Regular readers of Revert to Saved may remember that I’m Contributing Editor to Future Publishing’s rather fab Tap! magazine. The title is dedicated to iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch, and I’m responsible for its games section. For issue 5, editor Christopher Phin tasked me with writing a cover feature about iOS gaming, covering the best available games, what games designers think about the platform, exploring kit, and offering the odd nod to retro-gaming. Designer Chris Hedley then created one of the best covers I’ve seen on a consumer tech mag, featuring a ton of iOS gaming characters.

The magazine of course also includes all the usual iOS news, reviews, tutorials, features and columns. If you’re a UK subscriber, you should get your copy within the next couple of days (if it’s not already arrived). Alternatively, the magazine should be on newsstands (WHSmith, Tesco and other stores) some time during the next week.

Charlie Brooker, in his latest piece for The Guardian:

Look at the App Store. Read the reviews of novelty games costing 59p. Lots of slaggings – which is fair enough when you’re actively warning other users not to bother shelling out for something substandard. But they often don’t stop there. In some cases, people insist the developers should be jailed for fraud, just because there weren’t enough levels for their liking. I once read an absolutely scathing one-star review in which the author bitterly complained that a game had only kept them entertained for four hours.

FOUR HOURS? FOR 59P? AND YOU’RE ANGRY ENOUGH TO WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT? ON YOUR EXPENSIVE IPHONE? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?

He says this is human nature, with technology having left us hopelessly spoiled. I say people should get a sense of perspective, because their incessant moaning about App Store games is ridiculous. I wonder how many of these idiots whining about a good 59p game that provides four hours of entertainment have ever bought a game on another platform (such as the Nintendo DS, with its carts costing 15 quid a pop or more), or back in the days where you took a punt on an Amiga game for 25 quid. Even in the mid-1980s, the era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum, the absolute cheapest games were £1.99, came on cassette, and were—proportionately speaking—often as bad as the worst 59p iPhone ‘specials’, with the odd gem randomly lurking in the mix.

Four hours of fun gameplay for 59p isn’t something to complain about—it’s something that should be celebrated.

Peter Burrows, reporting for BusinessWeek, on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop addressing 2000 employees:

For a moment, Elop, 47, lays into the complacency he sees settling over the company. When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. “That upsets me—not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against.”

He’s absolutely right. And this is something of a contrast to Ballmer’s iPhone snatch/pretend stomp a while back, reported by the Wall Street Journal. Mind you, it’s also a change of heart for Elop himself. From the WSJ article:

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, used Apple products before Mr. Ballmer lured him to Microsoft in early 2008. But at a meeting of Microsoft sales representatives after joining, Mr. Elop placed his personal iPhone into an industrial-strength blender and destroyed it

Yup. That’s a great way of figuring out how to beat the competition: see if its products will blend. At least Elop’s grown up a bit—the question now is whether Ballmer will too.

Apple’s announced that it will reveal iCloud at WWDC, and the rumour mill is swirling with what features the service will bring. Foremost among them is the claim Apple has signed up the four major record labels for a cloud music service. Other claims are that Apple will offer similar back-up/streaming services for movies, television shows and documents.

I’d be excited about this, if it wasn’t for two things. First, I don’t buy a lot of iTunes content, and I’ve a horrible feeling Steve Jobs is going to bang on about some ‘magical’ system that backs up your iTunes purchases to the cloud. I can’t imagine there’s any chance we’ll see all your music, regardless of source, available. In part, this is because Apple itself won’t have copies of all tracks anyway, but also labels are greedy and will almost certainly block any attempt to enable access to tracks that might have been downloaded on the sly, even if they would make money from streaming subscriptions. Another possibility would be for Apple to offer a small ‘upgrade’ fee per track, like it did for iTunes Plus, but that also seems a stretch. In any case, Spotify will probably remain a better bet for Brits.

The second concern I have stems from my experience with the Apple TV. Using my UK iTunes account, it’s still the same content-light box it was when I got the device at Christmas, and that’s never changed for Brits since the dawn of the revamped black box. By contrast, Americans get Netflix, TV rentals, baseball and more. It’s understandable that Apple concentrates first on the US, which is a large, affluent market, but it’s disappointing there are no Apple TV deals in the UK to integrate iPlayer, 4OD and LoveFilm at the very least—and UK TV rentals might never happen. With iCloud, you can bet Jobs will reveal a bunch of great features, only for anyone outside of the USA to chance across a subtly different web page on their country’s Apple site, missing features but, crucially, not missing any of an associated price-tag. (You can also bet that the US tech media will fail to report on this, too, as always.)

The one saving grace here will be if Apple finally manages to provide some kind of usable, useful back-up and restoration process for iOS devices. If my iPod, iPhone and iPad could save app data and preferences to the cloud and reinstate them on an app reinstall, and perhaps even optionally sync data (such as progress in videogames), I’ll be prepared to overlook Apple overlooking my country.

Fighting talk from Dan Grabham over at TechRadar in Windows 8 could make you rethink buying iPad 3:

An iPad isn’t a do-everything device. Windows 8 tablets will be

Of course, it remains to be seen if Windows 8 tablets are do-everything well devices. Given that many apps will still be designed for mouse pointers rather than touch, I doubt that will be the case.

Despite slow sales, Windows Phone is a surprisingly good phone OS. If you’re guffawing at that last sentence, we reckon you probably haven’t used it.

I totally agree with Grabham here. I’ve only used Windows Phone briefly a few times, but I was impressed with what Microsoft has done. The UI is interesting and, importantly, Redmond didn’t just rip-off Apple’s iOS, unlike pretty much everyone else in the smartphone race. The system being called Windows Phone is fucking stupid, though, and hints at problems Microsoft has in moving on from its past.

Microsoft’s new OS has a potentially game-changing trick up its sleeve. Microsoft isn’t redesigning the Windows that we all know. Indeed, Windows 8 will have a desktop that’s actually very similar to Windows 7. But it will be overlaid by the Windows Phone-style interface. Two operating systems in one, you might say. And that’s actually going to propel Windows 8 devices past their competitors in terms of do-it-all devices.

That actually sounds extremely risky. Mac OS X and iOS share certain aspects of architecture, but they are each designed from the ground up to be suitable for the interfaces of the hardware they run on. Having a single operating system run across traditional computers and tablets is an extremely challenging prospect. Kudos to Microsoft if they pull this off and ‘force’ software creators to make their products work brilliantly with pointers and touch, but I worry Windows 8 will be the same old Windows on the desktop, and also the same old Windows on a tablet, just with a touch skin overlay that works really well for very few applications.

As John Gruber deftly points out in Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad:

[I]t’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Microsoft’s demo video shows [the full version of] Excel running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more ‘touch friendly’ all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t ‘touch friendly”’ versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface

Gruber claims that the ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system and other Mac conventions, would make the iPad worse, and that the device is popular due to it eliminating complexity. I think he’s right—in keeping complexity under the hood, Apple has made a system that is so intuitive even toddlers can happily use it. I find it hard to see how Microsoft will be able to do the same with Windows 8, if it remains the same old Windows. Windows Phone, on the other hand, was exactly the right foundation to build on for next-generation Microsoft, so it’s only natural Redmond is marginalising it in favour of ‘proper’ Windows.

Grabham again:

Finally, Windows can emerge from the shadow of the PC as we know it.

And yet remain in the shadow of Windows as we know it.