UPDATE: So someone from Touch Arcade found this post and said to me: “Really Craig? Your blog post is preceded with ‘I haven’t tried iDOS yet’ and you still go on to admonish Eli? Grain of salt.”

It’s a fair point, but my argument was more to do with the fact emulators for iOS never work as well as native games. Having since spent a couple of happy hours mucking about with iDOS, I certainly agree that it’s a fun curiosity, but the game-playing experience pales in comparison to games designed specifically for iOS, much as you’d expect.

Yesterday, an app called iDOS came to the App Store. Essentially a port of DOSBox with a couple of nicely IP-infringing Namco games welded to it, I predicted the emulator would be pulled off the store within two days. In fact, it only took a few hours before the Apple Police took it out back and shot it.

I’ve not tried iDOS yet (the developer was kind enough to send me a promo during the few hours the app was live), but I like me some retro-gaming, and it’s a nice curiosity. I have vague ideas about maybe getting a few old DOS games I’ve got knocking around working, but ultimately I probably won’t have enough time.

This is a good thing. That’s because it’s part of the slippery slope that I experienced with DS-based emulation. On Nintendo’s system, the lack of decent new games meant I very often ended up playing ZX Spectrum games via an emulator. On iOS, I pretty much download a new game every day, which is far more interesting than repeatedly playing stuff I’ve already played; also, I’m potentially supporting more developers; additionally, this means I’m getting optimal experiences, since the games are made for the system.

Touch Arcade doesn’t get this. In an article called The Importance of iDOS, Eli Hodapp says this:

What if developers leveraged the power of iDOS, or, more accurately, the open source nature of both Dospad and Dosbox to release individually tailored versions of iDOS with a specific game embedded and the emulator extensively tweaked to run that game well?

I can’t think of anything worse for iOS gaming. Emulators already exist on the system. Sega’s Mega Drive one is dire. Manomio’s C64 one is a good effort, but those old 8-bit games just don’t work without digital controllers. About the only emulator I can deal with is Frotz, and that’s because it’s a text adventure player (specifically, it runs Z-Machine files), and so it only needs a decent keyboard, which the iPad happily has.

I’m fine with retro games on iOS, but I sincerely hope if iDOS has inspired people, it’s inspired them to remake old games, or at least adapt them to iOS. I’d love to see Cannon Fodder for iOS. I’d be perfectly happy with the DOS version, but only if it had controls reworked specifically for iOS devices. What I don’t want is to be swiping my iPad screen like a crazy person, trying to move a cursor, thereby providing another layer of control abstraction that’s totally unnecessary in iOS gaming.

Back in 2008, Apple talked about availability of the iPhone 3G worldwide, and offered the following map:

(Pic credit: Iceland Review.)

For reasons unknown, Apple decided Iceland (and Greenland, for that matter) didn’t exist. My wife just discovered the same attitude prevails in iOS. Back in the heady days of iOS 3.x, Icelandic characters were readily available from the English keyboard: ð under D, þ under T and ý under Y. Now, they’re gone, forcing users to switch keyboard language to access them.

Fair enough, you might think, but think about it: Apple removed support from the standard English keyboard for no real reason; the characters were also useful to anyone needing to write about Old English/Anglo-Saxon; and the keyboard still retains a bunch of characters from other European languages that aren’t used in English.

So what’s the story here? Did Steve Jobs visit Iceland in 2007 and have someone recommend him hákarl and brennivín, without telling him what it was like, therefore sending the Apple CEO into a rage that he’s never recovered from? Or, more likely, has Apple just decided on a whim to remove support for something that people find useful, just because it can?

John Gruber talks about the MacBook Air’s place in the Mac lineup, and comes the following conclusion:

Here’s the way I see it: the Air is a secondary Mac; MacBook Pros are for use as a primary computer.

[…]

The new MacBook Airs—particularly the 11-inch model—don’t compete against the other MacBooks so much as they do the iPad. It’s like a ‘pro’ solution for the same ‘in between a smartphone and a full-size laptop PC’ market segment that the iPad sits in.

With iOS device sales outpacing Mac sales and the MacBook Air pricing being surprisingly aggressive, it’s looking like 2011 will see an increasing number of ‘second devices’ that rely on a ‘main’ Mac or PC. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone can figure out some way of dispensing with the hub—it’d be great to be able to just have a couple of iPads and a MacBook Air knocking around, relying on some kind of networked storage for holding large files and back-ups. Right now, you can do this with Macs, but not with iOS devices, but I reckon it’s only a matter of time.

TechRadar’s James Rivington on the Galaxy Tab. Some choice cuts:

Is it a phone? No – it makes phone calls, sure, but it’s too big to use as a primary mobile phone.

Is it a tablet? Again, no we don’t think it is one. It’s too small and fiddly and lacking in optimisations. Tablets need to distinguish themselves from smartphones by being bigger, better, more powerful, feature rich and interesting.

The pricing is all wrong, too. Clearly, Samsung needs to avoid undercutting the prices of its own Android smartphones like the Galaxy S. But in doing so, it’s made the Galaxy Tab £100 more expensive than the cheapest iPad – a class-leading product.

The camera, too, is fairly poor. Again, it’s nice to have this feature, but remember this is a £530 gadget. It’s expensive, and so you expect all the features to be top-notch… But they’re not.

It had the potential to deliver a serious blow to Apple’s iPad sales. But in truth, the Galaxy Tab is no match for the iPad. It’s nowhere near as smooth, it’s not as polished and remarkably, it’s not even a match when it comes to value for money.

Other 7″ Android tablets all seem to have similar problems. Personally, I’m very much hoping to see a 10″ Android, webOS or Windows Phone 7 tablet in 2011. I love the iPad, but Apple needs some serious competition to drive it on. It has this in the smartphone space, but right now the iPad remains so far ahead in its field that it’s starting to get a bit depressing.

Scott Rose gets it:

[…] going through 4 time-consuming & manually intensive tasks (double-click the button, swipe with your finger to the right, press the orientation lock, double-click the button again) is a REAL pain in the ass for something that used to be as simple as just touching a button on the side of the iPad.

And if you’re locking the screen orientation 100 times a day, you now have 400 extra tasks that you have to do every single day.

What a pity Steve Jobs doesn’t get it. There really is no excuse for Apple not enabling users to choose how this switch is used. Make mute the default—I don’t care. But wrecking the functionality of a switch millions of iPad users use daily for a function the majority will never need is just bonkers.