Analysis: Apple Bunts on iPad Gaming

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s iPad holds some unique possibilities for gaming, but what the company showed at the overly hyped tablet’s unveiling Wednesday barely scratched the surface.

The tech demos that mobile gamemakers like Gameloft and Electronic Arts showed at the briefing were tweaked versions of the companies’ iPhone games, adding a few new features that rely on the iPad’s bigger screen: In first-person shooter Nova, players can drag a mini-map around the screen, resizing it to their liking. In the auto racing game Need for Speed: Shift, you can look at the cars behind you just by tapping your rearview mirror.

Asphalt 5, built for the iPhone, also works on the iPad.
Photo courtesy Apple " src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/2010/01/asphalt_5_350.jpg" height="311" width="350">

The Asphalt 5 iPhone game also works on the iPad.
Photo courtesy Apple

While these features might be possible on the iPhone, the gestures involved would be so minute that they would be fiddly and unworkable on the small screen. On the iPad, the vast expanse of screen makes more things possible.

“The display is just huge, which makes the game immensely fun to play,” said Gameloft’s Mark Hickey of Nova on the iPad. “The size also gives you more flexibility when it comes to controlling the game.”

Electronic Arts’ Travis Boatman sounded jubilant as he described the iPad. “It’s a little bit like holding a high-definition television just inches from your face,” he said.

If only he had then shown something that looked more fun than a clickable mirror.

The iPad is Apple’s attempt to straddle the PC and mobile markets with a device that combines the iPhone’s minimalist touch interface with the productivity of a full-size computer. With models ranging from $500 to more than $800, the iPad will pretty much let users do everything: Watch movies in high resolution, read e-books, run spreadsheets and play every single thing in the App Store. All 140,000 iPhone apps will run on iPad, either in a small window or blown up to fill the entire screen.

But the only way to get gamers to buy it is to introduce exclusive killer apps. Jesse Divnich, an analyst with Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, says that these might be slow in coming.

“From a gaming perspective, the success of iPad as a serious gaming platform depends entirely on its ability to have a large installed base of gamers,” Divnich said. “Publishers need to be reassured by Apple that they’re going to get at least a 20 million installed base in the next couple of years.”

Otherwise, Divnich says, the big publishers won’t come running — they’ll experiment with iPad-only games, but won’t jump in feet-first the way that book publishers and movie studios will.

Gears of War maker Epic Games, showed off a version of his company's Unreal Engine running on iPhone at Wednesday's iPad unveiling.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/2010/01/gamer1.jpg" height="440" width="660">

Mark Rein, vice president of Gears of War maker Epic Games, showed off a version of his company's Unreal Engine running on iPhone at Wednesday's iPad unveiling.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

After the presentation, Apple let attendees get hands-on time with the iPad. But neither of the iPad-exclusive tech demos were available, just a selection of as-is iPhone games. It’s no more or less fun to play iPhone games on the bigger screen. Notably, 3-D titles like Super Monkey Ball looked very good when blown up to full-screen size on the tablet, surviving the transition better than games built on 2-D art, which tended to get blurry and pixelated.

With its 1-GHz processor, the iPad is more powerful than the iPhone 3GS — but it’s still not exactly a gaming workhorse. The success of the relatively underpowered Wii console has shown that this doesn’t matter so much if the content is right. But playing iPhone games on an iPad makes the Wii look like a PlayStation 3. Will gamers throw down five bills for the privilege?

Milling about the room after Apple’s presentation Wednesday was Mark Rein (pictured), vice president of Unreal Engine maker Epic Games. He said his company would seek to bring “the big-boy console gaming experience” to iPad, which he gushed over after getting some demo time.

“What’s not to love?” he said. “The quality of the device, the feel of it in your hand is unbelievable. I love the upgraded apps, I love the form factor. I think it’ll be a fantastic device for gaming.”

