One of the first things quickly and easily noticed is that it uses its own Window customization.  This really isn’t such a big deal for me.  Sure, it’d be nice if it could do the whole aero thing and fall back on this, but this looks pretty cool, so I’m not really going to fault them for this.

Next is actually mostly a good thing.  Steam has this very nice jumplist for Windows 7, something not a lot of other programs have really taken the time to integrate just yet.  You can see video games I have recently (attempted to anyway) launched from Steam, their own quick links to important parts of their client, and an optional (disabled by default) ability to change your current status from the jumplist.

The one problem I have with this jump list is that the tasks have no icons.  You could easily find some sort of icon for each of their little tasks.  A shopping cart for Store, a generic user-like figure for community, etc etc but there is nothing there.

Then of course, there is my ultimate pickle with Steam.  As I’m sure you can tell from the above screenshot – Steam has NO PRESENCE in the Windows Games Explorer.  This is awful!  The Games Explorer has been around since Vista, and yet Steam has yet to embrace it.

There could (and should) be (at the very least) a high resolution steam icon under Game Providers.  It’s not very difficult to make, and the “News” feed you see from Games for Windows LIVE is a simple RSS feed.  They could either populate this with the news from their site, or just a list of new releases, creating a steam:// URI (if it doesn’t already exist) to open up links in their own client.  Instead, they don’t even touch this.

As for games, I don’t know if they show up in the Explorer or not.  I don’t have any spare cash lying around, so I haven’t been able to check for myself – but somehow I doubt that the games appear there (though, I could be wrong – can anyone vouch for this?).

Hopefully, these issues will be addressed in a future version of Steam, and embraced by Rival companies. (I’m looking at you On Live.  Yes, I expect this from you as well).

What are your thoughts on the matter, anyway?

• No Multi-Touch User Interface
• Games are Expensive
• No App Store
• No iPod

Now, If you don’t like to listen to me rant, It would probably be a safe bet that you’ll want to skip this post, because I’m going to be going into great deal about what exactly is wrong with those reasons.  If you’re willing to listen to me rant and rave, then just continue reading

No Multi-Touch user interface:

Now, this is mostly true.  I can’t really refute or argue this statement.  However, homebrew developers working with the DS have managed to enable multi-touch operations.

Games are Expensive / No App Store

Now, when Apple was talking about the Nintendo DS games being expensive, they were referring to the cartridges you pick up off the shelf that can run anywhere from $20 to $50 per game.  Of course, this is for good reason.  The games generally contain a lot of information and can be quite large file sizes.  Apple has the advantage here due to their widely accessible app store, which generally maintains low prices on all applications.  However, Nintendo has this too on the DSi.  It's called DSiWare and currently has 38 titles due to how they approve games, and locking out small developers.  These games also sell for sub $10 prices.

No iPod

I’m not even sure what Apple means by this.  Why would the DS and PSP have an iPod?  They both play music files all on their own.

I just wanted to correct these misconceptions Apple may be giving people.  They’re obviously not entirely true, but they do bear a certain amount of truth.