I’ve in the past rallied against Apple complicating its device line-ups, but I’ve changed my mind about the iPhone and would now be quite happy in the future to see an iPhone mini. The device that prompted this change of heart was… the iPhone 5. I’d not actually used one before, but TechRadar temporarily sent me theirs, so I could write a couple of articles.

I don’t like it.

This surprised me. I cannot think of another iOS device evolution I’ve not cared for. Even the iPad 3 didn’t bother me, because I skipped and never used the lighter, thinner iPad 2. Perhaps I’d get used to the iPhone 5 over time, but it simply doesn’t feel right to me. It’s ungainly and awkward to use—the taller screen feels like a compromise to enable Apple to strut its stuff in the bigger-screen pissing competition. On the iPhone 4, my normal-sized hand can comfortably use the device and reach almost all of the screen. On the iPhone 5, no chance. I have to stretch, which feels wrong; and as someone with RSI, this makes me wonder exactly how much pain I’d be in after long-term use.

Of course, one might argue I’m holding it wrong. I should, clearly, change how I interact with the device. But in switching from one hand to two or holding the device in a less secure manner, that feels like defeat. It feels like bending to the will of relatively poor ergonomic design, and it also makes me want to punch whoever okayed the rather misleading Thumb commercial.

iOS dev Neil Gall responded earlier on Twitter about this, saying “I’ve been yelling my distaste for the comically long, ergonomically challenged thing since launch,” and I get the feeling my wife’s going to cling on to her iPhone 4S for dear life, rather than upgrade. My mother also wanted an old iPod touch rather than the new one (with the same proportions as the iPhone 5), solely because of the form factor, although she went for the newer model on the basis of the superior camera. She’s still not overly happy with it.

Perhaps, then, the iPhone should have a ‘mini’ version somehow, although instead of a teeny tiny device, it could retain a similar form factor to the iPhone 4S. I don’t see that happening though—this summer, the iPhone 5 will be bumped one rung down the ladder and the iPhone 4S will probably become the free iOS device. One more revision and only 16:9 devices will remain. Ironically, the Android devices Apple clearly responded to with the new form factor will continue to offer more variation, including one of the current trends: smaller devices. It’s not enough to get me to switch, but then I’m now looking towards whatever iPhone Apple unveils this summer without any sense of excitement, for the first time.

App.net now has a free tier. You can now access the service if someone who’s paying for it sends you an invite, and you’ll then be able to follow up to 40 users and use 500 MB of storage.

I like the ideal behind App.net a lot. It’s an ad-free and open system on which to build apps. Alpha was the first, a Twitter-like microblogging service without the increasing bloat Twitter keeps welding to itself. In its current form, Alpha reminds me of the Twitter of old, but in being so it also lacks the richness in terms of diversity and varied communities that Twitter enjoys.

I’m also increasingly wondering, from a personal standpoint, what the point is of App.net. When I stop using Twitter, I miss it. This is in part due to being a freelancer working alone in a home office; Twitter is my place to discuss things with people and to find out about what’s going on in the world. App.net… I’m not really sure what that is. I guess it’s a bit like Twitter after some kind of armageddon-style disaster after which some of the techies survive. It’s a lot quieter, quite a lot geekier, and regularly has an echo. Then there’s also the file-storage aspect, but, you know, Dropbox. And CrashPlan.

Still, when I offered up my invites on Twitter earlier, they all went in seconds, and so there’s clearly an interest in App.net. People are curious. Whether that curiosity results in permanent growth of the service or a lot of people going “now what?” remains to be seen.

Harry Marks (who writes over and Curious Rat) and I have differing views about the state of media and how companies should respond to modern technology. When we’ve discussed things on Twitter, he’s very much in the ‘black and white’ camp regarding piracy, and will even go so far as to rebuy media digitally rather than ripping CDs to iTunes. I’m generally more of the opinion that media companies should be doing a lot more to make content available, accessible, affordable and not hugely annoying to use. Although I almost never torrent anything (one of the side effects of having a reliable but capped broadband connection), I find it hard to sympathise with companies whose work is widely distributed in that manner when they’ve been region locking it in some way or charging obscene money.

