How iPhone 3G S’s Better Graphics Complicate Matters for Developers and iPhone Owners

I’ve had several computers that were less powerful than the iPhone 3G S. My Intel 486 machine was bleeding-edge at the time, but could not compare to the ones like my 300-MHz Pentium powered PC that I owned just a few years down the pike. iPhone owners will soon experience a similar phenomenon, and some apps in the App Store will be off limits to anyone that doesn’t have the latest Apple hardware.

The iPhone 3G S has a 600MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM (my family’s Commodore 128′s clock speed was about 4 MHz, and it had 128KB of memory). The graphics processor in the 3G S is the PowerVR SGX (same as the Palm Pre) that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics–meaning, it would blow my old desktop PCs out of the water.

The iPhone 3G only supports version 1.1 of the OpenGL ES specification. It’s possible to write an iPhone app that provides basic graphics on an iPhone 3G and better ones on an iPhone 3G S, but many developers may not bother. That means owners of the iPhone 3G will not be able to run applications and games with souped-up graphics. An increasing number of applications will be off limits, essentially being roped off into a VIP section of the App Store. How that will affect application development is an open question.

My take is that developers will need to decide which version of the iPhone they will be targeting. With Apple offering the iPhone 3G for $99, its market share will ostensibly increase–especially if Apple opens up to another domestic carrier in the U.S. Developers have finite resources, and will have to pick one or the other.

Consequently, there may not be many advanced games available for the 3GS  for some time. Over time, the number of 3G S owners will hit a critical mass, and developers will target it more often. If I was buying the 3G S simply so that I could play more advanced games, I wouldn’t be in a rush to get one.

Despite Piracy, The Sims 3′s Doing Fine

Given the chance, the games industry will whine ad nauseum about the evils of software piracy, but the recent success of The Sims 3 shows that illegal downloading isn’t necessarily bad for business.

Electronic Arts is boasting that The Sims 3 is a hit, with 1.4 million units sold in the first week alone. That’s the biggest PC game launch in EA’s history.

The company doesn’t break from its victory cry to acknowledge that 180,000 people illegally downloaded The Sims 3 a few weeks ago, after it leaked to BitTorrent sites. The piracy statistics, cited by Bloomberg, come from BigChampagne, a company that monitors file sharing. I’ve contacted the company in search of up-to-date statistics. (Got ‘em. See below.)

Even if illegal downloads of the game increased significantly since the end of May, it hardly seems that the leak dampened legitimate sales.

Why not? There are a couple possible explanations. First, there’s no demo for The Sims 3, so piracy could in some cases amount to taking the game for a test drive. Pair this with EA’s claims to Bloomberg that the leak is a “buggy, pre-final build” of the game, and there’s even more reason for downloaders to get the real thing. Also, there will always be a group of people who don’t want or can’t afford to pay for the game anyway. Neither of these scenarios can be justified legally, but they also don’t support the tired claim that every pirated download constitutes a lost sale.

And isn’t BitTorrent somewhat of  a niche anyway? The Sims 3′s appeal expands far beyond the tech-savvy Internet users who know their cracking software, and its online community features make a legitimate copy preferable.

I understand the games industry’s plight. It’s a shame that not everyone pays for their PC games, when legally they should. But perhaps instead of complaining that people aren’t buying software, publishers should study the people that do and look at why The Sims 3 earned their $50.

Update: Just got the latest stats from BigChampagne. The Sims 3, the leaked version, has been downloaded more than 700,000 times per week over the last few weeks, totalling 2.21 million downloads as of June 9.

Wait for iPhone OS 3.0? Fuhgettaboudit.

While Apple officially has set the public release date for iPhone OS 3.0 for next week, not surprisingly it has found its way onto The Pirate Bay. Weighing in at a hefty 230MB, from what we understand 7A341 is the build that was being provided to WWDC attendees.

The upgrade requires iTunes 8.2. In addition, there is talk that it locks your phone into some type of developer mode. Essentially, this means there would be no going back to a previous version of the OS software other than this: so far that has not been confirmed.

