Can we bring up Pat Metheney and his Orchestrion at this point? He has an orchestra full of real instruments that he can play with his guitar, sort of like MIDI for real instruments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VymAn8QJNQ

>>I would do the same with a Rapsberry Pi, some USB display, and a battery,

LOL!

I am sticking with my 4S until it is rendered too slow by the OS. A faster processor doesn't really mean anything these days. Most of the apps I run are not processor heavy games. Bigger screens and coloured cases are all window dressing really.

Welcome to the joys of getting old ;)

Lets face it, the original iPhone was all about running "web apps". Crappy bits of HTML running over the web. It is only because people started jailbreaking and writing their own apps that Apple opened up iOS to developers. Without the original jailbreakers Apple would be a lot, lot poorer.

Come on, its not like you meet someone on a $30/M web site, start dating, cancel your subscription and you are suddenly forced to stop dating them. You go on for a few months, contact all the possibles and if there is nothing, then you cancel. Stay on there too long and you just start contacting random ones.

Isn't the article rather missing the point? Does the average Android game really require more power? How many cores do you really need to play Angry Birds? I guess the hardest thing it is ever going to do is play 1080 video and I suspect the chipset is already optimised for that.

You see i have this old 286 machine i found in the loft. I can't be bothered to take it down the tip so i thought a charity might like it. ;)
Certainly where I live, the charity shops (of which there are a lot) won't touch hardware. Full stop. They are mostly run by old ladies who wouldn't know a top end PC from a hole in the ground. If they started accepting PCs, old printers, scanners (remember them), etc their shops would soon be full of them.

Unfortunately it will be judged mainly on its performance. So it better be running on some nice kit if it wants to make an impression.

You mean big japanese robots prancing around as if they were riding a horse? That I would like to see.

I would second this. I program for the day job but a few years ago i got an iPhone. I had always looked down on shareware and freeware but once i got my first app on the app store I was converted. As long as you come up with a vaguely original idea you can write a small puzzle/board game in a month or two of evenings. Probably quicker if its full time. Make it free and people WILL download it. Objective C is fairly good now they have sorted the memory management.

Sorry, but learning C++ is a bit like learning Latin. It is good if you want to understand the background of todays modern languages but really, there are so many better and well thought out languages these days that you shouldn't really need to.

Well, C is one step above assembler but not much more than that. Most of its commands and operations map onto assembly quite nicely (x++ to increment a variable, etc) and outside of the libraries, there is not much "high level" functionality built into it. Its portable as most of it is "lowest common denominator" stuff.

And for that matter, don't get me started on Objective C either. Worst of both worlds.

Unless you are doing string or memory manipulation in c, then yes, you can use them. In all other languages it should be banned. I remember tutting when i read that c# had caved in to the c programmers and included it. There is just no need because 1) it is not obvious (eg, _month[0]="Jan" or things like that). 2)Use an iterator, that's what they are there for.

Of course that is just my opinion.