For Apple, Web Standards Equals Safari Only

Apple's campaign to push HTML5 as the alternative to plug ins has taken a very odd turn. They've added a page to Apple.com to demo HTML5 with this particular twist:

You need to use Safari to access the demos.

Now, I'm browsing in the latest version of Chrome - which also uses WebKit for rendering and JavaScript. I'm sure there is a fork in the road from the Chromium project but they should be extremely close when it comes to features and standards.

And Apple won't even let me use that.

Instead of championing the supposedly future thinking open development that Jobs insists is superior to the "old ways" - the page highlights exactly what is wrong with the stance Apple has taken. First, net users have never really cared if a feature set is blessed by some committee - they want things to work in the browser of their choice. Second, Apple's concern for the use of these standards is directed in one direction: users of Safari ... and in reality, users of Mobile Safari.

Together and you can see that this is actually the same strategy Apple took with the cross-compilation issue. They're not concerned with creating content consumable across the net - if they did then they wouldn't block this demo down to Safari and conversely, developers would not need to worry about an iPad version of their website. No, they are concerned with content which falls under the umbrella of Apple software.

Game Play: 3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game Heroes is essentially a love song to any gamer old enough to have played nearly any 2D Zelda game ever made. As a Zelda clone, it is such a spot on implementation of the game mechanics which worked so well for these games that it is truly impressive.

Somewhat because of this - this will be a pretty short review. If you loved these games and have a PS3, you certainly owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. However, even as brilliant of homage as the game is - an in no small part due to the incredible sense of humor that the game manages, starting from the very premise of the art style being that the king declares nobody cares about 2D games anymore - it is also burdened with the fact that it is a spot on implementation of the game mechanics, with very little twist applied. So fans who love this genre will be all too familiar with what's going on.

So in other words, it's pretty brilliant while at the same time not the deepest gameplay you've ever met. For the price point, under $40, it is probably about right. I would put it in the safely, though not highly, recommend category.

Even A Lost Writer Can't Really Explain Lost

I swear, almost *this* close to never talking about the damn show again - but this was too much to pass up. Apparently someone stating that they worked on the show as a writer posted to a forum and sure enough, it has been making the rounds.

And for people like me still trying to figure out just how far Lost got from actually explaining anything, it is wildly unsatisfying as an explanation.

Here's a big chunk:

Thus began Jacob's plan to bring candidates to the Island to do the one thing he couldn't do. Kill the MIB. He had a huge list of candidates that spanned generations. Yet everytime he brought people there, the MIB corrupted them and caused them to kill one another. That was until Richard came along and helped Jacob understand that if he didn't take a more active role, then his plan would never work.

Enter Dharma -- which I'm not sure why John is having such a hard time grasping. Dharma, like the countless scores of people that were brought to the island before, were brought there by Jacob as part of his plan to kill the MIB. However, the MIB was aware of this plan and interferred by "corrupting" Ben. Making Ben believe he was doing the work of Jacob when in reality he was doing the work of the MIB. This carried over into all of Ben's "off-island" activities. He was the leader. He spoke for Jacob as far as they were concerned. So the "Others" killed Dharma and later were actively trying to kill Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and all the candidates because that's what the MIB wanted. And what he couldn't do for himself.

Dharma was originally brought in to be good. But was turned bad by MIB's corruption and eventually destroyed by his pawn Ben. Now, was Dharma only brought there to help Jack and the other Canditates on their overall quest to kill Smokey? Or did Jacob have another list of Canidates from the Dharma group that we were never aware of? That's a question that is purposley not answered because whatever answer the writers came up with would be worse than the one you come up with for yourself. Still ... Dharma's purpose is not "pointless" or even vague. Hell, it's pretty blantent.

Someone From Bad Robot's Take

I almost believe this is someone from Bad Robot because that's the kind of "of course it makes sense!" bullshit I expect it would take to sleep at night after writing for Lost. Let's quickly tick off some of the things wrong with all of that:

If Jacob has really been trying for centuries to kill MIB and this is how things turn out ... then Jacob is officially the only character on the show who is a bigger loser than Jack. The worst part of Richard's flashback was the revelation that these two have probably thought of nothing better than having others run at them with knives for decades.

So for the explanation of why DHARMA is even on the island to be "Jacob brought them there to kill MIB" ... well, that's the most over engineered failure in the history of attempted murders. Time Travel! Polar Bears! But, in the end all DHARMA and The Others figure out about their target is that it doesn't like sound waves.