Yes, Original iPhone Owners, I Am Sympathetic

Wow. My post contending that AT&T’s upgrade pricing for iPhone 3G owners who want to buy an iPhone 3G S is fair has prompted dozens of comments, pro and con. Some of the feedback is from people who bought the original iPhone, which reminds me that they’re in an entirely different situation than 3G owners like me.

The first iPhone was sold under unique and unreasonable policies: The first folks who bought it paid the extremely unsubsidized price of $599, yet were required to sign up for a two-year AT&T contract, just as if they’d gotten a price break. That’s one of the most consumer-unfriendly moves in the history of the cell phone business, which is saying something.

AT&T did at least acknowledge the unique situation by letting owners of first-generation iPhones buy the 3G at the fully-subsidized price. But the fact that those folks were under any contractual obligation to AT&T at all remains pretty darn ridiculous.

It’s one of a number of examples of policies relating to the iPhone being less reasonable than those for garden-variety phones. Another one: I’ve repeatedly bought cell phones from AT&T at unsubsidized prices and found that the company would cheerfully unlock them for me. But it took months before it offered a contract-free iPhone at all, and as far as I know, there are no circumstances under which it will unlock an iPhone for you.

The iPhone is an exceptional product–probably the most important cell phone in the history of cell phones, and an amazing gadget in spite of some significant flaws. But at the end of the day, it’s just a phone. And carrier policies relating to it should be the same as for any other phone they sell.

No Specs Please, We’re Apple

My friend and former colleague Jason Snell, editorial director of Macworld, has a good piece up on the fact that Apple isn’t saying much about just how it made the iPhone 3G S faster–the list of tech specs for the new phone doesn’t disclose its CPU or how much RAM it has, which are probably the two most important aspects of its hardware when it comes to determining how speedy it’ll be.

Apple’s disinterest in talking about the iPhone hardware’s technical details was striking at Monday’s WWDC keynote. When Phil Schiller announced the phone, he said it was really fast and quoted some benchmarks of its improvement in speed compared to the iPhone 3G–and left it at that. If there was ever an assemblage of people who’d be interested in the nitty-gritty of the 3G S’s performance boost, it was the developers in that room: A faster chip and more RAM (which the 3G S surely has) makes the phone a better platform for sophisticated third-party apps. But Apple wants people to focus on what the iPhone can do, not how it does it.

Of course, Apple is willing to talk about its engineering when it suits the company’s purposes–I don’t know of any other computer company that would spend so much time explaining the manufacturing process for its notebook cases, for instance. But manufacturing processes don’t involve numbers, and I think it’s numbers that Apple prefers to avoid dwelling on.

On some levels, I get Apple’s thinking here. I’ve written that tech specs are simply less important than they use to be: It would be a lousy idea to buy (or avoid) the iPhone 3G S based on its clockspeed or the amount of RAM it contains, and neither spec can be reliably used to judge how the iPhone compares to other phones. I’m not sure if Apple’s approach is any less satisfactory than that of tech companies who only know how to speak in spec-ese, and who forget to explain why a normal person should care.

But…

Apple products are, for the most part, bought by adults. Some of those adults are passionate about technology, and want to have a deep understanding of how the products they buy work. We already know that the iPhone 3G contains 128MB of RAM, which is on the tight side; if the 3G S has 256MB of RAM, that’s relevant information. So are basic facts about the processor, if it helps speed up the iPhone experience.

As Jason notes, third parties will break open iPhone 3G S units as soon as they get their hands on them, so we’ll know the phone’s technical vitals soon enough. Which is just one more reason why I wish Apple disclosed this information. It’s got customers who’d like to know; the info can help them understand Apple products better; trade secrets are not involved. Telling those who care to know what’s inside the iPhone would be a nice confirmation that Apple respects the intelligence of its customers.

Pay As You Go Mobile Broadband a Reality

Nothing beats mobile broadband on your laptop. While yes the size of the iPhone is nice, sometimes you need a full computer to do some of those more intensive tasks. Virgin Mobile is set out to make that a lot easier.

The carrier will begin selling a USB dongle produced by Novatel Wireless later this month for $149.99, but the best part about it is there’s no monthly fee or contract. Users will buy refill cards for the service much like they do for a prepaid phone.

Instead of minutes, the prepaid cards would be sold in denominations of megabytes. The cheapest card would be 100MB for $10, although it would also expire in 10 days.

