It appears that the three owning studios — ABC, NBC, and FOX — have been trying to figure out a way to make more money from Hulu besides the already annoying ads. This will probably result in a premium model that will give us access to more content. Currently, shows available on Hulu contain the latest three episodes (on average). That’s always been our biggest issue with Hulu: we can’t watch anything older than a few weeks. Even the networks’ online players tend to limit shows to the current season. Anyone else want to watch old seasons of Big Bang Theory?

So what does this premium model look like? It’s been suggested that paid users will have access to content on three devices: a computer, a TV and a mobile device. That seems like a pretty big step backwards to us. Just this last year, Apple gave us a great music sharing tool with iTunes Home Sharing. It lets us copy all of our content between computers on our home network. Granted this is still limited to Apple’s 5-computer model and requires you to sign into an iTunes Store account BUT there’s no limit for mobile devices. So, what makes Hulu think we should be limited to three devices?

Step back from the question for a sec… we don’t actually own any content with Hulu. We would be paying them for streamed content we can get from countless other sources — sources that would allow us to own it. Buy a season DVD, buy individual shows on iTunes, get a season pass on iTunes, there’s also the nefarious world of illegal acquisitions (we’re not recommending that one) — all of those options give us content that we own. Most of us already pay for cable or satellite and most of those companies won’t offer us internet packages without a TV option. So, what’s driving us to subscribe to another paid TV application that still restricts our access?

Sounds like a bad deal to us.

PopCap finally has brought its most recent popular title to the iPhone: Plants vs. Zombies. It’s not your mother’s tower defense strategy game; it’s a completely new variant of the style, which sends waves of zombies to your door — they want to eat your brains. Defend your home by placing 49 different plants. The game also boasts 29 different zombies. From pole vaulters to Michael Jackson, they can come at you fast or slow, so be ready. This game is probably one of the best iPhone ports we’ve seen and definitely matches the quality of other PopCap titles.

How does Cocoa Touch change the gameplay? To us, it seems easier. There’s no precise clicking as your finger is doing all the work. We’ve found ourselves tapping randomly at the screen in order to pick up all of the sun that comes our way. However, placing the plants can be somewhat difficult at times: we’re constantly putting the wrong plants in the wrong spot, but that’s probably because our fingers are somewhat large (they’re not huge and fat, just big).

Anyway, we’ve played both versions — iPhone and Desktop — and we’re excited to have it available in our pocket at any time. We’re thankful for that but still a little miffed that it’s not the full version. We can spend $2.99 for a pretty good port or pay $19.99 and buy the desktop version. At this point, we don’t see the survival mode, puzzles or the mini-games that we’ve come to love on the desktop version. Maybe they’ll appear in an update in the future, but we don’t see any way to enable them at this point. We’d seriously pay more to get that extra gameplay, as this could get old very quickly. Hopefully we’ll see them take advantage of the in-app purchases… or just give it to us for free.

The gameplay is great but the extras appear to be missing, so we’ll give it an 8 out of 10. Definitely worth the 3 bucks.

Full picture gallery after the break.

We’re not terribly disappointed with Apple’s decision to avoid Flash… we’re more disappointed with the fact that most sites are using it to display their content. Flash is notoriously buggy and a resource hog. Why watch low-quality hosted content instead of high-quality local content? The mere fact that we have instant access to thousands of TV episodes and movies will create a demand for hosted content: no one has a collection as large as the internet. We really hope to see services like Hulu, the TV networks, and even YouTube move away from Flash sooner rather than later. From a technical standpoint, Apple is completely correct: Flash sucks. But they also shouldn’t ignore the fact that it’s the current standard… they should be aggressively moving a different direction, working with companies to support different media playback: we all know they have the money to do it.

Before and after shots of the iPad promotional video:

Note: Internet Explorer has trouble loading the file because it’s so large. Here’s a hint, don’t use Internet Explorer. Try Safari or Firefox instead. The full resolution wallpaper is after the jump… this one is 1024 by 576 to help reduce load times.

Here’s the whole picture at 3000 by 1668… just right click it and save it wherever you would like

We’ve seen some pretty bizarre and unexplained things, like disappearing apps from the iTunes App Store.  We can’t even count how many applications have disappeared from the App Store: some were due to customers demanding removal (I Am Rich was a picture that you could buy for $999.99 just so that you could show your friends you were rich), other removed apps weren’t even explained (NetShare).  We’d imagine that Apple would reserve this ability for applications that manage to sneak through the screening process with some very well executed malicious coding.  If that ever happened, the URL listed below is a failsafe of sorts: it exists as a list that each mobile device would scan.  If there is an app installed on your mobile device that corresponds to the apps listed in the URL, it seems that Apple would have the ability to delete it immediately or remove it in some other way, shape or form.  Think of it as a Blacklist.  Any app that shows up on that list will be removed.

We’re more happy about this finding than mad… but we’d really like to know why some great applications are appearing and disappearing in the App Store.  If that’s truly any indication, it doesn’t look like it would be too difficult to get malicious software through the screening process.  Apple has taken their normal mute stance on all issues App Store and Cocoa Touch OS 2.0 and 2.0.1.  It’s not like our requests really matter, but how about a little more info, Apple?