So Ben was tricked by MIB and Richard was ... wait, no - Richard had a direct line to Jacob. That's clearly laid out in Richard's flashback. And we have no reason to think that MIB could pose as Jacob, or any explanation as to why Jacob couldn't pose as himself. AND The Others were clearly not actively trying to kill the Lostaways as they could have offed the whole bunch of them several times during the first couple of season. Tom Friendly could have easily killed Jack, Sawyer and Locke personally in one scene during Season Two.

Gah. And even more annoying is how much this dovetails back into the first two seasons when Lost was like, you know, good. Now, this might be just another rabid Lost fan, or maybe the guy who got coffee or something. I'd rather believe that, because if this was someone actually involved in writing the show then I've been closely following the events of a show from writers who can't really grasp cause and effect.

However, if anyone thought that the producers were to leave the finale as final middle finger to Lost fans, be warned: they apparently saved over ten minutes of material showing Ben and Hurly as protectors of the island.

Course, in order to see it - you have to buy the DVD.

Somehow, I don't see that happening. Anyway, I have a rough of a post on final thoughts on the show. I may or may not post it. Starting to feel like the guy still at the scene of a crime when even the cops have gone home.

Apple to Pull "Widgety" Apps

Apple can't even be nice to Apple fans anymore:

In late April, an unnamed Australian — one of a small team of cross-platform developers known as Shifty Jelly — made a point of telling the world that the Apple App Store is a mighty wonderful place. "I love the app store and the amazing hassle-free distribution it provides and I only really have a few niggling concerns with how Apple has dealt with us, as developers," he wrote in a blog post entitled "Sorry Media, But Apple Isn’t Evil."

But little more than a month later, this outspoken Aussie has accused himself of talking nonsense after the Jobsian cult said it was booting his company's photo-centric iPad application, My Frame, from the App Store. "A month ago I wrote a blog post about how Apple were not actually evil, because I was getting sick of all the media hype and bashing that was going on," he now says. "Little did I know that a month later that blog post would come back and smack me in the face."

-- Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

This really is the evil part of the App Store. This app violates no terms of service, appears to be pretty well done, and was getting popular. So why would Apple ban it? The common wisdom, and about the only thing that makes any sense, is that Apple wants to reserve the idea of a widget based desktop to ... Apple. So this is not an app that can do any harm to you, or your phone, or anything - but it may do harm to Apple at some point in the future.

So gone it goes. This isn't just developer unfriendly, this is outright hostile. You might have a good idea, and a good execution - but if it gets too close to competing with Apple, you've just wasted all of your developer money.

Apparently the developer emailed Steve Jobs to see WTF. Jobs responded with:

We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.

Sent from my iPad

Anyone else find the "Sent from my iPad" particularly annoying in that setting?

How Lost Should Have Ended

Failed animated GIF load - so here's the link to the Daily What ... via @kiyote23.

Lost: A Few Points Of Clarification

Spoilers, obviously.

I promise, only a couple more posts on Lost and then I'll never speak of the show again. This one, one more - then I'm done.

However, in the muddled writing which was the finale there has been a whole new brand of confusion. Since I've been faithfully tracking the show since the first episode (and blogging about since around the third season) - let's nail down some of the few things the writers/producers actually did tell us.

First, and very important:

No, they were not all dead from the beginning
Two things are causing this confusion: the first is the timing of Christian's speech to Jack within the last ten minutes of the entire series (hence giving the audience not a lot of time to process) and the images ABC added (apparently not the producers) to the end credits of the plane wreckage.

Proof: Christian actually says so during his speech and even indicates that what happened on the island was "the most important thing" in their lives. The producers have confirmed this (and that the end images weren't their idea).

But yes, the "flash sideways" wasn't "real"...
A lot of people simply call it "purgatory" but, that doesn't seem accurate to me. There's some Buddhist notions here about transcending but not having reach full enlightment which is closer, I think. I don't see these sould being tested or cleansed ... LA X wasn't about being tried or anything - just making your connecting flight to "heaven" once you find your soulmate (groan).

What I find really odd about this one is that some people seemed to enjoy the finale because they thought this was true. Which I can get - there would be a certain comfort in thinking that all six seasons were just, say, the imagination of a dying man in a bamboo forest ... because it would allow for essentially any contradiction on the planet thanks to dream / death logic. But no, that's not what happened here.