Today though, I’m mostly of the same opinion as Marks regarding his takedown of John Siracusa, who decided to whine about credits being attached to every episode of Netflix’s House of Cards. Marks says:

First, the problem was not being able to get the content we wanted when we wanted it. Then, came the laments about pricing. How dare seasons of television cost anything more than [INSERT ARBITRARY NUMBER… I REMOVED FROM MY RECTUM]!

Now, people are getting their panties in a twist over having to sit through opening credits? Where does it end? At what point does this blatant selfishness turn into, “I hate this actor/these mushy love scenes/this director. If you remove all of that, I’ll be beating down your door to give you money, then complaining some more.”

Netflix has its problems—the lack of a ‘wish list’/’save for later’ option is especially annoying—but credit sequences aren’t one of them. They’re a staple of TV, and although you might choose to watch several episodes in a row, until the systems are intelligent to recognise this and chop out the credits, you’ll just have to sit through them. Except you won’t, because Netflix—unlike many shiny discs—doesn’t lock the content it’s streaming and you can fast-forward through it. (Additionally, such sequences often have ‘previously’ sections, which might include a useful reminder that you’d otherwise miss, thereby making your experience worse. This won’t be rectified until we’re all wearing Google Chip In Brain™, some time in 2017.)

Mind you, here’s where I depart again from Marks, who says:

So, I’m going to finish this season of House of Cards and sit through every opening credits sequence because people worked hard to build it.

But if and when I also watch that show, I’ll sit through one credits sequence and fast forward through the rest. What I won’t do is complain about them.

I’m getting increasingly tired of the tech pissing contest, with everyone suing everyone else for every possible potential infringement, and I was idly wondering recently if there’s ever a line companies would not cross. It appears not. AllThingsD reports on Samsung’s latest shot across the bows at Apple:

A Mannheim Regional Court on Friday ordered a stay of a Samsung suit against Apple that alleges the iPhone maker’s VoiceOver screen-access technology violated its patent on display into speech data.

VoiceOver is accessibility technology, designed for people with impaired vision. In short, it enables blind people to use iOS devices, which gives them relatively easy access to information in a manner previously unheard of. AllThingsD notes:

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived.

I’d say it’s reprehensible. There are some things lawyers should just leave alone, and I genuinely hope Samsung gets a seriously bloody nose from this

Further reading: David Chartier’s story about watching a blind Apple Store employee use VoiceOver. Via 512 Pixels.

At the time of writing, most of the top grossing games in the App Store are freemium titles: games that are free to play, but that hinge on a business model that more often than not requires money to be semi-regularly fed in, either to speed up the game or to get through regular doorslams. I’ve written about freemium games before, highlighting my distaste for the model on the basis that it’s too often abused.

Occasionally, this isn’t the case, although that’s mostly when a game is more akin to an old-school demo (and therefore more accurately labelled as ‘free to play’ than ‘freemium’, if there’s a distinction to be made). For example, Gridrunner Free gives you a unique game mode and a single IAP upgrades the game to unlock everything else. Letterpress restricts you to a couple of simultaneous games, but, again, a single upgrade unlocks everything.

However, even when you enter into the realm of upgrades and ongoing cash injections, there’s no reason why gouging and grinding has to be front and centre. Hero Academy has a smart system where you buy new teams of characters and aesthetic customisations, but you can play without them, albeit without the same level of variety as those who choose to pay. And despite its hateful £59.99 ‘gold package’ (to my mind, any game with a disposable 60-quid IAP needs to take a good, long look at itself), Royal Revolt is a hugely enjoyable romp that you can play through without spending a great deal of cash to speed along upgrades. In fact, it’s perhaps the first game of this sort I’ve played where I thought it could do with more roadblocks, because it was being a little too generous. (I also felt the same about Frisbee Forever and its sequel, both of which I threw a few quid at, purely on the basis of the enjoyment I’d gotten out of the free games.)

