The rumours are old news. A million sites have been shown to have been liars. And the hype has given way to reality. The iPad doesn’t walk on water, hover like a board, or sing you sweet songs while you sleep. No, wait. It can do that last one.

For all the cries of ‘haters’ and ‘fanboys’, it’s hard to shake the thought that something about the iPad isn’t quite… perfection. Whatever you think of Apple and its products, it does a better job on the aesthetics of industrial design than anyone in the business. Keeping devices clean, simple and on target is their speciality. But the iPad seems a bit wrong for some reason.

For mine, that problem is the screen. There’s a few other niggles people are harping about (no multitasking, for one) but in the long game the screen is the most likely ‘miss’ to cause long term grief.

On the question of tasking, power, ports, services, software, or whatever else, these are easy adds. A firmware update here, a new app there, even a 2nd or 3rd gen product, and you have everything you need on almost every front.

But in the iPad context, the screen must remain a constant. Unlike a real laptop, Apple Apps are designed to suit a specific device resolution. Even moreso than resolution, the Apps are most specifically built to match a screen ratio. And the iPad’s 4:3 ratio feels like anything but ‘the future’.

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Since the dawn of PC gaming, flight sims have pushed the envelope, defining many fundamentals we now accept as core to the entire spectrum of gaming. Above any other genre, they have always demanded the fastest hardware. Reproducing the complex dynamics of flight and replicating sophisticated avionics is a huge design challenge even for NASA and aerospace companies. That a convincing sim can exist on PC hardware today is a wonder, but words can’t describe what a miracle it was on a 8Mhz 286 in 1982. Flight sims rock because we love the taste of knowing something is the very best it can be.

Graphics were crude and focused where it mattered. We needed crisp displays to show detailed instruments. Rendering the first 3D worlds with horizon-spanning draw distances was limited to a few perspective lines. Indeed, the jump to SVGA in the late 90s was a momentous step for flight sims, not so much because the terrain looked better, but because the avionics were more detailed and readable. Flight simmers look down more than up.

Hand in hand with the early technology wins, flight sims helped define the culture and meaning of what it is to be a PC gamer. A good sim’s complexity demanded weeks to master, dozens or even hundreds of keys to remember, 300 page manuals, and with all that, a sense held by the virtual pilot that they really were more sophisticated, more serious, more skilled than a mushroom hopping console gamer. We played sims because, forgive me for stating the obvious — they were simulations of things we could never do in our real lives. One felt that one really could fly, say, a real F-16, as long as it had a 101 keyboard in the cockpit… This was serious stuff, for serious gamers.

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Joe W-A was miffed when the L4D campaign mod he’d been working on wasn’t deemed awesome enough to warrant him being flown to Valve HQ to preview L4D2. Other modders were, mostly to get them onside as peer-leaders to counter the odd anti-L4D2 community uprising happening at the time.

Anyway, Joe managed to get Gabe Newell to agree to fly to Brisbane, Australia to check out the mod-in-progress — provided Joe paid the airfare. “I was just joking”, said Gabe today. With pure internet inventiveness, Joe got the community rallied and raised the fare in a couple of days.

Today in Sydney, the great meeting took place, and we were privileged to witness it.

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As discussed on Byteside Tech #1, we recently conducted a series of network data tests using the iPhone’s Speedtest.net app.

We had concurrent access to four iPhone 3GS handsets, one on each of the four Australian networks — Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, and 3. Travelling around the Sydney CBD and Sydney suburban areas, we ran close to 150 individual speed tests. Tests ranged from Manly to Homebush, Annandale to North Sydney, and plenty in between.

At each location tested, we ran four tests in rapid succession to try and get a reasonably accurate data set at each location while still pushing onward with the test as quickly as possible. Rapid successive tests would also, in theory, minimise excuses for high latency due to packet connection initiation times.

UPDATE: One thing we forgot to mention is that everywhere we tested we only ran the test when we could find full bars of coverage strength for all networks. So we were never testing good signal versus bad. Data strength may have had its own fluctuations in availability, but for most purposes we felt watching the standard signal meter was the best way to ensure we aimed for a level playing field at all locations.

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