Ajira Did Not Crash After Frank's Takeoff
This is just more confusion over ABC's end credit scenes. Those images were just filler, not part of the real narrative. Frank, Sawyer, Kate and Miles get to do non island things for a while.

The Smoke Monster Can Become More Than Dead People
I don't know why this has kept coming up recently - I think because the whole Church/Purgatory thing and when I post my final complaint about the show I'll bring this up more - but the writers and producers have used Old Smokey to make all kinds of appearances. I guess "Kate's Horse" was technically dead at the time she met it - and I'm 99% sure the horse was Smokey. Smokey certainly took the form of the spiders that (thankfully) bit Nikki. So what form Smokey can and can't take is really, really not well defined. But don't assume because, say, Walt showed up as an apparition somewhere that it wasn't Smokey (course, I wouldn't assume it was either).

Another likely candidate (sorry) is Dave, Hurley's imaginary friend. Interestingly, if Dave is Smokey then it is also a really early example of Smokey trying to off a candidate while still obeying the rules (something Smokey proved really bad at - but more on that later). Course, Dave is also confusing once we learn Hurley can see dead people - so maybe Dave was dead all along (sigh).

Short version: the only consistent "rule" is that the Smoke Monster can take the form of things it reads from other people minds (and/or dead people). Or short, short version - it can become things integral to The Island, but apparently not the living.

Walt, Michael, Eko, etc., aren't in the church because...
Because they're not dead? Except that Christian states there is no "now". Hurley and Ben are at LA X at the same time as the Kwans, despite apparently having gone off and had merry offscreen adventures together (groan).

Look, I have a lot of problems with the church and I did actually think the lack of black people seemed like pretty stupid oversight ... but Ben and Ana Lucia do give the writers a decent out here. Just because people have arrived at LA X, having died whenever, doesn't mean they're ready to "let go" and move on.

Actually, I think Ben, Eko, Michael and Walt were left out also in part because they didn't fit well into the "find love" mechanic they had set up to be "awakened" (groan). The producers say the actor who played Walt has grown so much that he woudn't have been recognized, which I don't entirely buy into. However, getting actors on contract for a highly touted finale might be a different story in general.

Regardless, we can probably assume that these characters are bouncing around LA X somewhere offscreen though. Don't get me wrong - I think the fact that Walt dropped so completely off the narrative radar is bullhockey. But that's for another post.

Lost has always been mostly about the characters
So prior to the finale, Damon and Carlton said that they were going to be answering the questions "important to the characters" - and that is when we should have known we were in trouble. These characters have been almost pathological in their inability to communicate reasonably. Let's not forget that Juliet was one of The Others and we still have little idea why The Others actually did anything. Sawyer at one point had Karl, also an Other, at gunpoint ... and simply let him go.

It's true - the characters were always an important aspect of the show. The flashbacks, their lives before the island, their interactions on the island - all very, very important.

Lost, however, did not get a third season because of character development. Lost got past two seasons because thousands of rabid fans were recording the show, going over every detail and then swarming forums en masse to detail how it proved or disproved theories about the show. When people like Javi did live chats with fans, they rarely discussed if Kate liked Sawyer more than Jack - they wanted to know about the mechanics at work when came to the mysteries of The Island.

Or maybe more to the point, if Lost has always been about the characters - we can't forget that The Island was one of the more important characters of the show. It's the character everyone fell for and wanted to know more about. Jack was, quite honestly, a pretty lousy lead in a lot of different ways - but The Island was always a star.

OK, so like I said ... one more to go. I'm just so annoyed with people asking inane questions like "what was inconsistent" or "what kind of answers did you really want" ... I mean, really - I'm beginning to think that the majority of the people left for the finale were people who stopped really tracking the show years ago.

Movie Watch: Exiled

The Girl and I were in a Kung Fu mood last night and ended up with Exiled, a 2006 Hong Kong bullet ballet which just recently arrived on Netflix Instant.

It is surprisingly good. This is clearly the kind of movie which inspired Tarantino's early films (this film being a 2006 I wonder if some of it isn't being paid back now). There's a lot of themes about power, revenge, redemption - but mostly it is a movie about comrades in arms who just end up getting mixed into a heap of trouble.

While some of the cinematography isn't great, it had a few brilliantly directed scenes (there's a gunfight which moves to an outside shot of a stairway which is just awesome) but the writing is really, really tight.

Highly recommend.

