HEAD BLOG

The new iPhone is crap. It’s not called ‘iPhone 5′. It only has a dual processor. It doesn’t have wings.

Apple’s announcement can be said to have underwhelmed the talking heads. Coming on the heels of Amazon’s Kindle it felt a little like they were standing still.

It was inevitable.

When a company releases a breakthrough product, everything after it is a case of enhancement. Innovation is the gunshot which makes us take notice.

And yet we still want to focus on that gunshot when in fact we should be focussing on the effect it has had.

Look at it another way and we see that there are two sides to product development: the solution and the marketing.

The solution is where the innovation occurs. You take a ‘problem’ and find a solution. It’s what led to the iPod, the iPhone, to Google, to Twitter, the Dyson and to all the other technologies that have become ubiquitous in our lives.

Marketing is how it reaches the public. Key messages inform as to what that technology, what that solution, can do for us. Will it let me talk to my family in Australia? Does it enable me to write tragic poetry whilst standing on cliff-tops? Can I use it to find my way to that secret club where we dress up? These are the benefits which innovation can bestow upon me, the humble user.

There comes a point, however, when the majority of people are just quite content with how their benefits are delivered. Whilst some might care about how pin sharp their photos are, more will be happy just to flick through the blurry images they fired off on holiday. Others might want 1080p in order to fully appreciate the bright colours of the shaky handcam film they downloaded. More will be content with the fact that all it took was two simple actions to start watching the latest Tim Allen christmas movie.

In other words, there comes a time when the physical phone no longer matters. How fast a piece of technology is is only relevant when it hinders the benefits it promised to deliver.

Amazon know this. Their innovation is in the ecosystem; in the delivery of benefits. So too is Apple’s. They just didn’t focus on that. If they made any mistakes with their announcement of the 4s, it was in allowing their usual secrecy to complicate their very simple message in a way that never happens with their routine upgrading of the desktop and laptop hardware.

Innovation happens once in a product’s lifetime. After that it’s a question of showing people what it can do for them.

SPiN Galactic is a ping-pong game for iPhone that is light-years ahead of everything else. It’s fast, stylish and built for the gamer who wants more than just a simulation. It’s awesome and we love it.

Head First worked with VivusNet and SPiN New York to emulate the über-cool vibe of Susan Sarandon’s nightclubs complete with their celebrity verve. The result is a game that will test the skill of ping-pong enthusiasts whilst catering to the quick-fingered reflexes of the old-skool gamer through a series of special attacks and defenses.

SPiN Galactic is the start of an epic voyage.

When it comes to ideas we like to think being different is a pretty good starting point. A few months back, a new client asked us to come up with ideas for a game based on Ping Pong in order to promote… well, let’s just say it’s something pretty cool.

We huddled and thought and huddled some more (hey, it was back in the depths of winter) and came up with a good few ideas. The client thought and thought and thought some more (their winter wasn’t that cold) and chose… not Swing Pong.

It was fair enough. They wanted something to meet a slightly different task (and we’re in the process of fulfilling THAT brief too so hang in there).

Something, however, wouldn’t allow us to let go of Swing Pong.

Maybe it was the name or maybe it was just the idea of basing a sports game on audio reactions that kept us interested but we plugged away and, thanks to some hard work and a team of honest beta-testers, created Swing Pong.

We think it’s a bit of fun.

The Guardian think so too. Which is nice.

We could have created a regular ping pong game of course. The App Store has quite a few of those. Poke your finger at the screen and score points. But we wanted to show that anything can be turned on its head and presented in a different way in order to stand out from the crowd. Add an ad spend to that and you have yourself a clear proposition which has really, measurable value.

Take a look and see what you think.

I’ve written about the possible dangers of Apple becoming the gatekeeper to entertainment. To me, the rise of the corporate State is a big, hairy and deeply scary shift in global politics. That one company can be the arbiter of morality above and beyond any nationally or internationally agreed laws is increasingly becoming a reality and shifting our sense of what democracy can acheive just at the very time when global democracy is moving within our reach.

This post isn’t, however, about politics. At least, not entirely.

It is about Apple and its attitude towards development and, more specifically about how ideas and innovation is fostered within the new one party State.

A post by the well respected Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard got me thinking. At first his claims of operating on the edge chimed with my sense of how creativity should work that great ideas are not born from control and order. but between the cracks; wild and wilful; the result of non-conformity.

That’s what want to believe. I want to believe that the approval system imposed by Apple is the antithesis of creativity and that it will end in a steady stream of stilted, unoriginal products that will ultimately turn people away from iTunes.

Only I don’t.

I don’t believe that at all.

I wish I did of course. I like the idea and I completely respect Mr Grigsby’s decision to quit iPhone development. It’s principled and therefore admirable. I like that a lot.

I just think it isn’t accurate. I think great ideas come from necessity. We all operate under some kind of structure imposed upon us. All of publishing works the same way; films, books, music – if you want to be heard then you generally have to follow the rules, even if breaking those rules is another one of the rules. Getting product in front of consumers takes money, even in these days of the long tail and the people who have the money are, by and large, interested in ROI and minimising risk. To them, innovation is useful only as a means to an ends.

Look at the studio system in Hollywood – great films still come out of that. Books are different but the economic pressures are no less (and increasing all the time). Games certainly operate under very strict control systems which companies such as Apple are merely emulating (ok, and strengthening).

Great things still happen. Great films, books, games – they all come out and on a regular basis. Ideas can’t be controlled no matter what systems gatekeeper companies such as Apple put in place. Ideas flow around such barriers.

Maybe there will be a corral of wild ideas for the iPhone. Maybe Apple will empower greater freedom for developers so they can experiment. I can’t see this happening if it threatens stability and control but maybe it will, in some form, happen.

If that happens it could be because all the real innovators have left to pursue other platforms. Most likely, however, it will be because it seems like a good idea.

A cheap little app for the iPhone which was recommended to me by Matt Booth has got me looking at the world in a different way.

Just as the app itself had to look at the world differently.

It’s a camera app called Hipstamatic and anyone with a 3g will know that the camera on the iPhone isn’t something to throw away your Nikon over.

At just 1mb it is the sort of camera you avoid rather than include in your arsenal. It will do “ok” prints for a postcard but that’s about it.

So making use of it means making some big compromises if you like your photos glossy and printed onto canvas.

The makers of the app came up with an idea which makes perfect sense.

They modelled it on old style point and click cameras with old style film. That means you get a camera that adds in flaws of the kind you’d see by looking through your own childhood photos (I’m assuming you are born way before digital cameras came about).

It’s a fun way of making the most out of a camera with such limitations.

And it’s a great way of forcing yourself to look at the world differently.

I’ve been playing with black and white photography. I’ve done this on my dslr and enjoyed it well enough but now it’s a whole new thing. I’m looking more keenly at contrasts and compositions because I wonder what flaws they will produce once processes through Hipstamatic.

Waiting (sometimes even patiently) for the image to ‘develop’ is part of the fun because it means I can’t fire off twenty shots in a second and assume one has captured the moment.

Digital freed us all to become photographers. It’s been a wonderful gift and has produced amazing photos and amazing sites. But seeing and using Hipstamatic has made me understand what our perfect digital world loses in the rush for better quality images. It’s also taught me that dealing with obstacles in life is a route to producing amazing, insightful and thoughtful work.