Following on from Chris, who wrote a piece after an open invitation from Ian, who himself was inspired by Matt, Alice, Ben, and Dan…

1. People need to take a step back regarding technology

At a recent Chris Addison gig, the comedian noted at one point how we’re living in an age of technological magic, and we’re all missing it. If you’d have told me about the iPhone 4 ten years ago, I’d have laughed in your face. A hand-held device with more games than the Commodore 64, that can stream video from your home computer while you’re sitting on a train, that can hold thousands of music tracks and photos, that can surf the internet, and that can do literally thousands of other things? If you’d have then also mentioned its slight problems under very specific circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared. Why today do people only concentrate on the negative aspects of exciting things, rather than being excited about the positive?

2. Gaming is becoming truly mainstream

When I was a kid, I had a few computers (one at a time—we weren’t that well-off!), and I mostly used them for games. Videogames were a geeky pursuit. Then the PlayStation came and opened things up somewhat, although that was mostly my generation growing up, drinking beer and convincing friends to have a go. Today, though, gaming is almost universal. The Nintendo DS started things off, targeting games at very young kids, women and older people, and the web took over, embedding addictive gaming into social networking sites like Facebook. Apple’s devices have gone a step further than both, providing the best gaming experience to date: novelty has returned, because releasing a game is now often relatively low-cost and low-risk; access is simple (go to the App Store, find a game, click ‘install’); prices are low (reducing risk for the consumer); and the choice is wide. Stats suggest about half of women and 40 per cent of men with iOS devices primarily use them for games, and as a long-time gamer, these are heartening statistics.

3. Media industries and laws need to be radically overhauled

The music industry sort of gets it. Although the odd lawsuit still arrives, suing someone into oblivion because they shared half a dozen tracks via a torrent, we must remember that music is now almost entirely DRM-free, affordable and also available via streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify. What’s now needed is for the ‘moving picture’ guys to realise that they could be doing the same thing. Imagine if an episode your favourite series aired on television, but was then available worldwide the following day for 59p. Would you still feel as compelled to arse about with torrents, or would you just subscribe to it? And in today’s environment, why is the UK still lumbered with archaic copyright laws that don’t enable fair-use on format-shifting? It’s insane that one cannot legally rip a CD to iTunes for personal use, and while the BPI promises not to sue people who do so, that’s a long, long way from something being enshrined in law.

4. I liked Apple’s way of multitasking in iOS 3

Seriously. The whole ‘one app at a time’ approach (apart from background music) made me focus, in a way that’s much harder on other systems. On my Mac, I’ve noticed that I often create a similar environment myself anyway—when I’m on deadline, I shut off my email and Twitter client, to avoid distractions, only letting music play in the background; when writing, I use WriteRoom in full-screen mode, to block out everything else. Luckily, iOS 4 hasn’t ruined this, and so I’m actively looking for some kind of solution that will enable me to shift from mostly working in front of my iMac to at least partly doing my writing work on my iPad.

5. Digital storage is slowly seducing me

On a recent holiday, I took my usual small pile of books, my iPhone and my iPad. Both Apple devices were loaded with music and reading material. In the end, the books remained untouched, and the iPad was used for almost everything. On returning home from the minimally decorated apartment, our walls lined with DVDs, CDs and books suddenly seemed awfully cluttered, not least because the CDs are pretty much never played anymore. I’m starting to ask myself: what is the point of buying CDs? With decent readers on the iPad, books and comics are also on borrowed time for me. And if the issues raised above in point three are solved, DVDs will also fall by the wayside.

Update: For more articles like this, Ben Horn is collecting all those he can find.

Engadget reports on HP rattling on about flexible display Palm devices. Phil McKinney talks about the great display technology that will “change what we think of in form factors, both in products from Palm with flexible displays, and with HP”. That’s great, so where are these devices? Oh, they don’t exist yet, except as a concept in people’s heads, or perhaps as devices sitting in a lab.

People moan about Apple’s secrecy, but here’s the thing: when Steve Jobs goes on stage and starts talking about something, it’s almost always because he has something to show. He’ll talk about something revolutionary, then he’ll show it to you, say how much it costs and when pre-orders are going to start.

If only others would follow suit.

I waited longer than many to upgrade my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, because I was on holiday when it was released, and also Drop7 hadn’t been updated (it has now). The experience has so far been variable—while Camera is now insanely fast, Angry Birds regularly judders; I enjoy Apple’s implementation of multitasking but it’s clear it’s been responsible for totally freezing the iPhone for the first time; and folders are a joy, but moving icons around is now even more of a finicky process.

It’s Mail, though, that truly offers the best and worst updates. On the plus side, the absurd dance back and forth to access accounts has been banished via the ‘All Mailboxes’ view (although it often freezes while downloading email from multiple accounts), but the way Apple has implemented automated threading is bonkers.

The way things work is fine until you actually bother to read something. Emails that are part of a thread are gathered together and flagged by a number denoting the messages in the thread. Tap it and you see the overviews of the thread’s messages, in reverse chronological order, so the latest one is at the top. This is all fine, but in the mailbox the thread’s overview is shown not by the most recent message, but by the earliest available one—and this changes depending on how many messages Mail is allowed to store.

The net result of this is that when threading is turned on, you see several new messages and then a very old one, followed by more new ones. To see an overview of the latest reply to a thread, you have to enter it, which is absolutely horrid from a usability standpoint. Not only should this action not be forced, but users shouldn’t see an overview and then jump to an entirely different message—it’s confusing.

Apple should make Mail threads show an overview of the latest email within the thread—something that would be logical and helpful. At the very least there should be a setting for this.

The quote of the day that forms the title of this post comes from MacRumors, as part of its link-bait iPhone 4 Drop Test with Bumper Case Shows Little Protection. Reporting on iFixyouri’s iPhone-with-Bumper drop test, the site notes: “The iPhone 4 with bumper lasted only 3 drops before the front glass cracked. This was the same number of drops that it took to break an unprotected iPhone 4.”

Oh noes! Apple is clearly evil for pushing those bumpers on everyone! BUT WAIT! It turns out that “the iPhone 4 hit the concrete face down for the last fall, so how it falls likely affects the chances of the glass breaking“. Wow, a serious revelation there, folks!

In other LATE-BREAKING NEWS, MacRumors will almost certainly soon reveal that if you repeatedly smash your brand-new MacBook Pro with a hammer, it will get damaged more easily than if you repeatedly beat it with the very feathery bit of a feather duster. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

One of the things that utterly boggles my mind is how reluctant the publishing industry seems to be to acknowledge the existence of iOS devices. Offline, there’s relatively little coverage in Mac mags, and in the UK only the bi-monthly iPod & iPhone User is there for people who want to do more with their iPhones, iPads and iPods. It’s a pretty good mag (disclaimer: I also happen to write for it), but it’s crazy that it’s the only regular publication of its kind.

Perhaps publishers have as one decided there’s no market for competition, but given how iOS stories make a site’s visitor count jump, one might think there’d also be more interest in print-based publications. One argument against is that the relatively low cost of apps makes it unlikely people will buy an iOS magazine; but from a consumer perspective, I’d be happy to pay four or five quid each month if someone would tell me what great apps are out there and how to use them, rather than wading through pages of crap on the App Store and ‘wasting’ 59p a bunch of times before unearthing a real gem of a game or utility.

The iPad might be shaking up thinking in this area, due to apps and games for it generally being more costly than those for iPods. I sincerely hope so, because when I was asked to write the games section for the rather wonderful MacFormat Presents: iPad The Essential Handbook, I had a really fun week, and it was quite a come-down when I returned to my iMac, to review and write about all manner of Mac things. But even if I wasn’t a writer in this space, I’d love to have a small selection of monthly iOS mags to peruse, rather than a few pages in a Mac mag, combined with the inevitable moaning from Mac users about their mags being ‘polluted’.

Anyway, if you have an iPad or are considering getting one, MacFormat’s guide is well worth reading—there are plenty of tutorials and apps covered, for the princely sum of £7.99. You can buy it online from myfavouritemagazines.co.uk.