BlackBerry chief executive officer Thorsten Heins has growled menacingly (well, spoken to some tech hack) about how RUBBISH the iPhone is and how AMAZING BlackBerry is. To be fair, it’s not like he’s the only CEO to do this, and Heins does at least give Apple device a backhanded compliment:

Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market … They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that

He then followed up with:

And that’s why, for the most part, we’re copying Apple as much as possible.

Ha! Only joking! What Heins really said is Apple is doomed, he tells you, doomed. Here’s why:

History repeats itself again I guess … the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don’t innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly.

Ah, the old ‘Apple isn’t innovating but everyone else is—at light speed’ claim. Or, in this case, ‘Apple did innovate once, in June 2007, but has not remotely innovated since, the lazy gits’.

The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.

Which would be terrible if that were entirely accurate, because, as everyone knows, it’s much more fun when interfaces radically change every six seconds, rather than improving through gradual and reasoned iteration. I for one am looking forward to my BlackBerry car, which replaces the steering wheel with a gestural system that requires me to mimic exciting karate moves, and eschews a gear stick in favour of an innovative Whac-a-Mole system, which is “far more fun” than just yanking a stick.

Paul Smith, Financial Review’s scribe for the aforelinked piece stopped quoting at this point, but nonetheless summed up another Heins nugget:

Mr Heins said one area that the new BlackBerry phones had surpassed the iPhone was in the ability to multi-task—running multiple apps at once—meaning that users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop.

There’s part of a good point in here. iOS is great for focussing on tasks, and its ability to perform certain basic tasks (audio playback, say) in the background but freeze others so to not kill battery life is useful, but it’s clear some people need a more traditional computing experience while working. On an iPad, having two-up app views could definitely be handy for performing certain tasks, although the user interface could take a kicking from a simplicity standpoint. But here’s the bit where it goes a bit squiffy for Heins:

… users could work in the same fashion on their smartphone as they liked to on a laptop

How big are these new BlackBerry devices? Do they have a battery the size of a truck?

Different devices solve different problems, and although an iPad or other tablet can conceivably be considered a laptop replacement if you’ve the right apps and services, the mind boggles that anyone could consider a smartphone a laptop replacement. And even if you get pedantic and argue Heins was merely saying BlackBerry would allow people to work similarly to how they do on a laptop, user experience isn’t always (or even often) about giving people what they want, but what they need.

Then there’s the reality of the system’s multitasking, which, when you do a direct comparison, doesn’t appear significantly different from multitasking on competing platforms anyway. Versus iOS, it appears there’s more potential to keep entire apps running in the background (a battery drain), gestures to move between them (available on the iPad, but not the iPhone—yet), and live thumbnail previews in the BlackBerry’s equivalent of an app switcher (versus iOS icons in the admittedly not very discoverable and very basic multitasking tray—something Apple could do with improving).

So it’s not very laptop-like and, from what I’ve seen so far, is really a case of gradual and reasoned iteration—exactly what I like in technology. Quite why Heins felt the need to trash iOS and claim it never evolved, then, is beyond me.

Also, to all commentators that are yelling about how BlackBerry’s now going to give iOS and Android a kicking, you might be wise to realise that companies do not sit still and let rivals take a lead. You can bet if Apple or Google has some improved multitasking ideas waiting in the wings (and, in Apple’s case in particular, if they don’t compromise the overall experience of the system), we’ll see them soon enough; any lead Heins thought BlackBerry had will be short-lived. Still, at that point I’m sure we can look forward to tech hacks running with a billion stories a second on how Apple ripped off BlackBerry (and precisely no stories if Google does the same, because that doesn’t get people rapidly clicking on links, in order to get annoyed about what they subsequently read).

Vlambeer did a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) and were asked about IAP. Their response:

We know IAPs are the best and everyone loves them, but we decided not to put them in the game and instead charge outrageous up-front prices because we hate gamers and love money.

I think I’m in love. (Also: buy Ridiculous Fishing—it’s fab.)

Wired today has a small article on the three things Samsung needs to overtake Apple. Writer Christina Bonnington explains that Samsung is “almost there” in overtaking Apple (admittedly in part due to its substantially larger marketing budget, which Apple could match if Tim Cook acquires a penchant for flinging shit at walls and seeing what sticks). All it needs are the following three things:

Industrial design

Complete control over the consumer experience

Brand power

Sadly, the list appears to be missing a fourth entry, which is “a sneaky copy of Apple’s roadmap, so Samsung can copy what Apple’s going to do, before Apple does it itself,” along with a fifth entry, which is “figure out how to sell it to people without accidentally forgetting that it’s no longer the 1950s”.

