It already works on Android

Though they seem to have transitioned it to Flash since Flash became supported. Going to the iPlayer site without Flash installed gives you the message "To play this programme you need to download the Adobe Flash Player from the Android Market" and supplies a link (albeit labelled "Click here" suggesting that somebody on the web team can't think beyond their mouse) that goes directly to the relevant Google marketplace page directly in the browser, exposing a download button. The rest of the iPlayer site is the mobile version for small screens. So it's clear that they have somebody there who has thought about Android and ensured that the site works.

Compare that to the iPad where, also, the site works, and you get to pondering why anybody needs an app.

That would make sense

It's what the iPlayer app that already ships on Nokia phones (well, at least the N8) does.

I have absolutely no idea how the existence of a Nokia app plays into the wider picture — for all I know, Nokia developed it or otherwise paid for it.

The BBC are bound by their charter not to support the XBox...

... because Microsoft won't allow them to release for free and the charter won't allow them to charge. That's the officially given reason why they're on the Playstation and the Wii, but not the XBox.

Android devices aren't outselling iOS devices

Android phones are outselling iPhones — you're thinking of statistics directly from the mobile phone industry. If you add the iPod Touch and iPad to the iPhone, versus all Android phones + tablets then iOS remains ahead. This year's Android tablet push by multiple manufacturers should go a long way to redressing this disparity.

Surely the question should be the other way around?

Given that it already works just fine on all shipping iOS and Android devices, why bother with an iPlayer app for anyone?

No Ovi Store?

Having recently checked it out, with support from at least EA, Gameloft and Rovio many of the same big name games that tend to dominate the other app stores seemed to be present on the Nokia. That said, I'm still acting under the impression that increased developer support is a good thing.

@AC

Thinking harder since last I posted, I think the risk to the Android path would be that they'd be back up to two Linux platforms even once the Maemo to MeeGo transition is complete. Probably a better path would be to put Dalvik on MeeGo, which probably wouldn't be too hard a port with the similar stuff underneath. That buys them entry to the Android ecosystem with a significant differentiating factor.

@Mark

On an iPhone I copy and paste by (i) selecting the text; (ii) selecting 'copy' on the little sign board that pops up; (iii) putting the cursor somewhere else; and (iv) selecting 'paste'.

I multitask by (i) launching an application; (ii) going back to the home screen; (iii) launching another application.

For the record, I do pretty much identical things on my Nexus One. If you have no trouble doing basic things on a Nokia 5800 but can't figure those out, I guess you're used to looking for complexity that isn't there?

I'm not sure that's where they need to be going

To my mind, Nokia engineers great operating systems with barely usable interfaces. If you look at the abstract numbers, Nokia seem to be able to get a lot more battery life out of ostensibly comparable devices at a cheaper price point. Their problems on the software side are that the user interface is awful.

Testing an N8 versus an iPhone versus a Nexus One: I'm in the browser, I want to go to a different web page.

On the iPhone I scroll to the top of the page (by tapping the status bar), tap the address bar, the keyboard comes up, I type the new address and press 'Go', which is right there on the keyboard. The Nexus One is very similar. Scroll to the top (albeit without a single tap shortcut, but that's because Android has other functionality permanently attached to the status bar, so no overall conclusion to be drawn here), tap in the address bar, enter something via QWERTY, press 'Go'. Total: two taps, some typing, one tap.

On the N8: tap the little arrow in the bottom right. I'm presented with a five button menu, of which three are not particularly obvious graphics without text. Having used it before I know to tap the world icon in the middle, which brings up a combined URL or search term menu. I then tap the URL line. That brings up an entirely different screen because all text box entry is done on a separate screen. I have to enter in T9. Tick that to go back. Tap 'Go to' to load the URL. Total: three taps, some T9 entry on a completely separate screen, two more taps. With lots of menus on which to get lost in between, and the extra delay of having to type in T9.

And the entire software stack is like this. It's a labyrinthine nightmare of menus upon menus upon menus with everything you want to do always requiring quite a lot more effort than on other phones and even then being achievable only if you've bothered to experiment with and memorise the system in advance.

Any strategy in which Nokia holds itself forward as being even slightly competent with UI design is a very bad idea. They're better off sticking with the Series 40 for emerging markets, adopting Android with the normal user interface and ensuring there's an official port of QT to the platform. They can revive themselves with hardware (there's a market for 12mp phones with Carl Zeiss lenses) and unique applications (Ovi Maps in particular). I think there's a route by pushing QT on Android to become the default glue for people that want to port C/C++ stuff, but it's probably more risky.

I think you severely overestimate the importance of Flash

"Look, we've got Flash" is what manufacturers say to score points with tech bloggers.

