“…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

While I absolutely agree with his primary conclusions…

“The era of the PC’s dominance is officially over.  We have crossed over into the age of mobile computing.”

and

“I’m not saying we won’t still have desktop computers.  But if you’re looking for the real action, the exciting innovations, it’s going to be in mobile from now on.”

… I can’t quite get on board with his assertion that the clear signal of this transition was Microsoft’s recent Windows Phone Series 7 announcement.  Instead, I think that most of us recognized the transition about the time that the iPhone hit 20M units.  By then, nearly everyone that we knew either had one, or was getting one.  Almost every major handset vendor had announced at least one “iPhone killer” and tens of thousands of us suckers were rushing to develop apps.  At that point, we saw iPhone use spanning all demographic groups, and people genuinely loved them (enough to put up with AT&T’s network).

Let’s face it, Apple may not be the dominant player in the long term, but, as they have so often before, they brought fascinating technology to the mainstream.  The truth is that nobody else could pull it all together in a compelling package.

Still, if you have any doubt that the future of computing is mobile, please go read Mr. O’Brien’s column.  If you still don’t believe it, consider that my 77 year old father is the very happy user of a new iPod Touch.

Image Credit:  Fast Company

In a past role, I spent time at both EA and Lucas Arts.  I’ve seen their production values.  EA will certainly raise the standards for games on the iPhone.  I just wonder whether there will still be a place for the humble efforts of small shops like ours.  If nothing else, as the Fast Company post suggests:

“…it’ll be harder for mom and pop games to get noticed…”

Is anyone else out there worried about how they’ll compete against the big game studios?

The Wired story linked to above has the money quote:

“This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).”

It does indeed make me wonder how they go about identifying their “favorites.”

The cynic in me can’t help noticing that Molinker produced 1 app for every 5 units of the iPhone sold during the launch with China Unicom (we’re told that Apple yanked 1000 of Molinker’s apps).  Oh well, 1% fewer apps are out there competing for attention.

Q:  Why did Apple change their minds?

A:  Again, only Apple can tell you their exact reasons. In our conversation with them, they indicated that our blog post, linked across the web and seen by tens of thousands of readers, was a force for change here. As for other problems that don’t generate this much exposure and backlash? They may be less likely to be fixed, and that’s unfortunate.

I’m truly happy for Rogue Amoeba (previous slightly critical post notwithstanding), but I absolutely don’t believe that this indicates that Apple will go any easier on the rest of us.  These guys just made enough noise to force Apple to blink.  Most of us probably can’t accomplish that.

“Presumably, such a check would be run at the beginning of the review process”

Any steps in the process that they can automate sound good to me.  I just wish that they would run this check in conjunction with submission (as they do for proper app signing).  Personally, I’d be thrilled if the whole process could be automated.  Unfortunately, software probably isn’t that great at finding objectionable content and trademark infringements.  At least this is a step in the right direction…

Airfoil Speakers Touch

I sighed when I read about Rogue Amoeba’s recent decision to place their iPhone development efforts on the far back burner.  Normally, I would have just written the story off as yet another developer in a (perhaps justified) snit. Then, I read Jeff LaMarche’s carefully written, and forcefully argued, defense of Apple’s actions in this situation.  My crude summary of Mr. LaMarche’s response is, “The rules were clear.  You broke them.  Stop whining.”

Then it got good.  Mike Ash (@mikeash), an engineer at Rogue Amoeba, tweeted his, less than pleased, response to Mr. LaMarche’s (@jeff_lamarche) post.  Through the 140 character at-a-shot dialog, Mr. Ash seems to assert that the images in question were served up from their desktop app, and pushed onto the phone.  The images are available to programs on the desktop and are permissible in desktop apps.  Thus, Mr. Ash argues that the iPhone app is just displaying an image, not unlike a browser.  Good point.

Does the computer on their iTunes Connect screenshot look suspiciously like an iMac?