Fun Fact: The film was awarded a Category III rating (18+ restriction), particularly for one scene showing Simon Yam's character shaking hands with another gangster with their left hands turned around, making a triads agreement handshake. The scene is present on the Mega-Star uncut Limited Edition DVD. However, only the Category IIB cut version was released in Hong Kong theatrically.

[Wikipedia]

Unanswered Lost Questions

Spoilers, obviously.


This is meant for funny, course - though I had naturally forgotten most of them. I'd find it funnier if it didn't remind me about a lot of the big balls they dropped. That they couldn't even keep their own rules about who or what can appear when or where straight now just feels incredibly sloppy (from the first season on).

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Via Kottke.

TV Watch: Lost, The End

Yeah.

Uh.

WTF was that?

The Lost season finale was a boon to one subset of fans: those really, really curious about whether Kate was in love with Jack. For everyone else, it was at best a nod and wave goodbye from the characters people have watched for six years.

For anyone hoping for a decent conclusion to the storyline, though: you were out of luck.

I'm going to save the LA X stuff until the end - because it really was somewhat meaningless based on Christian's final speech. Emotional? Yes. But meaningless.

Obviously massive spoilers follow. Pretty much a blow by blow.

If you remove the LA X portions, you aren't left with much and most of it doesn't make any real sense. And I don't mean "doesn't make any real sense" as in "they didn't fully explain X was Y" I mean "doesn't make any real sense" like the way old bad television serials are put together.

We start with Sawyer inexplicably, but conveniently, figuring out that SmokeLocke needs Desmond - even though Widmore really described Desmond as a "failsafe". In one of those mystical Lost moments, Sawyer manages to run to point A on the island, have a conversation with someone, and get back to point B while another group was making their way to point C.

Remember back in like Season Two when everyone was trying to figure out how The Others got around the island so fast and easy? Simple: it's called convenient writing. For those scoring at home, convenient writing is not good writing.

Jack, having been at this protector thing for all of about ten minutes, decides the best thing to do is ... whatever SmokeLocke wants to do. So they lower Desmond into the light, where he sees some kind of underground temple with the skeletons of other people who went to the light, but did not become Smoke Monsters but perhaps died in some slave labor effort to build this undergrou...

Wait. What? What the... underground temple? OK, so Desmond has a "immunity to the unique electro..." whatever, we know he won't die. Who the hell is down in the crazy light building temples? Find out next time on Lost? Uh, no. Ignore the fact that Mother Dearest suggested anyone going near the light would suffer a fate worse than death - which would seem to make construction pretty hard, why exactly would "life, death and rebirth" need a sun pool? The entire underground temple was nothing but a place for Desmond and Jack to futz around - making no sense whatever with anything we've shown before.

So after Desmond pulls the plug, the island starts to self-destruct. In frustration with his poor job performance, Jack starts to beat Locke to death. And he can, because SmokeLocke is now corporeal. Why? Don't ask! Seriously! Why are you asking questions? What show do you think this is after all?

SmokeLocke beats Jack unconscious with a rock and runs away to his secret boat. While Jack naps, a tree falls on Ben who then explains his escape plan while he has nothing better to do. Jack wakes back up to nothing but mud and rain ... and still manages to hunt down SmokeLocke before he can get away. How? Don't ask! What the hell is with all these questions? The island did it, ok?

SmokeLocke beats Jack with a knife, but then Kate shoots him! How did she know where they were? Or manage to get there in time while she was helping save Ben? Who knows! Why would you still care? She got a funny line! Go Kate!

As soon as SmokeLocke is fatally wounded by a commercial break, the rain stops (Why? Seriously stop with the questions). Also, Ben is saved. Yay! Jack, Hurley and Ben run off to fix that thing that we don't even know what is while everyone else escapes.

Jack saves Desmond, plugs island, dies. Hurley and Ben don't. Everyone else gets off the island.

Then there was a puppy. Yay! Puppy!

And that was a wrap, people. Did you expect some great reveal when Desmond went to the light? Yeah, sorry. Or some great climatic battle between SmokeLocke and everyone else? Uh, no. Not really. Or maybe some really great ending to this whole candidate thing? Happens off screen between Hurley and Ben. Maybe they would have showed it - but they really, really had a lot of ads to get through.

Look, I had lowered my bar considerably for the finale. I didn't expect any complicated solution which explain everything ... or even most things. I expected one more layer of the onion pulled back which just brought everything together: the rules, the candidates, the island, etc. Leave some of it to faith, fine, but at least put a bow on it. At least try to tie things into a knot. The on-island events of the finale were a complete mess and simply not good writing. As someone who thought that bouncing theories around and paying attention to detail was part of what made this show great - it became quite clear that the producers did not have any great story arc. The island was the distraction, the show was really just playing around with the backstories.

