He Gave Us Jetpacks

In so many ways, the future isn’t what it was meant to be. We are here, on the precipice of 2012, already years removed from the visions of Arthur C. Clarke.  We are here, more than 40 years removed from the last time man set foot somewhere other than Earth.  We are here, saddled with the debt of the prior century, stifled by the largesse of the past. We are here, facing a world moving more quickly, more discordant and fractured than ever before. We are here, doubting the fundamental integrity of our core societal institutions.

And yet we are here, carrying hundreds of times more computing power in our pockets than was relied upon to navigate from the Earth to the Moon.  We are here, able to access essentially the entire planet’s store of data by way of a device we can fit in our pockets. We are here, gazing into the penseives of knowledge we call displays, interacting with them using the very gestures innately developed over millions of years. We are here, able to speak to devices of man’s own artifice as naturally as we would with each other. We are here, able to fulfill mankind’s innate desire to create– anything, everything– more easily than at any other time in history. We are here, living in a world where our most prized possessions and our most valuable stores of knowledge travel with us through the air.  And we do all of these things by way of devices that exemplify man’s ability to create order and meaning from nothing more than chaos and base elements; to beat back, however temporarily, the relentless encroachment of entropy upon our universe.

Steve Jobs’s strength was not in technology for technology’s sake. He understood something that so many of Apple’s competitors will never truly comprehend: that faster and bigger don’t matter if a humanistic “better” isn’t the result. His strength was in taking the raw materials of progress and refining them into meaningful achievements: useful, beautiful devices infused with the very best of the human spirit. He made the future real– something that you and I can revel and wonder in, something often better than we could have ever imagined, something so effortless that that same sense of wonder can often fade to the background because things are so simply how they should be. The real magic isn’t that Steve Jobs delivered the very future promised and forgotten by so many others; it’s that he did so in a manner so elegant and well-considered that we forget that, before all this, we didn’t have jetpacks at all.  He made the future the present; a gift to us all. And he did it over and over again, for more than 30 years, by way of unquenchable curiosity, an indomitable spirit, and a restless desire to improve the world in which he lived.

Our charge is to bring to life those futures Steve didn’t have time to turn into the present. May we look to his example as a guide, and may we never allow the sense of wonder with which he imbued us all to recede into the darkness.

On HP's Touchpad

I got the chance to play with an HP Touchpad at Best Buy today for about a half-hour and wanted to share some of my thoughts about the experience.  I’ve been eager for many months to finally get my hands onto a WebOS tablet. After my experience, I will repeat what I have posited before and even go a step further: WebOS is certainly the most legitimate competing platform to iOS in the tablet space and, in some ways, has the potential to outdo even iPad.

Unfortunately, “potential” remains a key qualifier, but we’ll get to that in a bit.  First, I’d like to discuss what, to me, is perhaps the key usability battle in the tablet space, and the one in which WebOS is strongest: app switching.

Allowing only one app to run on screen at a time makes a great deal of sense for the tablet market for several reasons.  First, screen size, resolution and the need for fairly wide tap spaces for fingers would make it difficult to run multiple apps (and certainly more than two) on a tablet screen at a time.  If you need any proof of this, look toward the VNC apps out there and try to control your Mac or Windows PC purely by touch; it’s doable but not efficient.  

Secondly, running only one app on the screen at a time helps to cap the necessary resources to power a tablet experience. Running at most, say, one app actively, one music stream in the background and a few lightweight notification threads in the background is the constraint that allows tablet battery life to be so remarkably good on average, especially compared to laptops that are much larger.  Software is efficient and operating systems (or at least iOS) are cutthroat, prizing every kilobyte of RAM as if it were 1990.

                                                         Admit it: Your desktop isn’t any less crowded right now. 

Despite the logic, full-screen apps aren’t how most people are used to working with a computer.  The idea of having a browser window, chat window, Word document and Twitterstream going on the same screen on a Mac or PC is commonplace; on a tablet it’s almost heretical.  Because of this, app switching is an incredibly important part of the tablet experience; people need to be able to get in and out of the apps they’re using quickly and accurately.

In iOS, users select apps by tapping on one of the icons on the home screen, known as the Springboard.  Up to six of these icons may be placed on the dock at the bottom of the screen. All others are stored above; the user can swipe back and forth to browse their collection of apps 16 at a time. Folders can also be used to help categorize things, and expand to reveal their enclosed apps when tapped on, each capable of holding a dozen apps of their own.  

iOS 4 introduced multitasking, whereby a new, underlying set of app icons appears when double-tapping the home button; these represent active applications. With iOS 5 comes 4-finger gestures.  A pinching motion will close out to the Springboard while swiping left or right will jump immediately into other apps. However, this method is flawed in that there’s no way for the user to reorder the apps that are brought up by swipes.  Rather, they appear in reverse-order of how they were opened.  This can often be problematic.  

