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Monday, December 27, 2010

GigaOM (3 сообщения)

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How Apple Should Protect the App Gap
Apple’s iOS App Store offers one thing its competitors don’t: significantly more high quality paid and free apps. The company can hold on to that advantage by paying attention to what changes would make the most difference to developers and app users alike. Here’s how it can make sure it stays ahead of latecomers like Android and RIM.

Make More Private APIs Public

Apple is pretty good about eventually letting developers have access to many APIs it originally reserved as private. Releasing these features allows developers to do new and exciting things with every major iOS iteration, and helps provide upgrade incentive by associating the new features with new hardware, even if it doesn’t necessarily require it.

If Apple wants to stay competitive, it should consider making more of these available earlier, rather than holding some back for internal use only. It’ll ensure consumers and developers stay interested, and don’t flee to Android, where access isn’t so closely guarded. In particular, providing access to hardware-button-functionality customization would make for some very interesting apps, but Apple isn’t likely to let go of that one, since it could potentially confuse more casual users of the iPhone platform. Other restriction relaxations should be much easier for Cupertino, however.

Allow Persistent Sign-Ins for Facebook/Twitter

Rumors of Apple working with Facebook to bake the social network right into the OS have been around almost as long as the iPhone itself, and yet it hasn’t happened. Putting a basic ability to sign into Facebook and Twitter account directly into the OS as a native feature would eliminate a lot of repetition from the user experience, and make it easier to share mobile content across iOS apps. Apple should be doing everything it can to court these two, and especially Facebook, with its growing influence among third-party developers.

Expand Multitasking

Like Steve Jobs, I’m not sure true multitasking really is necessary on a smartphone, but I do think the iPhone doesn’t go quite far enough when it comes to running multiple apps at once. The services it provides are a nice start, but there’s so much more it could offer.

Pastebot’s story is a perfect example. Because the app doesn’t fit any of the implementations Apple allowed for multitasking in iOS 4.0, it feels incomplete, especially now that other apps like Pandora and Google Latitude are allowed to run their primary functions in the background. Hopefully, as the OS becomes more resource-efficient, and hardware gets more powerful, we’ll see Apple introduce many more times of background capabilities for third-party apps.

Learn From Competitors

It isn’t really the company’s style, but Apple should be trying to adopt some of the better features introduced by its competitors. Better multitasking and more public APIs are two examples, but other things like Android’s widgets have a lot of promise on any mobile computing platform. Coupled with the audience iOS enjoys, which seems more willing to part with money than most, this would really help Apple retain its edge in terms of developer appeal.

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Know Your Role: iPhone RPG Gaming Roundup
The holidays aren’t yet over, and that means you probably still have some time off on your hands. What better way to spend that time than with some engrossing, in-depth RPG gaming? Once upon a time, this category wasn’t very well represented on the iPhone, but that’s changed, and now there’s a very healthy selection. The following are some of the best.

Infinity Blade ($5.99, Universal)

By now you’ve probably heard about this game, possibly from our own review of the title. It also got considerable pre-release hype, since it’s the first game on iOS devices to make use of Epic’s Unreal engine. Thanks to that engine, it looks fantastic, and is easily the prettiest game on the iPhone, even if you don’t have a fancy new Retina Display.

Even without its good looks, Infinity Blade would be hard to put down. It’s simple and repetitive, but it features an awesome loot and leveling system, and what’s a really good RPG besides that, at its core?

Dungeon Hunter 2 and Dungeon Hunter ($6.99 and $4.99)

Gameloft makes a very good living taking formulas that have already worked for other studios and making them work again. The Dungeon Hunter series is a perfect example. They’re based on Blizzard’s Diablo franchise, but they have a far more frequent release schedule than those dungeon crawlers, and they work on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

I’ve played through both titles in this series multiple times. The sequel, which came out only a couple of weeks ago, was a much better experience overall, and a longer game, but both provide ample fun for the price. They lack the more refined elements of Diablo, like item customization and randomly generated dungeon maps, but they’ll more than satiate your RPG hunger.

Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD ($6.99, Universal)

This is a new title from the people who put together Ravensword for Chillingo (the icon should give it away). It’s sort of like the Elder Scrolls series of console and PC games, in that it’s an open-world, third-person, over-the-shoulder RPG with a lot of side quests.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Ravensword, but Aralon feels a lot more mature, and better put-together. It still comes off a bit amateurish in places, and has some bugs, but overall it’s a very fun RPG experience for the money. It’s a universal app, so one purchase gets you both iPhone and iPad gaming potential.

Solomon’s Keep (Free)

An oldie but a goody, Solomon’s Keep actually already has a sequel out in the App Store called Solomon’s Boneyard. The sequel’s great, too, but Keep provides plenty of entertainment with a unique cartoony art style, and best of all, it does so for free until Dec. 28.

This is yet another action RPG, with a dual-stick, shooter-inspired, controlled scheme that keeps things simple. It’s ideal for a casual platform like the iPhone in my opinion. But as I mentioned, it’s free, so I shouldn’t need to sell it very hard.

Eternal Legacy ($6.99)

Another Gameloft clone, Eternal Legacy has Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series squarely in its sights. It’s a nice change of pace from the rest of the games mentioned above, since it features a turn-based combat system featuring the queued attacks triggered by an action bar filling up, something which will be very familiar to fans of recent Final Fantasy games.

It doesn’t come close to Square’s titles when it comes to depth of story or character, but it does the job; you can carry it in your pocket; and it looks pretty good. Gameloft really needs to start thinking about making these games universal, since you’ll need to pay twice if you want it on your iPad and iPhone.

Chaos Rings ($5.99)

If you’d rather have the real thing, Square Enix’s Chaos Rings is its first RPG title designed specifically for the iPhone. This one’s been out for a while, but the experience still holds up. Right now it’s more than half-price, too, as an added bonus.

The only thing I didn’t like about this game was the length; I found it short, but you can play through as two sets of characters with different story outcomes, so that extends things a bit. But the game mechanics have the Square Enix polish gamers expect, and the story is more interesting than Gameloft’s carbon copies provide.

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Rumor Has It: 20 Million Plus iPhones for Q1 2011

Confirmed last month by Fortune and the Wall Street Journal , the Verizon iPhone is already impacting sales without actually being sold. According to DigiTimes, Apple has increased orders from component suppliers in Taiwan, raising shipments from 19 million to as many as 21 million units for the first quarter of 2011.

Shipments of WCDMA iPhones — the UMTS model sold by carriers like AT&T — has risen from 13 million units to as many as 15 million. CDMA iPhones, which will be sold by carriers like Verizon, would ship as many as six million units.

While shipments are technically not sales, Apple’s iPhone is a very different story from Windows Phone 7, which recently shipped 1.5 million units to carriers in its first six weeks. How many were sold? No one knows. In contrast, the iPhone is currently supply-constrained in China, and continues to sell extremely well worldwide. The iPhone sold 14.1 million units last quarter, and is expected to sell 15 million this quarter, for a total of more than 47 million sold during 2010.

Looking forward to 2011, Verizon’s more than 90 million customers will grab the majority of these CDMA iPhones, should they surface. AT&T, which has about as many customers as Verizon, activated more than 5 million iPhones last quarter. That number fits well with the estimate from DigiTimes of five to six million CDMA phones next quarter.

However, the big numbers will come in the summer, when, presumably, the iPhone 5 will be released for both UMTS and CDMA networks, if Apple has decided to offer both types of radio in its smartphones. There have also been questionable rumors of an LTE iPhone, and, of course, the almost mythic, white iPhone is scheduled for release. If Apple can sell 20 million iPhones on the downside of the yearly release cycle the next two quarters, it’s possible the company could average 30 million per quarter in the second half of the year, or 100 million iPhones in 2011.

No one would have predicted that when the original iPhone was unveiled just five years ago, which makes you wonder what heights Apple has yet to hit.

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