“…we’re hearing that it is in fact a system-on-a-chip driven by a Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU “identical” to the one found inside NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, while besting the iPhone 3GS significantly with its 1GHz speed and multicore architecture.  The A4 is composed of that Cortex barnburner, an integrated memory controller, and the Mali GPU, making it an all ARM affair…”

Engadget was even so kind as to publish a “photo:”

Lovely.

And then, today, Ars Technica tries to bring the whole dream crashing down:

“…it turns out that the the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU.  The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case.  (I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t.)

In all, the A4 is quite comparable to the other Cortex A8-based SoCs that are coming onto the market, except that the A4 has even less hardware.  The iPad doesn’t have much in the way of I/O, so the A4 itself can do away with the I/O that it doesn’t need.  In contrast, the typical Cortex A8-based SoC has more I/O hardware than a mobile phone can use, because you never know what customers will need which interface types.”

Now I grew up in the days when real men had big block V8′s in their cars, so I was excited by the original rumors.  On the other hand, the Ars Technica post makes a lot of sense — cram a simpler CPU in, jack the clock rate and let the software do its stuff.  In many circles, that’s just plain old good system design.

Image Credit:  Serious Wheels

As we’ve been pondering these imponderables, this “report” from Retrevo caught my attention.  From a business manager’s perspective, the money quote is:

… they [iPhone owners] use their smart phones more for activities like watching videos, checking sports scores, and texting and they even watch more adult material on their iPhones than BlackBerry owners.

That certainly sounds productive!  (I’m listening to Mötley Crüe on my iPod Touch as I write this.)

A cynic reading the Retrevo post might jump to the conclusion that iPhone owners are shallow, arrogant narcissists.  In fact, the post concludes with the following:

… sure paints a picture of a group of smartphone owners that “think different,” and another more down-to-earth, mainstream group of BlackBerry owners.

I was particularly struck by the final chart presented in the post.  Respondents were apparently asked to rank themselves with respect to several “coolness” characteristics.  I think that the self assessment is very telling:

… iPhone owners rated themselves higher as Intellectuals, Extroverts, and Media Buffs than BlackBerry owners

Source: Retrevo Blog: iPhone vs. BlackBerry Owners: Your Phone Tells All

With that in mind, I’m finally ready to get around to making a point.  The carefully crafted iPhone user experience is unparalleled for media consumption and gaming.  It’s in a class by itself.  The thing is, though, that Apple puts up a whole fortress of barriers to developers that want to build real solutions to business problems and make their software available on a range of mobile terminals.  Sure, you can hammer on your app to fit it into the Apple template (and you might even be able to get it approved), but why bother when you have so many more degrees of freedom and device choices with Android / Linux (unfortunately, I don’t know as much about developing for BlackBerry OS 5.0).  Until recently, the answer boiled down to 40M+ iPhones / iPod Touches, against pretty weak alternative hardware.  Perhaps this is starting to change.

As I’ve thought about the relationship between the App Store and the developer community, I’ve come to the conclusion that the fundamental problem is rooted in the power disparity.  Apple has absolute power.  Developers individually, and even collectively, have essentially zero power.  Allow me to share a few, hopefully, illustrative examples of what I’m getting at.

There are gigabytes of text flowing around documenting the latest upsets, but I think that I’ll lead off with Craig Hockenberry‘s latest opus on the App Store, since it’s particularly well written and constructive.  Mr. Hockenberry presents a number of the challenges that we’re all experiencing, and proposes solutions for many of them.  He concludes with the following:

The suggestions I’ve presented above are intended to help us grow this business and keep the ecosystem healthy. Every developer’s fear is that Apple doesn’t want an open a dialog regarding the App Store. It scared the [censored] out of me when our questions weren’t answered at WWDC.

A successful partnership is one where both parties work to the benefit of the other. If our needs are ignored, it will only lead to disenchantment. Working with the developers that are driving this new platform is Apple’s best long-term business strategy.

Well stated!  Mr. Hockenberry presents a number of rational proposals that could help make the system work better for everyone.  I remember when Mr. Hockenberry was able to arrange next day (for the free version third day for the paid) approval for Twitterrific after the “twitpocalypse,” so I gather that he has some significant juice with The Organization in Cupertino.  Unfortunately, just when one begins to be optimistic that Apple might listen to some of its influential contributors, we are reminded that this isn’t a “relationship” in any real sense.  Mr. Hockenberry’s well reasoned arguments fall apart if one takes the perspective that Apple has all of the cards, makes all of the rules and feels no real pressure to engage with the developer community.  From that perspective, let’s consider another example of egregious treatment of a developer.