For example, say you’re browsing the web and realize your Wi-Fi connection is acting up, so you jump to Settings before going to Mail as you initially planned.  You wanted to reference an email and a website, but now you have to wade through the Settings screen to get between Mail and Safari unless you once more leave Mail manually and reopen the browser.  This may be the epitome of a first world problem, but it’s also a serious issue for iOS because it breaks the magic of the system, if only for a fleeting moment.

Compare this to the WebOS, card-based system.  Once again, a dock exists at the bottom where popular icons can be stored.  To the right side of this dock exists a “more” button, in which all other apps are hidden.  They are categorized by tabs into Settings, Favorites and All Applications.  This leaves the default screen largely empty, leaving a hole where iOS would simply put more icons.  It’s in this newly-liberated area that the WebOS card system takes hold.  WebOS shows active previews of each active application and allows users to swipe between them, like they might with a deck of cards. To quit an application, one merely swipes up on the card, spinning it out into the universe.  To enter an application, a tap will bring it to full screen.  To return to the deck of cards, one swipes up from the bottom of the screen while in an application.

This is old news to anyone that’s used a WebOS device like the Pre or Pixi but is a revelation for the tablet market.  WebOS relies– correctly– on a visual model of navigation, rather than the mental model required for the iPad.  With WebOS, you’re looking at slightly-smaller versions of the screens you wish to choose from.  With iOS, you’re either get no visual cue (four-finger swipe) or can only navigate based on recalling which icon represents the content you’re trying to view.  This can be surprisingly problematic.  For example, let’s say that you were reading a PDF document this morning but played a few games since then.  You remember only that it was a PDF and what it looked like, without being able to recall how you received the document.  Were you viewing it in Mail or in Safari? Perhaps it had been imported into iBooks already, or you were previewing it in Dropbox?  With WebOS, you see the document, you tap it, you’re back in business. With iOS, it might take a while to figure out where you were at last.

The card system is absolutely, as I’ve hoped for quite some time, a better solution than the icon-based navigation offered by Apple, especially on a 9.7” screen.  WebOS loses some of its advantage on smaller screens, where an icon might be an easier visual cue than a 2 inch version of a full page document.  But in the tablet space, I have no doubt that the WebOS implementation is superior, especially given its speed of execution.

However– and this is the heartbreaking part– the Touchpad itself is simply not a good device at the moment.  It feels sturdy in the hand and not too heavy, although I did notice an almost anti-gravity type experience when picking up an iPad 2 right after holding a Touchpad for a half-hour.  The hardware is generally not an issue.  But the software remains critically broken in many places once the user leaves the excellent navigation area.

Many are small issues in the greater scheme of things: I had some difficulty connecting to Wi-Fi at first, the Bing Map software was fussy about my location and provided uninformative error messages and the spellcheck is woefully lacking, missing simple things like contractions (cant to can’t, wont to won’t, etc).  But the greatest issue is the screeching halt that the Touchpad will often come to when performing the simplest of tasks.  For example, switching from landscape to portrait mode took over ten seconds while loading DaringFireball.net, an exceptionally lightweight website.  The mail client took a good 3-5 seconds to boot up for the first time.  Resizing window panes in mail (another neat UI technique similar to Twitter on iPad) would trigger at least a split-second wait time and again.

These sort of issues are simply unacceptable and were never present on the iPad, even on day one. What’s both good and bad about these issues is that they’re so blindingly obvious– and the performance of the hardware so incredibly good in spurts– that it simply must be the software to blame, and not a lack of horsepower from its 1.2GHz, dual-core Snapdragon processor or 1GB of RAM.  This means that the issues can– and probably will– be fixed in short order.  But it raises the question of why they didn’t wait to launch it until the 1.0.1 patch was already in place.  In a way, I’m afraid that HP has squandered the opportunity to immediately leap into second-place for overall quality in the tablet space because they didn’t want to delay the Touchpad anymore.

Aside from performance, the lack of a solid music or movie store on the device certainly doesn’t help matters, and for the platform to launch with only 300 or so apps on the day the iPad surpassed 100,000 is challenging, to say the least.  But these issues can be resolved.  The app catalog will take care of itself if HP can solve improve performance and garner hardware sales, and Amazon’s MP3 Store would feel right at home here.  Indeed, the only glaring issue is the maturity of the platform.

