Not too long ago, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget said the iPhone was dead in the water. Apple then went LOOK AT OUR CASH MOUNTAIN and developers continued to moan about Android fragmentation and—SHOCK!—said they’d rather develop for the supposed dead-in-the-water device from Apple (Mac Daily News).

But our friend Blodget won’t be defeated. He’s now written an entirely original (read: not that original) article about the battle for mobile and it’s entitled: IT’S OFFICIAL: Android Clobbering Everyone, iPhone Dead In The Water.

(Aside: Judging by this, if we don’t all agree with him this time round, it’ll be all-caps next time, in an article entitled LOOK, IPHONE IS DEAD IN THE WATER, BECAUSE I SAY SO, OK? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

So! Argument time!

A few weeks ago, when Comscore’s mobile survey showed that Google’s Android smartphone platform had blown past BlackBerry and iPhone to dominate the US market, Apple fans temporarily panicked.

I panicked. But that was because I lost my keys that day, and, man, I hate losing my keys. On those figures, I want “yeah, whatever” and definitely didn’t panic. And then when Apple mentioned that it was making money hand-over-fist and couldn’t get iOS devices out the door fast enough, I still didn’t panic. And then when devs started going on about Android fragmentation, I still, heroically, managed to hold myself back from panicking. And then when various parties noted that Android in and of itself is effectively a bunch of different platforms being lumped together, and that RIM and iOS are doing rather well when you take into account hardware manufacturers rather than OS alone, I resolutely managed to avoid panicking.

Maybe I’m just a calm kind of guy. (Note: I am not a calm kind of guy.)

It was the 1990s all over again!

Because in the 1990s, Apple was a hugely profitable company with a market-leading mobile platform and— wait a minute. What?

Nielsen’s numbers suggest that, of all the smartphones sold in the US in the past six months, fully 50% were based on the Android platform.  Meanwhile, only 25% of buyers bought an iPhone, and only 15% bought a BlackBerry:

Wow. Only 25 per cent. (And in the USA, because no other country exists, according to Blodget.) Apple must be gutted. There’s no way Apple could ever make any money with such a tiny share of the market.

Now, these numbers extend back beyond February, when Apple started selling the iPhone through Verizon (which helps). And another Nielsen survey, of purchasing intent, suggests that going forward the sales may be more evenly split.

Phew! That’s a weight off my mind, Blodget. Let’s hope you follow up this reasoned piece of savvy insight with a perfectly balanced comment, rather than one that makes you look like a troll.

So Apple looks poised to regain some share, at least relative to RIM and other also-rans.

Ah.

After the initial Comscore numbers came out, Apple fans also made the perfectly reasonable point that, if you’re assessing platform market share, you should also include iPod touches and perhaps even iPads when looking at Apple’s numbers. And, certainly, if you include both of those, Apple’s overall share looks better. But, globally, if you add up iPhones and iPod touches, Apple still lost share to Android year over year.

“But globally, if I ignore the iPad entirely and stick my head in a bucket, I have decided Apple is doomed! Doomed, I say.”

Why do Android’s gains matter?

They don’t.

Can’t Apple just hold onto the “premium” segment of the market?

Along with, frankly, quite a lot of the rest of the market. The iPod touch is hardly ‘premium’. The iPad is among the cheapest tablets, not the most expensive. Even the iPhone’s hardly alone in its price sector.

The Android gains matter because technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Hang on, didn’t you say this last time? Mind you, he’s right. After all, there’s zero competition in games consoles, cars, televisions, hi-fis and— WAIT A MINUTE!

And the more dominant the platform becomes, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it becomes to dislodge. The network effect kicks in, and developers building products designed to work with the platform devote more and more of their energy to the platform.

Which must be why all those developers are saying they’re more interested in iOS than Android, because, uh, no, you’ve lost me again.

The reward for building and working with other platforms, meanwhile, drops, and gradually developers stop developing for them.

Yes. Yes, back in head-in-a-bucketland, you’re probably right, Blodget. Nurse! We may need another bucket! Buckets for everyone!

But wait! Blodget has noticed people calling him out on this, presumably due to some advanced installed-in-his-head-bucket radio receiver:

This has not happened yet. Developers are certainly gearing up to develop for Android, but most say that they develop for the iPhone first.

Yes, this is true. That must be what John Carmack meant when he said:

Every six months I’d take a look at the scope of the Android, and decide if it was time to start really looking at it. At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space.