"Look, we've got a good browser on a big screen, available for free on a contract and for not all that much on pay as you go" is what manufacturers say to win consumers.

No, it's like a regular owl

But somewhat superb.

Apple have done a broadly similar thing

The main difference is that we're almost a year down the line. So we temporarily had iOS 3.2 for the iPad only, with a bunch of new features that are useful on both types of device, then we had iOS 4.0 for handsets only which jumped 3.2 to a bunch of other useful features, then only at 4.2 did everything come back together. I'm sure they'll do the same thing with Android; fork the code base during the development and launch of new types of product, then a merge further down the line.

There's a risk of fragmentation, of course, but we're still in a much better position than we were trying to support J2ME across the breadth of available handsets, and the available handsets are a lot better.

I think they're hoping that...

... just like people buy into Sky, HBO, etc despite free television being available, they can build up sufficient brand prestige that some people will sign up for a subscription, allowing them to pay proper reporters and/or famous name pundits to maintain the brand. They would argue that one of the problems with other iPad content is that Apple didn't have a subscription model before, meaning that users have to invest effort every time they want to buy an issue (analogous to going to the newsagent) rather than having to invest effort if they want to stop receiving issues (as with the sort of magazine subscription they want to sell).

Given that it's a US publication, although not a Fox spin off so I'm using these names just as examples, I can imagine they'd recoup if they carried exclusive content by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck, etc. Vanity disclaimer: I don't actually like any of those people.

But how do those mobile operators count?

I've seen this story in a few places, and all of them seem to be a bit vague (as a result of the executive's inexact comment, no doubt) as to whether a tablet delivered to and subsidised (possibly up to 100%) by a mobile operator but put into the hands of a consumer counts as a sale to a consumer for the purposes of this story.

I would expect devices that can be supplied cheaply through operators to gain significant traction, even if they weren't available at all for direct consumer sales, just like the overwhelming majority of mobile phones.

@ElReg!comments!Pierre

It's not just according to Google — they acquired Android (the company, working on the OS) in 2005. That would seem to establish that work was in progress before the iPhone came out.

@Greg J Preece

Apple have paid for all the technology they've acquired but do we really have to drag them into it? They don't even run a search engine.

@hitmouse

It's nothing like the "two wrongs make a right" argument. That would be to argue that Apple's behaviour is excusable because of an earlier unethical act perpetrated against it. This is the argument that requiring perfect ethics would preclude you from buying absolutely any of the available devices, so an unethical act is not in itself sufficient.

You seem to have managed to post something to the Internet, so you're almost certainly using a component from an unethical company, whether it's Intel (anti-competitive practices to crush AMD), Google (Wifi sniffing), Microsoft (anti-competitive practices to crush just about everybody), Apple (anti-competitive practices to ensure revenue capture) or somebody else.

Maybe not calling them iFans would help?

You know, per the general rule that insulting people tends not to work very well when you're attempting to talk them around to a differing point of view.

I also think you'll want to argue that what Apple are doing is so disproportionately unethical as to be a sufficient reason to avoid the company's products. All of the competing vendors are also doing at least one unethical thing, so there's an on balance argument to be made.

Per the last earnings report...

... Mac shipments during the fourth quarter of 2010 were up 23% over the year before, setting a new record (though they've been doing that every year for a while — since 1984 the market has grown a lot more than the Mac's relative share has dropped, though the Mac continues to grow a lot faster than the market).

I was unable to find a detailed profit breakdown, but of iPads, iPhones, Macs and iPods, the breakdown by units sold during that quarter was:

8.8% Macs (up 23% year on year)

15.5% iPads (available for less than a year)

34.4% iPhones (up 85% year on year)

41.3% iPods (down 7% year on year)

Macs are still a non-negligible contributor, probably to a greater extend than those percentages suggest given that they're likely to be higher profit items than iPods or iPhones.

I'll wager that Xserves constituted maybe 0.001% of units shipped.

@AC

You have a funny definition of stealing.

Apple gave Xerox stock in return for IP. That's called a business transaction.

Touch screen technology? Nobody has ever claimed this to be an Apple invention, it's a straw man. You appear to be arguing that any company that uses any single component that isn't entirely new deserves no credit for anything.

Multitouch technology? Apple paid for FingerWorks in 2005 to acquire the technology. That's called a business transaction.

You seem to believe that if someone receives something and pays for it, then that's theft?

So... a symptom, not a cause

Banning Comic Sans somehow to solve all the world's signage and document composition problems is surely akin to banning PowerPoint and expecting everybody suddenly to be really good at public speaking?

