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Nintendo Still Doesn’t Get The (New) Mobile Market→

Nintendo Still Doesn’t Get The Mobile Market

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, speaking about “quality video games” and mobile platforms like iOS and Android:

In a feisty attack on the fastest-growing sectors of the video-game industry, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said that smartphone games and social-media games focus on quantity instead of quality.

“They are not like gaming consoles, there’s no motivation [for] high-value video games,” Iwata said at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

I’d say this is one of the biggest problems a company like Nintendo is facing right now: trying to compete in the mobile gaming space with a device that’s just meant for gaming, while consumers are demanding something that goes beyond cartridges and games sold at $40 a piece. And so they try to build “social functionalities” into their consoles, hoping that an avatar creation feature or in-console communication would provide a solution to a market that’s deeply changed in the past four years.

Should Nintendo change at its roots and start doing all that consumers want? No. But the way I see it, they should pull their head out of the sand and understand that the rules have changed and it’s time to stop complaining, and start building to stay in the game. Those Angry Birds won’t go away by themselves.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales Not So Small→

Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales Not So Small

Hey, remember all the fun last month when Samsung’s Lee Young-hee said that Galaxy Tab sales were “quite smooth” but everyone heard “quite small?”

Before unveiling the iPad 2 today the man in black and denim listed that early misquote – which was widely and officially corrected – as evidence to prove that the iPad’s competition was floundering.

I’ve never seen the Galaxy Tab break any headlines or get a full day’s worth of coverage. Misquote or not, I don’t exactly see Android tablets flying off the shelves either. And now they’ll have to play catch up. Again.

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Rovio CEO Thanks Apple, New Angry Birds Games This Summer→

Rovio CEO Thanks Apple, New Angry Birds Games This Summer

At the Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco, Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka spoke to a large crowd about the success of his company’s franchise, Angry Birds, and the results of going from developing games for others (they used to do work for hire) to having millions of people downloading your own mobile game. Vesterbacka thanked Apple for creating the App Store model and disrupting the Soviet-like market that was imposed by carriers years ago.

We really have Apple to thank,” said Vesterbacka – not just for helping to promote Angry Birds, but for creating the App Store to begin with.

“We got away from this carrier-dominated Soviet model,” he explained – before the App Store, the carriers were responsible for figuring out what software would run on their phones. “Other people decided on our behalf what was a good game and what was a bad game,” Vesterbacka said.

As for new entries in the Angry Birds world:

You won’t have to wait too long,” said Vesterbacka – Rovio plans to release new Angry Birds games this summer.

Angry Birds Rio is set to come out on March 22, and an update to Angry Birds Seasons was released a few weeks ago. Here’s my theory: does the fact that Vesterbacka is in San Francisco and that Apple’s iPad 2 event is tomorrow sound interesting to you?

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Apple Gets Back To Basics with Lion→

Apple Gets Back To Basics with Lion

Great post by David Chartier at Macworld:

iOS and Mac OS X are symbiotic entities. When designing iOS, Apple distilled the Mac down to something pocketable, but the core concepts are there, such as an app-centric workflow, an always-accessible “home base” Dock, and a fierce pursuit of intuitive interfaces. After gaining knowledge and experience from nearly five years and four versions of iOS, Apple clearly felt that it’s time to return the favor in Lion. Apple is incorporating some of the fresh simplicity of iOS back into its point-and-click desktop computing platform that, at its conceptual core, is almost three decades old.

It’s all there in the first beta: AirDrop lets you share files in your local network with one click (and I wonder if iOS 5 will gain support for this feature). The Finder is streamlined, redesigned and it’s got Coverflow-like navigation in the icon view. There is a unified UI for managing Mail and Calendar accounts. The Launchpad really looks like an iOS homescreen. Mission Control, one of my favorites, brings Spaces, Exposè and full-screen apps all together into a simpler interface.

We only have one beta of Lion, but the future points in this direction: simplification.

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An Interview With The Designer Of The Apple Logo→

Craig Grannel posted a transcript of his interview with the designer of the original Apple logo, Rob Janoff. Sorry to destroy all the theories about the logo:

What was the thinking behind the colour order of the stripes, and the ‘bite’?

There wasn’t a whole lot of hidden meaning behind the colours. The logo predates the gay-pride flag by about a year, so that wasn’t it—and there also goes the whole Alan Turing myth! The religious myths are just that too—there’s no ‘Eve and Garden of Eden’ and ‘bite from the fruit of knowledge’ symbolism!

I didn’t have much of a formal brief on the logo assignment, other than “don’t make it cute”. But I did know the selling points of the Apple Computer, and one of the biggest was colour capability. To me, that looked like colour bars on a monitor, which became the stripes in the logo. The order of the stripes, I’m sorry to say, had no particular grand plan other than I liked them that way. And, of course, the green stripe would be at the top where the leaf is.

The bite is really about scale and the common experience of biting into an apple. It was a happy accident that ‘byte’ is a computer term.

It’s just an Apple. [via The Brooks Review]

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Jim Dalrymple: iPhone 5 and iPad 2 Not Delayed→

Jim Dalrymple: iPhone 5 and iPad 2 Not Delayed

The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple pours cold water on today’s rumors of a “delay” for the iPad 2 and iPhone 5 which, he notes, can’t be really “delayed” as they haven’t even been announced yet.

