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.

If you’re feeling down in the dumps, for whatever reason, there’s a very good chance you merely need to watch Cookie the Penguin being tickled:

(Original link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wTWWjYTe1I.)