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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

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?

Samsung enters mobile computer market with 7in Galaxy Tab, launched at IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin

Samsung made its eagerly awaited new entry into the mobile computing market today with the launch of the Galaxy Tab, and hinted that further versions will be unveiled next year.

The 7in Android-based tablet computer with built-in phone capabilities is expected to challenge the Apple iPad.

However, with pricing details still not available today, it is not clear quite how the Tab will compare with other products.

Weighing in at just 380g, the Galaxy Tab is being pitched as a single portable device that can be used to browse the internet, make video calls, watch television or listen to music.

“This is not just another tablet. We call it a Smart Media device,” Thomas Richter, Samsung’s head of product portfolio, told a packed press conference at the at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.

Samsung executives said that the company will probably launch several more Tab models next year, possibly with different screen sizes, to target different audiences.

“Based on our research, customers have different needs … next year you might see very different tablets coming out of our company,” hinted DJ Lee, a senior Samsung executive.

The Galaxy Tab has a 1024×600 TFT colour screen, which can flip between portrait and landscape view dependng how the user holds it. It will be sold with 16GB or 32GB of memory, expandable with another 32GB. It has two built-in cameras for and will be shipped with several applications from Google pre-installed, including Maps and Places.

The Tab also supports a wide range of connectivity methods, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HSDPA and HSUPA. and includes a GPS chip. It will also run HTML5 and Adobe Flash.

“At this size and weight, the Tab is just as portable as a mobile phone,” Richter said. Samsung said that the Tab’s battery would support seven hours of continuous video playback.

There was some disappointment at IFA that pricing details were not available. Samsung said this would ultimately be determined by operators. Vodafone has already said today that it will offer the device, which will be launched in Europe in October.

“We will work very hard to deliver a very competitive price,” said DJ Lee.

Analysts at CSS Insight said that the Tab is likely to be positioned as an “operator-friendly alternative to iPad”, but warned that pricing will be “crucial in the competitive tablet market.”

The ability to make voice and video calls over the Tab may be a key differentiator in the competitive tablet PC market. According to Richter, mobile operators who sell the Tab are likely to offer a “two Sim” solution, so that a customer could run the Tab and another mobile phone on the same phone number.

The Tab runs the latest Google’s Android mobile phone application, and will have full access to the Android Marketplace of applications. Lee said that “80% to 90%” of Android applications will work on the device, but he admitted that some of the most popular applications did not run well – probably due to its sreen size. He said Samsung had been working with Google and the developer community to fix this problem.

Ebooks are also supported on the device. “We expect Tab to play an important role in the digitisation of printed media,” said Richter.

One of the world’s largest casual gaming companies today unveiled HTML5 versions of 47 of its games websites, proclaiming that it will be the new standard for gaming devices within three years.

SPIL Games has thrown its considerable weight behind HTML5 and the upward trend in casual gaming, with users now able to play its games on mobile browsers supporting HTML5 (ruling out devices running Android pre-2.0).

Previously, mobile visitors would have been taken to the full browser window displayed in Flash – but that would be slow to render with most phone browsers, and incompatible with Apple devices.

But close to a million mobile users try accessing a SPIL gaming website every month, a company spokesman tells us. More than half (52%) of these visits are from Apple devices, 15% from Android, 15% from Symbian (ie Nokia and/or Sony Ericcson) and 6% from BlackBerry devices.

The company, which currently has more than 4,000 games in its portfolio, is offering developers prizes totalling up to $50,000 (£41,000) for the best HTML5 game, encouraging the potential it says is “hampered by different protocols, operating systems, and platform-approval processes within the mobile world”.

An aside: Nick Jones, Gartner analyst, has an interesting take on that very subject:

“Native platforms will certainly become less important relative to the web platform because HTML5 supports a wider range of applications than the last-generation web.

“But native platforms can stay ahead by evolving faster than HTML5, and in different directions to HTML5, it’s not hard to outrun a snail driven by a committee. So although HTML5 will be important the native platform will retain a big edge if you want to develop clever apps. And the native platform owners want it to stay that way.”

“Openness is at the core of everything we do,” says Peter Driesson, chief executive of the Netherlands-based company.

“We are aware that HTML5 is still at an early stage, but already developers can use it to make great games, and we are confident that the industry will quickly embrace it. Within three years we expect HTML5 to be the standard in gaming devices.”

Analysts at Forrester predict the Western European mobile gaming market to grow from €746m (£616m) at the end of 2010 to €1.46bn (£1.2bn) by the end of 2015, due to the growth in paying mobile gamers (31 million to 45 million over the same time frame, Forrester predicts) and a growth in smarphone adoption.

• Another noteworthy HTML5 development: Ephemeral rockers Arcade Fire have teamed up with Google Chrome to put together a personalised music video. Nice.