Overreaching, I think

Take iOS as the example. It introduced the direct manipulation metaphor to the mass market. To 99.99% of people that met one, it was a new idea. They acquired most of the relevant IP by acquiring FingerWorks, but in order to commercialise it to the extent that they felt it could be. What they didn't do was look at what was already number one in the market and copy that. They've actually never done that.

There's a distinction between being able to spot and develop good ideas before they hit the prime time and running after the market leaders.

It's market share

In four years, there have been only three shapes of iPhone, all of them very similar and with exactly the same size of screen. That makes the form factor extremely compared to the market for all other phones. Nobody else keeps their handsets in as similar a form and nobody else sells so many of a single handset (albeit if only because the main competitor is characterised by choice).

Nah, the hardware's completely different

It's ARM + PowerVR, whereas the PS3 is Cell + RSX. I think they're just arguing that the graphics are similar to those of a PS3 (at a much lower resolution, one assumes, and therefore a lower processing cost — and getting a 1080p screen onto a PSP-sized mass consumer device just isn't going to happen very soon). So, no doubt, porting incurs costs and gives an opportunity for Sony to charge consumers that want both copies for (i) the additional costs of porting; and (ii) the content, a second time.

@No No No......

There's an exception to this; per the relevant Occupiers' Liability Act, signs on private property that direct you as to the required behaviour in order to be safe absolve the owner of liability if a person ignores the signs and is injured as a result. Though they have to give you actual, workable instructions (like "keep all limbs within the vehicle") rather than just warning you about a danger (like "bridge unsafe" without a safe bridge or other crossing being available).

@Eponymous Cowherd

The dictionary agrees that a PC is a general purpose computing device, but I don't think walled garden versus free for all is relevant to the device classification, no matter how relevant it is to potential customers. The iPad has a microprocessor and an interface that is suitable for a variety of tasks and in practise can be used for such tasks as browsing, emailing, word processing, games, spreadsheets and others. It's therefore general purpose in that sense.

Personally, where the things that the majority of people use them for are the same, I'd use sales channels to differentiate products for the purposes of market reporting. So the Galaxy Tab, the iPad, etc, get bundled with things that are uncontroversially PCs since generally you walk into a shop and buy one.

Phones don't because generally you buy a phone contract and get the phone as a bonus. You may specifically pick the phone and pay a premium for it, but the main commercial transaction is the acquisition of the phone contract.

I don't go with the Canalys attempt to define a pad as something with at least a seven inch screen and then to try to get pads into the category of PCs.

Courts decide

And since the Sale of Goods Act works to imply terms into the contract of sale you implicitly make when you purchase something, this is civil law and the balance of probabilities is the relevant standard of proof. If they push it all the way, a court will decide.

I agree entirely

I guess Apple are concerned that botched adjustments by less ethical people may lead to greater support costs at their end. Though, like you, I don't really see that they're likely to see any real improvements from this change.

First person to make a workable pun about Apple screwing things up wins a prize.

@AC

According to Dr. James D. Eason, programme director of the hospital that treated him, Jobs "received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (model for end-stage liver disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available". Or is this one of those theories where people connected to the events agreeing would prove it and people connected to the events disagreeing also proves it?

@AC

JaitcH always funds a way to say something negative about an Apple story. I doubt the downvote is to do with just this one comment. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's reasoned and appears to make no particular effort to be inflammatory, so I can't see a problem with it either.

@AC

Anon because you didn't think to give him Numbers and a Bluetooth keyboard, so he could not just view but also edit and otherwise work with Excel spreadsheets?

Then the evaluation could have proceeded to "you forgot to give me a mouse".

@AC

Idioms don't have to make sense on their own terms. That's why you rarely get "How so?" as a response when describing something as being swings and roundabouts. There's a distinction in that most idioms did make sense in the first place, but most people don't inspect the actual words if they know the meaning. I figured it was worth pointing out for "could care less" because people outside the US don't automatically associate a meaning to that.

And it turns out it was a typo anyway. Ho hum.

@jbk

I think the iPhone screen is above the Android average. Possibly you've underestimated the penetration of Android into the low end of the market, skewing the results away from the flagship Droids, Desires and other really decent handsets? Android is about choice and not everybody prioritises screen size.

Anyway, if screen size is really the most important then probably some sort of argument about tablets is more appropriate?

Not quite right...

Per the pie chart in the article, of smartphones there's a 32% market share for iOS and 46% for Android. Smartphones are 60% of the total, so that's 19.2% to iOS, 27.6% for Android. I think your Android answer suffers from being a summation only across the top 30; you have to assume a whole bunch of other handsets are Android powered, which I guess cuts to the issue of the iPhones being lumped together.