Sick Chirpse reports on footballer-turned-boxer Curtis Woodhouse tracking down a Twitter troll. The short of the story is some twonk on Twitter had a go at Woodhouse, and Woodhouse then asked his followers for the troll’s address. There then followed a bit of to-and-fro, with original twonk getting increasingly cagey and boxer bloke showing his grown-up, professional sportsperson demeanour with such lovely outbursts as

i cant wait!! im give him a right pasting!! [sic]

and

right Jimbob im here !!!!! someone tell me what number he lives at, or do I have to knock on every door #itsshowtime [sic]

—that second one, complete with a picture of the street where increasingly frightened twonk lived.

The episode is spreading round Twitter and the web, with people generally on the side of Woodhouse. How great, they argue, that some stupid little troll got what was coming to him. Personally, I find the entire episode despicable and chilling.

I hate Twitter trolls as much as the next person, and I’ve also experienced several runs of prank phone calls, including one lovely soul who’d ring up daily and rant down the phone about what a wanker I was and how everything I do was shit. (Presumably, they weren’t an Apple fan, nor, clearly, a fan of my writing.) But the Twitter mob mentality is worse. If someone’s making a genuine threat, make a complaint to the proper authorities; but if someone’s just being a dick, don’t form a little online posse and have a boxer drive to the troll’s house, to, in the boxer’s own words

give him a right pasting!! [sic]

Sometimes the internet is a thing of pure magic—one of those inventions that is almost as revolutionary as penicillin or the car. But this skirmish also shows that it can be an enabler of the worst of humanity, where bullies bully, and the bullied become just as bad as the aggressors, while an audience looks on, baying for the most explosive outcome. It’s not funny—it’s just sickening.

Stuart Dredge has written about the recent online row about paying journalists. The short of the story is Nate Thayer was asked to repurpose an article for The Atlantic for no money, and countless toys were rapidly thrown out of countless prams by countless writers, bloggers and people who just really like throwing toys out of prams.

Dredge is calmer than most, and argues against the commonplace default position these days that people should always be paid for writing.

My wife and I have a site called Apps Playground, about children’s apps, which is profitable (to the tune of £20-£30 of App Store affiliate fees a month, once hosting costs are deducted) as long as you don’t factor in the time we spend writing it. So we’re writing for free, but it’s our own thing.

If someone – say a big technology site like TechCrunch or Mashable – asked me to write the kind of stuff I do for The Guardian for them for free, would I? Obviously no. If they asked me to do a guest piece for free in my role as Apps Playground co-founder, with a link to the site? Obviously yes. Different hats.

On the surface, this looks similar to the regular ‘write for us in return for exposure’ offer every seasoned writer I know gets from publications on a fairly regular basis. As Dredge notes, writing for free is about the trade-off—whether or not you will potentially see more overall long-term value/income in return for giving away some of your time.

That said, this is looking at things from an individual’s viewpoint rather than a wider context. When publications—especially online—trend towards unsustainable rates (or in many cases, no rates), everyone’s individual one-off potentially leads to a situation where no-one gets paid. As someone who’s almost entirely a professional writer these days, that scares the shit out of me. Having been doing this gig for well over a decade now, with (so far) precisely no editors hunting me down and repeatedly punching me in the face while yelling about inaccurate use of interrobangs, I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of things. But even so, it’s hard to see how it’s possible in the long term to compete against free, if that’s the way things go.

Dredge notes:

Perhaps, too, there are simply too many journalists, and new digital economics mean we’ll have to work harder and scrap smarter to stay in the game. There’s an interesting parallel with musicians here, I think, which is probably a separate article in itself.

He may well be right. Perhaps the entire creative sector is moving towards an end point where the vast majority of those within it—even those who’d previously had long and healthy careers—simply won’t be able to survive. Writing, music, and other creative endeavours could become little more than hobbyist pastimes, filling an hour in an evening before the creator goes to bed, ready for another day doing a ‘proper’ job, whatever that might be. That doesn’t so much horrify me as make me incredibly sad. If we cannot find a place and see value in creative tasks, I think we’ll be poorer for it and publications/other outlets will increasingly become unfocussed; however, perhaps with more people having a voice, diversity will flourish, great new creators will break through, and people will start once again thinking about paying directly to read, watch or hear more work from them, rather than waiting until they’ve a spare evening to craft something new.

Update: Gary Marshall adds his thoughts.