Mike Ash Explains the Image Issue in Airfoil Speakers Touch

Here’s the bottom line for me.  It doesn’t matter what seems “right.”  It doesn’t matter what seems “fair.”  Apple has made it exceedingly clear through its actions that it owns the App Store.  It makes all of the rules and interprets / enforces them as it sees fit.  If developers don’t like it, they can follow Rogue Amoeba and the Facebook App guy out the door.  Apple has more than 100K apps in the store and they clearly don’t care about any specific individual developer (unless the individual can raise a big enough ripple, like Jason Snell at Macworld).  As they say, “There are a thousand other developers who will gladly take your place…”

“This prospective client wasn’t looking to hire TapBots for any development work, they were looking for confirmation that a development firm out of India did the coding on ConvertBot, a popular TapBots application. The client had found Trucid, the supposed coders of ConvertBot, on the Rentacoder.com website, a virtual cork board where companies can hang their business cards. Trucid quoted a sum of $2,400 for an application similar to ConvertBot. The only problem? TapBots designs and writes all of its applications entirely in house.

Curious as to just what was going on, Haddad decided to e-mail Trucid pretending to be interested in their services. In the e-mail, he requested information about the company and a list of examples of its work. It wasn’t long before Haddad received an e-mail back from Trucid’s Chief Marketing Officer explaining who the company was, what it did, and its experience on the iPhone platform. Sure enough, ConvertBot was on the list of the 14 apps the company had supposedly developed. In the correspondence, the CMO reportedly claimed that his company had worked on 14 iPhone applications, the majority of which were coded under nondisclosure agreements. The CMO did say that the company hadn’t signed an NDA for two of their contracted projects: ConvertBot and BillMinder. Those two apps are popular though, and look like jewels in a portfolio. Yet, as it turns out, neither application was touched by Trucid.”

This is sad, but not unexpected.  It reminds me of a story from my days as a rep for Chinese outsourcing companies, which I’ll get to later in this post.  First, I want to highlight the project quote:  $2.4k for something similar to ConvertBot.  Those of us that have been toying with the idea of doing contract app development had better be very frightened by this.  While we can talk all that we want about the quality and the real value of our work, the truth is that the folks at Trucid (no link — I don’t want to reward bad behavior) have set the price.  By the way, I checked on Elance and they’re quoting $15 per hour.  I love developing apps as much as anyone, but $15/hr isn’t much incentive to develop someone else’s stupid idea.

This is a good place to stop reading unless you really want to hear an embarrassing (at least to me) story about one of my past ventures.
 

We had a contract to do sales and marketing for a company founded by a very well known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was originally from China.  In the interest of making this a good story, without getting myself sued, let’s call this company “Phantom.”  Phantom had a beautiful office overlooking the south end of the San Francisco Bay, more than 100 employees working in a new building in the Shanghai Pudong Software Park (with an option on another floor and a commitment to build a whole new building in the park), along with a large operation in Dalian (>400 resources) [at least that was the story that we were given].  When I visited the Phantom Shanghai facility everything was bright and shiny, but there weren’t many people around.  Their president (he was based in their U.S. office) assured me that this was a sign of their tremendous success — almost all of their resources were onsite with clients.  About two weeks into the engagement, the wheels just came off.

Apparently, representatives of a large Japanese consumer electronics company that we were trying to win over were visiting Dalian.  Unfortunately, they decided to make an unannounced visit to the Phantom facility there.  They showed up at the correct address (prominently posted on the web site).  Sadly, the receptionist had never heard of Phantom.  She called the site general manager over.  He had heard of Phantom but told the Japanese visitors that there was no relationship.  The GM was telling the truth.  The people in Dalian were employees of another company that had previously been managed by Phantom’s founder.  He simply listed the facility, and counted the resources, to make Phantom seem more substantial.  There was absolutely no involvement with Phantom.

Shortly after this, the founder decided to shut the company down.  After the dust settled, I cornered the president to demand an explanation.  His only claim was that he had also been duped.  Needless to say, we never made a nickel.  They didn’t even cover the expenses that we incurred.

According to AppleInsider, the launch resulted in just 5K new subscribers for China Unicom.

Another story suggests some of the reasons for the “soft” launch.  Although the reporter is still optimistic about the iPhone’s future in China, the excuses include:

• It’s too expensive.  No kidding — US$1,024 for a crippled (w/o 802.11) 32GB 3Gs
• No Wi-Fi (apparently it’s coming in a future version of the device)
• Everyone who wanted one already had a gray-market iPhone.  I’m guessing that this, coupled with China Unicom’s policy of just letting current owners legally activate on the network, was a big factor.

For what it’s worth, we haven’t sold a single app in China since the launch…

Image Credit:  Demotivation.com

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.