Here is the great failure of the finale: you would enjoy the show more the less attention you paid. The message was: don't ask questions - just watch love conquer all and be happy about it.

So yeah, on LA X: so instead of an alternate reality, LA X was just a waiting room for some of the people on the island after they died. They might not be dead yet during the main story, but that doesn't matter. Which is why the LA X events are completely meaningless - they aren't actually related to the story. LA X was all epilogue, from the very beginning, and very strange structure wise since you haven't actually finished telling the story. At best you could say "Jacob did everything he did so that the gang could go to heaven" - which, fine, whatever. Except that it doesn't fit anything else from the rest of the show.

When I said that I thought LA X would survive so that the writers could have an out for a happy ending - I had no idea how far they would take it. This ending was pure fan service, watching characters fall back in love and leave in a warm white light. It demonstrates none of the aspects that made the first season great - including reasonable character development. Many fans probably enjoyed watching what amounted to a clip show followed by a curtain call ... but that doesn't make it good storytelling. The story deserved more.

OK, this has been too long as it is. Honestly, this episode and the show doesn't get any better if you try to analyze it. It only gets worse.

I still enjoyed the show in general, but I mark this finale my least favorite of any show I've watched.

TV Watch: Lost, What They Died For

Well, let's just get right to it then.

The Good
This episode probably had me more excited about the LA X world than most, and I'm hoping that whatever Desmond pulls off will be truly explosive for the finale (honestly, I'm half expecting a bomb to go off). The scene where Desmond beats the hell out of Ben to remind him who is was relatively awesome.

I'm rather liking Ben in general, actually. On the island, it is very tough to tell if he is just being his old manipulative self or if he has some long con for redemption. In LA X, his potential hookup with Danielle is both touching and mildly creepy. Ben's a complicated guy.

The Kinda Good
There were some sideways explanations here - which is I suppose better than no explanation at all, even though we are almost at the finish line. Is the pregnancy issue tied to the importance Jacob puts on someone being a mother? Are the powers of Jacob and Not Jacob actually tied to conversation, and that's why Not Jacob went ahead and just offed Zoe? It will be annoying if some of this isn't more fleshed out in the finale, especially the pregnancy thing which has been so core to the show - but I'm pretty much braced that we're not going to get a real good definition of the "sickness" at this point.

The Not So Good
The whole "why they died" speech and Jack getting promoted to protector gets lumped into what is a series of anticlimactic explanations which have been put out this season. Considering what has happened to these characters over the last few years, one might think they would have a more heated Q & A with the entity most directly responsible for it. That the island and the candidates "needed each other" fits well into what we know, but why Jacob had to do it by crashing a plane (killing a bunch of people), the actions of The Others, why it took so long to reveal the idea of "candidacy", etc. - nobody asks? I guess Kate kinda did, but who is listening to her anymore...

And Jack actually getting the promotion was about as exciting as, well, watching a normal person get a promotion. He was the obvious choice and the entirely scene seemed most ceremonial, even plot-wise. Maybe this all gets more detailed in the finale, but it seems like a small prize tied to a very long string at the moment.

I did like the "just a name in chalk" bit. Sometimes a cigar smoking chimp is just a cigar smoking chimp, people.

The Outright Bad
Ben and Widmore really deserved more air time. Well, more specifically - we deserved more air time to explain what has been going on with these two characters. Why do the rules apply to them? OK, I still don't know why the rules apply to anyone or anything, but the power dynamic between Widmore and Ben is the untold story of the island from the military, to DHARMA to The Others. And to have it seem that Widmore is suddenly good because he and Jacob had an offscreen chat is just downright annoying.

And if Richard is dead and does not make an appearance during the finale I will throw a chair in the general direction of Carlton Cuse. Not anything against him over Damon or anything, but I do believe he is taller and therefore easier to hit when throwing a chair several thousand miles.

Bottom Line
We are in the eleventh hour and I think we're about where most fans expected: the story is coherent (good), they don't have time to really reveal everything (bad), but all in all we should have one thing to comfort us:

I don't think there has been a bad Lost finale yet, and I honestly suspect this one will be the best of the lot.

