I’ve found a surprisingly easy way to tell if an app from iTunes for the iPhone or iPad is going to take too much time to play and won’t be any fun. Just check out the “Top In-App Purchases” levels. If the top tier is over $10, you’re not going to enjoy playing that game if you have a full-time 8 AM to 5 PM kind of job.

Take, for example, EA’s latest offering… Road Trippin’!

Looking at the app listing in iTunes, everything seems all Smurfy-Happy-Blue on top.

 

 

But if you look off to the left column, under the FREE APP button (or DOWNLOAD button if you’ve already grabbed the app before), there’s a section called “Top In-App Purchases”.

So looking at Road Trippin’s! top offering, I see to play the game with “everything”, I would need to spend…

 

 

..$99.99!

$99 dollars and 99 cents. Almost half the price of a console system! Just so I can play with “everything” this “free” game offers.

You don’t have to be in iTunes to see this. You can also find this info under the iPhone and iPad section of the game app by clicking on the “Top In-App Purchases” banner….

 

 

…where you will see the same $99.99 foolishness.

 

 

“In-App Purchases” are just things you can buy while playing the game to move along faster, or just get those missing “propeller-for-the-damn-airplane” kinds of parts and those oh-so special “air-strike to get that pickle-faced rat bastich sniper that’s been nailing me for the last three days” kinds of options.

Do you need to make in-app purchases? No. You can slog through the game, playing hours and hours and hours and hours on end just to nickel and dime your way to nirvana. No more “sneaking-a-game-on-the-freeway”. No more hanging up on someone just because a pop-up from the game appeared.

But, in my experience, playing games like this take months to “win”.

The wheeeeeee-fun part ends around day 12. The Spirit of Piss, Vinegar and Vengeance kicks in around day 21.

The more iOS games I play like this, the more I realize most of the “In-App Purchase” games are basing themselves on the good old Las Vegas slot machine business model.

1. Put some money in the system.
2. Push some buttons.
3. Watch the beep-boop flashing lights.
4. Your money is gone!
5. Repeat Step One.

When a game company has priced the top-tier of their In-App Purchases insanely high, in my opinion, they’ve made the game overly hard and time consuming on purpose to get you hooked and make a grab for your money.

I’ll stick to the games without the in-app purchases banner. If a game does have in-app purchases, I’ll only install it on my device if the top tier is $10 or less (or to unlock the full-version of the game).

Like the old Vegas motto says… the easiest way to win these $100 games is not to play ’em.

I have an upcoming project where I need to securely stream videos to multiple iOS devices for a training seminar, so I decided to give the Seagate GoFlex Satellite a try yesterday to see if it would do what I needed.

I should have known things were going to go bad just looking at the box.

 

Somebody in Seagate’s art department needs to hold an iPad someday. This is ridiculous. A five year old can see this picture is wrong.

 

 

I should have known this was going to be the start of something…. terrible. Something that would eat two hours of my day just to get set up and running.

 

 

Right up front, I found out this fugness is NOT plug and play. The Seagate GoFlex Satellite is about as friendly as a crackhead rattlesnake on a burning cactus.

Once you take the Seagate GoFlex Satellite out of the box, you’re going to have to do some work before your iPad can see it (let alone use it).

I’ll skip over the 55 minutes of trying to get this thing installed and researching Seagate’s online tech support and just list what I had to do…

1. Charge the Seagate GoFlex Satellite for 30 minutes into a wall outlet using the plugs they provide.
2. While it is charging, go to Seagate’s download page and get your sync software for your platform (mac or PC) and install it on your desktop.
3. On the iPad, while it is connected to a live WiFi network, download GoFlex Media (by seagate) AND 8player Lite in the iOS store. Install both of these apps on the iPad.
4. After 30 minutes of charging, unplug the usb cable from the back of the Seagate drive
5. Press the RESET button on the bottom of the device with a tack or pin for 5 seconds to clear out the factory garbage on it
6. TURN OFF EVERYTHING IN THE AREA THAT AUTOMATICALLY CONNECTS TO WIFI NETWORKS. Not kidding. If anything auto connects to the Seagate during the next steps, the drive’s WiFi will never blink blue and update.
7. Turn off the WiFi on the iPad (by going to GENERAL and WiFi)
8. Connect the Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive to a PC – not a mac.
9. Download the latest firmware update for the Seagate GoFlex Satellite from Seagate’s website
10. Save the update directly to the root level of the GoFlex drive
11. Safely eject the drive from the taskbar of your PC. (You can’t just unplug this thing straight. It may lose the update.)
12. Hold down the power button on the side of the Seagate GoFlex Satellite for 15 seconds to turn it off.
13. Wait 15 more seconds.
14. Press the power button to re-boot the drive
15. The power light on the drive will blink green and then go solid. Then the light under the WiFi will start blinking green… then stay solid green…. then blink again.
16. After two minutes of this green blinkage, the wifi light will blink blue very briefly. This is where you MUST connect through WiFi on your iPad. (Miss this opportunity at your own risk!)
17. While the GoFlex is blinking blue, on the iPad, go to GENERAL and WIFI.
18. Turn the WiFi back on the iPad
19. Under CHOOSE A NETWORK, pick SEAGATE GO FLEX WIFI
20. Once the checkmark appears next to the SEAGATE GO FLEX WIFI network and the WiFi icon appears by the iPads’ name on the top menubar, go to the GoFlex Media app on the iPad and launch it.

