Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s three-years-late response to Apple’s iOS, is officially being released in Europe today, and even though America won’t get the first WP7 handsets until November, the European release means that review embargoes are over and the first blushes are starting to trickle in.
The good news? Most reviewers agree Windows Phone 7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, and even a pretty smart mobile operating system… but it’s still about a year behind iOS.
Sign seen in an electronics store in Surrey, Canada: Please Do Not Touch the iPod touch. Straight from the “People Unclear on the Concept” Department. Kafka would be proud.
Although one could argue that with Apple’s ongoing fetish for Shiny, Tiny objects, soon No One will be able to Touch the iPod Touch.
[via Ellen]
Obihai Technology, a tiny Cupertino start-up, this month brought to market its first product, the OBi110 — an unassuming $70 box with blinky lights that may well prove to be the most disruptive telephony device to come along in a decade.
The OBi110 is the physical hub in a multi-layered communications model the company believes can revolutionize the way consumers use their mobile, Internet and fixed-line telephony services, bringing emerging social networking behaviors together with maturing Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to create total communication freedom at the personal level.
With web and mobile-based software products, including an iPhone app presently in Beta testing, Obihai is poised to show the millions of consumers who’ve bought magicJacks and all 237 of them who’ve bought an Ooma just how IP telephony can be done.
AppBackr was launched this week as an invitation only beta. The service offered by AppBacker, Inc. of Palo Alto, California offers iOS app developers a new way to get cash advances for future app sales. Developers earn these advances by selling their apps wholesale to buyers via the AppBackr online catalog.
The return on the buyer’s investment depends on whether or not the app sells well. This sounds risky for the buyer, but not necessarily since they are expected to promote the app in magazines, blogs, etc. or they might just hire a good public relations firm to help.
Therefore AppBackr provides three very important services to app developers that are not very easy to come by: marketing, financing, and an online wholesale sales catalog.
Jailbreak developer p0sixninja recently tweeted an image link that revealed a nicely jailbroken Apple TV. The jailbreak showed the injection of a new menu option which was like the ones used in hacks for the previous version of the Apple TV.
There is a lot more to do before this one will see prime time since the iOS based Apple TV generation two doesn’t even include an app launcher at this time. It will be interesting to find out what Apple’s plans are for the new Apple TV. Perhaps a hint might leak out today during Apple’s special event.
This jailbreak isn’t publicly available yet so don’t get all excited just yet. Oh heck, go ahead be excited Apple TV fans. This looks like fun!
One expects great things from an app costing double its nearest competitor (which happens to be the excellent $5 Cyclemeter). And for the most part, BiCycle — a $10 cycling app that uses the iPhone’s GPS receiver to log data — delivers. But while the app is well-designed and contains features not found elsewhere, there’re a few gaping holes that should make potential purchasers pause before taking the plunge.
It’s war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an “epic rant” during an earnings call this week blasting Google’s “fragmented,” er, “open” approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple’s “closed,” I mean “integrated” iOS platform.
“We think Android is very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day… We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”
In retaliation, Google mobile strategy chief Andy Rubin apparently posted the following dorky reply on Twitter:
the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.
That’s a set of Linux commands for copying Android.
Does Rubin have a point? No, seriously. What’s his point?
Since Google hasn’t mounted a coherent defense against fragmen… I mean the open approach to mobile platforms, does anyone here want to try?
Go here to read the whole post on IT World.
Deep down in their guts, iOS and OS X are basically the same beast, distinguished largely by their user interface shells… so could tomorrow’s reveal of OS X 10.7, “Lion,” make OS X’s UI more like iOS than ever before? An unconfirmed report says yes.
According to the report, the upcoming update to Lion will be heavily based on iOS in many of its trappings. It’ll still be Aqua, but “the iOS influence is [more] visible in the new OS user interface.”
Here’s a juicy excerpt, already up on YouTube, from Apple’s conference call today where Steve Jobs dropped by and bashed Google repeatedly with an Apple-shaped hammer.
It seems like just the other day that the App Store hit 200,000 apps, but the juggernaut just never stops, and sometime over the weekend, Apple rolled the speedometer over to 300k.
