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Posts Tagged ‘Flagship’

Iris suspends development, users can upgrade to Acorn for free

Filed under: Software

I never actually used Iris (my image editor of choice is still Pixelmator), but the one-window image editor released a few years ago certainly had its share of fans. Unfortunately, those fans may be disappointed to hear that Iris’ developer, Nolobe, has suspended development on the app. Nolobe’s principal Matthew Drayton says that back in 2007, when Iris started development, there were no cheap yet quality image editors, and nowadays, the app has simply become a “me too” app. He doesn’t want to do that, so he’s out.

Fortunately, however, Iris owners aren’t completely left in the lurch — Drayton highly recommends Acorn, and anyone who currently owns Iris will be able to get a free upgrade to that app. Sad to see that a quality image editor is calling it quits, but the reasons seem legit and the transition should go smoothly. If you own Iris, watch your email for directions on how to upgrade, or contact Nolobe yourself.

It’s not all glum news from Nolobe: the company has a great deal going now for its flagship FTP client, Interarchy. Commemorating the two-year anniversary of an office-gutting fire (well, maybe it is kinda glum, now that we think about it), the Interarchy Fire Sale offers a steep discount on the app for the next week, along with discount codes for several other leading indie apps (including Acorn). The $19.95 Interarchy 9 licenses are valid for free upgrades to version 10 (now in beta), which adds up to a savings of almost $70.

[via DF]

TUAWIris suspends development, users can upgrade to Acorn for free originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GDC 2010: Hands on with Pocket Creatures

Filed under: Gaming, iPad

One of the best things about going to a convention like GDC is what we in the business call “doing research,” which you might know as “playing games.” We often get to check out the latest and greatest that developers are working on, and so when Tactile Entertainment offered us a chance to check out their upcoming Pocket Creatures title, we gladly took it. The company is founded by four friends from Denmark, one of whom used to be the Development Manager at Crytek (makers of the PC graphics engine and its flagship shooter Crysis), and Pocket Creatures, due out later this year, is their first title.

The game’s backstory tells of an island somewhere with an egg in an ancient temple, and in an intro movie, the egg hatches to reveal the game’s main creature character. But the game isn’t merely a virtual pet simulator. While you can pet the little guy to make him happy or slap him to make him sad, the rest of the game actually embodies a pretty complex ecosystem, of which the creature and his emotions and abilities are only a part.

Early on in the game, the creature was hungry, so we shook a tree growing elsewhere on the touchscreen, and out dropped a banana. The creature wouldn’t eat it at first, so instead we pulled a carrot out of the ground and fed that to him. As he interacted with the carrot, a meter showed up on the bottom of the screen, with the marker all the way to the green, positive side on the left — the creature liked carrots. He didn’t like bananas, however, but with a little petting and reward added to the banana offer, he eventually learned to like it and ate it up.

The peel was carried away by a few ants who appeared on the scene, and this was where things got interesting. Almost anything on the island can be interacted with in some way, and often even more than one way. We dragged an ant to a small nearby pond, where a set of eyes was peeking out, and dropping it in there brought out a platypus. Grabbing the platypus and scratching him across the ground created a small hole in the dirt, and placing the half-eaten carrot there created a sproutling. Sproutlings need water to grow, of course, and while we were told that there were a few ways to get water to the hole, one seemed pretty sadistic — we smacked the little creature around until he began to cry, and a small raincloud appeared above his head to show that he was sad. Dragging the raincloud over to the sproutling watered it, and we were off to the races.

The game is full of relationships like that — feeding the creature certain things can activate certain powers as well, and those can be used on critters and items in the rest of the world for all different kinds of interactions. He can eat a lightning fruit, and gain the power to zap all sorts of things, changing them in some way. Or he can eat a love fruit, and gain the power to convert enemies into friends. Tactile made it clear that if you wanted to turn the island into your own personal garden of peace, that was possible, but they want to make sure and “play in either direction” — you can turn your creature and his surroundings into a mess, if that’s what you’d rather do.

For each of your actions, you’ll get rewarded with various achievements. Those achievements not only track everything you do in the game, but they also give you items that you can use to customize the creature’s appearance — earn the “Devil” achievement and you can get some horns to wear, or earn the “Angel” (whatever that is — they haven’t created all of the different criteria yet) achievement, and you can wear some wings. You can even earn both, and keep both items — however you want to play it is fine.