On Eurogamer recently, Dan Whitehead reviewed Ghostbusters. Whitehead seems to be of a similar age to me, given that he references David Crane’s 1984 tie-in (which, let’s face it, was amazing if you had a C64 and were about ten: *stabs space bar* GHOSTBUSTERS!), but this also means he’s old enough to remember not only when gaming lacked modern-style freemium business models but also when it was heavily based around ‘pay to play’ a.k.a. arcade gaming.

Whitehead tears apart Ghostbusters, his review being summed up by the concluding paragraphs:

You quickly realise that there’s absolutely no point to anything you’re doing. You grind through identical battles dozens of times to scrape together enough credits to earn the right to grind through more identical battles. It’s a prime example of that upside-down design mentality that requires the ‘game’ element to be so slow and frustrating that the player feels compelled to pay in order to skip it.

In the comments, he’s then accused of being anti-freemium. Perhaps, argue those in favour of the model, Eurogamer should be asking people who love buying a 70-quid barrel of Smurfberries to review the likes of Ghostbusters. But making that accusation on Whitehead is missing the point he so clearly makes in his review:

There’s a world of difference between a game that uses micro-payments and a micro-payment model that is simply delivered in the guise of a game. If Ghostbusters has any value at all, it’s as an illustration of this important point.

In the comments, he further elaborates:

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a freemium model, and many games use it wisely to great effect. There is something very wrong with ‘games’ that are simply mechanisms for payment, dressed up as ‘gameplay’ in the limpest possible sense. That’s what Ghostbusters is. Take away the payment model and there’s simply no game there—just an endless series of mindless tasks with no positive feedback loop.

This is something people misunderstand when comparing freemium titles to arcade games. The latter were sometimes vicious in their difficulty levels, gulping coins, but the games were always about skill. Get good enough and you could survive on a single coin. That, to some extent, was the magic: a well-tuned game would reward your investment; and although from a manufacturer standpoint you could argue it’s not savvy that a game would potentially earn less per play as it aged, older games would regularly make way for new ones anyway, enabling the cycle to repeat.

However, I do nonetheless divert slightly from Whitehead’s views; he states:

This is why the example of arcade machines is flawed—those games were fun, whether you put 10p into the slot or £10. The input-feedback loop was completely different because progress per coin was skill based. You don’t need skill to beat Ghostbusters—just reams of patience and money to burn.

Although this is an opinion that aligns perfectly with my own preferences, it’s not an opinion I consider relevant to all modern gamers. In many cases, people seem content—even happy—with an experience rather than an old-school arcade-oriented title, demanding puzzler or slice of challenging strategy that demands skill for success. They’re happy to tend—the gaming equivalent of mindless gardening, where you go through the motions. However, I believe that even in this space, there still needs to be reward, and companies must take care to not enforce grind.

Even looking at Ghostbusters from the point of view of someone who enjoys freemium games, Whitehead’s review calls out the truly negative, hateful aspects of the production: grinding through nondescript scenes dozens of times to merely see more of the same; making progression so slow, frustrating and annoying that a player pays to skip through. Even without skill, a game can offer progression, fun, delight, beauty, and, as I’ve said, rewards—a return for the investment of both your time and your money. Without at least those things, freemium titles still represent a massive threat to not only iOS gaming, but also to the entire gaming ecosystem. Within a few years, the most exciting medium in history could be little more than potentially infinite Little Infernos* installed on people’s devices, sucking bank accounts dry in return for what ultimately amounts to nothing at all.

* Little Inferno is an experience-led game that riffs off of freemium games, almost being one, but with in-game currency generated solely by the items burned on the Little Inferno fireplace. It’s proved divisive, but it’s one of the finest productions I’ve seen in recent months on the iPad, and I very much recommend it and staying the course. If you get frustrated by the combos, I’d even argue you won’t lose much by finding some hints online, because the game’s pay-off is wonderful. Also, judging by reviews I’ve read, some people (who presumably like their freemium games) are ecstatic purely with the burning and not just the underlying story, which is amusing.