Android – Iphone – Applications

The zombie kid isn’t the only one that likes turtles. Microsoft does too. At least that is what the Project Pink phone prototypes indicate. Above are the first screenshots of the devices, called the Turtle and the Pure.

The Turtle and the Pure phones will be made by Sharp. Sharp was the company behind the Sidekick hardware, made by Danger. Danger is a telecommunications company that Microsoft bought a couple of years ago for $500 million. Rumor also has it that the Turtle and the Pure will have their own app store and will complement the Zune.

written by admin \\ tags: appleiphone, asked-question, ipod touch

Micro-blogging company Twitter.com is rumored to be closing a deal worth $100 million in venture funding. The rumor is according to a Wall Street Journal source. The investors involved are T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). This is double the rumor that a TechCrunch source predicted earlier this month.

Spark Capital and IVP are previous investors in Twitter. In Twitter’s last round of funding, their valuation was $255 million. At an additional $100 million round of funding, the company is expected to be valuated beyond $1 billion. Despite the valuation Twitter has, the company does not have any substantial revenue model. But as we have learned from YouTube’s acquisition, that really doesn’t matter. YouTube was burning through VC funding before Google bought them out.

How many users does Twitter have? The company expects to have 25 million users by the end of this year. Twitter rival Facebook.com has about 300 million users. At one point Facebook made an offer to buy out Twitter for $500 million, $100 million in cash and $400 million in stock options. Rather than buying out Twitter, Facebook bought out FriendFeed.

written by admin \\ tags: appleiphone, asked-question

Dopplr is a social travel company that was just reportedly acquired by Nokia. Although the price was not disclosed, the rumored price is about $15-$22 million. This is Nokia’s third acquisition in the last two months. Earlier this month Nokia bought out Plum and last month they bought out cellity.

Dopplr is based in London and they focus on getting consumers to reveal where they plan to travel in the future. This makes it so that they can set up meetings at different locations. Altogether Dopplr.com raised about $1.8 million. The founder and CEO of Dopplr Marko Ahtisaari was previously Director of Design Strategy at Nokia. Many other employees at Dopplr also previously worked at Nokia.

Once we have confirmation, this post will be updated.

written by admin \\ tags: asked-question

I covered Aera back in July right when I saw the very first released screenshots from iChromo. Coming from a seemingly small developer and being so unique, I felt like it was my civic duty to show everyone the sheer beauty of the game. I knew that the screenshots were from a very early build, but they were already something to behold.

After a good three month wait, Aera finally dropped onto the App Store. I knew the game would be pretty, but I really had no idea what I was expecting in terms of gameplay. What we have here is a hybrid 3D biplane shooter on a two dimensional playing field. Basically, your plane can move only backwards and forwards along the screen, allowing for as many twists and (up and down) turns as you feel like performing. The controls of the game are quite simple. All of the games movement uses tilt controls, and they are quite fluid, allowing this game to work as well as it does. Moving the plane up and down requires just a quick tilt your phone to the right and left, while performing a quick tilt away from you flips your plane upside down. Other touch controls include the ability to touch anywhere on the right edge of the screen to shoot, a rechargeable speed boost in the top left, and homing missiles/mines on the bottom, which are undoubtedly pretty useful.

The entire game includes 10 levels that are split up into three varieties: solo, fight, and race. Solo flights have you flying through an obstacle course of sorts, dodging land mines while collecting a certain amount of tokens in a certain amount of time. It’s hard to explain the feel of the solo flights, but to me they reminded me of playing the coin collecting sled races in Mario 64 for the first time. Sure, it’s a bizarre reference, but it’s the only memory I have of being wowed by a games increadible depth of scope. Just imagine stressing your propellers to fly straight up in the air to get to a hoop, flipping over for a dive bomb to avoid 3 air mines and having the screen pan way out, showing you the entire background landscape, with your next target just a bit below you. It’s a unique experience, Fight levels are basic dogfight adventures, and are surprisingly fun given the fact that you cannot turn your plane right and left. Race levels on the other hand are the bane of my existence. The first race level in the game took me about 20 tries. Maybe I’m just quite bad, but I’m convinced that the racing levels are just plain hard.

The real selling point for the game though isn’t tilt based controls or mission variety, it’s the games cinematic immersion factor. I can play all the airplane games I want on the iPhone, but this is the only one makes you really feel like you are experiencing something. Dogfights, my favorite of the level types, have you twisting and flipping around the screen, albeit in a straight line, in an attempt to get your machine guns in line. The thrill of dive-bombing with the ground rapidly approaching, hearing the sound of your engine spin out of control, while shooting down an unsuspecting plane from above is an experience that is unique to Aera alone.

Aera truly is a fun game, and at $2.99, is at a palatable price given the extremely high production value. People will probably complain about the lack of replay value, with only local 1v1 multiplayer available at the moment, but the developers are promising more levels and more things to do in future updates. If you are a fan of airplane games, or just enjoy ‘pretty’, pick this one up today. You won’t regret it.

written by admin \\ tags: asked-question, floor, ipod touch, red bull, redbull, your-jailbroken

It’s difficult to review a trivia based app, with a topic as specific as international soccer/football (depending on where you’re from), unless you are up to speed on the subject in question. Thankfully I know my way around a football pitch, and can usually find my way between two goal posts. Therefore I was able to make it through a significant number of questions in World Cup Trivia Challenge (WCTC) without stumbling over confusions such as ‘Are Holland and the Netherlands the same place?’ Don’t get me wrong though, you could be Mr. Statistics when it comes to World Cup knowledge and you’ll still get stumped by a few of these questions.

WCTC certainly has a great approach to doing trivia, and offers a style of gameplay that you won’t find in many other places. My knowledge of other trivia games and formats isn’t great, but I’m sure there are many out there that do little more than ask you a set number of questions over a set time period, and give you a score at the end. Granted, if you stripped away all the gameplay elements from WCTC this is essentially what’s happening, but the makers behind WCTC have done a great job of making trivia more interesting and competitive.

The basic format has you picking your favourite international team and an opponent, and then answering as many questions as possible over a couple of minutes or so. For every question you get correct you gain one point; collect three and your team scores a goal. For every question answered incorrectly, your opponent gets a point. Now while you may not have realised it at first, but the difficulty of the game is set when you pick your opponent. Rather than assigning different questions varying difficulty (something that has never been particularly effective given the nature of trivia), the team you pick as your opponent governs the difficulty of the game based on their real world ranking. For instance, pick Brazil and you only have to get one question wrong for them to score a goal. Pick Australia though, and you get four chances to screw up before they score. Whichever team you pick, you always have to get three points before the goal is counted, which is nice as it allows you to always play as your favourite team regardless of their real world skill.

One of the more challenging questions

The meat of the game is the World Cup mode where you get to pick a team, fight through a couple of qualifying games before reaching the group stage. Make it out of the group stage and then fight your way through a series of knockout games against progressively harder opponents before reaching the final. Not only are the questions World Cup themed, but you get to answer them in a World Cup tournament which feels more like a competitive game than a test of your knowledge.

The database of questions seems pretty solid, with the developer claiming 600+ questions in three languages (which is a nice touch). I played through a few times, and while I did spot a few repetitive questions, it didn’t happen often. The developers also claim to be on the lookout for new question material for future updates, so it’s probably reasonable to expect future updates if the game takes off.

Another nice touch is the multiplayer mode. If you’re a football fan then you’re certainly a competitive type, and what better way to indulge in this than challenging your friends to find out who really is the most knowledgeable fan. You can play on one system, and simply hand your iPhone/touch back and forth between questions.

The game looks fine graphically, and comes with added football sound effects. While you can turn these off, it doesn’t allow you to play your own music in the background, which is unfortunate given the casual nature of playing trivia on the go. While I would certainly recommend this to the World Cup buffs out there, given that it’s not a World Cup year quite yet and the trivia is strictly limited to World Cup internationals, I’m not quite sure if it’s worth $1.99 considering the amount of gaming available in the store right now for 99 cents. Don’t get me wrong though, if you’re a big football fan you’ll certainly find enough knowledge to entertain you, I just feel it may be a little mistimed.

The format works though, and I would love to see it expanded into other international tournaments, as well as the national leagues. I can’t help but imagine a mega-app with questions on the Premiership, La Liga, Euro, the World Cup and many other leagues. This could be worthy of up to $5 and would have much greater appeal. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

written by admin \\ tags: asked-question, floor, ipod touch, redbull