Rein showed me a tech demo of a first-person shooter running on a version of his company’s engine designed for the iPhone. As consumers use the iPad and become accustomed to the high-quality display for books and movies, they will demand increasingly better games, Rein said.

“When you go and play this on a big huge screen, it’s not an Xbox 360,” he said. “But the point is that when you have the experience on (the 10-inch screen), it’s not that long before you can do really spectacular-looking games on this device, and that’s what we want to be.”

That’s where we’d all like to be, and where iPad could be. But it isn’t there today.

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Will the Apple iPad eat your TV?

Steve Jobs demonstrates the movie function of the Apple iPad with a scene from Up. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Apple iPad will probably never replace television, but it is likely to cut a big piece out of it. Chad Evans of MLB.com, the official website of US Major League Baseball, is leading the attack.

Last August, MLB.com announced that it was to stream full-length live games for the iPhone and iPod. Now, it is taking that to the iPad.

"We couldn't just take our existing iPhone app and make it bigger," Evans said proudly when presenting his iPad app. "This big display really allows us to create a much more immersive experience."

Alongside the live full-screen video will be onscreen stats and data: You can scroll through a team's lineup on the bottom, click on players to get specific data, and there is a scoreboard on the top.

Emerging media producer Gary Hayes says about this new the digitalisation of television: "We are finally entering an era where the second and third screen – the PC and the mobile – are truly converging." The increasing links between social media and TV are now embodied in a single device.

Live sport wherever you go is likely to be the iPad's most attractive video offering, but it won't be the only one. A generation has grown up used to watching TV series and movies on laptops, and the iPad might be a more handy alternative. "The larger and shareable display of the iPad means on-demand TV and streamed web video/TV can retain its 'scale' and integrity while finally becoming portable, but more importantly become a viable second 'networked' screen actually in the TV room itself," says Hayes.

iTunes has a TV and movie store with a catalogue of over 50,000 TV episodes and 8,000 films, 2,000 of them in high definition video – as Steve Jobs proudly demonstrated with a clip from Pixar's animated film Up. And both might be taken soon somewhere else.

"The device though opens up many possibilities for interactive producers such as rich, synchronized web pages and apps alongside broadcast TV and the 'friendly/social' non-laptop device will encourage more 'group' activity in the same room," says Hayes.

How Apple's iPad Ratchets Up Pressure On AT&T

AT&T has been complaining about iPhone users gobbling too much of its 3G network bandwidth. AT&T subscribers, meanwhile, have been venting about the carrier's subpar service. So what's going to happen when the Apple iPad arrives?

With a bigger screen and more powerful processor than the iPhone, the iPad will give developers more to work with when building applications. It stands to reason that the iPad, if successful in the market, will put even more pressure on AT&T to upgrade its network in order to handle the extra traffic.

With the 3G iPad slated to arrive around the beginning of May, the race is on for AT&T to add the capacity necessary to handle the iPad.

"There's no free lunch in the physics department," said Joe Bardwell, president and chief scientist of Connect802, a wireless solution provider in San Ramon, Calif. "The addition of enhanced data, video, music and other services that the iPad brings to the market will increase the capacity requirements for 3G cells, and that can only result in either dissatisfied users or upgrades from the carrier."

Quy Nguyen, CEO of Allyance Communications Networks, an AT&T partner in Irvine, Calif., says AT&T has been aggressive about upgrading its network, but still faces challenges from new bandwidth intensive apps that are arriving on the App Store every week.

"Wireless infrastructure is a constant battle, and it's not just AT&T's problem," Nguyen said. "As soon as they upgrade the network, more video, music and streaming apps come out and put even more strain on the network."

AT&T says it's in the process of upgrading its 3G network and will continue to do so until 4G arrives. "Today we offer the nation's fastest 3G network and we will continue to increase network speeds throughout 2010 and 2011 in advance of 4G networks and devices being widely available," an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement.

