Register Hardware reports that Vue has gone totally batshit bonkers and is contemplating banning mobile phones from its cinemas. At present, says the article, Vue “forbids punters from taking ‘sound and video recording equipment’ into the auditorium. Vue reserves the right to search visitors to prevent them from sneaking such kit in”, and may, presumably, smother them with extortionately expensive popcorn if they fail to comply.

Currently, Vue bans video-recorders, but also, somewhat oddly, laptops and tablets like the iPad—which conspicuously lacks a camera of any kind. Worryingly, a bloke from the linked article who recently visited Leeds Vue was told that “staff should have confiscated his iPad and camera too, for the duration of the showing”.

OK, two things. First, there’s no way in hell I’d trust a Vue employee with my iPhone or any other electronic kit, and I suspect Vue’s terms would be such that you’d leave your device(s) with them at your own risk. Similarly, I won’t leave my iPhone in my car, because I’m not fucking stupid. But I also won’t leave it at home, because, you know, having a mobile phone on you when you’re driving about in a tin-can with wheels is handy for when the tin-can suddenly decides it doesn’t want to go any further while you’re surrounded by picturesque fields and a distinct lack of housing and telephone boxes.

Secondly—and this bit is quite important—I really wish cinema chains would shut the hell up regarding people recording films. I recently saw Scott Pilgrim and had to sit through yet another patronising piece of tosh where some actor or other told me that ‘camcordering’ (hrng) films is ILLEGAL and BAD and EVIL and stuff. I know. I just spent an inordinate amount of money on two tickets to see said film. GO AWAY! And the fact remains that the vast majority of bootlegs are from promo/preview discs that subsequently circulate—the days of someone downloading a film recorded by some muppet at the back of a cinema are mostly long gone.

If Vue thinks extending its ban or policing it more thoroughly, removing iPhones and similar kit from punters, will help it in any way or protect the film industry, it’s sadly deluded. If someone is stupid enough to start recording a film on their smartphone, fine, kick them out of the screening; but don’t ban the rest of us from entering the screen in the first place. If you do, you’ll suddenly find quite a lot of people won’t bother visiting the cinema at all; and far from protecting the film industry, a chunk of those tech-aware people might suddenly be more drawn to torrenting preview discs.

The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.

So I just installed iOS 4.1 on my iPhone and started farting about with Game Center. Like Ping, it does make me wonder if Apple understands that when it comes to social networking, it’s best not to avoid the ‘social’ and ‘networking’ bits.

The good

Game Center has a pretty straightforward interface that shows up the likes of OpenFeint as being even more of a mess than you originally thought they were. I can take or leave (well, if I’m honest, leave; well, if I’m really honest, set fire to) the casino-like gambling table green-fuzz and wood visual appearance, but at least the navigation is fine.

The bad and the bonkers

In the case of Game Center, ‘the bad’ and ‘the bonkers’ are both the same thing. Currently, most of my social gaming happens on Facebook, but via iOS games that happily connect to my Facebook account. I sign in, and immediately I have an arcade-game-style high-score table, populated with my friends’ scores. It’s great, and it’s simple (one click and a sign-in).

Because Apple hates relying on others, it’s eschewed this approach, instead forcing you to go through a protracted set-up to get your Apple ID talking to Game Center, followed by an invite system that’s either by known username or by email (seriously).

The modern web and online services are entirely based around networking, and are successful when these services all talk to each-other. By sealing itself off from the rest of the world and existing social networking (be it Facebook, Twitter or other services), Game Center irks. I don’t doubt it’ll be a success—there are too many iOS gamers and excited developers for it not to be. But it is awkward, unwieldy and unnecessarily time-consuming to deal with, and these are direct opposites to the things Apple has historically been known for.

Update: Game Center also cunningly provides usernames only with friend requests. I’ve already had a request from someone who I’ve no idea who they are. Gnh.

Update 2: ‘The Rev’ writes in the comments: “It’d be nice if it worked, too – the Flight Control leaderboard is showing my first score today, not the better score from my next attempt and not my best score from before Game Center launched.” Oh dear. Follow-up-o-tron: “It’s actually my FIRST since GC – not best since. I’ve done better today and it’s not uploaded. Other people okay, though.” Fire up the Bug Kill Machine, Walter!

I’ve just spent a happy half-hour reading through the entirety of The iPad Project over on Fraser Speirs’s blog. Amusing that at the end of day one, the kids had already figured out how to make mischief with their new devices:

We installed a drawing app – I forget which one but it might have been Doodle Buddy – that allows kids to collaborate on drawings over the network. The kids were fiddling around with this app when there was a knock on the door. “Errm….Mr Speirs? Are your children doing something to my class’s iPads?”

Turns out some kids had been joining shared whiteboards on iPads in the other classroom. Hilarity ensued, of course.

If you’re in education, go and read Fraser Speirs’ blog. Of late, it’s recounted his fascinating experiment of introducing iPads into the classroom for his young students. Inevitably, the Apple-hostile crowd has leapt on every article reporting on the story, and the national press has wrongly claimed that iPads are being used for everything in class, rather than as a supplementary tool; therefore, going to the source is your best bet.

Today, Speirs answers some of his critics, and the point I wanted to highlight was this one:

“Won’t the children lack ‘proper’ computer skills?”

This has been a criticism levelled at Speirs since he revealed the iPad experiment, and it is, frankly, utter bullshit. Think back to when you were at school. How does the technology compare to what you’re using today? In my case, rampaging as I am towards my mid-30s, I grew up with BBC Micros and then, in secondary school, the Acorn Archimedes. By sixth form, the school had some Macs in the graphics department, but both the hardware and software was a world away from even the technology I used at university (Macs for video editing, PCs for web access) and it certainly has little resemblance to what I work with today.

Even kids who grew up with PCs at school during the 1990s or later will find that many things have moved on. To that end, the only things that are really important are:

1. Providing the best environment for children to learn in, regardless of the technology. If PCs work for you, that’s fine; but if iPads (or some other tablets) engage the children more, and are more practical and manageable, by all means use them. Or have a mix of technology (as in Speirs’ school);
2. Ensuring that you’re teaching the children foundation skills in technical subjects, and that you use transparent software elsewhere. In other words, don’t teach software. Most applications in use today simply won’t exist in over a decade’s time when kids entering school leave education. However, fundamental skills (even in the likes of spreadsheet work, word processing, image manipulation and video editing) will always have some kind of analogue.

Speirs sums this up nicely in his article:

This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current ‘business environment’ or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I’m not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.