All the rest of the denominations would expire within 30 days, and include a 250MB card for $20, a 600MB card for $40, and a 1GB card for $60. While yes, you can get 5GB of data for $60 through other carriers, you have that pesky contract to worry about.

Virgin’s broadband plan seems to make sense for occassional users. I would venture to guess there could be a potentially large untapped market here. Really, mobile broadband only makes sense for business right now due to its prohibitive price.

Some seem to be complaining over the short expiration periods. While I tend to agree, at the same time I see Virgin’s desire to attempt to make this as stready of a revenue stream as possible.

Either way, it’s a start, no?

5Words for Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Ready to partake in news?

Mozilla Gives Firefox Extension Collections.

New iPhone is smudge-resistant.

Caterina Fake’s Hunch launches Monday.

Google Search Box for Macs.

Virgin’s contract-free wireless broadband.

Great Mac, iPhone apps honored.

Last-generation MacBooks: cheap cheap!

Facebook to Implement User Names

Facebook announced today that user names will become available at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13. Save the time and date: Legions of homebodies with nothing better to do will be the first in line for the land grab.

If someone wants to find out what I’m up to on Facebook, they have to log in and search for me unless they know the random string of numbers that represents me. Whereas Twitter already has easy to remember user names that people can type into their browser (I’m twitter.com/dcworthington).

This is a welcome improvement, and it complements Facebook’s strategy of focusing more on its users’ stream of events. I’m equally happy that it still requires people to use their full names when they register for an account. That protection adds a measure of trust, which many be one of the reasons why I am not spammed on Facebook. I get spammed on Twitter, and now to a lesser extent, Myspace. Adding user names is that latest of many smart decisions Facebook has made to evolve itself.

How Soon is Too Soon in Video Games?

Not everyone is happy that Valve is making a sequel to its hit zombie apocalypse shooter Left 4 Dead.

A growing number of gamers are boycotting Left 4 Dead 2, not because it portrays zombies in a stereotypical fashion or anything, but because the game’s holiday release date comes only one year after the original game. “The release of Left 4 Dead 2 as a stand-alone sequel will split the communities and decrease the quality of multiplayer gaming,” says the protest’s Web page, arguing that the additional content should be released as part of the first game.

Similar issues have come up before, but in opposite circumstances. When Capcom announced a separate, $5 versus mode for the blockbuster Resident Evil 5, it felt like a cheap attempt to wring more money out of players. Increasingly, publishers announce paid downloadable content before or just after the game itself is released, leading players to wonder why the material wasn’t included to begin with.

To my knowledge, this is the first time an entire retail game stands accused of coming too soon.

Indeed, one year isn’t a lot of time between iterations of a franchise, especially for a game with virtually no plot and fairly homogeneous challenges (“don’t get killed” is the overarching goal). But how much distance does a game developer need before building a sequel, and how different must the game be to justify it in the first place?

The answer — despite players with a wide range of needs and expectations — is “not much” and “not very.” Personally, I’d be happy with a 10-year hiatus for played-out properties such as Mario, Zelda and Halo, but for the overwhelming majority, sequels couldn’t come fast enough.

That’s why Valve will never give in to this Left 4 Dead 2 boycott. The 20,000-plus protesters may seem like a threat, but the original game has sold well over 2.5 million copies at retail alone, not including online sales through Steam, Valve’s PC download channel. The market decides how soon is too soon in video games, and I get the feeling Valve knows exactly what it’s doing.

AT&T’s Network Problems Aren’t Just in Big Cities Anymore

The AT&T hate is strong these days, especially following the carrier’s inability to deliver two of the most highly anticipated features to the single largest iPhone market in the world. But now even I am beginning to hate AT&T, and I still unfortunately have 16 more months to deal with these folks.

I’ve been hearing a lot of reports from people about network quality issues. I never experienced them, and I guessed it had something to do with the fact that I live in a relatively small market.

That’s no longer the case. In the past few weeks, I am noticing increasingly degraded service. I watch as my phone signal flails around, losing data connectivity or becomes so sluggish its unusable. Call drops have also become increasingly numerous — before late May I may have dropped one or two calls in six months.