The numbers aren’t official yet, but according to Mobclix, their data shows that Apple added the 300,000th app to the App Store sometime on Saturday.
It doesn’t do much — no fancy vocal wizardry, just adjusts the pitch of the user’s voice up or down — but Devil Voice looks like the first instance of a real-time voice-changing app, without the need to record a user’s voice first before playback — though it can, if desired.
The app is a dollar, and comes out just in time for Halloween; see our forthcoming Halloween Guide for examples on how to duct tape it and attached speakers into a Darth Vader mask and whatnot.
Potential and current (see what I did there) Chevrolet Volt owners will be pleased to hear that the mostly electric car’s iPhone app will finally be hitting the App Store at the end of October.
The app includes a ton of interesting controls and features: Charge the Volt immediately or schedule a charge time; check charge status and battery level; display expected range; and display various data tracked while driving like how many miles were electric-only, how many were gas. That’s on top flashy functions like being able to start the car from the app and mess with the door locks.
An OnStar spokesperson told us the Volt comes with five years of free OnStar service — other cars get six months free — and that the app will be free for the iPhone (and the Droid — sorry, Blackberry). Not impressed with (mostly) electric vehicles? OnStar will be making the app (sans Volt-specific functions) available for about a dozen or so additional OnStar-equipped cars in the near future.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wP-t_XZ5As
If you ever had an Amiga, prepare to squeal: the Bitmap Brothers have just announced that, in association with Tower Studios and Vivid Games, they will be bringing their famous Amiga game Speedball 2 to iOS.
Cast your mind back to June; remember reading about an app that used the iPhone’s GPS to bulls-eye the user’s location on any map imported into it? Well, the developer, Fog Technologies, is back with Expo Tec, an app that starts with the same basic principle, but narrows its focus to convention-like events and adds some features to help the user through his chaos-laden convention visit.
The developer says it’s pretty easy for event planners to create “event packs” through a web interface designed for the app, which then shunts the pack to users of the app. Besides a GPS-enabled event map, the app provides event schedules, instant event updates, detailed vendor info and general event info.
Expo Tec is $4, and boasts that it’s a “fist-in-the-industry” solution. Yeah, sure, it was probably supposed to read “first-in-the-industry,” but we like the fist version better; “we’re angry as hell (about getting lost) and we’re not going to take (poor convention info) anymore!” Or something.
With all due respect, this was originally intended to be a gallery post dedicated to discovering the magic of MC Escher, a 99¢ app that brings users hi-res imagery of the artwork that’s decorated millions of dorm rooms and student apartments worldwide over the years. The app incudes two mindbending games as well, and for a buck, it’s got to be good value. MC Escher on the iPhone and iPad — how could you go wrong?
However, digging around for something to say about the Escher app, iFractal surfaced. It’s a free app that allows users to play around with renderings of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets of images derived from mathematical visualization theory. There’s also Fractals, a $2.99 app that seems to offer the same thing, with perhaps a finer manipulative granularity — but in the end, these apps warrant a gallery.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg74pDVek8
This looks cute: Evac is an upcoming pixel block maze game incorporating elements from games as diverse as Pac-Man to Splinter Cell. Your job is to guide a cheery moppet of a pink square through a maze while dodging red guards by any means necessary: from stealthing past them, to trapping them, to outright vaporizing them.
It looks fantastic, and sounds even better thanks to a captivating soundtrack by Kubatko. It should be available on the iPhone and iPad sometime next month.
As if its frenetically gleeful yellow and purple icon wasn’t enough enticement to download, yesterday saw Yahoo make its free Yahoo Messenger app even more appealing with some beefy upgrades: backgrounding, voice calling and the biggie, video calling.
We tested it briefly and found the video calling works pretty well over wifi, even with a 3GS — though, obviously, the person on the other end won’t see a face unless the 3GS is turned around — with decent transmission of both voice and picture. But the app suffers from a few issues, which fellow Cultist David Martin will reveal in a full review later this week.
While voice and video calls will only work between users of the app, Yahoo also yesterday added the Skype-like ability to make voice calls (including international calls) to landlines or mobiles at low fees via a Yahoo Voice Phone Out account.
Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8
Taking their iPhone Where No iDevice Has Gone Before, a father and son in Newburgh, NY recently took a weekend science project to new heights. Luke and Max Geissbuhler attached an HD Video Camera, iPhone and some styrofoam packing to a weather balloon, then launched their homemade satellite on a journey that lasted 72 minutes and climbed over 100,000 feet into the atmosphere!
If you need convincing about the power of HTML5, look no further than Biolab Disaster, a fantastically retro, shoot-em-up platformer with some fantastic gameplay. Here, go play it for a bit now, I’ll wait for you.
Fun, right? Want to play it on your iPhone now? Well, the game’s developer has it up and running on the iPhone 3GS at sixty frames per second, and it looks awesome.
The only problem? The developer seems a little unsure about whether or not Apple will let Biolab Disaster onto the App Store because it uses the JavaScriptCore Framework, which is a private API on iOS. He’s hopeful he can get around that problem by bundling his own copy of the JavaScriptCore Framework with his app, which is perfectly legal to do since it’s part of WebKit, but there’s always the chance Biolab Disaster for iPhone will be shot down.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed: Biolab Disaster on the iPhone would be the perfect pick-up-and-play platformer SHMUP.
Two and a half weeks ago, as New Zealand rolled back their clocks for Daylight Savings Time, Kiwis started noting an odd iOS bug: any recurring alarms they had set on their iPhones were going off an hour early. Curious, but then it gets curiouser: last week, when Australian had to adjust for Daylight Savings Time, it happened again.
We love the story: its like a mini-Y2K for iOS 4.1, hitting iPhone users around the world as their country enters Daylight Savings Time… and with Europe set to enter DST on October 30th, and America on November 6th, the bug is about to hit a lot more people.
So what does Apple intend to do about this? Apple Australia says they’re on it and have developed a fix that will be included as part of an upcoming software update. Since iOS 4.2 has a late November ship date, that means we’re likely to get an iterative iOS 4.1.1 update sometime before the 30th, when all of Europe starts hurling their iPhones dramatically against the wall when their alarms rob them of an hour of sleep.
Pogoplug has updated their free app over the weekend, and it now sports the ability to stream and play music in the background over either a wifi or 3G connection from a network-attached storage device running the Pogoplug engine — which currently means either a Pogoplug unit or one from Seagate.
The big advantage the Pogoplug app’s new function has over, say, the free Zumocast app (which debuted last month and does the same thing), is that the Pogoplug version doesn’t require a computer running from which to stream music. Downside? You’ll need to pop for a Pogoplug-equipped NAS unit, if you don’t already have one. The app also gains background photo uploading and fast app-switching.
Next, hopefully Pogoplug will improve the app’s movie-streaming capability, which sorely lacks the ability to convert videos on the fly to a streaming-freindly format, like Zumocast does.
It’s taken them over three years to respond to the revolutionary shift in the mobile operating system landscape posed by iOS, but Microsoft has finally done it and released a properly modern, properly app-laden and properly multi-touchable successor to the Windows Mobile series: Windows Phone 7. But what differentiates Windows Phone 7 from Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Mobile 6 and a host of even crappier mobile operating systems squirted out by Microsoft?
Quite a bit, actually, and it’s quite a bit better… but it’s still two years behind the curve of iOS.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9BETZOfwo8
Aralon: Sword and the Shadow by Galoobeth Games is an upcoming open-world role-playing game for iOS devices, and as you can see from the the trailer above, it looks about as close to Oblivion for the iPad as we’re going to get. But for a laugh, check out the original trailer for the game below the cut. Amazing what a bit of spit and polish can do in six months, isn’t it?
Halloween is Big Business in historic Salem, Massachusetts. It’s now High Tech too. For the 29th Haunted Happenings Celebration, the annual festival of witches, ghosts, and fall in New England, the town has created a new Haunted Happenings App for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
The app features info about the Festival Calendar of Events, local attractions and museums, restaurant and retail listings, and directions on how to get to Salem (tip: plan ahead and leave time). Users also have an opportunity to purchase tickets for some events and attractions directly from the app.
Let the Frightful Fun Commence! [via boston.com]