As we all know, developers HATE making money, so they’re queuing up to develop for a platform where Google’s cunningly made everyone prefer ‘free’, over iOS, where Apple’s trained its users to pay for apps. Right?

It’s hard to make a rational business decision to say I want to take resources from something else and put them on this. We did actually hire a person to be our Android guy, but it looks like he’s going to get stuck on iOS development!

Oh.

Blodget returns! Hurrah! More from Blodget:

And Apple’s app distribution and payment mechanism is still far superior to Android’s. But lots more developers now develop for Android than they did two years ago.

And more developers now develop for iOS than they did two years ago. Your point?

Importantly, it’s not a question of which platform is “better.” (This is irrelevant.) It’s a question of which platform everyone else uses.

Let’s ignore the question of “which platform can developers make money from?” because that’s clearly totally irrelevant.

As we’ve said before, Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought–and lost–in the 1990s.

As John Gruber says, Apple lost that war and in doing so is now the most profitable PC maker in the world, the poor dears. This, of course, has nothing to do with not having to pander to the lowest common denominator, and managing to avoid competing on price alone. Because that OBVIOUSLY doesn’t happen with Windows (what with PC manufacturers only offering the hardware and relying on another company for the OS), and it would certainly never happen with Android devices (what with Android device manufacturers only offering the hardware and relying on another company for the OS).

Phew!

It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them.

Those idiots! All that’s left them with is platforms that come highest in user experience and satisfaction surveys, enabling the company to become massively rich. WHAT WENT WRONG, APPLE?

This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are “better,” but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s, Android now).

Apart from, you know, competing in the sense of making a ton of money and huge profits. Other than that, Apple’s doing really badly.

As we explain here, two important things are different about the current Android – iPhone battle as compared to the Mac – Windows war in the 1990s. First, Apple is maintaining price parity (or better) with the leading Android phones. (Macs were always priced higher than PCs). Second, Android is still a fragmented platform, which significantly reduces the benefits of “interoperability” across multiple manufacturers.

But presumably, Blodget, Apple’s soon to be DOOOOOMED, right?

Google is working to fix the second problem, though–enacting much tighter rules about how Android can be used. And if the platform is to become dominant and ubiquitous, it will likely continue to tighten these rules.

If? I thought you were saying ‘when’? And, yeah, Google is working to tighten those rules, rather like a stablehand closes the stable door after the horse has bolted and run on to the motorway, only to be hit by a truck.

And Apple’s price parity certainly does not appear to have stopped the Android juggernaut so far.

Luckily the iPad isn’t by far the biggest touchscreen tablet on the market, nor the iPhone a leading unit in terms of sales, or Blodget’s claim there might look a little silly.

And the reported delay in the release of the iPhone 5 until September won’t help.

It’ll help you, Blodget—it gives you another five months to keep churning out garbage and yell that Apple’s “dead in the water” to everyone within earshot. Lucky everyone.

Wired:

Nintendo was caught unawares by surprisingly slow sales of the 3DS, the company said Tuesday.

“Nintendo 3DS has not been selling as expected since the second week [of availability in the United States and Europe], and this is not just in the Japanese market but also in the United States and Europe,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said during an investor briefing in Tokyo. “Therefore, we recognize that we are in a situation where we need to step up our efforts to further promote the spread of Nintendo 3DS.”

I used to swear by Nintendo handhelds. In the particularly bleak period of gaming from the late 1990s and into the early 2000s (when the Dreamcast died, taking fun with it), everything had to be 3D with as many polygons as you could fit in. Too many games had to conform to pre-defined genres, and as budgets escalated, risk and innovation all but disappeared.

Nintendo’s handhelds were the last place where the kind of excitement and drive of early 1980s arcade and home gaming thrived. Lower budgets meant you got crazy little games like WarioWare that just weren’t—at the time—feasible on TV consoles. But Nintendo’s handhelds—like all its consoles—always suffered from the same problems:

• A launch line-up weaker than everyone was expecting;
• A surprisingly short period of A-list games—releases soon turn into churn garbage for children;
• Expensive cart-based systems, which make each purchase a risk.

