Steve Jobs pours ridicule on netbooks, saying: “They’re slow, they have low quality displays … They’re not better at laptops than anything, they’re just cheaper”. Well I have news for him, after the launch of his iPad I think that my Acer Aspire One netbook is a better ownership proposition. Which is not what I was expecting.

So where have Apple gone wrong?:

• Apple have a marketing strategy with iPod/iPhone of planned obsolescence, like Detroit carmakers in the 1950s and 1960s. The product line is updated regularly with features held back to make the next model more appealing. So many customers upgrade every year. This strategy is no longer valid because of Android. Apple need to maximise their benefits and features to stay ahead in the race. They haven’t done so and will be outperformed on price and specification by a myriad of competitors.
• No OLED display, presumably this will be in next year’s model. Instead they have gone for IPS (In Plane Switching) LCD. This technology gives a wide viewing angle and good colours, however it switches very slowly producing motion blur which is not good for games. Also, compared with OLED, it uses a lot of electricity, resulting in a short battery life.
• Not a proper competitor for Kindle. Amazon must be very happy today. The Kindle’s E Ink display technology is vastly more readable than any LCD. And Kindle will run for a week on a charge whilst the iPad only lasts 10 hours.
• The iPad has no camera. What were Apple thinking about? This is an unbelievable omission which severely curtails the usefulness of the device.
• Processing power. The iPad uses an ARM processor. The netbooks that Jobs derides can have ARM processors too. Or Intel’s rapidly developing Atom. So the iPad has no significant horsepower advantage.
• No removable battery. This is naughty of Apple, these batteries have a finite life, so eventually need replacing. You have to send your machine back to Apple for this to be done. Which is costly and inconvenient. Also I have different sized batteries for my netbook for different situations and can change between them in seconds.
• The name. iPad. This is already the butt of massive derision all over the net. I am sure that there are many excellent jokes to come. What were they thinking of?
• No multitasking. My netbook will do this. This is a very significant weakness.
• No Adobe Flash. Huge chunks of the internet run on Flash and iPad can’t see it. Presumably Apple do this to protect their App Store revenue. My netbook runs Flash.
• No Skype. Another massive omission and, once again my netbook can do what the iPad can’t.
• No USB or Firewire ports. Seriously. My netbook has three USB ports. Once again Apple are seriously limiting what their customers can do with their machine.
• Storage capacity is limited to a maximum 64GB flash drive. When netbooks often have far bigger hard drives and as many USB memory sticks as the user wants.

Not looking good is it? So what has the iPad got going for it?:

• Apple fanboys and Apple marketing. This is cult like. Lots of people will buy anything they stick the Apple logo on.
• Fantastic user interface. Apple really do lead the world at this and have taken it several steps further with the iPad. This gives the device fantastic touch and feel.
• Price. For once Apple have a realistic price structure. They need it with the competition this machine is going to have. But remember that an iPhone costs just $180 to manufacture and the iPad will cost a similar amount.
• The App Store. 140,000 applications. On the iPad existing apps run in a small window or scaled, so there isn’t much advantage over an iPhone. But the huge catalogue still represents a huge amount of capabilities for the device. iPad specific applications will obviously benefit from using the bigger screen properly.
• Money. Apple have enough cash in the bank to buy several small nations. They can throw this at the iPad project till it works.

My Acer Aspire One is still the better device for me and my requirements. It has a mechanical keyboard and a big enough hard drive, it runs Windows XP and Firefox customised for my needs. I can use nearly 30 years worth of heritage software including all the established industry standards. Apple have failed to come up with something that competes with such a netbook.

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I have written a number of articles on here telling the truth about what Chinese gold farmers are doing with the game Evony. What I wrote was the truth and is supported by massive evidence from elsewhere. They are just trying to bully me, for instance threatening to sue in Australia in order to make things as difficult as possible. And it is ironic that they try to use the legal system against me when they blatantly stole other people’s game mechanics and graphics in order to make Evony. Also I wonder if they are trying to be so heavy handed against the Guardian? And cheek of all cheeks they are trying to deny comment spamming this blog.

Here are the articles about Evony:

• Don’t play Evony.
• More about Evony.
• Is Evony malware?
• Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.
• Queen of Evony competition.

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The game Ashes Cricket 2009 is overall, all formats, number one in the UK, having removed Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort from that position. A great achievement. But as is so common in video games the people behind it don’t get the credit.