Nothing to it!!

Once you have cleared the hurdles of connecting this device, these are the screens you will see in the GoFlex Media app on the iPad…

This is what you will have to deal with. It’s not like having a external flash drive or a folder you can just tap-open stuff with. It’s definitely not a Mac-like app. What you see above is what you get.

Once you’re connected to the drive on the iPad, you can change the name of the drive as it shows up in WiFi as well as assign a password. That’s about it, though.

To get files on the drive, you will have to use that sync app that was downloaded to the desktop and connect the Seagate GoFlex Satellite directly to your mac (or PC). When you use the transfer app, whatever files Seagate’s app does not support will not get copied over. If you drag and drop files, the files will copy over, but the Seagate app will not list them in the VIDEO or PHOTO views. Also, if you try and drag-and-drop files directly to the drive, some files may not transfer depending on how your computer is set up for external NTFS disk write access.

You can download files from the GoFlex Satellite drive to the iPad in the app, but you can not send any files from the iPad to the drive. It’s strictly a one way street.

Also, Seagate’s GoFlex app also does not support .flv videos (among a few other formats).

Oh, and the drive is formatted NTFS. If you re-format it into any other type, it won’t work anymore. It’s NTFS or nothing.

Right. So back to the other app that was downloaded to the iPad – 8player Lite.

The reason 8player Lite was downloaded to the iPad is because Seagate’s own technical support staff recommends using this app instead of Seagates’ GoFlex Media app!! Not kidding. The techs’ comments in their own forums and on amazon.com constantly mention this app instead of their own.

It’s pretty obvious why. Launching 8player Lite will get you to a old-style PSP navigation system…

Click what you want and the icons appear under to list content, or to the right for hierarchy. To back up a level, just click to the left.

It’s exactly as I remember my PSP system’s navigation.

 

The best part is that this app will list everything you dragged and dropped. Everything.

This is really handy to see what you really have on the drive in a category pane, and I believe it’s how a file-management app should behave.

But what really sold me on the 8player Lite app was this…

 

It played .flv’s. This little app actually played everything I had… every format, every size, every medium.

That’s a pretty sad state of design when I would rather have an old PSP interface than the one Seagate designed in 2011 for an iPad.

OK, now for the bad part… you can’t get online while you’re using this thing. The ipad is only connected to the Seagate GoFlex Satellite through WiFi, and if you try to get anywhere in Safari, you will just wind up at a web-interface of the files you have on the GoFlex Satellite drive. To get back online, you have to break the WiFi connection and switch back to your original network in the iPad’s GENERAL and NETWORK settings.

(You can also just switch off the Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive with the power button on the side, but your iPad may or may not reconnect to the previous wireless network as quickly as you could do so manually.)

Let me tell you, no internet access gets old real fast.

So to sum up my complaints…

1. This monstrosity is NOT plug and play out of the box! Connecting a WiFi drive should require no more than 5 minutes.
2. NTFS only is a poor decision considering most iPad users are also mac users as well.
3. There has got to be a way to surf the internet while the drive is connected. Maybe make this drive an FTP server that can get a DHCP address from a wireless network and let the iPad app act as a GUI FTP login? Or let the drive login to the network as a alternate configuration. (EX: if network named “X” is detected, then set IP address to “Y” and login with “Z” credentials.)
4. A Mac-like GUI. Something for the iPad shouldn’t look like something from the Napster-lovin’-90s.
5. There is no SEND TO DEVICE option. A storage drive that you must to connect to a desktop or laptop to load files to it is just ridiculous.
6. There is no on the fly converting. Seagate needs to take a look at AirVideoFree on the app store to get an idea on how it’s supposed to be done.
7. There are two green lights on this thing. The problem is one of these lights only turns blue and flickers when data is streaming or you have a window of opportunity to connect to the drive. IMO, this light should REMAIN SOLID BLUE when ANY device is connected and revert to green when NO ONE is connected. Ideally, it should also blink blue for every number of users connected and flicker blue when data is being transferred.
8. User/password combos would be great.
9. The getting started video is on the drive, and you can only see it after you have connected! This video needs to be put on the root level of the drive (or in a big TRAINING folder) so people can view it when they need it!
10. No love for .FLV.

Right now, bottom line, the Seagate GoFlex Satellite stinks on ice. But the potential for this drive is enormous.

I think of this drive like one of those fantastic big-budget sounding movies, with characters you’ve always wanted to see on the big screen. But what got made was something with C and D-list actors and director who doesn’t know anything about the project or material they are working on. Just bad all around.

Once the damn thing is connected to the iPad the first time, it behaves. Somewhat. But would I recommend a Seagate GoFlex satellite right now? No. Absolutely not. It’s actually easier to “cloud” data than use this device as it is now.

