Screen: 3.5″ 480×320 Sharp HVGA Capacitive TOUCH screen (This is same like IPHONE, for some technical reason maybe will have 1 light point on screen)
Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11/802.11b/802.11g)
2.0MP CAMERA
Language support: English,French,Spanish,Portuguese,Italian,German, Japanese,Dutch, Russian,Chinese , Danish , Finnish ,Swedish , Polish
experience the T11RK online
http://www.mumumusic.com/showroom/t11rk/?zol560
ciphone c6 : playing video
ciphone c6 : playing music
ciphone c6 charger
ciphone c6 :pdf reading
ciphone c6 game
ciphone c6 phone call
ciphone c6 wm6.1 ui
After creating that superb iPhone Elite concept, its designer, Mat Brady thought that it lacked something and instantly he remembered LG Versa’s game controller and came up with a new idea. This second iPhone Elite concept is a dual-sliding device, an elegant way of incorporating both a QWERTY keyboard and game controls.
The keyboard of the first iPhone Elite has changed and now it uses the full length of the handset, while Mat is still looking for a way to implement the best possible camera on this handset, without using moving parts (lens shutter etc.).
The specs of this beauty are nothing short of amazing: OLED touchscreen display, true 16:9 screen ratio, 60GB of memory, front facing camera and a 5 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom that also captures 640×480 video. This camera also comes with burst capture, image stabilization, red eye reduction, a timer, flash and much more.
Mat accepts any new ideas for his concept so, in case you want to add something or have a feature modified, don’t hesitate to post a comment on his site.
[via Planet Mat]
iphone fans around the world upload their pictures of iphone ,let’s have a look
We may cover them on a daily basis, but we really don’t geek out on new iPod and iPhone accessories—it’s not often that we see items that are individually awesome, and far less common for us to find a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup combination where two items come together to form something greater than their separate parts.
Behold the iPod and iPhone-compatible mini home theater we just put together. It starts with the BenQ Joybee GP1 Mini Projector for video, then adds the Boston Acoustics i-DS3 Plus for audio—three matching glossy white plastic boxes that are individually optimized to do separate things extremely well, coming together to create a clean-looking, powerful AV experience for a small, dark room. Notably, the i-DS3 Plus is both iPod- and iPhone-compatible, with video-out functionality that supports both devices.
Over the past few days, we’ve been playing with the GP1 projector to figure out what it can and can’t do. As noted in our updated First Look, it has a smaller-than-Mac mini footprint, but pumps out a DVD-quality video image that’s pixel-level crisp, nicely colored, and reasonably bright. In a moderately lit room, it can produce a respectably viewable 6-foot image on a flat wall, improving in brightness as the image shrinks down to a minimum 14” size, or as the room’s ambient lighting decreases. If you’re in a truly dark room, even better. GP1 has some nifty features to dynamically shift its color palette automatically to adjust for wall color, its projecting angle for the angle it’s mounted on, and so on. The integrated speaker’s not too bad, either.
But it’s not going to deliver a theater-quality listening experience. That’s where the i-DS3 Plus comes in. While the main enclosure looks a lot like the i-DS2, it actually contains four speaker drivers – twin 3.5” full-range drivers like the ones in i-DS2, but also two tweeters for superior high-frequency performance. Even without assistance from an additional speaker, the main i-DS3 unit sounds quite good. Add the wireless subwoofer in and the excitement begins: the six-inch speaker inside the sub just gets plugged into the wall wherever you want to place it, and doesn’t need to be tethered to the docking main speaker system. It roars with bass, balanced nicely by the drivers in the main dock, and boasts 100 Watts of total power. Out of the box, with very little hookup work required, i-DS3 and the GP1 together transformed an iPhone 3G into a mini theater for our Dark Knight viewing pleasure. All for just under $1,000.
Could a similar system be put together for less? Yes. Could a different system be put together for a similar price? Again, yes. If you’re looking for a simple 5-driver audio system without the fancy wireless feature, we’ve reviewed a number of options, many of which are now discounted and/or being closed out. Similarly, you could substitute some inexpensive TV for the projector, at least, if you’re willing to accept a much smaller sized image than the GP1 is capable of displaying. Yet there’s something about the elegance of this combination that’s truly exciting to us—it’s a nice “price no object” iPod/iPhone mini home theater solution, with individual pieces that could be the missing puzzle pieces for users who are halfway through similar projects. We’ll have more to say on both of these accessories in the days to come.
[via ilounge ]
Yesterday, Apple officially announced iPhone OS 3.0, the upcoming operating system update to the 2.2.1 software currently running on iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod touch, and second-generation iPod touch hardware. A beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 was released soon thereafter, showing off many of the disclosed “consumer” features of the new software, as well as a number that had not yet been mentioned by the company. In late March, 2009, a second beta version was released, and additional features were uncovered, including some that appear to be dependent on hardware features that are not included in the current-generation iPhone or iPod touch devices.
This article looks at the new consumer-side features in the iPhone and the iPod touch versions of iPhone OS 3.0, additionally spotlighting their differences and interactions with iTunes 8.1. Additional features are expected to be added to both the iPhone OS and iTunes before updated versions are available sometime in “Summer” 2009. Barring unexpected delays, the new OS is expected to debut in early- to mid-July.
iPhone owners will receive the update for free, though iPhone 3G owners will benefit from certain features not found in the standard iPhone version. iPod touch and iPod touch 2G users will have to pay $10 for the new software, and again, original iPod touch users will be lacking for certain features found in the iPod touch 2G version of iPhone OS 3.0. We’ll discuss the known limitations, below.
The Home Screen
While many users expected that Apple would introduce a radical new approach to organizing or grouping applications, the company did not do so in the initial beta release of iPhone OS 3.0. Instead, the Home Screen received only minor changes: the Text app was renamed to “Messages” and given a new icon, the Stocks icon was updated, with sharper peaks and no calendar months at the bottom of the icon, and a tiny magnifying glass icon was added to the left of the white and gray page number indicator dots above the dock. The iPod and Phone icons also received diagonal line tweaks to make them look more like the new Messages icon.
The most significant of these changes is the smallest: the magnifying glass. Now, when you click on the Home button twice from any other application, you’re brought to the first page of icons; clicking one more time from the Home screen, or flicking this screen to scroll to the left, brings you to Spotlight, a new application that has its own page.
Spotlight and Search
Having added a Search feature to Contacts in the prior version of the iPhone OS, Apple has now added active Search bars to Mail, iPod/Music, and other applications, as well as the ability to passively search the entire device using Spotlight.
Spotlight lives off to the left of the main Home screen, and lets you type in letters, words, or numbers to search your entire device for matching applications, text, contacts, calendar events, or media files.
Interestingly, Searches can in some cases—as with Mail—go beyond the scope of the iPhone or iPod touch’s own contents and actually expand outwards to content found an an external server. Here, Mail enables searches of an entire Google Gmail archive.
Search results for Spotlight can be customized to let you display Contacts, Applications, Music, Podcasts, Video, Audiobooks, Notes, Mail, and/or Calendar events; you can switch the order of displayed results and turn individual types of results on or off.
Widescreen Mode for Key Applications
Another major change is the long-requested addition of widescreen modes and keyboards to a number of the key iPhone OS applications, including Mail and Notes. This change enables users to take advantage of a superior, larger keyboard when typing messages to others or themselves.
Widescreen isn’t just limited to Mail and Notes, though. It also appears in Contacts, as well as enabling a new, higher-detail display of stock performance in the Stocks application.
While not every app has been given a widescreen option, this appears to be Apple’s new way—following the example set by Calculator last year—of expanding the functionality of existing applications using the accelerometer as an easy to way to access a second screen.
Cut, Copy, Paste, Select, and Select All
Another long-awaited feature—text “Cut and Paste”—has been added to the iPhone OS in the form of a unique and simple “double tap” interface. Double-tapping on text within most of the key apps now results in the appearance of a light highlighter box and bars that can be touched and dragged to the left and right of existing text. Grabbing a bar brings up a magnifying glass to show you more precisely where the bar currently ends.
When you’re done selecting the text, a black pop-up word bubble appears with three context-sensitive buttons inside. That bubble will contain Cut, Copy, and Paste options if nothing has previously been cut or copied into the iPhone’s clipboard.
When something is in the clipboard, it offers Select, Select All, and Paste features, enabling you to erase part or all of the current text on screen in the process of pasting new text from the clipboard.
Text, including HTML from web pages, can be selected in one application and pasted into another. Photos, including multiple photos, can separately be selected in one application and pasted into another.
Voice Memos
As the only new icon-based application added to iPhone OS 3.0, Voice Memos presently does not appear on the iPhone’s Home screen by default. It will not work on the first-generation iPod touch, but it does work on the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and second-generation iPod touch.
With an old-fashioned microphone taking up almost all of the screen, a similarly old recording level indicator, and buttons at the bottom for recording and menu options, Voice Memos serves several purposes: first, it lets you record audio from either the integrated iPhone mic or a mic attached to the iPhone or iPod touch. Second, it lets you easily trim the recording by dragging sliders to mark the beginning and end of the portion of the sample you want to preserve, and third, it lets you send the voice memo to yourself or others through e-mail.
Also interesting is the fact that Voice Memos is capable of running in the background, unlike any previously released third-party recording application for the iPod touch or iPhone. Like the Nike+ application for iPod touch, it displays a red recording bar at the top of the screen while it’s running, which can be touched to instantly bring you back to the application. It does not work during phone calls.
Enhanced iPhone 3G Bluetooth, and Unlocked iPod touch 2G Bluetooth
After a teardown by iFixit, everyone knew that the iPod touch 2G had a Bluetooth chip inside, but it was barely being used: Apple had repurposed it as a way to communicate with the Nike+ Sensor for exercise purposes. Meanwhile, the iPhone and iPhone 3G both contained Bluetooth chips, which Apple used only for a single purpose: enabling monaural wireless earpieces and car kits to transmit voices back and forth with the Phone application.
In iPhone OS 3.0, Apple both acknowledges and unlocks the iPod touch 2G’s Bluetooth potential, while expanding the Bluetooth capabilities of the iPhone 3G. Now, both devices will be capable of streaming stereo Bluetooth audio, as well as connecting to other Bluetooth-capable iPod touch or iPhone devices for same room (~30-foot) gaming and other multi-user applications. Data sharing, including streaming of one user’s audio to another user’s iPod or iPhone, is said to be possible. Software support for as-yet-unreleased Bluetooth-based hardware accessories is also being added. Note that the original iPod touch will not support this functionality, and the original iPhone will not support stereo Bluetooth. Additional details on the sound quality and related functionality of Bluetooth audio are not yet available; limitations of the data transmission features have also not yet been disclosed.
Phone and Contacts
Though obvious changes to the Phone application are minor, there are a couple that are worth mentioning. The application now keeps a log of your recent calls to specific contacts, offering both individual call details and a pooled call information screen as varying levels of detail.
It also adds to the bottom of Contacts the ability to share your contact information with someone else via e-mail or MMS. Bluetooth contact transfer is also expected, but not obviously accessible at this point.
Apple uses the widespread VCF format for contact file transmission.
Stocks
Beyond its ability to display stock charts in widescreen mode, additional details have been added to the Stocks application.
Stock headlines relating to stocks in your portfolio, as well as more detailed current statistics for the selected stock, are now displayed at the bottom of the screen.
Multi-touch can be used to measure the change in a stock’s value from two points on a dateline, using sliding bars to set start and finish dates for the comparison; a calculation of the price and percentage difference appears on screen.
App Store
Additional tweaks to the on-iPhone App Store have also been made in iPhone OS 3.0. Individual listings now contain reviews that have been tagged by version number, rather than generically pooling all reviews across multiple versions of the application as is done now.
Additionally, multiple, scrollable screenshots have been added to the middle of app download pages.
YouTube
Though the core functionality of YouTube appears to be the same as it was in both prior iterations of the iPhone OS, Apple has given the application the ability to connect to your YouTube account, complete with a username and password sign-in dialog box.
Once you’re connected to your account, you have access to video subscriptions and playlists of videos, neither previously included in the application. Your history may also carry over from your computer-based YouTube browsing, as well.
Photos and Camera
While there haven’t been any dramatic changes made to the iPhone-only Camera application, Apple has changed the bottom-left button from a generic “see the Camera Roll” icon to a tiny thumbnail of the last picture you snapped. Clicking on it brings you to the Camera Roll screen in your Photos library.
The Photos app now enables you to select multiple photos at once to be Shared (e-mailed or MMS multi-media messaged), Copied (into another app), or Deleted. This is a major improvement for users who have been forced to send multiple individual e-mails to share photos. Note that the original iPhone will not support sharing of photos or other MMS features, but the iPhone 3G will.
Settings
Apple’s collection of Settings screens continues to increase and change a little with every iteration of the iPhone OS, and this version continues that trend.
New optional features are buried within these menus, including the iPod Shake to Shuffle feature, which first appeared in the fourth-generation iPod nano: when you’re listening to music, shaking the iPod changes the current song and randomizes playback.
On the iPhone 3G, there is now an option to enable MMS messaging—a multimedia messaging feature that other phones have had, but the iPhone and iPhone 3G have not. While this feature is unavailable on the original iPhone, and the costs have not yet been disclosed for using it—the instantaneous, device-agnostic equivalent of text messaging, but for photos, audio, contacts, and other data files—you can activate it for the iPhone 3G under Settings. Otherwise, the Messages application will be limited only to text messaging.
Apple’s MobileMe service is apparently gaining the ability to “Find My iPod touch” or “Find My iPhone,” presumably using a direct Push-based messaging connection to the device in combination with location-based services to figure out whereabouts a lost device is currently located. Additional restrictions, or parental controls, have been added to prevent access to the Location functionality, as well as more specific restriction on what sort of iPod media content is allowed to be displayed on the device.
New Safari settings offer access to AutoFill, which will automatically populate web browser fields with your specified Contact information upon request, and also store names and passwords for specific sites. Another feature adds a Fraud Warning, which pops up when you are going to visit sites determined to be “fraudulent.” Our sources have been unable to trigger this feature so far.
A new Load Remote Images option has been added to let Mail have faster access to the text in your mailbox, eliminating its need to acquire images when loading messages. Presumably only for developers, but possibly to acknowledge the unlocking of phones in certain regions, iPhone OS 3.0 currently enables users to enter their own preferred phone numbers into the settings menu; it is unclear whether this feature will appear in the final version of the software.
Localization
Some of the major Settings changes are buried in the International menus.
Amongst other improvements, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malay, two Portuguese, and Thai keyboards have been added, along with region formatting and localization for new territories.
Internet (Modem) Tethering
Announced by Apple but not easily discoverable in the iPhone OS 3.0 software, Internet Tethering is a feature that enables the iPhone 3G to serve as a 3G cellular modem for a computer that’s attached either via a USB-to-Dock Connector cable, or Bluetooth—Apple’s dialog screen for the feature actually says “USB and Bluetooth” to suggest that devices might share the connection through both means at once.
Developer Steven Troughton-Smith discovered a way to tweak the iPhone 3G’s settings to enable this feature. When active, it transforms the top of the screen into a purplish blue bar, which also extends to the full-screen battery charging unlock screen when the iPhone is connected via USB. The words “Internet Tethering” appear under the clock on both screens to indicate that the feature is active. Some cellular networks may disallow use of the feature altogether, and it is highly possible that many networks will charge high fees for it.
Safari and In-Line Links
In addition to adding AutoFill, the aforementioned feature that can automatically populate web page fields with personal information you store as your personal contact information, Safari—and other applications—now offer more actions for on-page links, such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and web pages.
When a link to one of these things appears on the page, you can hold down on the link to bring up a special contextual menu that lets you (a) send a new e-mail or create contact info for an e-mail address, (b) call, text message, or create contact info for a phone number, or (c) open or copy a web address.
iPod Audiobooks and Podcasts
Small tweaks have been made to Audiobook and Podcast playback in the iPod app (iPhone) and Music app (iPod touch).
Both audiobooks and podcasts have added “go back 30 seconds” icons that make it possible for you to easily jump back a few sentences, even in an audio file which is difficult to scroll through with the scrubber bar. In Audiobooks, there’s now an icon that can change playback speed, and in Podcasts, there’s an icon with an envelope, presumably to let you share the podcast link with a friend. The feature is apparently non-functional at this point, notes our source.
In-Song Scrubbing
In order to improve “scrubbing”—the user’s ability to skip to a specific portion of a song by moving around on the song’s timeline—the third iPhone OS 3.0 beta has added a three-speed scrubbing bar that switches from “hi-speed” to “half speed” to “quarter speed” scrubbing if you slide your finger down.
Prior versions of the iPhone OS forced the user to make more imprecise movements through the song using a single-speed scrubbing bar that rarely seemed to be as precise as it needed to be, a problem that increased with longer songs and super-long audio tracks since the same on-screen line needed to represent even more possible skipping points in the song. With the new three-speed scrubber, users will be able to choose the pace at which they skip through each track.
Messages
As noted above, the SMS “Text” app found on the iPhone and iPhone 3G but not iPod touch has been replaced with Messages, which now handles multimedia messages: images, audio files, contact information, and text can all be sent, assuming that your carrier offers support for MMS messaging.
Images and text appear within text bubbles. Other files appear as icons that need to be clicked to be opened in other applications.
Push Notifications, Subscription Calendar Support
In the second beta release of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple turned on support for push notification services, which will allow certain applications to continue to send updates to the iPhone/iPod touch even when they’re not actively running on the device. The company began more active testing of the feature with the fifth beta release, sending developers an Associated Press application with the ability to push notifications that might be text “alerts, sounds and icon badges.” A universal Notifications Settings menu allows alerts, sounds, and icon badges to be individually turned off on an application-by-application basis.
In addition, the second beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 added support for “Subscribed Calendars,” the ability to synchronize calendar information from sources other than iTunes and MobileMe. Screenshots are posted below.
Video Recording & Editing, Battery Percentage Indicator, Voice Control, and Magnetic Compass
Further examination of the second iPhone 3.0 beta release led to the discovery of a number of hidden text strings and images that appear to spotlight upcoming iPhone and/or iPod touch hardware changes. Images of video recording and editing tools were discovered within the software, requiring the iPhone OS to detect video camera hardware that is apparently not present in the iPhone 3G before allowing the user to choose between still or video camera modes. The editor appears to enable simple snippet-style video editing of recorded videos so users can cut down their clips for faster sharing. iPhone OS’s prior Photos application seems to have evolved into a new form, as well, with separate tabs for stored Photos and Videos. Whether this is a revised Photos app or an integration of Photos into the prior Camera app is not yet known. Images of these features were first discovered by sources who leaked images to MacRumors and the Boy Genius Report, as watermarked below.
MacRumors also reported the presence of text strings referencing an unknown Voice Control feature, and a magnetic digital compass feature, the exact functionality of which are not as yet known. The Boy Genius Report corroborated the former feature with a Settings menu screenshot that shows Voice Control as active within the International settings menu, and also noted a new battery percentage indicator option that expresses your remaining power numerically as well as graphically.
Direct-from-iPhone/iPod iTunes Store Account Access: Updated April 29, 2009
Slipped into the third beta version of iTunes OS 3.0 and still in early form visually as of the fourth beta version, the iPhone and iPod touch have gained the ability to create, store and access iTunes Store account information, as well as to redeem Store credits and certificates.
The goal of this new feature addition appears to be a very modest untethering of these devices from a computer-based version of iTunes, enabling some users to handle everything from initial iTunes Store account setup to management without the need to use a Mac or PC. While the feature was mentioned during the unveiling of iPhone OS 3.0, it’s unclear at this stage just how iTunes-free it will allow iPhone and iPod touch users to be.
Other Features Not Depicted in Screenshots
A considerable number of additional features have been announced by Apple for iPhone OS 3.0 but are not depicted in the screenshots above, due to either their status as “features offered to developers to include in their apps,” or “features that will be supported in as-yet-unreleased third-party hardware.” Those features have been discussed in separate iLounge articles, and include:
In-Application Purchasing Services
Dock Connector and Additional Bluetooth Accessory Support
Push Notifications from Apps (Demo)
Peer-to-Peer Device Communication Using Bonjour (Demo)
Embedded Google Maps
In-App E-mail and Voice Chat (Demo)
Assisted Turn-by-Turn Directions, But Not For Google Maps
iPod Library Access for Apps (Demo)
Enhanced, Bandwidth-Adjusted Video Streaming (Demo)
Apple says that there are 1,000 new features available to developers in iPhone OS 3.0. Many will be revealed in the months to come.
iTunes Changes: Updated April 29, 2009
A handful of small changes are already apparent in iTunes 8.1 when connected to an iPod touch or iPhone running 3.0 software. A new Encrypted Backup feature appears, enabling users to securely backup and restore the contents of their devices—complete with password protection—rather than keeping easily disassembled archives of their contacts, e-mails, photos, and apps sitting on their computers.
Notes composed on the iPhone or iPod touch can now be synchronized with iTunes. Prior to April 28, 2009, it was unclear whether this synchronization will be expanded further with the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, or with a subsequent version of iTunes.
Released late at night on April 28, 2009, a beta version of iTunes 8.2 for the Mac provided additional information on Notes synchronization: “syncing notes requires Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later,” and apparently, iPhone OS 3.0 will require the use of iTunes 8.2 or later. It’s unclear how Notes synchronization will work on the PC.
Additional features will most likely be added to subsequent releases of the iPhone OS 3.0 between now and Summer, as well as to iTunes. Stay tuned for additional articles discussing the new functionality as we learn more.
Special thanks to iLounge sources “Mr. F” and “Tobias Funke” for providing these screenshots, except as otherwise credited above. This article was most recently updated on May 18, 2009 to add additional information.
[via ilounge ]
After a couple of weeks in which our Weird and Small Apps column skewed way more small than weird, the wacky is back for our latest edition. Between the insane iHoop and the less crazy but still amusing Need For Cheese, Ohmz, and Run From Hell, there’s a lot to tell you about this week; a bar code scanning and lookup tool called RedLaser and an odd Japanese slot machine simulator called Slot Japan! fill out the list.
Though none of the titles here merited our general recommendation, the highest-rated title this week was Need For Cheese. Read on for all the details.
Never afraid to put out a bad or just really crazy title, Global Net Value has struck again with iHoop ($4/$1), a title that manages to make the act of hoop spinning oddly creepy. The goal is simple: keep spinning one or more hoops around the body of a baby who evolves over time into an old, bony man if the hoop continues to spin.
You do this, of course, by shaking the iPhone or iPod so much that you can barely see what’s happening on the screen, and get to listen to robotic noises—no music—while you’re playing. We’ve included iHoop here not because it’s worth buying, but because it sets an all-new threshold for what we consider bizarre and useless on this platform; it’s demo-quality weirdness. iLounge Rating: D.
Need 4 Cheese ($1) by Spielhaus/Nicolinux is incredibly simple but surprisingly amusing. There’s a flat surface with circular floating icons: you control a mouse, and try to avoid touching a huge collection of evil creatures—black and red cats—while collecting occasional pieces of cheese and a serum that lets your mouse kill one cat before becoming vulnerable again; the gameplay is like an imbalanced, dot-free and maze-free Pac-Man where the ghosts keep becoming more numerous and the goal is merely to get the occasional piece of fruit or power pellet. Due to the accelerometer-based controls and an upbeat, continuously playing audio track, Need 4 Cheese is actually fun while you’re playing it, but it’s so shallow that it’s hard to imagine playing more than a few times for kicks. A free demo is available and offers everything you need to see; the full version is worthy of a limited recommendation for its amusement factor. iLounge Rating: B-.
Peggle has inspired plenty of clones over the past few months, and SCI’s Ohmz ($4) is if nothing else more original than the rest. You’re presented with what initially appears to be a familiar looking maze of colored pegs, but quickly realize that you wind up launching balls from one of two electrical towers on the left and right of the screen, using a power slider to indicate how much force each ball should have as it’s dispensed. Once that’s done, the ball bounces around in the pegs, releasing sparks and large energy orbs that need to be caught by a bucket you move with finger swipes on the bottom of the screen.
While all of these elements are genuinely novel twists on the Peggle concept, each one is executed with less polish than it really needs; the “do this, then do that” launching controls could really stand to be unified into a simpler scheme, there’s no music and only simple sound effects, and having to keep your finger on top of the basket you’re using to collect the falling orbs isn’t exactly a great idea. Plain graphics and too little visual or sonic awards for grabbing things don’t help much, either. What’s here is the basis of a good game, but it still needs a lot of work before it’ll get there. iLounge Rating: C.
By comparison, Visionaire Design’s Run From Hell ($1) isn’t the basis of a good game; it’s a bland, not so fun title with decent graphics and no in-game audio. You control a little devil who for some reason is adverse to flames, and needs to keep jumping on blocks that fall from the sky to rescue him from a growing wave of lava. The blocks fall at random, sometimes stacking on their predecessors, sometimes not, and you need to make the devil move left, right, and jump to get on top of them; only when they stack high enough to get you to a goal marker several screens up. You die and the game ends if you touch the lava at the bottom or get crushed by a falling block. Between the not fun button-based controls, the bland gameplay, and the lack of sound, there’s nothing to recommend this game except for the low price and fine theme. iLounge Rating: C-.
We thought we’d seen “bad” when we tried Griffin’s Lucky 7 Slots for the iPhone OS, but Slot Japan! ($4) by Ichikaku now shares Lucky 7’s crown: it’s a slot machine so boring that the developer includes an automatic play mode so that it can just keep spinning its wheels until something interesting happens. Based on Japanese Pachi-Slot machines, Slot Japan! offers three step gameplay—tap to insert coins, tap to start the three reels spinning, and tap on each reel to stop it individually. If the reels line up with matching icons, you get more coins, as well as the opportunity for more dramatic lights on the machine if matching icons are made repeatedly in sequences. As with Lucky 7, in the absence of financial benefit for the player, there’s absolutely nothing compelling about this title, with so little reward for play that you’re best off setting it on automatic mode and watching until something vaguely interesting happens. And seriously, who wants to pay $4 for that? Slot Japan! is an expensive snooze. iLounge Rating: D-.
Last but definitely not least this week is RedLaser ($2) from Occiptal, a title that is extremely useful in concept but crippled by the iPhone’s and iPhone 3G’s cameras. The idea: go into any store, point your widescreen iPhone at box packaging, and snap a picture of its barcode. RedLaser will identify the barcode, look it up on the Internet at a wide variety of retailers, and tell you how much you’ll pay to buy it online. While the premise is fantastic, and RedLaser tries to make it work by guiding you to hold the box at the correct distance for the iPhone’s camera, barcodes routinely come out blurry, get misidentified by the software, or yield no search results—often times, all three. Different sized bar codes are just one of the problems; scanning Apple’s tiny ones is a special challenge for this app.
The single biggest issue is the iPhone’s lack of autofocus and anti-shake capabilities, which would let you grab barcodes at closer distances with less blur; in the absence of a good shot, you’re left to manually type in the UPC code yourself. When it succeeds at photo IDing a product, you’ll be impressed by the comparative results it finds, if not the way they’re sorted or presented; thus, the only question is whether it’s worth spending $2 for an app with such a limited success rate. Perhaps it’ll work better on the next-generation iPhone; for obvious reasons, it’s incompatible with both versions of the iPod touch.
Having previously reviewed quite a few Internet Radio and On-Demand Radio applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, we’re using today’s iPhone Gems to spotlight two more recent releases: Slacker Radio and ooTunes.
If you’re in the United States and have been using Pandora, Last.fm or another program to find music to hear in your car or at home, Slacker Radio is a must-try, free alternative with a great interface and strong search results. By comparison, ooTunes turns the iPhone or iPod touch into a global radio, tapping into nearly 8000 stations from around the world, including many local and national stations for major and minor cities. Read on for the details.
We’ve previously reviewed and loved Pandora and Last.fm for the iPhone and iPod touch; now they have a similarly impressive rival. Slacker Radio (Free) by Slacker is, in essence, on-demand radio in app form: it starts by playing the specific content you searched for, then takes you on a path of related “music discovery.”
The first part is critically important to Slacker’s appeal. Thanks to a massive collection of music and comedy programming, you can boot Slacker Radio up, enter the name of a song that you want to hear, and have a pretty good chance of hearing it—the right version—right away; the same thing works with artists of your choice. Contrast this with Pandora, which does a good job if you search for an artist, but may or may not hit the specific song you want to hear, or even start by playing the artist whose song you were searching for. Slacker makes you feel like an archer whose arrow goes through the bullseye of one target and keeps cruising down a similar trajectory, while Pandora’s arrow takes its own path, but hits your targets pretty close to dead center. You can also use Slacker as a more generic radio, playing genre-specific “stations” and digging into narrow categories—“smooth jazz (non-vocal)” versus “smooth jazz,” as just one example. Audio plays back over cellular or Wi-Fi networks, and sounded great in our testing, without any skips or interruptions.
As nice as Pandora’s and Last.fm’s interfaces are, Slacker has come up with something that’s even nicer: a UI that doesn’t just duplicate Apple’s, but rather has its own, attractive multi-pane design, placing track details below album art, while your current “station” information and a button to access the station list are above the art. A simple four-button pane at the bottom of the screen offers play/pause, up to six track skips, a heart button to indicate a favorite track, and a “ban track/artist” button. Double-tapping on the album art adds a volume slider, a button to let you stop the device from going to sleep, and a scaling image of the next album in the song queue, which can be swiped as an alternative to the next track button. It’s very slick—the visual next album preview feature is actually something Apple should include in iPod playback mode. There are, of course, artist and album details, a Buy in iTunes button for songs, and the ability to both save and fine-tune stations you like.
So Slacker looks great, sounds great, and works well; what’s the catch? Well, there are a few. First, like the most recent version of Pandora, the app is ad-supported; Pandora now overlaps text or graphic ads on the screen, while Slacker now inserts an audio and album art ad after every cluster of songs. In addition to being unskippable in the free app, the ads occasionally interrupted Slacker’s audio stream for channels we were listening to, forcing us to hit play to restart playback—a bug. If you want to lose the ads, gain unlimited track skips, and get access to song lyrics, Slacker offers a $4/month service called Radio Plus that expands the program’s functionality. Finally, Slacker is a U.S.-only application for now, which means that the millions of overseas iPhone and iPod touch users won’t have access to it, a shame given how well it’s designed. As a free application, even with its limitations, this is a highly recommendable application for fans of music and comedy; we’ll keep it on our own devices, for certain. iLounge Rating: A-.
By comparison with Slacker, ooTunes Radio 2.0 ($4) from Oogli takes a very different tack: it is a more traditional aggregator and sorter of third-party Internet Radio streams, providing what might be called a network-savvy interface once you’ve tuned in a station. It provides you with access to nearly 8000 different channels, sortable by genre, country, or U.S. city, then looks up album art, artist, and song details for whatever’s playing. If it succeeds in finding those details, it then tries to provide lyrics, cross-reference a list of similar tracks using Last.FM, and offer you multiple options for purchasing the song or a full album containing it—in digital download or CD form from Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, CDUniverse, Half.com, and Secondspin. Additionally, if you’re willing to buy a $20 program called the ooTunes Media Server for your Mac, PC, or Linux machine, ooTunes can stream your iTunes and other media libraries directly from your computer to your device while you’re on the go—a feature that some users may find worth the $24 total price of admission.
While all of these features are nice, as is the fact that the basic ooTunes app provides wide access to city-level local radio stations and national stations from all around the world, the app is hobbled by the quality of the audio and photos it uses. Most of the stations appear to be streaming at a scratchy 32 or 64kbps, well below the “near CD quality” sound people are accustomed to hearing, though there are some 128kbps stations in the collection. Add to that the stations’ heavy advertising content, which admittedly Oogli doesn’t profit from in any way, and it’s hard not to feel as if you’re paying for the app, then paying again with your time as you listen.
Similarly, album art is presented as a tiny thumbnail-sized icon on an otherwise less than beautiful now playing screen: the elements may be similar to the ones in Slacker, but they’re presented with more cluttered iconography, smaller text, and an oversized radio tower graphic that fills most of the display. As smart as ooTunes might be at finding extended track details, it requires you to manually activate the search by selecting a song from your list of recently played tracks.
Additionally, in an effort to leave the iPhone or iPod touch useful for web browsing despite its occupation as an audio streaming device—a really nice idea—ooTunes offers a simple browser with URL and Google search features, but like the rest of the interface, this part could use some more visual polish.
Overall, ooTunes strikes us as a good but not great Internet Radio and streaming app—one that’s a little expensive right out of the gate given that it’s basically repackaging existing Internet Radio streams and leveraging the web to deliver links to related content. Its strongest asset, the large, global database of streaming radio stations, is something that can be tapped into with less expensive and even free iPhone/iPod touch apps; that said, we liked the ooTunes experience of interacting with those stations while having easy access to song lyrics and purchasing links. With more polish and a lower price of admission—perhaps ad- or affiliate-link supported—this app would be easy to universally recommend to fans of traditional radio.
[via ilounge]