If you can watch it out without a mental checklist of things left unexplained - it will probably be awesome. If the last episode was bringing the story to a simmer - we're certainly at a full boil by now. I think we're done moving the pieces on the chess board ... it is time to throw down.

My long shot guesses? SmokeLocke is throwing Desmond down Ye Old Tunnel Of Light. Or trying to do so. Also, my money is on the LA X world surviving, especially with the current kill rate on the island ... or by bringing LA X down there will be a chance of some kind of reunion.

Also for the last scene? Jack and something that appears to be Locke on the beach.

Steam on OS X: Nice But Certainly No Nirvana

Last Wednesday, Valve officially released Steam for OS X. Along with the release was the promise of the release of essentially the entire Source library for Mac eventually.

To date, only one Source game is available - Portal, but it has been offered free for a limited time. Portal is a pretty great game, so Steam + Free Portal is pretty decent gift to the Mac community. And honestly, I'm still optimistic - but having played around with it for nearly a week now, most of my original feelings about Steam haven't changed.

For one thing, Steam is buggy. I can't speak to the PC version anymore - but I never knew it to be terribly stable. The OS X version likes to do things like block you from closing Steam because a game is running - even though a game is not in fact running. The browser Steam uses shows an almost interesting lack of performance considering how basic most of the pages are constructed. It will lock up. It will zombie.

Also, Steam is just poorly designed. Essentially one large custom browser with a lot of access rights, Valve didn't bother to actually coordinate your Steam account with your community account, forum account or support account in 2008 - and they apparently haven't bothered to add such things by 2010. The end result is a decent browsing experience, a relatively robust checkout experience and a a lackluster everything else (at best).

Partially because of that - Steam is quite possibly the most user unfriendly gaming product in the history of gaming. It's not just that their support section feels like a bad PHP script bolted onto the side of an online store, but rather that is the support for a product which can at any time update code on your hard drive without any control on your part, completely trash your game, and then simply walk away.

And remember people, Steam does not offer refunds (unless you feel like reporting them to the BBB it seems). So if Valve forced an update on you and it broke your favorite game - well, tough. And I've had Torchlight less than a week and guess what? That very thing has already happened. I don't think there is a Mac user on the planet right now who can play the game.

And has Valve responded to any of the many forum posts about it? No. Have they sent out any tweets from the Steam twitter account? No. Have they bothered to respond to any of "Ask A Question" support tickets (I could go on for some time about how annoying that they frame support issues as me asking questions. I shouldn't have to ask Valve why their QA sucks)? Not that I've read and certainly not mine.

So yeah - Portal for free running natively on the Mac? That's a nice thing. And if down the road I can play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead off the MBP as well, then that will be a win. But Steam is still Steam - it's a buggy mess and does nothing to empower users when things go wrong. So remember Mac users - Steam is buyer beware for the digital age.

TGIF: Kittens In AutoTune

Technically I should thank @feliciaday for the find, but I doubt she needs my traffic. Enjoy the weekend, people.

Google Destroys Apple With Giant Robot

The Internet is a great place for misinformation at times. I mean, let's go back to all the wonderful FUD which arrived prior to the PlayStation 3 release which had at least two sources claiming that Sony would block used games from being played (which would be nearly physically impossible) and BoingBoing declaring that it wouldn't play Sony's flagship product - Blu-Ray movies (which was tinfoil at best).

On May 10th, the NPD group - a market leader in consumer demographics that many of us gaming bloggers know quite well as "the start of half the fanboy wars on any given forum", made this statement:

The Android operating system (OS) continued to shake up the U.S. mobile phone market in the first quarter (Q1) of 2010, moving past Apple to take the number-two position among smartphone operating systems, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company. NPD’s wireless market research reveals that based on unit sales to consumers last quarter the Android operating system moved into second position at 28 percent behind RIM’s OS (36 percent) and ahead of Apple’s OS (21 percent).

“As in the past, carrier distribution and promotion have played a crucial role in determining smartphone market share,” said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. “In order to compete with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has expanded its buy-one-get-one offer beyond RIM devices to now include all of their smartphones.”

-- Android Shakes Up U.S. Smartphone Market

Now let us take a step back and actually read this statement. It is saying, in relatively clear English, that in the first quarter of the year 2010 in the United States, Android outsold Apple's iPhone by some seven percent and that the spike was largely credited to Verizon extending buy one, get one free deals to Android that had previous been limited to RIM's Blackberry.

And that is pretty much all it is saying. Not quoted here is the fact that it does not include enterprise sales here - only consumer.