Tactile says they’re planning to keep the content coming as well — “we like the way Pocket God is doing it,” they told us during the demo. They haven’t settled on a price yet, but they do realize that the game has a lot of potential on the iPad. Even before the game was announced, they said, “the concept was already there for a touch tablet,” even if it wasn’t done by Apple. But like all developers, they’re unsure of making any plans before they actually see the product. “Our destiny is sealed by somebody behind a secret door somewhere.”

If there’s an issue with Pocket Creatures, it’s that the game might be too open in this early stage — there were so many things to do and so many relationships that not too many of them were clearly apparent in our short time with the game. But we did get to see a feature that allowed them to place some tips in the landscape, and they’re continuing to tune and work on development, so hopefully by release, even the most complicated of relationships will be accessible. We’ll keep an eye out for it when it shows up on the App Store in a few months.

TUAWGDC 2010: Hands on with Pocket Creatures originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony Ericsson To Pre-Load Gokivo Navigator Onto New Windows Mobile Handsets

Unlike most other smartphone platforms, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a mapping application pre-installed by default. While this may very well change with the soon-to-be-announced Windows Mobile 7, it has thus far been up to the handset manufacturer to throw in a map app if they so choose.

Later this week, messaging/location technology providers TCS will announce that Sony Ericsson has chosen their turn-by-turn application, Gokivo, to be pre-loaded onto future Sony Ericsson-made Windows Mobile handsets.

The first Sony Ericsson handset to come with Gokivo out of the box will be the Aspen, which was just announced last week.

This is pretty big news for TCS; they just acquired the company behind Gokivo, Networks In Motion, back in December, and this is the first time any manufacturer has chosen to pre-install the app at the factory.

The flagship features, according to TCS:

• Local Search
• Traffic and Weather
• Location Sharing

While it’s great news for TCS, I have to wonder: with Nokia and Google’s recent moves toward making turn-by-turn navigation a standard feature on S60 and Android, how much longer will smartphone consumers be willing to cough up a subscription fee?

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Apple is the third largest smartphone maker

Filed under: iPhone

Apple is now the world’s third largest smartphone producer, coming in behind Nokia and Research in Motion. IDC’s latest report from its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker cites continued interest in the iPhone and Apple starting to offer the device in China as major driving forces behind the growing dominance in the smartphone world.

Apple shipped 25.1 million iPhone units in 2009, 8.7 million of those in the fourth quarter. By comparison, Nokia shipped 67.7 million device units throughout the year with 20.8 million in the fourth quarter alone. Manufacturers Motorola and HTC round out the top five smartphone makers. It’s worth noting that while Apple still trails RIM and Nokia by unit sales, by some estimates the company already surpassed Nokia in Q3 of 2009 by generating more profit from handset sales than any other manufacturer.

A similar report released by AdMob at the end of January also shows the increasing use of the iPhone around the world. The amazing thing is that Nokia, RIM, Motorola and HTC all produce multiple devices while Apple has leapfrogged over into its position with just a single flagship phone, the 3GS. Motorola, which had fallen off the top five list in the past year, scrambled back onto it with the introduction of the Droid. Google’s now entering the market, and Symbian is still very strong in Africa and Asia. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple fares against these smartphone competitors in the next year.

[Via Wired]

TUAWApple is the third largest smartphone maker originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Droid gets a USB hack allowing it to control printers and cameras, humans put on alert
Time to resurrect that old Droid Does chant, folks. Already headed for Android 2.1 from official sources, the Droid is gettings some extra software capabilities courtesy of a few benevolent UK hackers as well. Chris Paget has revealed a mod for Motorola’s flagship that turns it from a USB peripheral into a USB host, thereby letting it communicate with and control USB devices that speak the Linux language. That includes printers, webcams, and the vast majority of other things you typically jack into your computer. Mind you, this is one hack that’ll require you to get your hands dirty, as you’ll need to splice a few cables together and reboot your phone to switch between modes, but that’s how real modders do it anyway, right?

