ensuring every article would be commercially viable on its own, potentially reducing risk and following a more web-like ‘eyeballs are all that matter’ model. You’d lose ‘browsing’, hitting upon something you actually find interesting in a section you don’t often read, or about a subject you don’t usually find appealing. And rather than coherent publications geared towards certain demographics, you’d instead end up with an editor curating content for smaller and smaller niche markets.

It doesn’t sound very magazine-like—more, as I said, a commercial Instapaper or a bit like Kindle Singles. Perhaps that is what people want—I certainly don’t have any answers there. The one thing I do sense is that there’s a massive shift ahead for publishing, but no-one knows what it is yet. Until we find out, we’re going to continue seeing existing models being reworked slightly for digital, frustrating the likes of Arment and like-minded people, yet also delighting those who still enjoy magazines but don’t have space to store bound paper editions.

Mat Honan for Gizmodo:

I’m reading 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited new book. In hardback, it’s 944 pages and weighs several pounds. I am a pasty blogger with weak arms and soft hands, so the Kindle version seemed like a no-brainer.

Except the Kindle version is hobbled. Extensively hobbled, in fact. It lops off two of Amazon’s best features, public highlights and, far worse, the ability to read on all my devices.

Honan says he started reading on one device, wanted to pick up on another and got an error stating ‘License Limit Reached’. Amazon subsequently said that the device limit for 1Q84 is one. Clearly, this is down to the publisher, but I’m surprised Amazon has allowed this. Yet Amazon customer service confirmed the device limit to Honan and added that device limits vary by publisher.

I’ve not heard of this restriction on Kindle before, so I guess it must be fairly rare. That said, it is troubling. The point of a digital ecosystem is to free us of restrictions. Buy a digital book for Kindle, and you should be able to read it on any device for which you have Kindle access. Restricting it to one device is like the bad old days of digital music, where publishers demanded you rebuy per device. That’s great for publishers, in their deranged minds, but it’s not something modern consumers will have any truck with, and it’s also damaging to the systems publishers increasingly rely on.

The path forward for media is clear: re-engage with consumers by making your content affordable, accessible and easy to transfer between devices. Lock users into a system (iBooks, Kindle, Comixology) if you absolutely must, but don’t think you’ll get away with locking things down further per device, or you’ll just drive people to other publishers and, for your content, torrents.

You’ve got to love old rockers. Pete Townshend comes across a bit like today’s Mr Bonkers, blaming iTunes for not offering everything a record label does, and instead acting like an uncaring shop. That’s probably because iTunes is, in fact, an uncaring shop and not a record label.

The interview is summarised on Mac Observer (hat tip: Adam Banks, and full transcript on MusicWeek) and it’s quite illuminating:

Mr. Townshend, the leader of iconic rock ban The Who, argued that once upon a time, the music industry as a whole (including publishing and record labels) used to offer eight different forms of support to artists, including editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurture, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution, and payment of royalties.

He said that if you look at artists who distribute through iTunes, they get only the last two forms of support, distribution and payment of royalties.

Because iTunes isn’t a record label.

“Now is there really any good reason why,” he asked, “just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can’t provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire [UK bank] Northern Rock for its enormous commission?”

Because iTunes isn’t a record label. As for it bleeding artists’ work like a digital vampire, iTunes is one of the main reasons why anyone pays for digital music at all. It wasn’t the first of its kind, but it rapidly embedded itself in the collective consciousness of device and Mac/PC owners, and it made it natural to spend a few quid on a digital album download, rather than go hunting for a torrent, which would be much closer to Townshend’s digital vampire.

Townshend goes on to say Apple should employ A&R people to guide artists, and so perhaps he isn’t misunderstanding what the iTunes Store is, but is instead arguing that Apple should be assisting artists due to the label ecosystem crashing and burning in slow motion. I suspect he suggests Apple because of its clout, since he doesn’t make the same demands of Amazon, WalMart or Tesco.

The thing is, Apple’s never really had much truck with creating media—it just provides the platforms on which people can create and sell—and so there’s no proof it’d even be any good at being a record label. In iOS gaming, Apple’s made a single game—Texas Hold’em—and it simply lets devs get on with it, rather than interfering. To that end, I can’t see Apple going all ‘record label’ in the music space, nor really why it should. It’s providing an outlet—an easy way for people to buy. And you can bet if Apple did pump resources into helping music artists, it’d alienate people working in other fields, lacking such support, and probably also piss off remaining record labels, too, potentially making things worse for many musicians.

Townshend continues to offer suggestions:

He would also like to see Apple choose 500 worthy artists a year and provide them with free Macs and the training to use them when creating music. Those artists could be identified by the above-mentioned A&R folks, who should then follow the progress of those artists throughout the year.

So, Apple should not only provide advice, but also free hardware. What about their own radio station?

“Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth,” he said. “It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.”

How about groupies and drugs?

…

OK, so there is some kind of line.

Still, Townshend does come up with at least one nugget of solid-gold sense:

The biggest change that he advocated during his speech was that Apple stop requiring independent bands to go through third party aggregators to be in the iTunes Store. He believes Apple should pay these artists directly so that more of the money from their music downloads gets to them. He acknowledged that some of the third party aggregators offer some label-like services, but argued that most are just middlemen sitting between the artists and iTunes.

This is the one thing that’s always surprised me a little about the iTunes Store. You can make and upload your own game, and, unless I’m mistaken, you can self-publish a book. But music? Too bad. You have to pay a third-party service a buck or more per track, for each store you want a presence on. And that isn’t a particularly modern, ‘Apple’ way of thinking.

Got yourself an iPad? YOU IDIOT! As Laptop, the “pulse of mobile tech” shows, it’s merely a round-one contender in a 2011 Tablet World Series. (Hat tip: Brooks Review.) As you can see, if you nip through to the site, the tablet champion of champions is in fact the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, which has taken the world by storm and has sold millions since you started reading this article.

Laptop says:

With strong features like a scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass display, support for enterprise-level security software / encryption, and an optional active stylus, the ThinkPad Tablet simply dominated the game this weekend. Users were undoubtedly also attracted by the ThinkPad Tablet’s productivity-centric software, including its note-taking app and file manager. Full-size USB ports and SD card slots also helped the ThinkPad tablet’s case.

Or: readers of Laptop (responsible for the voting and final outcome) are deluded anti-Apple nutters, given that they had the ASUS Eee Pad Slider win out over the iPad 2. (It’s one thing to prefer another system over the iPad—fair enough—but the Eee Pad Slider? Really?)

Laptop again:

Could the ThinkPad Tablet’s win herald a new appreciation for productivity

Goddammit, now I have to delete all my productivity apps from the iPad again, because, apparently, it’s not a device for productivity. Only the wonderful Lenovo ThinkPad, with its unique Documents to Go (enabling you to edit, view and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and not at all available on, say, iOS) gives you productivity!

and for pen-based input?

In other news, perhaps we could get rid of those nasty touchpads and mice and return to keys alone on the desktop. And those cars? Horrible. Horse and cart, please. And sanitation? DISASTER! Let’s wallow in mud, consider the sun a god, and kick each-other’s faces off for instead thinking something else is a god, such as the moon, a tree, or a particularly dashing squirrel.

Extra points to the Laptop readers for voting the Amazon Kindle Fire—a tablet that isn’t out yet—into round two. Dreams beat reality, I guess, which perhaps is another reason why the ThinkPad Tablet won out overall.