“Get Firefox for Android,” the ad in the center of your newly invoked browser will announce, and if you’re like most people, you’ll brainlessly enter your phone number and click on the button that says “Send me the link”, and Firefox will send the link to your phone instantly by text message. SMS & data rates may apply, you’re advised, but since nobody knows that SMS means “Short Message Service”, and data rates are about baud rate (one character at a time) or bit rate, one bit at a time — characters are generally 8 bits, or one byte, if my history class memory about the 21st century serves me rightly. I’ve been wrong before, which is why I carry a 2.4 average back home, in an unbroken record of scholastic defeats.

My point about the graphic above is that everyone’s doing it, which is the classic concept for sales & marketing. It’s being made “dropped in the lap” easy to click your way around the internet and load up your smartphone with stuff you’ll never use, just like you do with your closets, drawers and any other storage space you have. Stuff seems to accumulate even when you can’t remember taking it in.

Until an Android videogame can be loaded in just as easily from a phone-friendly browser, my new Android games won’t see the dawn of the New Age of Gaming. Continue reading →