It took a while, but iOS eventually obliterated these issues. Since the platform regularly evolves, there’s no launch line-up, but there is a constant stream of titles. Most of them are utter crap (much like on any other system, ever), but I find something new I’d be interested in playing every single day. And because the system uses digital distribution, prices are lower and risk for the consumer is reduced. This also knocks budgets, forcing developers to innovate and rely more on gameplay than gloss.

These are the things that got me hooked on iOS gaming, to the point that I’m now the guy who deals with Tap! magazine’s games section, but anecdotal evidence beyond my own experiences made me wonder if a wider pattern was emerging regarding a transition away from Nintendo and towards Apple in the handheld space. I first became aware of a shift on interviewing an ex-Atari developer a couple of years ago. He told me his home was full of gaming kit—his children had access to every console available; but since iOS arrived, his daughters and their friends pretty much only ever played with Apple kit. “The DS,” he told me, “is dead”. The reason was that an iPod touch provided access to similar quickfire games to those they’d played on Nintendo consoles, a few titles with depth, but also offered internet access, enabling kids to mess around on Facebook.

As time moved on, more people told me that their kids were becoming fascinated by iOS, playing games on iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, all but ignoring handheld Nintendo kit from that point on. With youngsters, the intuitive nature of a touchscreen beat the relatively complex buttons of a traditional handheld; for older kids, the range of cheap games made some of their parents keen to embrace iOS, rather than paying 30 quid for a piece of plastic that could get discarded within minutes; and for teens, the importance of access to content other than games was increasingly of paramount importance. And with an entry-level iPod touch being anything up to 30 quid cheaper than the 3DS and having games that cost a fraction of the price, I wondered how Nintendo would fare this time round.

Perhaps things will change for the 3DS in the same way that they did for iOS. According to Wired, Iwata argues that it’s a

challenge to get users to understand the appeal of the [3D] screen even when they get their hands on a unit.

This was certainly the case with iOS. Many gamers I know considered iOS devices useless for gaming, right up until they experienced them. (Hell, back in 2008, I wrote—with an amusing lack of prescience—Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac, an article I subsequently countered when I had a year’s experience of the platform.)

That said, some people I know with a 3DS rarely use the 3D component, because they find it painful. And it’s also interesting to note that the majority of 3DS owners I know are also so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers. During the last-generation handheld scrap, Nintendo’s presence went across the board, from pensioners to children, from gaming newbies to dedicated fanatics. Sony fans would yell from the sidelines about Nintendo kit not being for ‘proper’ games, but Nintendo fans would smugly note that they actually had a range of titles and the best of everything. Right now, Sony’s almost irrelevant in the handheld space, and Nintendo appears to have taken its slot. Whenever I question Apple’s surprising rise in gaming and suggest it’s at the expense of Nintendo, the response is identical to the one Sony fans argued years ago. Nintendo, they say, is now the preserve of ‘proper’ games, unlike those ‘throwaway’ and ‘casual’ titles on iOS—the ones Nintendo in part used to thrive on, and that attracted the audience outside of core gamers that gave Nintendo so many DS and GBA sales.

It remains to be seen if the 3DS sales slump is a temporary glitch, and even if the console isn’t a massive hit, that certainly doesn’t mean Nintendo is in any way doomed. Like Apple, it’s managed to be profitable at almost every point during its history, even when one of its consoles only had a minority share of the market. But Nintendo could for the first time find itself ousted as the default company synonymous with handheld gaming—and that would be a pretty major shake-up for the entire industry.

Wayne Rash’s now much-quoted piece over at eWeek:

Why is it that I’m comparing the PlayBook against a Virginia ham? Well, why not? It makes at least as much sense as comparing the PlayBook against an iPad […]. But in fact the iPad was designed to be a lot like the iPod Touch, except with a screen sufficiently large that it has a lot more utility for visually oriented tasks.

As you may know by now, the PlayBook is getting a lot of negative press, due to a lack of native apps (about 3000 in total), no 3G, iffy Flash performance, and the glaring lack of built-in apps for email, calendars and contacts. And yet quite a few pundits, including Rash, are steadfastly defending RIM—and I utterly fail to see why.

Rash makes two arguments: people shouldn’t compare the PlayBook with the iPad, because they’re different devices, aimed at different audiences, and if you compare the iPad against any Apple device, it should be against the iPod touch.

On that second argument, the PlayBook still comes up short. It has a bigger screen, which in theory makes it superior for advanced applications, but the iPod still has the edge when it comes to productivity, due to the sheer number of decent apps available; more to the point, the iPod ships with native and usable email, calendar and contact applications.

On the first argument, though, why the hell shouldn’t everyone compare the PlayBook to the iPad? Haven’t RIM’s co-CEOs been bullishly doing so throughout the device’s creation? They’ve not at any point said: “Actually, we’re not aiming to compete with the iPad at all—we’re creating an add-on for anyone with a BlackBerry.” Although they’ve made arguments about the PlayBook’s supposed superiority in enterprise, they’ve regularly rattled on about how the device will blow the iPad out of the water for everyone—and it hasn’t.

There’s also weirdness happening in reviews giving RIM a break. It’s somehow become ‘unfair’ to compare the PlayBook against the iPad, or reviews judge RIM’s device on the basis of what it might become, rather than what it is. This is bullshit. If you release a half-finished product, too bad. And if a reviewer doesn’t review that half-finished product as it is today, they are not doing their job. You can only make direct comparisons with what exists today, not what might happen in the future.

Perhaps the PlayBook will become amazing in six months from now (although I doubt it), but RIM’s already changed its plans a bunch of times, and so reviewing a product on the basis of how it might hypothetically be towards the end of 2011, comparing it against how an iPad is now, is just stupid. Tech industry: stop doing it.

The tech world went mental last week when it turned out your iPhone is a digital stalker, recording your every move, and that the file that held the location database could be accessed by a third-party desktop application. People got terribly angry about the whole thing, tweeting about it (with geo-located tweets), while checking into Foursquare, and then additionally yelling about Apple on Facebook (next to the bit where they’d left their personal details online for everyone to see).

And, yes, I’m being flippant (again), and, yes, this iOS problem is clearly some kind of stupid bug where cache isn’t being flushed, and, yes, Apple should perhaps make the ability to turn off such data collecting more discoverable (tip: if you’re the kind of person to wear a tin-foil hat, turn off Location Services in the Settings app). But Marco Arment makes a few really good points about this Apple privacy snafu in his piece Privacy and incentives.

His main argument is that Apple largely doesn’t give a crap about your data, because it doesn’t make (much) money out of it, and that Apple’s always been good at protecting privacy. You might PFFT loudly at that, but bear in mind what’s happening in digital publishing on the iOS platform: publishers are mostly pissed off at Apple not providing access to user details, not the 30 per cent cut Apple takes.

Arment continues, arguing hugely popular websites are far worse than Apple when it comes to privacy. He cites Google and Facebook, but adds that many other web services

make money overwhelmingly from advertising. Advertising can be far more lucrative when it’s targeted well, so there’s a huge incentive for these services to collect as much data about you as possible, store it forever, and indirectly sell it to advertisers by selling targeted services and “eyeballs” to them.

People forget that the customers of Google and Facebook aren’t the users as much as the advertisers; but Apple’s customers are the people who buy the kit. Apple sees content providers as facilitators, adding value to the things Apple itself then sells to its customers. This is a big difference, and a big part of the reason why I don’t think Apple’s suddenly decided to become Big Brother; like Arment, I think the location database issue is a bug, and it’s one that will be squashed in an upcoming iOS release.

Curious Rat posts in response to Don Reisinger, who argues that with Jobs on medical leave, the iPhone could hurt Apple because “there’s no telling what might come out” of future development and no way of knowing how appealing those devices might be. Obviously, now Jobs isn’t at Apple day-to-day, Apple’s going to turn the iPhone into the iRetro and make it look more like the device Dom Joly used to use in Trigger-Happy TV.

But wait! Curious Rat throws a logic-shaped spanner into the bizarre-o-works:

Steve Jobs does not sit in a laboratory all day building things out of aluminum and glass.

But the tech press told us he was responsible for everything Apple has done since he become iCEO. HOW COULD THEY BE WRONG?

He does not cut metal, he is not Dr. Frankenstein and he certainly is not the only person at Apple creating beautiful things.

But that means Jony Ive isn’t just for show, to woo the ladies with his British accent and shaved head. THIS IS MAKING MY BRAIN HURT.

Steve Jobs probably has final say on what gets shipped, but he has a team of brilliant engineers and designers who have perfected their crafts over many years.

But that would mean Apple will be fine if Jobs steps down permanently, not least because Apple has effectively become Steve Jobs in company-sized form. STOP IT NOW, YOU’RE MAKING THE TECH PUNDITS CRY.