This was widely reported. In increasingly poor ways:

The iPhone gets the bulk of the mind share, but in actual U.S. smartphone sales, the iPhone trails not only Research In Motion's BlackBerrys but also now handsets built around Google's Android mobile operating system.

-- NPD report: Android outselling iPhone; BlackBerry number one

So kinda right. For one thing, you may note that the original NPD report avoided declaring that Android was outright outselling the iPhone - rather that is "shaking up the market". This is probably because Android taking second place in one quarter of one year by a somewhat slim margin thanks to marketing deals is probably not a strong indicator that the iPhone is doomed to a #3 spot.

We can quickly move from this statement to the just plain wrong:

The Android operating system has moved past the iPhone to capture the No. 2 ranking in smartphone operating systems in the first quarter of 2010, with 28 percent of the U.S. market, according to the NPD Group. The Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) OS was still No. 1, with 36 percent marketshare, based on unit sales to consumers. Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone OS held steady with 21 percent.

-- Android Elbows iPhone Out of Second Place in US Market

Comparing first quarter sales to market share is like, uh, well, like comparing apples to the barrel in which they arrived. This mistake would be repeated and once again, NPD results would eventually kick off many a fanboy flamewar.

This is reality:

Android is suspected to take 10% of the overall smartphone market in 2010. Currently the market leader? Not even RIM - but Nokia with around 40%. In 2009, the Symbian OS held 47% off all smartphones.

Short version: even if Android outsold RIM in the first quarter of 2010 - they would be hard pressed to be in double digits market wise, much less second place.

That's not to say the report isn't news. It is, because Android sales have been increasing, and nearly every analyst seems to expect it to contiue to do so. The next couple years are likely to be very formative for the OS - but that does not mean it suddenly dominated Apple.

We have to remember that Apple just got into a massive PR campaign with Adobe over Flash, HTML5, the iPhone OS and the future of the web in general. Adobe responded by buddying up with Google and making several comments about how great Flash runs on Android. Then the NPD releases their report and pretty much the entire techsphere went off to the races.

Course, we also have the opposite end of the spectrum. Beatweek Online seems to specialize in reporting about two things: how great boy bands are and how great the iPhone is. Their homepage literally has two categories: Music and iPhone+iPod+iPad. Suppose in some ways it makes sense, many people listening to pop music do it on an Apple device. It's just a shame that they are so embarrassingly fanboy in their reporting, and so shamefully bad at it:

The report yesterday claiming that Android has now surpassed the iPhone in marketshare has been revealed to be more or less total bullshit, as it turns out the the claim was based on not on a head count of actual users of both platforms or a measure of total recent sales, but instead an online voluntary survey consisting of a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand participants, a number representing less than one half of one percent of the number of people who’ve bought an iPhone. If anything, the statistically invalid survey confirms only that Android users are more willing to take online survey about their cellphone usage than iPhone users are. This new revelation not only completely negates yesterday’s claim that the Android is outselling the iPhone, it also calls into question the validity of the same survey’s claim that the BlackBerry is outselling them both.

In light of this news, it’s unlikely that any “data” or claims from NPD will be taken seriously any time soon, and we’re back at square one in terms of knowing how each smartphone is currently selling in relation to the next.

-- iPhone-Android “marketshare” turns out to be bulls— online survey

While not mentioned, this seemed to come in response to Apple's press release on the subject ... which seems to be the main basis of all of Beatweek's tech news. You can read the brief twitter spat I kicked off in response. When the extent of one's journalistic skills can't get beyond revealing something which was in the original report as shocking (which, with other statements by Beatweek, suggests they never bothered to read said original report) - one might consider a different hobby than writing about technology.

I have feeling NPD's "data" will still be widely accepted.

Back to work people. Sorry for the long post, short version: Verizon gives away free Droid phone with purchase of Droid phone. Droid sales increase dramatically.

TV Watch: Lost, Across The Sea

I was actually so distracted by the fact that Allison Janney was in this episode that it took me about a half hour or so to realize we were finally getting The Island Flashback Lost fans have been talking about for some time.

Early in the show, "Mother" tells the soon to be departed mother of Jacob and Not Jacob that asking her questions just leads to more questions. And just as much as this episode gave us a glimpse to the show's backdrop, but it was also indicative of the show itself - the questions you ask ... the more questions you get back.

Fan reactions to this episode seem mixed, and granted some of the hockey "the light is life" type stuff was a little thin - this episode was in many ways a final rounding out of story's core mystery: the relationship between the island, the "others" and the protector. I was more or less enthralled from the first minute on.

