Tag: iPod touch

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Nathan Brown for Edge, on Nintendo’s recent statements that they won’t allow a race to the bottom for 3DS downloadables:

Nintendo’s Hideki Konno has renewed the firm’s attack on low-cost software, saying that neither hardware manufacturers nor software developers want to see 3DS games sold at smartphone prices.

“We don’t want content to be devalued,” Konno told Gamasutra ahead of 3DS’s launch this weekend. “Let’s say there’s a ton of other software out there that’s free, which forces you then to take your content which you want to sell for 10 dollars and you have to lower it down to one dollar to be competitive. It’s not a business model that’s going to make developers happy.”

I love and admire Nintendo, and they are the caretakers of a vast amount of IP and a number of franchises that I have enjoyed since my childhood.

But in my opinion, the Nintendo DS was the pinnacle of handheld development and existed in a pre-iPhone/iPod touch era. They are pricing and hardware-designing (look at the 3DS battery life!) themselves right out of competition. I’m sad that it’s going away and I unfortunately don’t believe the 3DS is going to be as successful.

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Tapbots on the iPhone OS 3.0 adoption rate:

The data seems pretty clear. Prior to June 8th we have a fairly low adoption rate of ~3%. Starting on June 9 this jumps up to 6-8%, which can be directly tracked to the developer release at WWDC. Starting on June 17th we get a huge jump as all the non devs start upgrading. We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.

The article is a great read both because this level of uptake in an upgrade release is phenomenal—even with the iPod touch, which is around 50% (and you have to pay $10 for it)—and because the statistics and data in the post are, well, really nerdy.

Apple deserves credit for making the upgrade process more or less an automatic thing. You sync the device, it checks for updated software, and shouts at you to upgrade. A couple of clicks and some time later, and you’re good to go. Lots of things should be so easy and decided for you.

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I’m now the proud owner of one 16-gigabyte iPod touch, and after a good half-day of messing with it and playing to try and figure the thing out, I have to say that I’m coming away from the first experiences very, very impressed. I find that music library management is going to be difficult for me, at least at first, as I’ve just now filled up my 40-gig fourth generation iPod, and Smart Playlists have become much more important for both iPods. I may have to pick up a 160-gig iPod classic at some point to continue to have at least one device that contains my entire music collection.

In any case, I wanted to jot down some of my thoughts for those who read, so if you’re thinking about picking one up, or you have questions about it, I figure more of those will be handled by what I have to say. You can already see some of my commentary in my tweets from earlier this evening, while I was messing around with it.

Continue reading “It’s iPod, Except with More… Touching… in a Good Way…”