In this latest instance, we have the situation with Ninjawords (WARNING:  If you’re an App Store Approval team member, the post contains “objectionable” words. I know that Mr. Schiller responded. The TrueBelievers can stop yelling at me — more on that in a moment).  Mr. Gruber does a much better job of expressing outrage than I ever could, so just go read his post and then come back …  I’ll wait right here…  Are you upset, yet?

Mr. Schiller’s response to Mr. Gruber completely ignores the infinitely uneven power relationship between Apple and iPhone developers.  Apple knows all of the “rules,” makes all of the rules and serves as judge, jury and executioner.  We are left to frantically scan through our developer agreements, monitor all of the forums looking for folklore and then just take our best shot.  The folks at Matchstick Software simply didn’t have enough information to make what Apple now apparently considers a rational decision.  To assert otherwise demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the plight of the developers.  It also suggests some serious arrogance — “I know this, why don’t you?”  In this light, I find it ironic that Mr. Schiller takes Mr. Gruber to task for the reporting:

Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words. You accused Apple of both in your story and the fact is that we did neither.

Given Apple’s track record of extremely limited transparency regarding their App Store approval policies and procedures, along with their previous reluctance to explain anything in more detail than citing a section of our Developer’s Agreement, one might expect a more enlightened organization to take a slightly lighter hand on this issue.

The personally sad thing about this is that I’ve been actively looking for a new dictionary solution for the iPhone.  I currently use the Dictionary.com app.  It’s OK, but it’s extremely slow.  It takes a long time to start up and to display words.  I’d love to have something better, and I would have gladly bought the unadulterated version of the Ninjawords app (I hope that “unadulterated” isn’t “objectionable”).  However, since I don’t know what Matchstick felt forced to censor, I’ll just stick with Dictionary.com for awhile.  By the way, I just verified that a number of the terms that were barred from Ninjawords are openly available in Dictionary.com v1.0.1.  Dictionary.com has a 4+ rating.  The purified Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.

One point that I’m trying to highlight is that, if the App Store process continues to be this capricious, the professional developers will be forced to shift their focus to other platforms.  We’re already being buried by the “competition.”  We don’t need to be fighting Apple’s processes as well.  While I applaud Apple for finally dealing with this fellow, I have to admit a grudging respect for the model he allegedly adopted, apparently with Apple’s full (until recently) and long-term support.  According to the post on Mobile Crunch:

“Khalid Shaikh has been making a killing off the App Store through questionable means. In less than 9 months, Khalid Shaikh and his 26-employee team (most of which are in Pakistan) have published 943 applications (thank you TapMetrics for validating these numbers). That’s roughly 5 apps a day, every day, for 250 days. All of these apps have gone through the entire Apple review process, sometimes taking as long as six weeks to get reviewed, and have been published on the App Store. Users have bought these apps in droves; Khalid has refused to give official numbers but we gather from his comments that it’s a few thousand dollars in sales per day. This business was making solid money until last Friday, July 24, when Khalid Shaikh was officially banned from the store. Without advance notice or forewarning of such an action, Apple revoked Khalid’s developer license and asked him to remove all of his apps from the store.

Whoa. Wait a second. Over the course of 9 months, Apple has accepted 900 applications submitted by Khalid Shaikh and his team of developers. Then, realizing their mistake months later, Apple tells Khalid he has to delete all of his apps?”

Now I understand why Apple couldn’t be bothered to approve the v1.2 update to iPuck in anything resembling a timely fashion.  While we’re on the subject of iPuck v1.2, I’ll share one last bit of strangeness.  The primary upgrade to iPuck in v1.2 is Scoreloop integration, which lets users compare high scores and challenge each other in the game.  We’re huge privacy freaks, and I’ve taken all of the precautions, so I didn’t think that there would be any problem until I saw this post over on iPhoneDevSDK‘s “App Store Wait Thread.”

