TowerMadness is one of the most popular tower defense games on the iPhone, and now makers, Limbic Software, have released a high-definition version for the iPad which boasts stunning 3D graphics, split-screen multiplayer and eight new maps. But how does this version compare to its smaller predecessor?
In the first year of Windows Phone 7’s launch, Microsoft wants to sell 30 million licenses by the end of 2011… three times the amount of iPhones sold in its first year.
What a joke. There’s simply no way Microsoft can manage that. They aren’t even in the game at this point, and Windows Phone 7 is, at best, playing a game of catch-up with iPhone OS 3.0. Meanwhile, iPhone OS 4.0 — an operating system attached to the world’s best selling smartphone — is right around the corner. And that’s not even mentioning Android, a far superior and more fully featured mobile operating system that is available to every handset manufacturer for free.
Let’s run the math. In the first quarter of the year, Apple sold 8.8 million iPhones compared to Microsoft’s 3.7 million licenses for Windows 7. So for Microsoft to sell 30 million licenses by the end of 2011, they essentially need to keep pace with the most popular smartphone in the world’s sales, without any app library or existing users, while competing with not one, but two superior operating systems with thriving user and app ecosystems, one of which is free.
Perhaps I should just end this post here with one final word: lolwhut?
[via Apple Insider]
Pop quiz. You’re at your local AT&T store when two unarmed men rush in and steal multiple iPhones without harming anyone. What do you do?
a) Calmly wait for the police to arrive and take your report.
b) Rush out of the store on foot, pull out your hand cannon, brace your legs and fire round after round at the fleeing get-away vehicle as onlookers and passers-by scream in terror and dive for cover, all the while laughing maniacally after every squeezed off shot.
Most of us would pick the former, but Roger Witter of Gresham, Oregon chose the latter and ended up in jail for it, prompting the local police to issue this statement in the understatement of the year:
“It is important to remember that no matter how frustrated one may be with crime and the criminal justice system, it is not permissible to use deadly force in this type of situation.”
The two iPhone thieves remain at large… probably because Witter’s Dirty Harry jackassery distracted police long enough for them to make their clean escape. What a doofus.
Here’s a device filling a mystery niche if I’ve ever seen one: the iP49 is a bulky, fold down clamshell travel alarm clock which includes a dock for an iPhone or iPod… itself a travel alarm clock. Double indemnity of redundancy. ho!
Personally, I’m not sure I get it, but in case you do, the iP49 features separate weekday/weekend alarms, customizable snooze times, gradual wake and sleep volume controls so you don’t start off the morning swallowing your tongue.
It also boasts “Bongiovi Acoustics’ patyented Digital Power station technology and four neodymium compression drivers,” which sounds impressive and promises to provide “studio quality” sound wherever you are. It also boasts both an AC adapter and a built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
The iP49 is available from iHome now for $159.99.
The sometimes accurate, oft wishful thinking Digitimes has a doozy of a story this morning, claiming that the fourth-generation iPhone we’ve seen time and time again in countless leaks might not be the one Jobs hoists onstage at WWDC in June.
According to their interview with senior analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has two iPhones its currently working on, internally called the N90 and the N91. The N90 is the iPhone Gizmo got their hands on, while the N91 is a less impressive handset more similar to the iPhone 3GS.
The N90 is the iPhone Apple wants to release, providing they don’t have any unexpected setbacks (such as component shortages). The N91 is the iPhone they’ll release if they can’t get their ducks in a row.
Egretlist is a neat idea for an iPhone application, based on the data you store inside Evernote.
The app looks inside your Evernote notes (Evernotes?) for checkboxes, and extracts those items on their own. Then it re-arranges and re-displays them in a very smart, Moleskine-style notebook format.
What I like about this idea is that the todo items retain their context inside Evernote. You can keep a short list of todos with the other notes and info that relate to them – then, when you simply want to see the todo list as a whole to see what you should do next, Egretlist gives you that at-a-glance overview.
The Evernote team are impressed as well, and they’ve published an interview with the Egretlist developer that explains the thinking behind it in more detail.
If you’re in the Oakland area in California some time in the next couple of weeks, you might like to pop along to the second iPhontography exhibition.
Organiser Knox Bronson (we’ve mentioned him before) is a keen proponent of iPhone photography, which he considers an entirely new artistic medium.
There are twice as many iPhone OS devices in use as Andorid devices, the mobile advertising company AdMob estimates.
AdMob’s April Mobile Metrics report analyzed the number of unique Android and iPhone devices in its network. The company found that in the US, there were 10.7 million iPhone devices and 8.7 million Android devices. Include the iPod touch, and there are 2 to 1 iPhone OS devices compared to Android. Overseas, the gap is even wider: 3.5 to 1 iPhone devices compared to Android.
The numbers are illustrative because both platforms are growing fast, but there little idea how many are in day-to-day use. For example, Apple has sold 85 million iPhones and iPod touches in the last three years, but doesn’t say how many are in use. At its recent developer conference, Google boasted that it is activating 100,000 Android devices a day. Gartner estimates that Apple’s OS now powers 15.4 percent of global smartphones, while Google’s Android has 9.6 percent of the market.
AdMob says its numbers are good beceause they are based on actual data, not estimates, and it has a large sample size.
Capcom’s fantastic series of lawyerly anime adventure titles, the Ace Attorney series, have been delighting gamers on Nintendo’s handhelds since 2001… and now the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is available to download through iTunes.
The iPhone version of Phoenix Wright is basically a direct port of the Nintendo DS version, with the lower half of the iPhone screen standing in for the DS’ lower display. Otherwise, though, the two games are identical, and as a long-time fan of the series, this is an easy game to recommend if you like quirk, tongue-in-cheek gravitas and cheeky mysteries to solve.
You can buy Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the App Store now for just $4.99.
With every new Apple product comes a new advertising campaign, so it’s no surprise that Cupertino’s already casting for a new campaign centered on the next iPhone. Now Engadget has confirmed it with their sources.
According to Engadget, the next iPhone commercial will be directed by American Beauty director (and mawkish paper bag enthusiast) Sam Mendes will be helming the commercials for the next iPhone, which is being referred to as Mammoth / N90 internally… presumably to keep the actual name of the next iPhone (the only aspect of the device not yet revealed by leaks) underwraps until WWDC.
The spots will apparently heavily promote the next iPhone’s videoconferencing abilities, and one will featureg a mother and daughter having a video iChat call with one another.
Engadget also spotted some Twitter status updates from young actors bragging about their forthcoming auditions…. although I’m guessing after their indiscretion has been picked up by the newsfeeds, their chances of actually landing the roles are pretty slim.
In the ramp up to the official unveiling of the next-generation iPhone next month, megalithic big box retailer Wal-Mart is planning on slashing the price of Apple’s 16GB iPhone 3Gs to just $97.
That’s a $102 savings over the current price, and strongly implies that, next month, the 16GB iPhone 3GS will be AT&T’s new entry-level iPhone and cost $99 in locations across the country (Wal-Mart tends to undercut AT&T’s own prices by a couple of bucks).
To get the deal, customers will need to sign up for a two-year contract from AT&T. However, with talks of a Verizon iPhone hitting at the end of the summer gaining traction, it seems like a short-sighted move to sign up with AT&T before seeing what deals might result from an iPhone price war between two competing national carriers.
This is unlikely to gobsmack anyone, but with a new iPhone right around the corner, the days of the $99 iPhone 3G are likely numbered.
According to Boy Genius Report: ” We’ve heard that Apple has stopped shipping iPhone 3G 8GB units to AT&T stores and orders are not being placed for the device.”
The most obvious interpretation of this is that the iPhone 3GS will plug the place previously filled by the 3G as the entry-level AT&T iPhone… a guess that seems to be strongly evidenced by Wal-Mart’s recent decision to slash the price of the 16GB 3GS to a mere $97.
If you’re a fan of Flight Control HD, you’ll love Harbor Master HD for the iPad from Imangi Studios. It shares the same principles as Flight Control, although instead of planes you’ve got boats, which you must guide to their corresponding colored docks by drawing their route with your finger, ensuring the boats do not make contact with each other along the way.