The iPad will launch with two data plans from AT&T: One with a monthly data cap 250MB a month for $14.99, the other with unlimited data for $29.99. The latter is the same one that iPhone subscribers currently have, although iPad users won't have to sign a contract to access the service. Given the struggles AT&T has endured with the iPhone, the lack of a contract requirement could be an acknowledgment on the carrier's part that the "unlimited" pipe may not always be freely gushing.

Nonetheless, Apple seems pleased with its relationship with AT&T. Earlier this week in Apple's fiscal Q1 conference call, COO Tim Cook called AT&T "a great partner" that's well on its way to fixing its network issues. "AT&T has acknowledged having some issues in certain cities, and they have detailed plans for addressing these. We have personally reviewed these and have very high confidence that they will make progress in fixing them," Cook said.

The upgrades won't be cheap, however: Earlier this month, Gerard Hallaren, director of research at TownHall Investment Research, estimated that AT&T will need to spend $5 billion to upgrade its wireless network to catch up with Verizon, which is widely viewed as tops in the industry. AT&T has been focused on wireline investments but would be well advised to shift more resources toward wireless, Hallaren noted.

Seen in this light, perhaps it's telling that Apple chose not to include a camera with the iPad. Is this AT&T's recognition that the iPhone 3GS' video functionality has placed undue strain on its network? Only Apple and AT&T can answer that one, but AT&T still doesn't support wireless tethering despite pledging to do so last year, and it's not supported in the iPad either.

With the 3G iPad arriving in three month's time, a line in the sand has been drawn between AT&T and the hordes of Apple fans eager to get their hands on the iPad. AT&T is already under a microscope for its iPhone issues, but if it gets the necessary wireless network upgrades in place in time, that could help restore its battered image.

"AT&T is definitely working hard to upgrade their network. The plan is there, it's just a question of how long it will take," said Nguyen.

Apple iPad is Just Another DOA

Neither lived up to its advance publicity. Both also turned out to be more fashion accessory than the revolutionary gizmo each portended to be.

I can't say "pretended to be" because neither Google nor Apple did much to fuel the pre-launch speculation, but neither reined it in, either.

Why is the iPad a disappointment? Because it doesn't allow us to do anything we couldn't do before. Sure, it is a neat form factor, but it comes with significant trade-offs, too. No 16:9 widescreen, for example.

The iPad is more evolutionary than revolutionary. People have noticed this, as even a quick scan of news stories about the iPad will quickly point out.

I wonder: Has Steve Jobs' fabled reality distortion field finally failed its creator?

An unbiased observer would have to say the iPad is really not much more--and in some ways less--than an iPod touch with a larger screen.

Apple says the iPad comes at "an unbelievable price" and they're right, I don't believe.

The $499 iPad, with its whopping 16GB of memory and Wi-Fi only, won't cut it for serious users' needs, especially if video is stored on the device. More believable, for most folks, is the $599 32GB or $699 64GB models.

If you want 3G data, you'll spend $829 on that 64GB model, though you can buy a much more functional notebook or netbook for less.

Between the Nexus One and iPad, Apple's tablet is clearly the better device. But, neither lived up to the hype that surrounded their release and each is diminished by the unfulfilled expectations created for them.

Such hype is part of Apple's marketing plan, so it's unlikely the company will do anything to rein it in. Google, however, might learn from it's Nexus One disaster and do a better job of setting expectations in the future.

It's not supposed to be that new products are better liked before launch than after.

Apple's iPad beauty could be an ugly beast for mobile operators

The gadget appears to do everything but make your breakfast. Like its predecessor, the iPhone, more applications will be added over time and, eventually, its price will drop, making it even more desirable and ubiquitous. Therein lies the problem for already-strained carriers like AT&T in the US and O2 in the UK.

Sales of the device are unlikely to jump out of the gate. Even though the 16-gigabyte version costs less than $499 (£308), most anything the iPad does can already be done by an iPhone or a netbook for a lower price. Yet sales will heat up with time. The device displays books, runs business software and serves up web pages in a more appealing manner. For many people, the speed and utility of the device will be worth paying for.