Droid gets a USB hack allowing it to control printers and cameras, humans put on alert originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lenovo names T410i, T410si, and T510i ThinkPads in honor of Core i3-330M inside

Hey everybody, new ThinkPads! Lenovo seems hellbent on crushing its reputation for pricey hardware — while presumably maintaining the related renown for rugged reliability — and today it’s snuck out a set of new i-appended variants of its flagship T series laptops. The T410i, T410si and T510i come equipped with the budget-friendly Core i3-330M CPU from Intel, which runs at 2.13GHz, alongside otherwise typical specs. Memory goes from 2GB to 8GB of DDR3, two megapixel webcams come as standard, and fingerprint sensors can be tacked on as well. Even more friendly to businesses on a shoestring is the option for Windows XP pre-installations on the T410i and T510i. Prices are not yet available, but the whole trio should be coming out by the end of this month, so not long to wait now.

[Thanks, Peter]

Lenovo names T410i, T410si, and T510i ThinkPads in honor of Core i3-330M inside originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Klipsch Image X10i iPhone-friendly earbud impressions

We let you in on one of Klipsch’s little secrets when we revealed the Image X10i to the world back in December, and now that the company’s highest-end iPhone-friendly earbuds will be shipping en masse within a month, we figured we’d grab a set and let you know if they were indeed worth their weight in gold (or just $349.99, really). The X10 has sat atop the company’s most recent lineup of earbuds for awhile now, and with the raging success of the S4i came a stellar idea: add the same iPod / iPhone remote to the flagship set of ‘buds. The X10i is just that — a set of X10 earbuds with the iPhone remote that we highlighted in our S4i review. Needless to say, the X10i isn’t aimed at the budget-minded listener, but we were most curious to see if these really were worth the $250 leap from the aforementioned S4i. Read on to peek our conclusion.

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Klipsch Image X10i iPhone-friendly earbud impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows Mobile 7 megarumor: LG Apollo and HTC Obsession running flagship ‘720p’ specs, Zune Phone Experience
Alright, this is some wild, heavy stuff, but the folks at WMExperts have compiled what they believe to be true about Windows Mobile 7, including a whole bunch of previously undisclosed info and even a couple of flagship phones. We can’t vouch for the rumors, but there’s a ring of truth to plenty of it, and most of the rest of it we want to be true. First off, Microsoft is approaching the revision with two flavors: Windows Phone Seven Business Edition, and Windows Phone Seven Media Edition. The former is a stripped down OS that will allow OEM overlays like HTC’s Sense UI, and includes lower minimum specs — though a WVGA “minimum” is nothing to get angry about. Meanwhile, it sounds like the Media Edition is the quasi-”Zune Phone” we’ve been dreaming of, with a heavy emphasis on HD media playback and capture, along with social networking activities like Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter. Other features include cloud-style services on the Business Edition side for live manipulation of stored data, a long with a location-aware platform dubbed “Orion.”

This all sounds great, but what’s really exciting is what Microsoft is dictating should be in some of these Media Edition phones. The first two to break cover are the LG Apollo and HTC Obsession. The Apollo is a 3G worldphone (EV-DO and HSDPA) that runs a 1.3GHz Qualcomm QSD8650 processor and a 3.8-inch AMOLED 1280 x 720 WXGA display. The phone also is purported to have a 10 megapixel camera capable of 720p video recording. Meanwhile, HTC’s HSDPA-limited Obsession runs a mere 1GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 proc, with a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, 5 megapixel camera and 720p video recording. The Apollo is due in August or September of this year, with the Obsession following in October. Now, some of these specs are admittedly suspect, like the WXGA resolution on the Apollo and that seemingly 10 megapixel sensor, but we want to believe.

As for what we know to be true? Well, we know we’ll see something at MWC next month, unless Robbie Bach is just joshing around, and we also know HTC has confirmed its involvement with Windows Mobile 7 — lending some credence to rumors of the Sense UI sticking around for a new-generation — and that LG has gone on (and quickly off) record as well saying it’ll have a WinMo 7 phone in September. It’s all a lot more vague than the pages of specs we’re staring at now, but it’s clear that something is brewing. Hit up the source link for the full nitty gritty.

Windows Mobile 7 megarumor: LG Apollo and HTC Obsession running flagship ‘720p’ specs, Zune Phone Experience originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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