The way in which Harbour Master is different to Flight Control is that once you have guided a boat to its dock, you must wait for it to unload its cargo before you can guide it back off to sea. This adds just enough complexity and challenge to the game to prevent it being too simple and boring.
If rumors of a Verizon iPhone in September (or a Sprint iPhone later this summer) are true, AT&T is going to have a hard-time keeping iPhone customers on their network after their exclusivity is up. One great way of keeping subscribers would, of course, be to offer better rates and improve their service… but since this is Ma Bell we’re talking about, they’ve just decided to try to almost double the price of Early Termination Fees from $175 to $325 to keep their existing customers locked-in.
To be fair, this is already the price of Verizon’s ETF… so AT&T is really just trying to make it equally difficult for subscribers to walk away from a contract as Verizon already is. Short term, however, it makes it a lot more expensive a proposition for customers to abandon ship for their competitors.
On their part, AT&T is saying the timing of the price increase isn’t related to Verizon getting the iPhone. Yeah, yeah. We’ll believe that only if a CDMA iPhone isn’t announced at WWDC.
With Apple’s factory leak in China seemingly spurting iPhones by the palletful into Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries, it’s looking less and less likely that, hardware-wise, Jobs will have anything to surprise us with when he officially unveils the fourth-generation iPhone in four weeks. We know what it looks like, we know its hardware, we know its operating system… heck, we even know what colors it comes in, black and white.
But just in case you weren’t quite convinced by the white faceplate that leaked last week comes these better shots of a fully assembled white iPhone. It could still be fake, of course, but it takes a special kind of incredulity to disbelieve that Apple, after all these leaks, just wouldn’t release the next iPhone in white, of all colors. Either way, guess we’ll know for sure at WWDC.
Dismayed enough by AT&T’s woeful service that you’re considering hiring a shyster? The Worstphoneever website offers up a helpful class-action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tell just such a shyster just how bad (and actionable) your service actually is, and help him sue Ma Bell on everyone’s behalf.
The site works by searching for baseband crashes as recorded by your iPhone’s log files, automatically uploading them to the service, saves them to a database and tabulates them. Once Worstphonever has enough data, the site makers claim that they will file a class action lawsuit on behalf of their users, “running Apple and AT&T through the ringer” while giving users a “slice of the action.”
Not that we’d recommend this. There’s obvious privacy concerns associated with uploading your iPhone logs to a third-party, and while AT&T’s service can be atrocious, suing Apple over it just seems sleazy.
As you might recall, I reviewed Cadence for iPhone several months ago. I found it a useful app and a fun way to browse your music collection by tempo, not title. It did, however, have a near-killer flaw: a setup process that consumed hours as it added (with lots of errors) tempo data to the entire iTunes library.
The creators of Cadence have released a new version that resolves these problems by connecting the app to EchoNest to just grab tempo information over the air. You simply go into the settings on iPhone, ask it to grab info, and after a few minutes, you’re good to go. Having used Cadence for more than six months, I can say with some confidence that it’s most useful in a party setting, when you’re not sure what you want to hear, but you know the mood you want to bring about. Bear that scenario in mind when contemplating the new, elevated $4.99 price tag.
It’s available now in the App Store.
Got an iPhone 3G and looking for a project to occupy yourself this weekend? The binaries of hacker David Wang’s Android port for the iPhone 3G has now been released.
Android on the iPhone is still more of a “because you can” proposition than recommended for day-to-day use, but follow Wang’s somewhat complicated guide and you’ll soon have an iPhone that dual-boots into Android.
There’s some drawbacks, of course: Wang has yet to implement any sort of power management into Android for iPhone, so your fully-charged handset will only last about an hour before it shuts off. Also, if you want to switch back to the iPhone OS, you need to do a reboot.
Still, if you’re interested in what the mobile space looks like from the other side, Android for iPhone looks like a worthwhile little hack.
Act quickly, and you can get Gameloft’s Rogue Planet for iPhone/iPt for free.
Today only until 5 pm ET, the strategy game is free as part of the company’s 10th Anniversary Happy Hour. That’s a $5 drop and the best price we’ve seen for this game.