I’m also having problems where people are calling me and the calls are going directly to voicemail, even if I have service. The only way I know somebody was trying to reach me is a seemingly phantom voicemail notification.

So my question for our rural readers: are you seeing these problems creep into your neighborhoods? I’m quite curious.

AT&T is apparently being brought to its knees by the iPhone, and can’t keep up. It is also becoming the single strongest argument to end the company’s exclusive grip on the device. Problems like this are not the Apple way.

Looking across the Web, its becoming clear that consumers ire for AT&T is now being transferred to Apple. While this may not necessarily be fair, it was bound to happen. It is now the company’s responsibility to demand results from the carrier or move on.

I am actually hoping that T-Mobile makes a move to get the device. Personally, I think that carrier would have been a better fit for Apple if it would have had a decent network: AT&T was more a marriage of convenience and necessity.

Apple, please listen. It’s time to move on.

Last Call: Got Any Questions for AMD?

Technologizer is launching a series in which we’ll let readers pose questions to tech companies, and AMD was nice enough to volunteer to be the first organization to field your queries. Got any questions about the company, its products, the chip industry, or tech in general? Ask away in comments on this post by the end of day on Wednesday. Then look for AMD’s answers soon.

Microsofties: There is No Hypocrisy

(Note: Yes, it’s Tuesday, but I thought I’d give you a break from Apple news, so here’s this week’s column.)

Apparently WWDC has rattled some feathers in the Windows community. Apple is on the move, and its clear even in this recessionary environment consumers are still buying Macs.

The MacBook realignment was to be expected, and to bring system value back. I’m no fan of the way Apple releases new systems for this reason. Towards the end of the product cycle, the systems lose value because the internals do not change while the rest of the industry is continuously updating.

But that’s not what has the friends of Redmond upset.

Microsoft was mentioned during the keynote, especially surrounding the release of Windows 7. This is what whipped the Microsofties up into a near frenzy.

It appears the beef is this: Apple software chief Bertrand Serlet makes a comment saying Windows 7 is essentially the second coming of Vista.  This is leading into his discussion of how Snow Leopard has made development easier, while Windows development remains unnecessarily complex.

After all, this was a development conference, correct?

Let’s summarize. Apple is apparently hypocritical because Snow Leopard is the second coming of Leopard. Somehow, the Microsofties would have you believe that Apple sprung this on us without us knowing. But there’s one problem with that — we’ve known this for over a year now.

Continue reading this story…

Google Syncs Google Apps With Outloook

I’m at a Google Apps press event at San Francisco’s Clift hotel, where Google execs are talking up Google Apps as a Microsoft Office alternative for big companies. They’re bragging about their productivity apps (one rep just said that Gmail is the world’s best e-mail app, period) and touting large companies that have deployed Apps to thousands of users. But the morning’s big news involves something Google is doing to help companies keep on using part of Office–namely Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. It’s a piece of software that lets companies stop using Microsoft’s Exchange Server, but keep on allowing users to run Outlook. As the name suggests, it does so by letting Outlook sync with Google Apps. (It runs on Windows and is now included with the for-pay Premier and educational versions of Google Apps.)

Why would anyone want to keep using Outlook if Gmail is so great? Representatives from big Google Apps customers such as Genentech are here at the event, and they’re saying that some users within their organizations are simply comfortable with Outlook and have no desire to give it up. Apps Sync lets them continue to wrangle e-mail and calendaring in Outlook, and silently syncs messages, folders, appointments, and other data to and from the cloud, so it’s available within both Outlook and Google Apps services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. Companies also get access to all the other features and services that Apps makes possible, such as push Gmail for BlackBerry phones.

Google’s move here is an interesting reflection of the real world, which is one in which Microsoft Office is an undeniable fact of life. I like Google Apps–hey, I’m a customer myself–but think Google has a major challenge ahead of it if it’s trying to lure a meaningful percentage of the world’s companies away from Office. (The company won’t disclose how many paying users Apps has.) Living with Office rather than trying to utterly replace it makes a lot of sense.

5Words for Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Tech news–Apple and otherwise:

More lack of iPhone sympathy.

Buy iPhone? Wait for Verizon?

The iPhone’s new processor: secret!

