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Wallpaper* October issue sees Lynch share editor’s chair with stage director Robert Wilson

Film director David Lynch has guest-edited a section of the October issue of IPC Media’s design, fashion and lifestyle magazine Wallpaper*.

Lynch, whose credits include Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, and stage director Robert Wilson have each edited a section of the magazine’s latest issue, as well as creating their own covers.

In a collaboration with creative communications agency Dentsu London, Wallpaper* readers will be able to animate Wilson’s still images by using a striped sheet of acetate provided by the magazine.

Readers can also use a QR code – a type of two-dimensional barcode that can be scanned by a smartphone – to go to a web page where they can view Wilson’s films, which feature Isabella Rossellini, Brad Pitt, a sumo wrestling champion and snowy owls.

Wallpaper* will also launch its first iPad app with the October issue, The Director’s Cut, which goes on sale tomorrow.

iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch; £5.49; cert 4+; Cave

DoDonPachi is one of the longest-running shoot-em-up franchises in Japan, with its first iteration, DonPachi, establishing itself in arcades all the way back in 1995.

DoDonPachi Resurrection is developer Cave’s first mobile release for the franchise, and offers both an optimised iPhone mode and a straight-up port of the arcade version – though the difference between the two is fairly negligible.

In a format that will be instantly familiar to most, you pilot a small, laser-toting fighter ship over a landscape packed to the nines with enemies, projectiles, power-ups and score notifiers.

Your vessel – available in three different varieties – constantly fires, so all you need to worry about is navigation. Bombs, a “hyper cannon” and the game’s “slaughter menace” mode (which changes your ship depending on your style of play) offer some variety but, handily for a mobile release, your input is pretty basic.

Inifinite continues means DoDonPachi is pretty forgiving, though the difficulty level if you do attempt to avoid damage is incredibly high.

The game falls in to the niche shmup subcategory of “bullet hell”, where the screen is almost constantly more than three-quarters full of moving sprites (often with noticeable lag): you’ll probably need a lie down after any extended period of play.

Meanwhile, the game’s Japanese idiosyncrasies charm and annoy in equal measure. The strangely translated instructions fail to give you any real idea of how to play – for example, you’re told “scrape” your ship against bullets to power-up the ‘menace bar’ – I’m still not too sure what this means.

At the same time there’s something weird and wonderful about some of the Parodius-like strangeness to be found. The first end-of-level boss turns into a mechanised schoolgirl before exploding, for example.

Sadly this oddball charm and the game’s frenetic action can’t hide that fact that, on a small screen, there’s simply far too much going on for the game to be remotely playable.

It’s rare a game makes me feel old, but the difficulty I had working out what was happening most of the time made for a completely bewildering experience.

The fact that your fingers cover part of the playing field as you swipe to move your ship around only makes things worse. At least now I know how my Gran felt when I forced her to play GoldenEye with me.

OpenFeint compatibility, polished graphics and controls and the niche appeal of such a title means it will probably please many hardcore shmup fans. Sadly, this reviewer just wasn’t hardcore enough.

Rating: 2/5

Two new reports suggest that online ads still don’t pay like paper-and-ink ones

You can have opinion (and hope, and aspiration) or you can have facts. Benedict Evans, at Enders Analysis, has just trawled through all the data of newspaper finances present and future – and he has concluded that one current print reader is worth four times as much as any prospective online website reader.

Even when you’ve killed all the forests and lugged them around the country, the old combination of cover price and advertising revenue comes out on top, it seems. Put up a paywall, as the Times has done, and subscription money (with concomitant advertising decline) fills only a quarter of the gap. And if you forget paywalls and concentrate on advertising alone, the gap is just as big, if not even bigger.

Too glum? Wall climbers and advertising directors would both say “yes” to that, I guess: but try an absolutely new Deloitte report, based on a 2,000-strong YouGov survey. The pollsters asked which advertising medium has the greatest impact. Answer: TV at 56%. Newspapers were on 30%, magazines 17%, and radio 15%, with posters, leaflets and cinema slotting in behind.