First entry:

“unbelievable!
Hi, I hope someone in management at Apple reads these posts, the rejection I received today was unbelievable . It has been extremely hard to get Scoreloop enabled apps approved but I finally added enough warning text on the startup screens of three apps to satisfy the reviewers and get on the app store, ( Apollo XI, Tornado Alley & Bot Hive). I have 2 apps in review, after waiting 6 days they rejected one of them for the same reason that they initially rejected the other three…
…
But wait…, this app has the same text on the startup screen as the other reviewers required before they approved my three other Scoreloop enabled apps! ???”

The developer receives a bunch of, mostly useless, advice, then follows up a few weeks later:

“It’s been a while and I forgot to update everyone on this.

I resubmitted the same zip and it was approved within a week.”

How’s that for a predictable, developer friendly process?  I keep hearing Steven Tyler’s voice telling me that I should walk this way…

Since my mother always told me that it’s polite to end on a positive note, I believe that it is an encouraging sign that Apple did, indeed, hear Mr. Gruber.  Also, happily, iPuck v1.2 was approved after I wrote this post, but before I published it.

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, iPuck, Ninjawords, iPhoneDevSDK, Scoreloop

Personally, I completely discount the attraction of sitting around looking at album art (even in an altered state) as the Wired story seemed to suggest.  A Financial Times article, that was the original source for the Wired piece, claims:

“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans

I guess that I’m not enough of a music lover, but that just sounds like a complete waste of time, compute cycles and bandwidth to me.  Further, I cannot imagine that there are large numbers of people with both $800 to spend and a burning desire to sit around in a circle staring at album art, even interactive album art.

I’m completely in agreement with the always entertaining John Paczkowski (I miss reading Mr. Paczkowski in Good Morning Silicon Valley, back in the days when there were these things called “newspapers.”) when he asks, in his inimitable snarky tone:

“Which begs the question: Can that heyday ever be recreated? Now that we’re accustomed to purchasing only the music we want via the thin-margin, 99-cent-song-by-song downloads that iTunes pioneered, can we ever be convinced to pay a premium for bundled music, cluttered up with a bunch of liner notes, wacky band photos and throw away filler songs?”

Maybe it’s just me, but the ten-inch form factor seems to be a little bit bulky for constant presence.  The beauty of the iPhone / iPod touch is that it’s always with me.  I don’t have to think about whether I want to lug it, and I try to be rational about the risk of scratching the screen.  Let me tell you, if I had an $800 10-inch unprotected screen, I’d worry about it a lot, and I’d constantly be trying to decide whether the benefit of having it with me justified the risk of carrying it.  This is especially the case if the device has enough battery capacity to let it operate with the 802.11 radio on and the screen lit whenever I want to use it through the course of a day.

Fortunately, the FT seems to be less certain about the actual dimensions of the screen:

“The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.”

…but many of the stories that report on the form factor seem to be trying to interpret the chicken bones from the Apple supply chain.

The FT does mention something about books:

“Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer.”

I’m not sure that I see a “Kindle Killer,” though.  Let’s not forget Walt Mossberg’s smackdown on the Kindle DX:

“Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading.”

For those that are sticklers about such things, the Kindle DX has a 9.7 inch screen.

Lest I venture too far into the forbidden territory of questioning Apple, I have to share Jason Schwarz’s assertion that,

“Apple’s iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product”

Mr. Schwarz presents four rational reasons why he sees:

“… this device taking its place at the high end of the iPod family; it will be a larger version of the iPod Touch. This product won’t fall quietly into place however. The iTouch Tablet launch is primed to be the most significant in the history of Apple.”

Giving credit where credit is due, I borrowed the name for the mythical device from Mr. Schwarz.  I do hope that he’s right in his rather bold assertion.  Maybe we’ll see in a couple of months.

I wonder what kind of changes we’ll need to make to our apps to have them run on this thing.  Will we be able to use the same SDK that we use for the iPhone/iPod touch?

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, tablet

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago.

I’m still more than a little stunned.  We all knew about the medical leave, but …

Mr. Jobs is truly one of my business heroes.  I’ve suffered the pain of being an Apple developer when he wasn’t leading the company, and I’ve experienced the joy of being part of the community when he is firmly in charge.  I’m extremely relieved to hear that Mr. Jobs is still scheduled to return to work later this month.

I mean no disrespect to the competent professionals at Apple, but, to me at least, Steve Jobs is Apple.  I send him all my best wishes for a full recovery and a triumphant return as the High Priest for the Apple faithful.

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, Steve Jobs, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile