Get Better Gear!
- Kensington Windshield/Vent Car Mount with Sound Amplified Cradle for iPhone from Kensington, $39.99
- SigFx Energy iPhone Case Contains Smart Battery from SigFx Energy, US$69.95
- NAVIGON AG - True GPS Software for the iPhone from NAVIGON Inc., 89.99
- Tweetie 2 from atebits, $2.99
- Snood: Flawed Casual Play from Electronic Arts, US$3.99
Top 5 Free Apps
iTunes New Music Releases
Top 5 Paid Apps
Discover New Music
- Spoon
Gimme Fiction by Spoon is a terrific album by an Austin band that I was lucky enough to catch on an Austin radio station during a Christmas visit.
An Evening with George Shearing & Mel Torm�
- Mel Torm� & George Shearing
- Of the three men who taught me how to sing, the last was Mel Torme. Apparently, Mel Torme is a joke to anyone more than a decade older than me, a living parody of a Vegas crooner. But I stumbled on th
Every Day: The Best of the Verve Years
- Joe Williams
- Joe Williams was Figure Two in my three-man education in singing. A brilliant vocalist, scatter, and interpreter of jazz and blues, Williams produces music that's totally unique, yet sounds so effortl
- Brian Eno
- In his first proper solo release since 1996's relatively cold "The Drop," Brian Eno has constructed a whimsical and ecclectic masterpiece which is arguably one of the year's strongest records thus fa
- Fantomas
Mike Patton may well be one of the hardest working men in showbiz these days, and his latest with Fantômas underscores just about how far out he is willing to travel.
Suspended Animation
Reader Specials
Visit Deals On The Web for the best deals on all consumer electronics, iPods, and more!
News
iPhone Game Developers Seek to Surpass Golden Nickel
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:00 PM - by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mobile gaming has languished, and only a small percentage of customers ever buy a game for their mobile phone. With the introduction of Apples iPhone SDK, game developers are hoping that all that will change, according to RCRWireless News on Tuesday.
The problem has been that mobile game makers have struggled to surpass the the "golden nickel," five percent of customers who download a game for their phone. Meanwhile, a handful of other mobile phone applications are starting to gain some traction.
The driver is the memory available for a mobile game application. The iPhone has enough and the accelerometer as well which can make for very interactive games.
On Tuesday, Sega Mobile announced "Super Monkey Ball" which exploits the accelerometer and the tilting of the iPhone as the primary input.
The accelerometer allows you tilt the device, and through very subtle motions of your hand you can get the monkey to move," said Ethan Einhorn with Sega Mobile. "That’s literally the experience you get; it’s such a cool thing to bring to handheld gaming. You’ve never been able to do that in a handheld."
The strength of the hardware in the Apple iPhone explains why there is so much energy right now in iPhone game development. The key may be in understanding how to marry the game ideas to the platforms strengths.
"We believe fully in the potential of the iPhone to grow the mobile games market," said Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s senior VP of publishing. "When you look at the current handsets on the market now, most of them have size limitations of (600 kilobytes to 2 megabytes.) The iPhone is introducing a new level of games that we consider to be rich games; games that are about 10 MB and very competitive to console (games). Essentially, the iPhone will be the convergence between mobile and console games."
Thats a key insight. With the iPhone sometimes displacing a notebook computer for some tasks and now taking on the game market, its beginning to take on all the aspects of the next major platform in computing.
Recent Headlines
- Apple TV 3.0.1 Update Fixes Missing Content Bug
- Taiwan Leak Shows Verizon UTMS/CDMA iPhone for Q3 2010
- iPhone Moves Into RadioShack
- Dictionary, Dictionary, Dictionary, And More
- The Latest App Store Games: Gravity Sling, RocketBird, Ground Effect, Checkers!
- iPhone Game Developer Sued for Collecting User’s Cell Numbers
- Apple May Be Bringing RFID to the iPhone
















Post Your Comments