It needs work to be iPad friendly, and it needs a complete overhaul to be actually useful.

If the software updates make major improvements, I’ll re-review the drive.

UPDATE : If anybody from Seagate reads this post, let me strongly suggest you call Verizon and Sprint. Team up with them to make a 4G WiFi server. Their WiFi hotspot devices (like the Verizon 4G LTE MiFi) and your drive tech. Think mobile 4g hotspot, storage, streaming and internet access. All on one local device, no cloud needed. You will not be able to make these things fast enough at the factory.

I am sick of wireless companies saying a 5 gigabyte data plan is “enough for most regular users”.

Bull!

Here’s a perfect example. Electronic Arts and Gameloft are having a .99 cent sale on the iTunes store this weekend. Let’s say I want to spend $10 and get the top 10 iPad games that are .99 right now. The top 10 .99 cent games are…

• Monopoly – 69.3 MB
• NBA Jam – 249 MB
• Battleship – 17.7 MB
• Scrabble – 15.2 MB
• Asphalt 6 – 505 MB
• N.O.V.A. 2 – 504 MB
• Need For Speed Hot Pursuit – 431 MB
• LIFE – 13.8 MB
• Transformers Dark of the Moon – 116 MB
• Battlefield Bad Company – 265 MB

For $10, I would be downloading a little over 2 gigs (2, 186 MB). That smokes about half of my 5 gigabyte data plan right there.

But let’s say I had a $20 bill burning through my pocket and I wanted the top 20 .99 cent games on the iTunes store. The next 10 are…

• Dungeon Hunter 2 – 467 MB
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 – 259 MB
• FIFA 11 – 1.24 GB
• Dead Space – 427 MB
• Tetris – 29.8 MB
• Yahtzee – 18.3 MB
• RISK – 21.3 MB
• StarFront Collision – 605 MB
• Sim City – 93.1 MB
• Madden NFL 11 – 327 MB

For the top 10-20 games on the iTunes store, that would mean I would have to download over 3 gigs of data (3,487.50 MB).

To sum up, spending $20 for 20 video games for the iPad would also mean burning through a total of 5,673.5 MB, which is slightly beyond a 5 gigabyte wireless data plan “for regular users”.

With Verizon and AT&T putting data caps in their DSL and cable plans, I expect to see similar 5 gig plans as the “limit for regular use” coming soon to every internet plan regardless of connection medium.

So my question is, who exactly defines “regular use?” The gatekeepers collecting the money? The top four companies who provide internet access to the US? Ah, no, that’s not a good idea at all.

There simply MUST be a national average that is ADJUSTED over time that is set as a national benchmark. Think of the pricing of natural gas as an example. The rates vary per usage and per quantity delivered. The rates are fixed based on a true usage average and amount of supply available.

The internet is not a supply based medium that requires delivery and transportation (in the semi-truck to a warehouse sense). The only thing the internet takes up at a telco is a room full of computers. So logically, the only thing to determine is the true national data usage average as defined by the data use by individuals.

How hard would that be? Take the data use form the top 4 companies that provide internet access to the US. Divide the data usage by the number of users. Bam. There’s your target average for the next calendar year. Call that number the new “national average” and move on.

Of course the telcos will bitch and complain to high heaven about this. How dare we want a reasonable opportunity to have fair internet access? How dare we want a connection plan that adjusts for leaps and bounds in technology and education?

I hate to say it, but congress will have to get involved with this one. There just isn’t any way I can think of to ask for a modern telco company to do this on their own.

So the next step is finding a member of congress who understands the internet, who doesn’t mind pissing off all the major telcos, and can present this in a comprehensive bill to their peers.

Wish me luck, kemosabe. I’m going in.

[EDIT 07/03/11 : I am not in favor of government regulation of the internet. I am not in favor of government mandated tiered pricing or of tiered pricing in general. I do believe the current “data caps” are a scam from the telcos to squeeze money from consumers the same way the old style long distance charges were for land lines. (Why are long distance calls free on wireless phones and not on land lines anyway?) The infrastructure for internet data access is already in place. I truly wish for a return to the “drink from the fire hose” unlimited internet access from a few years ago, but I would compromise on a a sensible pricing plan for a reasonable amount of monthly data access. $10 for 30 gb of data is a baseline for what I have in mind. Putting a limit in internet access through exorbitant pricing is like saying you can only have so much electricity per month because it costs $500 per kilowatt hour. Make the pricing for internet access more realistic and let us, the consumers, decide what is “enough for regular usage”.]

[EDIT #2 07/03/11 : When (not if) data caps for internet use hit all the DSL and cable internet access subscribers, I  can guarantee all the “free WiFi” access will dry up inside of a year. No more open WiFi for neighbors to share when they’re costing you $200 a month in overage fees. No more mom-and-pop WiFi coffee shops when it is a direct hit to their bottom line every month. The only “free WiFi” access points I think will remain once this cap is in place will be the state sponsored WiFi (if there’s any available in your area) or from retail locations that have worked out a special corporate hosting-data management package deal with their internet providers. Seriously!]