A look at Safari 4.

Going to Borneo? Don’t Twitter.

T-Mobile: Yes, we were hacked.

Did Pleo just get rescued?

Nokia’s N97 goes on sale.

Are the Webby Awards obsolete?

Is the new MacBook expensive?

Can Qik Go Legit on the iPhone?

Here’s another question I have as I ruminate on Monday’s WWDC news: Will the fact that the iPhone 3G S has a video camera and Apple is touting video streaming as a major iPhone OS 3.0 feature mean that we’ll finally get an official release of Qik’s nifty videostreaming application on the iPhone App Store? It’s been available on the iPhone for months, but only for jailbroken phones, since Apple hasn’t permitted the camera on the original and 3G models to capture video.

I’m not sure why the iPhone 3G S wouldn’t be Qik-friendly–Apple said today that there will be an API that will allow third-party developers to write apps that make use of the video camera. And while all the examples that Apple has given of streaming video involve stuff coming into the iPhone, the fact that carriers are comfortable with the idea might mean they’d be comfortable with Qik, too. (I don’t think Qik stands much chance of bringing even AT&T’s fragile network to its knees–it’ll likely never be used by as many people as apps for consuming streaming video will be.)

None of which means that the new iPhone hardware and software will make an App Store release of Qik available, of course. We’ll see.

In related news, Qik is announcing today that Qik will ship on all of Nokia’s Symbian S60 phones, starting with the soon-to-be-released N97. Score one for the N97, especially if there’s no good news about Qik on the iPhone in the immediate future…

Sorry, iPhone 3G Owners, I’m Not Sympathetic

If you ask Apple or AT&T how much the iPhone 3G S costs, they’ll emphasize two prices: $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB one, as Apple does here. It’s only in the fine print and disclaimers that they’ll explain that only new customers and those who aren’t on a contract (or nearing the end of one, at least) qualify for those deals. Which means that all of us who bought AT&T iPhone 3Gs upon their release a little under a year ago don’t qualify–we’ll pay $399 for the 16GB model or $499 for the 32GB one, assuming we’re willing to extend our contracts for another two years. Which still represents a discount off the no-commitment pricing: $599 for 16GB and $699 for 32GB.

Some folks are irate at this turn of events, arguing that the pricing punishes loyal AT&T customers. Nope. What it does is prevent customers who got a steep discount on an iPhone a year ago in return for signing up for a two-year contract to get an equally steep discount this year for signing up for another two-year contract. Which strikes me as perfectly reasonable, given that this scenario involves you only being under contract to AT&T for a total of three years. You can still get a discount on a new iPhone–just not one that’s as steep as someone who commits to AT&T for a total of four years.

Come to think of it, the math is perfectly logical: You get a total of $400 in discounts (on one phone) for two years of commitment, $600 in discounts (on two phones) for three years of commitment, and $800 in discounts (on two phones) for four years of commitment. That’s a $200 discount per year of contract you fulfill.

(Why doesn’t AT&T let iPhone 3G owners get a $199 iPhone 3G S today in return for agreeing to fulfill their original two-year contract and extend it for an additional two years? I’m not sure. But I’m wary of long-term commitments to any wireless character, and therefore wouldn’t endorse a scenario which involves agreeing to marry AT&T until at least 2012 in order to get a discount on a phone.)

If there’s a problem here, it’s the way phones are usually sold in America, via subsidies that encourage us to think that phones cost less than they really do, and which tie us up with a carrier and prevent us from moving a phone we’ve bought to another carrier (even temporarily, when we’re overseas). A top-of-the-line iPhone really costs $699, which is not a crazy price given its capabilities; it’s just that very few of us ever pay that price or even realize it exists. We’re conditioned to think of those subsidized prices as the prices, in part because phone manufacturers and carriers stress them above all else.

So no, I’m not that sympathetic towards iPhone 3G owners who want AT&T to sell them the iPhone 3G S at the same sweetheart price as someone who didn’t buy an iPhone 3G last year. You agreed to fulfill a two-year contract with AT&T in return for the discount you got last year. AT&T is willing to renegotiate it and give you a proportionate discount on a 3G in return for another year of commitment. Explain to me again what’s offensive about that?