Speed must improve, and not merely on the next Touchpad but on this Touchpad.   Truly competitive platforms can’t survive on the promise of the next iteration, because Apple will simply leapfrog them again.  The Touchpad must be brought up to, or close to, parity with the iPad 2 in terms of performance before a Touchpad 2 or iPad 3 ship, period.  As it stands, the Touchpad shows us two things: how very excellent WebOS can be as a tablet OS, and how very far ahead of everyone else Apple truly remains.

The Next-Gen Portable Wars

Tomorrow, Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, will be giving the keynote address here at GDC. While the headline indicates that his address will focus on the past 25 years in the gaming industry, he's also expected to dedicate a significant portion of his time to the Nintendo 3DS, which launched last week in Japan and will be launching near the end of March in the United States. Shortly after Iwata's address, Sony will hold a session to share more details about the NGP, their code-name for the next generation PlayStation Portable platform. The NGP lacks the stereoscopic screen that the 3DS boasts, but is a vastly more powerful portable unit based on the new A9 ARM chipset and a powerful array of features that effectively puts it on par with Sony's home console, the PlayStation 3.

Yet both of these sessions will almost certainly be lost on the general public, because of the uninvited guest that also decided to set up shop near the Moscone Center on Wednesday. The Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts has been transformed, as so often in the past, into a stage for a new Apple media event, widely expected to focus on the second generation of the iPad.

iPad 2 is not expected to have a "Retina" quality display, which would require a jump in screen resolution from 1024x768 to an unheard-of (in a 10" form factor) 2048x1536. It is to be driven by a more powerful processor, based on the same A9 chipset found in Sony's NGP and will double the amount of on-board RAM to 512MB. iPad 2 will likely have a better on-board speaker, a sleeker and lighter case design and battery life at least on par with its predecessor. And while Apple may shy away from assertions that they are actively competing in the portable gaming market, setting up a media event for a new portable platform across the street mere hours after Nintendo and Sony hold events to discuss their new portables says otherwise.

Nintendo and Sony have both seen the threat posed by Apple and are attempting to respond to it with their latest portables. Nintendo turned to the same philosophy that served them so well with the Wii by centering their new portable around a stereoscopic screen, something that forces developers to create exclusive content (or at least highly adapted content) for the 3DS and provides a unique selling point not offered by any current competitor. They also stuck with the dual-screen design that set the original DS apart in order to ensure backwards compatibility and to allow for the benefits of a touchscreen display, something very difficult to accomplish with just a stereoscopic screen currently.

The 3DS also features a number of multifunction capabilities; a web browser will be launching in May, and users meanwhile can purchase games from the Virtual Console, take notes in a simple note application, chat with friends and other simple features. These can even be accomplished by simply suspending a game session, rather than quitting out of it entirely, allowing users to reenter their game after completing a task. Battery life for the platform is, however, disappointing, often registering as low as three or four hours depending on

Nintendo priced the 3DS at $249, even though many had expected it to come in at $299 or higher. This is no mistake; Apple's entry model iPod Touch also retails for $249 and is the most direct competitor the company offers to today's portable gaming platforms.

Sony also took a similar path to their home console strategy when creating the NGP. Sony set out to build the most powerful portable, bar none, and built in a dizzying array of complementary features. The system includes touch functionality on both the front and back, every wireless antenna this side of CB radio and a chipset that allows developers to truly recreate console experiences in a portable environment. However, Sony has yet to discuss pricing or battery life, which is a bad sign. Jokes that the NGP won't be priced at $599 like the PS3 was initially have not helped to reassure gamers that it will be an affordable proposition.

This leave Apple in an enviable position. Despite the efforts from Sony and Nintendo to make their new portables even more multifunction friendly, there's no doubt that they are to their core gaming machines. The iPod Touch and other iOS devices, on the other hand, elude such categorization. Today's iOS devices are media players, web browsers, SMS communicators and home to a staggering array of apps encompassing every software category imaginable. This includes gaming. iOS users have proven particularly receptive to quick and casual gaming experiences, be it Flight Control, Angry Birds, We Rule, one of Smule's music games or others.