But praise is boring. Let's talk about the relatively bizarre contradictions in this episode.

Mother tells us (and the kids) quite implicitly that she has set things up so that they cannot hurt each other. Yet, Jacob pummels his brother not once, but twice AND kills him in the end (well, maybe kind of ... more of that in a bit). So Mother would seem to have been just sort of making that up. Also, Mother has more than a bit of a freakout when she realizes Not Jacob has figured out a way to tap into The Light with the Donkey Wheel. Yet, since we know said wheel as the Frozen Donkey Wheel Locke uses to move the island - Jacob apparently continued on with Not Jacob's work - apparently both with tapping The Light and cultivating people who arrive or are brought to the island.

Let's jump specifically to what may be the core question of the episode: Is The Smoke Monster Jacob's brother? Or is he dead and buried with Mother? Mother said that touching The Light wouldn't kill someone - it would be worse. So it would seem the answer is both. The apparitions on the island seem to be either representations of The Smoke Monster, who look like one person but are really Old Smokey (SmokeLocke) or are real ghosts (Alpert's wife). And since Alpert's wife is trying to get SmokeLocke killed, I think we can assume they're on different teams.

As we saw Not Jacob on the beach with Jacob, talking about doing all this stuff Old Smokey is now doing, I'm guessing The Smoke Monster is whatever Not Jacob transformed into - leaving his body behind. I'm also guessing that the writers made a big deal about Adam and Eve because Not Jacob's body will become a factor in the finale.

At least I'm hoping, because the amount of attention they poured into the fact that two recent characters with no real names are in fact Adam and Eve was a bit much. The flash-forwards didn't seem necessary, I think most Lost fans saw the connection and compared to other "revelations" from this season (Christian was Smoke Monster, whispers are ghosts) it got a lot of screen time.

Sadly, I'm thinking The Light (or The Source as some are calling) is going to get the Wallace's Briefcase treatment from Pulp Fiction. In fact, they might even be the same thing. With one normal episode left before the finale, I'm not holding my breath for any more complete explanation than the one Mother gave Jacob.

So in the long run - it was an interesting episode which gives us at least some depth ... even if not filled with answers.

Game Play: Warpgate (iPhone/iPad)

Elite is considered by some to be one of the greatest games ever made - but at the very least you have to give credit that it was a seminal piece of work. Creating a massive world (using some creative procedural methods), players could simply fly their ship around and ... well, do whatever they want for the most part. Fast forward a couple decades, and we have Grand Theft Auto IV.

Well, OK - similarities are there but we can save that for another post. We also have Warpgate for the iPhone and iPad. Longtime Mac game publisher Freeverse drops you into a galaxy, puts some touch controls on your free starship and lets you run around. There is a story, but you are welcome to ignore and wander around blowing stuff up, finding viable trade routes, and essentially just exploring.

The core of the gameplay is quite good. The touch controls work well, the graphics are great and the level of detail given to the different ships, planets and galactic factions provide plenty of depth. Combat is pretty simple button mashing affair, not exactly strategic - but at offers little in the way of frustration. The story missions often manage to offer twists to the gameplay so that not every one degenerates into "fly to X and then fly to Y" type affairs.

Actually, my only core complaint is the difficulty. Or the lack of it. At one point in the game I realized I could essentially hover around for some two factions to duke it out, and then pick the (occasionally very valuable) cargo that was left floating around. Wash, rinse, repeat ... and I had a shiny new starship. After that, some shiny new weapons and after that I don't think I lost many battles until much later in the game.

There's also the occasional bug - but in the latest release nothing too crazy. Worst one is when my ship would mysteriously freak out and the appear in a random spot in the map - but that generally just takes some patience to get back to civilization. I'm also suspicious of some of the battle math, occasionally it feels like all my big guns do no damage at all.

However the bottom line is that even after I have finished the story (which I wouldn't call a good story - but it was some fun twists and turns and a great dose of humor), I'm still playing it. You can easily listen to your own music while smacking down space pirates - and there is also the challenge of hunting down even better trade routes while trying to catch to everyone on the online leaderboard.

And Freeverse, this would be a great game to offer some DLC for - new ships, new missions, new weapons. I'm sure there are many Warpgate fans willing to shell out a couple bucks for an extension to the storyline.

Thumbs up, easy recommendation for the iPhone / iPad lot.