Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun John Walker has been publishing a list of do’s and don’ts for video games. Many of them made me laugh. Here’s the first bit. And here’s the second.

Do: let me carry more than two guns. Just when did we all decide that we weren’t okay with that element of unrealism in gaming? Sure, it can be set in the retro-future on a spaceship made of time, but god forbid we holster an improbable number of weapons. Especially if you’ll then let me carry hundreds of bits of ammo for all the weapons anywhere. Where am I storing those? In my magic trousers? And if so, why can’t I stick a pistol and a rocket launcher in there too? I want to stick a rocket launcher in my magic trousers!

Don’t worry. Taking my cue from Richard Cobbett – who didn’t blog about his iPad on the grounds that there were probably enough reviews of that particular device kicking around already – I’m not going to go on about it other than to ask for one little feature. User accounts.

The iPad is a great family machine – I pick it up and use it for X, Mrs Bigmouth picks it up and uses it for Y, Baby Bigmouth grabs it from us to use the colouring apps – but user accounts would make it even better. At the moment we’re divvying things up, so I get the mail app for my email and Mrs B uses Safari; Mrs B gets the Facebook app and I promise to use the web version, and so on. I have no idea whether multi-user support is in the forthcoming OS update, but I’ll be delighted if it is.

Anandtech has looked at this stuff in incredible detail.

The fact of the matter is that either the most sensitive region of the antenna should have an insulative coating, or everyone should use a case. For a company that uses style heavily as a selling point, the latter isn’t an option. And the former would require an unprecedented admission of fault on Apple’s part.

Apple’s dropped a bollock here. But – and it’s an enormous “but”:

reception is massively better on the iPhone 4 [compared to the 3GS] in actual use.

If you’re in a place with patchy reception – some people know it as “Scotland” – then the way you hold the phone makes a difference to the number of bars you see and the speed of your data connection, but the iPhone 4 gets a signal and can download data in places the 3GS can’t.

This man is right.

In the pre-Twitter/Facebook days, the “share” buttons across the web were simple static links. There were links above and below articles allowing the user to email, bookmark, or share an article across a variety of social networks, but they were static in that they were simple images with no realtime information baked into them.  On the other hand, today’s buttons have constantly-changing data showing, for example, how many times a story has been reTweeted on Twitter or Liked on Facebook.  This realtime information requires a separate call to each respective site to receive the current data.  This process takes time, and when a web publisher or blogger uses three or four buttons beneath multiple stories on a given page, each unique button has to load.

…Button Overload is beginning to take shape across the web. Often, I simply want to read a story that sounds interesting, and I don’t care if it has been liked 75 times on Facebook, reTweeted 45 times on Twitter, shared 5 times on Buzz, and that I can be the first to submit it to Digg.

Business Insider is amused: it’s found video of Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer dismissing the iPhone back in 2007.

INTERVIEWER: …  The Zune was getting some traction. Then Steve Jobs goes to MacWorld and he pulls out this iPhone.  What was your reaction when you saw that?

STEVE BALLMER: 500 dollars?  Fully subsidized? With a plan?  I said that is the most expensive phone in the world.  And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.  Which makes it not a very good email machine… Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year.  Apple is selling zero phones a year.  In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace…

I don’t really see the point here. Since when did company bosses react to questions about their competitors by going “Oh fuck! You’re right! We’re fucked! They’re going to kick our arse! Fuck! Fuckity fuck!”?

There are plenty of reasons to criticise Ballmer, but publicly slagging a competing product is part of his job.

It’s overhyped, costs a bloody fortune, probably isn’t as shatterproof as Apple would have you believe and appears to have been rushed out of the factory (some of the first units have yellowed screens, antennas shorting out and so on), but if you don’t want to buy one then for God’s sake don’t play with one.

It’s not very often I’m blown away by something, but the screen on the new iPhone is extraordinary. It’s the closest thing to colour print I’ve seen on any kind of computing device, and while e-ink is more readable over long periods or on a sunny day it’s by far the best colour screen I’ve ever encountered.

I wasn’t impressed by the 3GS – it seemed like a lot of cash for not a lot of things – but I’m sold on the fourth one, UK prices permitting. Techradar’s Apple iPhone review tells you what’s what. The big selling point for me is the new screen.