Online advertising, from banners to videos, floats in at 3% and 1% respectively. Ads on iPhones and iPads are other one-percenters. It may be a growth area. It may be a sector that advertising agencies themselves like to talk up during an economic downturn. It may find ways of matching TV and print for brand-building and display somewhere down the line. But it is not a game-changer: and Evans seems to doubt whether it ever can be. More space – going on infinity – to fill: less revenue attached: fewer bangs for the buck.

And if you don’t like that particular array of facts, you better nip out quick and find some more.

The trade fair is one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics and home appliances shows

Samsung’s new tablet computer signals an understanding that it takes more than hardware to be successful, say analysts

Samsung’s new Android-powered tablet computer, the Galaxy Tab, has been well-received by industry analysts – even though full pricing details have still not been released.

The Tab, launched at the IFA show in Berlin, is expected to herald a charge against the early success of the Apple iPad. Consumers should benefit, with a price war predicted to kick off in 2011.

Here’s some of the early reaction.

Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight

Apple has legitimised the tablet category with its iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab sees the tier-one brand go head-to-head with Steve Jobs’ creation.

Samsung is betting big on the tablet category with this device. It’s the first major manufacturer to unveil a device targeting this segment but we expect a flurry of further announcement from an array of other players.

The Galaxy Tab signals Samsung’s understanding that it takes more than hardware to be successful. Allowing access to books, music and films is a major step forward as it ratchets up its competitive positioning against Apple.

The 7in form-factor is very compelling. Rumours abound that Apple is evaluating a similar device footprint for future iterations of the iPad to sit alongside its 9.7in older brother.

Success will depend on pricing. If positioned carefully, the Galaxy Tab could emerge as an operator-friendly alternative to Apple’s iPad as it could be subsidised (with a contract) to extremely ultra low price points in the run up to the lucrative holiday sales season.

This is the first of a torrent of Android tablets we expect to be launched in coming weeks. At the low end, it’s going to be a complete bloodbath as no-name brands race to the bottom of the price curve.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice-president at Gartner

The Galaxy Tab builds on the success that the Galaxy S [mobile phone] has been having since its launch in June. With a 7in display, front and back camera, 16GB and 32GB storage plus SD card and a price tag of around €600 (£500) before subsidy, the Galaxy Tab offers a good solution for those users that have been thinking about getting a tablet but were waiting for something more price competitive.

Samsung will have about 200 apps at launch that will be dedicated to the Galaxy Tab. All apps in its Markets application store will, of course, run as well. But if the iPad experience is anything to go by, it will be dedicated apps that will make the difference. It will be also interesting to see what will be the consumers’ response to the subsidised model. The flexibility that you can have with iPad – where, in the UK, I can buy a day pass for 3G, or a week or a month – has had a lot of success with consumers who do not feel they have signed up their life yet to another contract.

All that said, the recent Ofcom report on the UK shows that the trend for the 24-month contract is growing. Subsidy on hardware is still what consumers see rather than total cost of ownership.

Apple has some competition from a slew of companies. But it made its design decisions in a vacuum: so why did it go for the features that it did, and do they matter more than others?

Here’s a question: why is the screen of Apple’s iPad 9.7 inches across? Why that size? Why not bigger? Or smaller?

If we examine this question, we may be able to figure out the answer to another question: how are the slew of tablets being released now (hello Samsung) going to fare in the market?

Consider what the iPad was going up against when it was being designed: the range of Windows-based tablet computers, which would have had screens in the 12 to 13-inch range; the Amazon Kindle, a dedicated e-reader, with a 7″ screen; and the Kindle DX, launched in May 2009, which has a 9.7″ screen. (There was also, of course, the smaller range of machines, bottoming out at the iPod Touch, with its 3.5″ screen.)