Grab it quick; time’s nearly up.
Future iPhones may be able to flash ads for theater discounts or suggest a burrito special in the neighborhood as you head out of the office at lunch time.
Geo-tagged ads and coupons would zap themselves to iPhone users a number of ways, including RFID, Apple Insider writes.
The Cupertino company applied for a patent this week titled “System and method for providing contextual advertisements according to a dynamic pricing scheme.”
If the price (or timing) is right, users could make buys at kiosks or use coupons or discounts from their smartphones.
Here’s how they described it in the application:
“If the submitted advertisement… provides a coupon for food at a restaurant, the submitting advertiser… may include an indication that the advertisement… is directed to food sales, times of day when meals are popularly served, a GPS location of the restaurant, keywords that may relate to the restaurant in an Internet search, how weather may affect the use or non-use of the coupon in the advertisement…, etc.”
Via Apple Insider
First revealed back in January at CES, the L5 Remote is a useful little dongle that supplements the iPhone or iPod Touch’s already incredible remote abilities by turning your iDevice into a fully functional infrared universal remotes.
All you do is slap the infrared sensor into your iPhone and load the free L5 remote app. The app comes with presets for many popular devices, but failing that, it’s easy to program your iPhone with your existing remote by bumping them nose to nose and pushing the button on your existing remote you want to program in.
Conceptually, I love the idea of using my iPhone as a truly universal remote, but if you think losing a remote is an irritatingly commonplace occurrence, imagine losing a tiny dongle between the couch cushions. Worse, the L5 remote costs $50: way too expensive when a cheap universal remote can be picked up at Best Buy for half the price.
Until iPhones and iPod Touches come with a built-in IR receiver, I don’t really see the iPhone to squeeze existing universal remotes out of the market.
Thanks to its inexplicable lack of a custom dictionary, the iPhone’s always been a frustrating filter on the gutter-mouthed obscenity enthusiast and the serial sexter alike.
It’s frustrating. More than once, the iPhone has automatically cleaned up some of my most romantic text messages to refer, time and time again, to an earnest plea for me and my girlfriend to go on a “duck hunt…” the most euphemistic description possible of the activity I was actually trying to type.
According to Gizmodo, though, it looks like our frustrations are at an end: he latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta contains a custom dictionary under keyboard settings.
It’s a bit counterintuitive to set up: you apparently need to change the network settings to see the new tethering option before the functionality is revealed. Once you do, though, you’ll be rattling off obscenity-laced Tweets, emails and Facebook status updates with the best of them. You’re welcome!
Given AT&T’s almost universal bad press when it comes to the reliability of their 3G network, you’d think the prospect of a Verizon iPhone would have Ma Bell trembling at the prospect of a mass diaspora of unsatisfied users.
With typical arrogance, though, AT&T head Ralph de la Vega laughed at the idea that AT&T had anything to worry about if the iPhone comes to Verizon at the JPMorgan tech conference.
Of course, Vega’s not banking on AT&T’s excellent service to keep customers around. Instead, de la Vega cited the near impossibility of getting out of AT&T’s contracts as the reason why they had little to fear.
The latest iPhone HD leak comes not from Vietnam, as we’ve come to expect, but good old Taiwan. Ready for a bombshell? Better pop a Lipitor: it looks like the iPhone HD may very well come in white.
We admit, snark aside, that’s not very exciting. iPhones have come in white before. What is interesting here, though, is that these are pictures of a white iPhone front panel. Traditionally, white iPhones are “white” only on the black plastic backing.
Whether these images turn out to be legitimate remains to be seen: the front panel’s a pretty easy thing to fake. Still, given the pedestrian nature of the revelation and Apple’s own history giving a white option on iPhones, don’t be surprised to see a white iPhone floating around at WWDC.
Can’t decide whether to get the iPad with or without 3G? It looks like AT&T will soon be adding tethering, but you can already share your iPhone’s 3G data connection using a $10 app called MyWi.
All you need to do is jailbreak your iPhone — a painless, two-minute process that unlocks the iPhone’s full potential, including turning it into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot using MyWi.