Justin Forrest is the key here. He played divisional cricket in South Africa, which is the equivalent of our county cricket. And he is a top game designer and external producer and was at Codies for 7 years, during the good days! He was the driving force behind Brian Lara ’05. Then he went to EA Canada for two and a half years and was responsible for their Cricket ’07. So Brian Lara Cricket ’07 was made by Codemasters without him.

But now he is back at Codemasters as we can all see with this great chart success.

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Sony have reduced the manufacturing cost of the PS3 by 70% according to Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony CEO and EVP: “The cost reduction since we introduced the PS3 is very substantial and this is on schedule. We don’t disclose how much of the PS3, specifically the cost deduction was achieved during the past two years.  But that is on schedule.” Pushed further he admitted:  “About 70%, roughly speaking,”

Obviously this gives Sony room for a price reduction and thus make the PS3 less uncompetitive.

The 70% reduction is nothing special here. Firstly Sony were forced to rip a lot out of the original machine, including hardware backwards compatibility, to reduce costs. Secondly Moores Law reduces semiconductor costs by half every two years. And thirdly the Bluray drive was new and expensive at PS3 launch, now it is a mass production part which must be costing them a tenth as much to make.

And the PS3 Slim is in production now.

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I just thought that I would share this great video with you. Very Minority Report. And a good example of a gesture interface used in gaming.

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So, as predicted, Sony have removed the UMD drive from the PSP and replaced it with 16 Gbytes of internal flash memory with the option of adding Memory Stick Micros. Content will be downloadable from the Playstation Network (PSN) and will include films, TV and games.

Online discuss has centred on the lack of a touch screen, lack of a second analogue nub and what looks like difficult ergonomics. So there isn’t really a wow factor out there.

It is ironic that Sony, who are championing physical content distribution using Blueray, have abandoned it with the PSP. Also this is another arrow in the back of high street game retail, who are becoming increasingly redundant. The writing is well and truly on the wall that their business model is on the way out.

What will make this device will be the available games. Developers and publishers don’t like PSP because of the immense piracy rate. For the PSP Go launch Sony have rustled up Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid and Jack and Daxter. A good start, but is it sustainable?

Personally I think that this is too little, too late. Just like the Zune HD. The world has moved on since these devices were thought up. Now an iPhone or an Android phone like the Samsung i7500 has these previous generation devices for breakfast.

And, also ironically, Sony, from a different division, have Android phones on the way. So the PSP Go is yet another example of the lack of joined up management at Sony. Their right hand doesn’t know what their left hand is doing.

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• Seven Hollywood studios including Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney have teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. iiNet is accused of doing little to stop its subscribers from sharing copyright works via BitTorrent. We are going to see a lot more of this if the film, music and gaming industries are going to survive. We are currently experiencing the biggest glut of stealing in the history of mankind and the ISPs are the only people who could possibly reduce it. It’s not nice to see that the Hollywood studios understand this better than the gaming industry.
• Microsoft fail in their attempt to reach a broader demographic. Lips just isn’t any good. Eurogamer give it 5 out of 10 because of flawed game play. There is no excuse for this, Nintendo have taught us just how polished games need to be these days.
• Oh the sweet serendipity of two widely diverse articles on here coming together. Ann Diamond is a z list celebrity who was paid by the Daily Mail to say how bad video games are. Now she is being paid by Popcap, a dynamic publisher, to say how good their games are. “PopCap is working with one of videogaming’s toughest critics to see if casual gaming can aid weight loss.” This is excellent marketing all round. Ann Diamond gets the chance to restore some credibility to her image whilst PopCap ride on her notoriety in this area.
• Future publishing is now worth only £30 million after reporting minisculey improved results. They are reaping what they sowed here with a disastrous historic lack of an internet strategy. Basically they didn’t see how chopping down trees as a communication medium would fall away so quickly. The new management are obviously correcting this but from a long way back. They should do it which makes these shares a bargain. Unless they get taken over first.
• Developer whinges that XNA game prices are too low. Maybe in comparison with boxed retail console games, but these are vastly overpriced. I don’t see how he can complain when he knew what he was getting into. If he doesn’t like the way XNA is run he can always develop for the iPod or nGage.
• Chris Lewis, VP of the Interactive Entertainment Business for Microsoft EMEA drops some  hints about the next generation (phoenix) and how important scaling is to Microsoft: “I think this generation will be longer, because there is so much scalability. When you look at NXE, that is a complete revision of the interface and the look and feel and every aspect of the system. That’s not predicated by new hardware. We have fundamentally done that through software and services. So if you think of that scalability and the opportunity to enhance and develop what we do with this platform, then I think it’s very, very possible–and indeed appropriate–that this generation will be longer. But we’re not specific about when that will happen, and we don’t have a particular timeline that we share right now.”
• The game addictiveness debate rumbles on, fuelled by Wrath of Lich King. We have to accept and allow for the fact that games can definitely be addictive. But that there are far worse addictions and vastly worse things in life. Dr Richard Graham, a child psychiatrist at London’s Tavistock Centre, told the BBC: “The problem with World of Warcraft is the degree it can impact and create a socially withdrawn figure who may be connecting with people in the game and is largely dropping out of education, social opportunities.” I don’t see anything massively wrong with people preferring to live a virtual reality, they are lucky to have the choice.
• Carphone Warehouse, a UK retailer, is giving away free PS3s with new phones. How the mighty have fallen. That Sony need to resort to this sort of marketing in peak season tells you exactly how well they are competing in the market.