The fact is, to many consumers, and especially to the parents of children that play games, the iPod Touch represents a better value than traditional portable gaming platforms. It allows them to effectively kill several birds with one stone, letting kids tap into their music and video libraries while also enjoying games. iPod Touch is also smaller and has better battery life than its gaming-dedicated competitors. The same holds true on the iPhone for older customers, who can bear the burden of monthly service plans. The iPad holds an odd position as a gaming device. It can be a multiplayer-oriented experience more akin to a home console or a very large personal gaming device. For older customers, though, this can be alright; they're used to lugging much heavier devices or portfolios around for their work or studies and can now accomplish those on iPad before enjoying it as a gaming platform as an added bonus.

iPhone and iPod Touch are more likely than the 3DS or NGP to win in another critical, but often overlooked, element of real-world play: the Pocket Wars. People simply have a limited amount of space in their pockets. Normal folks have to make room for a wallet, their keys, perhaps some change and a pen, a pair of earphones, etc. Carrying a 3DS or a NGP is a difficult proposition in a pocket and, at best, certainly requires a pocket all to itself. This requires that users carry their cell phone, if they have one, in another pocket, and pockets are in short supply. This simple, practical concern may serve to detract many customers who have to make a decision between one platform or several. After all, if they don't have room to carry around their gaming system, then their ability to enjoy that system is constrained to when they carry an additional bag or when they are at home, and good be enjoying a true console experience.

From a graphical point of view, Infinity Blade has shown that modern iOS devices can hold their own. Powered by the Unreal Engine, Infinity Blade shows that an immersive 3D environment can be created on iOS devices, and allows iOS devices to hold their own when compared to at least the current PSP.

From a distribution perspective, the App Store model has some downside in that users are limited to the onboard storage of their device rather than being able to carry an unlimited number of separate game cards with them. However, the instantly-available nature of any App Store content is clearly more convenient (and more prone to impulse buying) than the traditional model of a game-in-a-box, requiring a trip to the store.

Perhaps the most critical element, though, comes back to pricing. While the 3DS and the iPod Touch are identically priced (with the NGP likely being priced at least a little above that range), the difference between game prices is cavernous. 3DS games are slated to be priced at $35-$45 each, and NGP games will likely fall in a similar range. Compare this to Angry Birds, which is offered at full price for $4.99, and often on sale for as little as 99¢. The fact that a gamer can purchase Angry Birds and six other similar games for the same price as one 3DS game cannot be overlooked.

This sort of devaluation is a tremendous issue for Nintendo and Sony to overcome. Nintendo's Virtual Console and Sony's "Mini" game entries are meant to compete with this, offering many titles for a more reasonable $5-$15. But even the most tremendous gaming experiences available on the App Store fall into this range. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, for example, sold for $30-$40 on the Nintendo DS and PSP, but for only $10 on the App Store upon its introduction.

The reality is that Nintendo and Sony will likely have a difficult time when trying to compete with Apple for the casual and mainstream gaming audience. We suspect that both new portables will more likely fall into the sales model of the original PSP, catering toward a more dedicated gamer audience willing to pay a premium and invest the time and attention necessary for a gaming-specific platform. It's not that the market for gaming-specific portables has vanished in the face of Apple's competitive offerings. Rather, we simply believe that attracting mainstream customers will be increasingly difficult as Apple and others offer devices capable of gaming as a feature, rather than as a focus, while offering a quality of experience almost as good as that found on dedicated devices at a higher price.

Welcome.

Since 2009, MegatonApps has been pushing the definition of mobile applications, helping companies and consumers around the world understand the potential that today’s pocket devices truly hold.  Yet for much of the decade prior to Megaton’s inception, founders Casey Ayers and Sean O’Neill worked together to redefine media coverage of technology and video games.  Beginning with this year’s Game Developers Conference, they will be reclaiming the legacy of unique insight and analysis that has served them so well as the founders of MegatonApps.

Welcome to The Megaton Review.  This site will serve as the home of a new type of content about mobile applications, gaming and technology.  Casey and Sean will be sharing their thoughts on a wide variety of topics, covering products and events from the unique angle that only their eclectic backgrounds can provide.  Don’t expect classically styled reviews of games or apps here. Expect to see strategic industry analyses, coverage of the serious games industry, thought pieces on usability and interface choices and much more.  Furthermore, while The Megaton Review is certainly related to MegatonApps, we pledge not to abuse your trust. If we cover something we’ve made, a competing product or anything else that would represent an ethical quandary, you’ll see a disclaimer attached.  We want to discuss topics of interest not well covered elsewhere, not use The Megaton Review as a purely promotional vehicle.

There’s no better launching point for such a venture than GDC, a conference famous for exploring the kind of topics that The Megaton Review intends to cover.  You’ll see a few updates here during the conference next week, but expect to see more detailed pieces the week after, once we’ve had time to contemplate the higher meaning of the week’s developments.  We’re glad to have you with us.