From what I’ve heard this morning both products are on schedule and will ship when they are supposed to. Only Apple knows exactly when that will be, but the products are not delayed.

It seems amazing that rumors of Apple missing product deadlines are running rampant when Apple hasn’t even announced the product yet. The only deadlines that have been set are by the media, not Apple.

Jim has a great track record and his sources are usually spot-on. Like we said this morning those rumors felt very inconsistent, and we believe Jim when he says Apple is on track to ship the next generation iPhone and iPad without “delays”.

Update: Reuters and Barron’s are now claiming the rumors are false, too. Both websites cite sources close to Apple and people familiar with the matter as sources denying a delay for the rumored iPhone 5 and iPad 2 releases.

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Apple’s “Greedy and Unjustifiable” In-App Purchase Rules→

Apple’s “Greedy and Unjustifiable” In-App Purchase Rules

Finally someone who gets the problems with Apple’s recently announced subscription / in-app purchase policy. Instapaper developer Marco Arment nails it:

But one argument that Apple should care about: this policy will prevent many potentially great apps, from many large and small publishers, from being created on iOS at all.

A broad, vague, inconsistently applied, greedy, and unjustifiable rule doesn’t make developers want to embrace the platform.

Android’s installed base is now large enough that a huge, compelling new service could launch exclusively on it. (It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s possible.) What if the developer of the next mobile killer app decides, for political or economic reasons like this, to release it only on Android?

A few curious paradoxes:

And what about a situation like Amazon’s Kindle app that will presumably be targeted for not selling Kindle books via IAP, even though Amazon’s catalog is so large that it surpasses Apple’s own limits on how many IAP items an app can register?

There are a lot of first- and third-party apps that access Salesforce, LinkedIn, and 37signals’ services, all of which have paid service tiers. Will all of these be removed from the App Store if they don’t build in IAP?

As Arnold Kim puts it, Apple’s policy is as clear as mud. I’ve said this earlier today in regards of the Readability rejection, and I’m going to say it again: it’s ridiculous to enforce IAP for “software as a service”. Not that Apple can’t: they have all the rights to do what they want with their platform. But it doesn’t make sense.

Apple needs to clarify many points of In-App Purchases for developers and content publishers, and quickly.

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Apple’s Subscriptions and Consumers→

Apple’s Subscriptions and Consumers

This piece by David Carr at The New York Times gets to the main point of subscriptions as seen by Apple, not publishers:

Publishers say their objections are less about the steep revenue split than the lack of data. But publishers who sit out Apple subscriptions will be bypassing a huge embedded base of not only iPad users, but also the very people who have already shown a willingness to pay for content. It’s worth pointing out that publishers are already in the business of selling products to consumers they have no data on: it’s called the newsstand. Cosmopolitan and People know nothing about the millions who buy their magazines at retail stores, and that doesn’t stop their respective publishers from making a ton of money there.

Apple knows many publishers already have digital subscriptions in place on their websites, but they also know many readers would like to jump to digital versions altogether if only the subscription system was simple, integrated in a single place or device. So looking at Apple’s subscriptions from a consumer perspective, here’s what we get:

Keep in mind that consumers could not care less about revenue splits. In pushing through a plan that publishers are unhappy with, Apple is able to position itself as an advocate for consumers, enabling one-touch transactions while keeping their data private from a host of media providers.

Publishers have every right in the world to guard their business model, but it won’t please their potential audiences.

Publishers may pass on this new Apple plan, but consumers will be disappointed to know they can’t have Condè Nast’s publications available through this fancy iTunes payment thing. By playing the “advocate” role, Apple has cleverly implemented a way to rewrite the rules and keep their cut at the same time. Consumers, in the very end, want content and they don’t care about publishers’ issues. They’re just going to say “why can’t I subscribe to Wired here?”.

And if this strategy doesn’t work, you can stay assured Apple will change.

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‘I Am Number Four’ Director On Hollywood & iPads→

‘I Am Number Four’ Director On Hollywood & iPads

(Above: Michael Bay using his iPad on the set of ‘Transformers’)

Film director DJ Caruso describes his experience of using the iPad as a productivity tool while shooting ‘I Am Number Four’:

I got it, I don’t want to say as a toy, but then I realized about a week into prep that my storyboards were coming on it, my previs was on it, my script was on it, I don’t carry my script anymore. I started getting emails from two of my storyboard artists who work in Los Angeles and I have this application where I can mark up the boards – I’m a terrible drawer – and I can mark up the boards and send them back. It just became this amazing production tool.

There’s more than a director discovering this new tablet computer as a useful gadget, though. In fact, DJ Caruso says almost everyone at Hollywood from assistants to actors to directors now has an iPad, and not just to play Angry Birds during breaks. He even tells the story of when he got into an email conversation with Spielberg about the apps they had installed and used for work purposes.

The coolest part, however, is about the supernatural powers of the main character of his movie being controlled by a custom-made iPad app:

Pettyfer’s character John Smith, an alien, discovers during the film he has several supernatural powers. One of those powers is that he can control light through his hands. During filming, Alex wore a flashlight-like contraption wired up through his jacket and it was activated… by an iPad off screen.

It turns out, some people do create content on their iPads. Looks like Hollywood is indeed hooked on iPads. [via TUAW]

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