Apple’s engineering and design team will have played with all sorts of screen sizes, and they’ll have compared the Kindle and Kindle DX screens to see which was the more satisfying in terms of user experienced – because that’s where Apple really sweats it, on the user experience. You can imagine Steve Jobs wandering around with prototypes with differently-sized screens, trying to figure out which was the ideal. Given a certain screen size, you get a certain battery life. Or vice-versa.

Apple plumped for 9.7″, with 1024×768 pixels, and stuck in a huge battery too, which is what has given the iPad its (alleged) 10-hour battery life. Though for once, that claim seems to be backed up by anecdotal reports around the web: the iPad really does seem to last through the day. (Using 3G, Apple says you’ll get a nine-hour battery life.)

But that battery life is also the reason the iPad weighs more than other tablets: because it’s got a big battery.

Now we come to all the other tablets, which have been built and launched in the aftermath of Apple’s January announcement – and may well have been designed since January too.

Here comes Samsung; here too is Viewsonic, and Archos, and we even got an email from Binatone, one of the really old British consumer electronics names. It’s offering the “HomeSurf” for £130: 7″ screen, 800×480, resistive touch screen “with stylus”, 2GB storage, Wi-Fi, Android (2.2 we assume, but it’s not specified), MicroSD card slot, plays MP4, H.264, XVID. The claimed video playback time: 3 hours. Plus there’s an 8″ version for £180: 800×600, touch screen with stylus, 2GB storage, video playback MP4, H.264 (but not XVID, apparently), video playback time 4 hours.

Toshiba has also launched a tablet, with a 10.1″ screen (interesting) with Froyo; apparently the 16GB version will cost about £399 – making it a challenge to Apple (the 16GB iPad is £429).

Samsung, which has attracted a lot of attention with the announcement of its Galaxy Tab – whose specifications were well-known ahead of the launch, apart from the price, which then didn’t get announced – might be one of those. Why? Because Heise Online at IFA says that the price for the unlocked 16GB 7″ Wi-Fi/3G Galaxy Tab will be about €800.

Does that sound reasonable? Well, if you compare it to the 64GB Wi-Fi/3G iPad, which costs exactly the same amount, then.. no. The suggestion is that Samsung is actually letting the mobile carriers – which will be the only retail avenue – decide the price.

The Samsung will manage 7 hours of video playback, it’s claimed: we’ll have to see whether that’s the case. And you do get a camera on the front and back, plus other little extras.

Tim Bray, formerly at Sun and now looking after various Android-y things at Google, has had an early hands-on with the Galaxy Tab. “The world still isn’t sure just where it is that tablets are the right tool for the job,” he notes (which echoes my own ponderings about the function of the iPad, before it was released).

His other thoughts on the product:

“It’s got a phone but (at least on the pre-release model I used) you can’t hold it up to your head, which is a good thing as that would look supremely dorky… Did I mention that the screen is beautiful? Also it feels really good in the hand and looks pretty nice, and is obviously in the first microsecond’s glance not an iPad.”

So what will he do with it?

“I know what I’ll use the Galaxy Tab for: to show off Android. The big screen just makes everything easier to see and point at, and graphics look outstanding, and it passes from hand to hand easily. Showing off Android is part of my job and this will help me do my job better.”

That leads him onto his thoughts about what tablets are for:

“Which leads to a general theory, reinforced by informal observation of hipsters with iPads in coffee shops: a tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the café, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone’s eyes.”

Key question:

“How big a market is that? Anyone who says they know is lying.”

At which we turn to Ray Chen, the president of Compal, one of the big Taiwanese computer assembly companies – which builds tablets for companies including Dell, Acer and Lenovo. He thinks sales of non-Apple tablets will “not exceed” 15m units in 2011, and that there will be a fearsome shakeout soon after as the market turns out to be tougher than expected. Compare that to Apple, which says that it sold 3.27m iPads in the three months since the device launched in April. Clearly, Apple works out as the biggest player in that market.