I don't see the anti-competitive angle

Assuming you can't bundle the Java runtime into your app (hence: no other optional install components required), just distribute somewhere other than Apple's App Store. Apple have themselves donated a large chunk of previously proprietary code to help the OpenJDK team start getting up to speed, so they probably have some sort of interest in keeping Java available in some form (keeping university science students on board, maybe?).

Ah, an American in the house

*cough* "could care less" isn't idiomatic outside of the US... *cough*

Regardless of what the article says, I don't think AirPlay is usable for moving any old output around. My understanding is that bandwidth concerns limit it to compressed video. Since the iOS devices don't really have the stuff to perform video compression as well as whatever else they were already doing, that limits it to video that has already been compressed — i.e. anything you'd currently stream over the internet or add yourself via iTunes.

Furthermore...

... Apple have their own advertising network in iAds, which is trivially easy to implement in an application and for which most developers will already have suitable payment details set up. Is anybody willing to guess that Apple are supplying any statistics whatsoever for surveys like this?

Ad supported apps may be a larger proportion of the Android Marketplace, but are there really more of them in absolute terms?

I have no doubt Android devices are ahead in the US given that they're cheaper and more widely available (re: carrier exclusivity), I'd just like to know more about how the numbers were collected and can think of factors that could skew them either way.

Flip reversing it

Flash supports H.264. Some, but no means all, browsers support H.264. As a content provider, you can (in theory) therefore keep a single encoded video and serve it in either a Flash container or an MP4 container as the browser will accept. Per the current version of Flash, you definitely need that H.264 video in order to reach the majority of end users. So whatever licensing issues may apply to Flash, you're already having to navigate them. From that point of view, H.264 as a supported <video> tag codec is a big technical win.

Of course, I take Google's point that integrating something that is patent encumbered into the core stuff of the web — whether by specification or by common practice — could stifle innovation and raise costs in the future. See also: the GIF debacle. WebM hasn't been litigated yet, which is a worry, but the simple act of muddying the water is likely to be beneficial while the standard is still up in the air. I'm willing to take Google at face value when they say that they expect WebM to be litigation proof; their very selective stands against proprietary technology may be self serving but in this instance Google's best interest aligns with the web's best interest.

What I don't put any stock in is ad hominem attacks on anyone that calls Google hypocritical. Even supposing that all those calling Google's stance hypocritical are doing so through a vested interest in the Apple ecosystem and that Apple themselves take hypocritical positions, how does that exonerate Google?

For my money, the people Google are being hypocrites and we're all benefitting as a result.

Net Applications would seem to disagree

Android is irrelevant in terms of browser market share. Chrome is the big hitter, and rightly the focus of the story. Per Net Applications, Chrome is the third most popular browser, pushing 10% of the entire market for browsing the web. All the Android devices put together manage just 0.4%. Chrome + Android is about double Safari + iOS, but with the caveat that Chrome (and, usually, Safari, though on some devices you have to install it yourself now) can fall back on Flash support.

iOS versus Android? 1.69% to 0.4%, with iOS up 0.33% during November, Android up 0.09% but by a larger proportion compared to where it started. Neither significant enough in numbers terms to really have an effect.

@MacroRodent

"I suspect Apple would not have released their webkit version to the world, if it weren't for the GNU license of its original code that required publication."

This wouldn't seem to fit with Apple's recent release of Clang and their older decisions to open source stuff like Darwin and the entirety of WebKit — including the Javascript interpreter that they developed from scratch and various other bits additional to the stuff inherited from KHTML.

It's not Android owners in general

There is a group of people that have issues with everyone different from themselves. They see the world in stark black and white tones. Since they're consumers, some subset of them end up with Android phones and come on places like here to shout at everybody else. Similarly, some subset of them has iPhones and probably another is still very happy with a Nokia 3210.

So it's not Android owners you want to be unhappy with, it's a completely orthogonal set of idiots.

You have to assume the iPhone normally works at -11

On the basis that they've sold millions of them over several years, yet this failure is newsworthy. As far as I'm concerned, the story is that Apple's customer support people are acting like asses.

Restocking fees are just one of the (alleged) reasons

Other reasons for things costing more over here: VAT, the Distance Selling Regulations, higher taxation in general. But we get things like free hospitals and increased consumer rights out of the deal.

But if he was thinking of the Distance Selling Regulations...

... then it seems a bit odd to single out the UK, given that they are an EU directive. From Google alone, I can find some case law that The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 have been used to quash restocking fees based on the prohibition of terms "requiring any consumer who fails to fulfil his obligation to pay a disproportionately high sum in compensation;", but without a proper law library at my disposal it's difficult to find anything more specific than that. And the standard Sale of Goods Act and Unfair Contract Terms Act bits prohibit a restocking fee for faulty merchandise, but that isn't really relevant.