Pickle Zombie

For the record, ‘queued’ was worth hella points. Forrest found it kind of strange how after a few years we’ve traded World of Warcraft for iPhone Scrabble for our communal gaming fix. We must be getting old. In another five years it will be Blackjack, and in ten we will have sunk to the level of Bingo. Then a synchronized crisis of midlife and the games from the sex shop will have their day, then finally resting back on Bingo, as a sword leaping up one last time after cold hands failed to support it. Ours is a glorious future to be sure.

I now assail you with more, likely largely redundant thoughts on the illustrious iPad, only because I haven’t any fresher material at my fingertips. Behold my mastery of the segue.

For all I said last week about how the whole interface concept would stand to benefit from the bonus screen real-estate in such a way that was significant and worth-while, I feel I should justify my position of not wanting one. For starters it’s based on the iPhone OS and not something more robust like OS X, which just as in the iPhone’s case means they’ve given you a phenomenally power touch-screen computer but want to impose sanctions on how it is to be used. The App Store and I have had a shaky relationship in the past, which can be summarized with a single, simple app: flashlight.

Now, in Apple’s API, there is no way for an app to control the brightness of the screen, and using non-standard APIs are strictly verbotten. So a flashlight app from the App store will simply be a white screen. If one were inclined to jailbreak their iPhone, a process by which you bypass the API restriction at the cost of angering His Lord Jobs, one can have a flashlight app which not only displays a white screen, but also temporarily ramps the brightness to full. The latter is infinitely more useful. This case may seem trivial, but it is an example that represents the scenario by which there is no meaningful encryption on the iPhone either. It’s not missing because the device is incapable, it’s simply missing because Apple said so.

Now, Dave–you remember Dave, right?–posits that by the end of the year some pimply teenager will have cracked the machine to allow it to run more robust, and less straight-jackety operating systems, and I wouldn’t give it that long, but that is neither here nor there.

I also lament the new device’s lack of camera, which seems like a cheap shot from a grasping fanboy. Sure, though, one of the most interesting exploitations of the iPhone’s combination of GPS, accelerometers, and camera has been that of augmented reality, where by the screen shows superimposed images over a live video feed. Remember those pullout screens from Red Planet? The iPad could have been one of those was it really just a scaled up iPhone, but lacking a camera, all is for naught.

I also harp on this a lot, but battery life is a primary concern for me when buying anything portable. In the keynote, Jobs claims a total life of about ten hours and then alludes that that ten hours is while watching video, which is sure a more taxing operation than say, eBook reading. Combine this is a tendency of manufactures to publish their battery tests in the form of the machine sitting there with the screen turned off, and we get not even a vague picture of what the actual battery life will be. But now I’m just nit-picking.

It is good to hear their still getting along with Google Maps, given all the shit-talking that’s going on.

Ja.