iFlowReader is closing and in a candid open letter, the service blames Apple for “changing the rules in the middle of the game”.

Facebook Indie Games argues:

If you are an iOS developer then no matter how much money you’re making diversify now. If iFlowReader had put out HTML5, Flash, and Android apps while times were good they may be in a different position now. Still painful but at least sustainable.

It’d be great to have some figures to back this up across a number of app/game types. I agree that, in theory, diversification is a good thing, and—from a business standpoint—a platform-agnostic approach (even if you build specific delivery mechanisms for each platform) enables you to cast a wider net.

But all we hear about these days is that iOS device owners have been trained to buy content and so they do so, but Android owners want free, and desktop/laptop users often also moan when presented with firewalls and paid content, preferring the free route as well.

So while it’s great to argue that iFlowReader would still be in a sustainable position had it also created an Android app and an HTML5/Flash version of its offering, there’s absolutely no guarantee that’s the case, just as there’s no guarantee even the most popular iOS app and game offerings could survive if Apple saw fit to ‘force’ them off the platform.

As reported here before, Henry Blodget has argued a number of times that the iPhone is dead in the water. His main reason is that there can only be one winner in any single tech field:

Technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Given that even the ageing iPhone 3GS is still outselling many new Android devices in the USA (All Things Digital), it’s increasingly clear (if it wasn’t before) that Blodget is talking crap.

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has ushered in similar comments, with people calling Microsoft bonkers to splash out $8.5 billion on a service that’s clearly going to be crushed by Google at some point. But Ben Horowitz offers a different take in his article that provides background on Andreessen Horowitz’s acquisition, 18 months ago, of the service from eBay.

Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust [and we] soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.

These attacks were Google’s free competitor to Skype, aggressively marketed to Gmail users, and Apple’s FaceTime, heavily advertised and baked into iOS devices and Macs.

Horowitz reveals the result of these two titans attacking Skype:

Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google’s launch, culminating in:

500,000 new registered users per day

170 million connected users

30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently

209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010

[And] 50 million users have downloaded Skype’s iPhone product since the release of Apple’s Facetime.

But, yeah, technology platform markets tend to standardise around a single dominant platform.

Electronista reports:

Apple’s iPad 2 is as fast as a Cray 2 supercomputer from a quarter-century ago, Top 500 and Linpack co-manager Dr. Jack Dongarra said late Monday. At 1.5 to 1.65 gigaflops of computing power, Apple’s tablet would compete with the eight-processor, 1985-era system despite being just a sliver of the size.

The real disadvantage of the Cray, though, is that there’s no shipping version of Angry Birds. Still, given Rovio’s increasingly fevered attempts to milk that series until it screams, it’s probably only a matter of time.

(Before the Cray version, Rovio should release C64 Angry Birds!)

The Telegraph claims, in an article that sounds unlikely to me, that mobile phones could soon be charged by talking into the handset:

Electrical engineers have developed a new technique for turning sound into electricity, allowing a mobile to be powered up while its user holds a conversation.

The technology would also be able to harness background noise and even music to charge a phone while it is not in use.

If true, this is also good news for The Telegraph itself. Assuming we really can generate electricity by talking hot air, the newspaper’s HQ could become the Middle East of generating electricity by the power of regularly spouting garbage at volume.

Harry Marks on ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough:

Google’s philosophy: “How much stuff can we cram into this thing that works well enough?”

Apple’s philosophy: “We can’t do everything, but what features can we perfect so they’re easy and fun to use?”

Apple’s far from perfect, and it has some seriously questionable desktop UI ideas in the upcoming version of Mac OS X (including an absolutely hideous new ‘skin’ for iCal), but it often works hard to get the details right.

Justin Williams on trading an iPad for a Xoom:

Honeycomb as an OS supports rotating the device into both portrait and landscape, but rotation is not nearly as fluid and instantaneous as on iOS. In fact, it is so slow I often wonder if the device has registered that I changed the device’s orientation. After several days, I ended up just setting a preference to disable rotation on the device and have it stay in landscape permanently.

When Apple dropped the rotation lock from the iPad, I was annoyed, but only because I wanted the option to periodically lock it. However, to think of a device almost forcing me to lock its orientation because of poor performance is just crazy.

Mind you, it remains to be seen whether ‘good enough’ will do regarding tablets. It certainly has when it comes to PCs, but less so with smartphones—many users seemingly demand a good experience now. I hope that this will be the case in the tablet space, not so Apple can beat Google, but so Google will strive to better the experience and so challenge Apple to keep bettering its products too. The worst-case scenario is when ‘good enough’ wins the day and companies continue shovelling out third-rate crap, enabling everyone—including the field’s leaders— to become complacent and lazy.