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Yet this speed may be the iPad's Achilles heel. When outside a Wi-Fi connection, US users must use AT&T. And the operator is already feeling the strain from devices such as the iPhone, for which it is the exclusive carrier in the country. In December, the head of AT&T's mobile operations admitted its New York and San Francisco networks were under strain from increasing use of smartphones.

Cell networks were designed for short and infrequent calls. The iPhone changed behavior, as customers use their handsets longer, for more data-intensive functions and more frequently. Streaming video, a key selling point of the iPad, is particularly hard on operators. If customers used wireless connections in the same way they use their broadband connections, operators would need 10 times as many base stations, according to Sanford Bernstein research.

The iPad will intensify this problem because it encourages users to stream video and play online games. Sure, iPad sales may take time to rev up, giving operators time to invest in their networks. And AT&T can deploy more urban Wi-Fi hotspots to reduce bottlenecks. Investors seem to be counting on this. They sent AT&T shares up slightly.

That may be first-day giddiness. The iPad is beautiful, but it may become an ugly beast for operators.

Apple's iPad Ready to Challenge the Kindle

Daniel Ionescu

Jan 28, 2010 7:03 am

Not only will the Apple iPad compete with the Amazon Kindle as an e-reader, but because Apple's new tablet will run iPhone apps, it will compete with Kindle's software, too. People who buy the iPad can choose to use Apple's new iBooks app and bookstore, or they could opt to run Kindle's iPhone app on the device instead.

The decision might just come to down to the book stores. The iPad's iBook store may be new, but the concept behind it is not; it's not all that different from Amazon's Kindle store for iPhone.

What's interesting is that the Amazon Kindle book store will work on the iPad from day one, albeit only in 2x mode (pixel doubling to fill the larger screen). However, as the SDK for the iPad is out today, Amazon has plenty of time to prepare its store for the larger screen of the iPad over the next 60 days.

Books and magazines for the iPad

In theory, if you already own a Kindle (or ebooks purchased from Amazon) you will be able to enjoy them straight away on the iPad. But the best part of having two (three if you count Barnes & Noble in as well) book stores on the iPad will be diversity and choice. All of the apps are free to download; you pay only for the titles you want to buy, so there's little to prevent users from switching between all three.

My colleague Nick Mediati was commenting last night how the iPad iBookstore is lacking periodicals. But then it struck me - it doesn't matter if the iBookstore don't have magazines, the Kindle store does.

Yet, what's interesting about the iPad is that publishers don't have to rely on book stores for distributing their static content. Instead, they can create their own full-fledged application from the App Store, like The New York Times does on the iPad.

Kindle DX loses to the iPad, Kindle stands a chance

The Amazon Kindle goes for almost half the price of the iPad and comes with free wireless and a full keyboard. The iPad starts at $499, but brings in loads more storage, a larger color touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and a familiar interface to those who ever used an iPod touch or an iPhone.

Battery life on the Kindle is superior though, up to two weeks. Yet the Kindle is a single-purpose device with a grayscale screen. Perhaps it would be best to compare the iPad with the Kindle DX, which incidentally also has 9.7-inch display, and it's only $10 cheaper than an iPad. Here's where the comparison gets tough on Amazon.

The iPad won't probably kill the small Kindle: it's cheaper and performs well at letting your read for an extended period of time without tiring your eyes. But the Kindle DX should prepare for a battering from the iPad if Amazon doesn't drop the price significantly. For only $10 more, the iPad delivers three times the storage of the DX, a color touch screen, and an all-round multipurpose device.

If you already have a Kindle though, things might get exciting, as Amazon is preparing to launch apps for the platform as well. Keep an eye though on book prices. Apple's iBookstore merchandise is up to 50 percent more expensive than on the Kindle, which means bigger bucks for publishers, and possibly hurdles for Amazon's store.

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