But come around again to that question at the top: why is the iPad screen the size it is? If Apple thought that 7″ was the sweet spot for this, it surely would have built it that size. Ignore the lack of features; remember the Slashdot observation when the first iPod came out: “No wireless. Less space than a [Creative Labs] Nomad. Lame.” But what the iPod did have was size (the Nomad was a giant compared to it) and battery life.

I think the same applies for tablets. The specs, and things like cameras, are all subsidiary to the main things that people want to do with tablets: browse on them and share them (per Bray) and use them for long periods without having to hunt around for a power source. True, it would be nice if we could browse for hours on end on our laptops, but the choice there seems to be between netbooks offering long battery lives but pokey screens and keyboards, or nice big laptop screens but unsatisfactory battery life.

And even for the former of those categories, things aren’t going well:

“Chen also noted that Wintel netbook sales have recently been devoured seriously by tablet PCs and if the two firms [presumably Microsoft and Intel] do not consider dropping prices or improve performance, sales will continue to drop.”

This chimes with something Jack Schofield posted at ZDNet: while sales of desktop and laptop PCs are rising towards 1m per day, “Gartner also sees diminishing sales of netbooks, which it calls mini-notebooks. Netbooks accounted for 20% of mobile PC sales at the end of last year, but Gartner expects it to fall to around 10% by late 2014.”

Netbooks are even beginning to look like a brief spasm in personal computing’s history; Apple’s disdain for them, and its refusal to produce one in the face of analysts and press who thought it was cutting its own throat by not doing so, now looks well-placed. Certainly, better to be the leader in a sector like tablets than a follower in netbooks.

But until more people have bought and tried out these tablets, we’re not going to know if a 7″ screen can do the job – or if, as one ever so slightly suspects, it’s the 9.7″ measurement that actually does the job best.

Chen’s forecast is definitely one to watch – and it will be interesting to see if tablets turn out to be a sort of computing flash in the pan, like netbooks are looking, or if they turn into the equivalent of the MP3 player, and carve out a whole new mode of use. And if the latter, the really interesting question will be: what’s the best-selling screen size? And how long is “long enough” for the battery? And is there any other essential element to a tablet that guarantees sales?

Specialist publisher announces paid-for iPad app, looking to increase return from digital operations

Future Publishing is to launch a bespoke iPad edition of its gadget magazine T3, buoyed by a sixfold increase in US print sales of the title since the iPad launched in April.

T3: iPad Edition marks the specialist publisher’s move into publishing tailored editions of its magazines for tablet devices, following the release of iPhone apps for its Total Film and MacLife titles.

Development of the T3 iPad edition will be led by Future’s in-house team and built on the WoodWing Digital Magazine Tool platform, which also hosts the Sports Illustrated iPad app.

The app will showcase exclusive video, 360-degree animation and interactive image galleries. Although T3′s print edition is currently hosted by Zinio for digital browsing, the new app represents Future’s first bespoke paid-for edition for the Apple iPad.

Nial Ferguson, publishing director for Future’s entertainment and tech lifestyle portfolios, said: “The natural synergies between T3 and the iPad create a dream union for both consumers and our commercial partners. Our research tells us that T3 readers are high-spending early-adopters, who already voraciously consuming media on the platform.

“We’ve worked very hard and liaised with Apple to ensure that T3: iPad Edition will give our readers the quality and authority of the print magazine, combined with the unique interactivity and functionality the iPad platform provides. Early testing among consumers and commercial partners has been very positive.”

After posting better-than-expected financial returns for the six months to the end of March, Stevie Spring, chief executive of Future Publishing, told the Guardian that digital publishing represented “more than a quarter” of its revenue in the given time and suggested that there were opportunities to develop its brands further in the space.

“The iPad could be a bubble or it could be a bandwagon,” said Spring, reflecting on the significant increase in sales of the magazine since the US launch of Apple’s tablet device. Spring said the publisher’s existing stock of iPhone apps for its titles, which are a mixture of paid-for and free, were “partly promotional, partly experimental”.