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Plenty of them this year.

Surfer girl did an open letter, supposedly from John Riccitiello full of such delights as: “all physical products published by EA will see two editions, one that is free of advertisements and one that features advertisements, which will have $10 below the advertisement free edition.”

Bungie came up with this visual Halo 3 spoof.

ThinkGeek put a lot of work into this one. It involves a new Wii peripheral and a game called Super Pii Pii Brothers. Very well crafted, it took people in.

World of Warcraft coming to console with Molten Core is another that a lot of work went into and which some believed.

Microsoft put four seperate Xbox jokers into theirs. Once again very well crafted but less believable than some.

PS3 Addict photoshopped a CBR 600 motorcycle into Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Nicely done.

PSXExtreme have Sony launching a $150 PS3 with no BluRay drive.

GTA IV to feature masturbation and intercourse. Yep, sure.

There were more, but some have already been taken down, so the links above may not last too long.

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Will the tabloid newspapers ever grow up and realise that games are just another form of popular media? Judging by this story it seems to be unlikely to be any time soon. What we have is a casting website called StarNow which is used by all sorts of performers and their customers. It is also used by television and print media to find people for their stories.

So to anyone interested in games the following advert is a bit disturbing:

Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?

Listing no. 63806 – All regions, UK
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person. Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.

Payment details: paid role

Created: 27 March 2008
Applications accepted for at least another month
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK

So there you have it, a national newspaper will pay you hundreds of pounds if you help them stitch up the games industry. This is the standards of the British gutter press today. I can even have a good guess as to which newspaper this is.

Many thanks to willc for finding this.

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On November 29, at the Reuter’s Media Summit John Riccitiello said: “Is it ripe (for mergers), or has it already been picked? I would argue that it’s been largely picked.” So he was telling the world that consolidation in the video games industry was pretty much all done.

Then on December 2 Vivendi bought Activision. Which relegated EA to the position of number two global games publisher. And confirmed the trend that big global media companies need to be in gaming and are buying the industry out.

So on December 10 this blog asked the obvious question, who is going to buy Electronic Arts? Because it really does look like a juicy target for one of those massive media companies like News Corporation. How to acquire a powerful worldwide gaming presence in just one purchase. A typical Rupert Murdoch move.

Then on February 7 there were rumours that Viacom was going to buy Take 2 for $1.5 billion. Which made sense in the overall scheme of things. But it turned out to be so much hot air. Nevertheless, with these things there is rarely smoke without fire so Viacom were probably thinking about something.

If they were they have had a shock because on February 15 Electronic Arts put in a near $2 billion bid for Take Two. This was rejected so EA upped the bid slightly only to be rejected again. EA even have a special website to explain what they are doing. The proposed merger would bring the classical consolidation advantages of removing duplication, especially in sales, marketing and distribution. They would also be able to get rid of wasteful competition in sporting games. Best of all it would make EA the number one publisher again and make them so big that even the biggest predator would have to think twice before trying to gobble them up.

As the December 10 article here said: “The main way to remain independent is to rapidly become a lot bigger.” So, does John Riccitiello read this blog? 

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