From iPhone to Nokia N97 mini? Not quite so fast!
Collaring our very own Matt Radford, I pressed him to try the Nokia N97 mini, the latest touchscreen offering from the Finns, albeit with a QWERTY keyboard as well. Below are his video impressions after two weeks with the N97 mini. Happy watching and happy Christmas!
The company behind (most of) those in-app ads – Smaato
In-app advertising has become more and more common in the iPhone world – it’s a great way for developers to monetise their apps and games while keeping the app itself free for users. But how does it all work, in terms of putting the right ads in the right apps to the right people? Following on from the Heroes of the Mobile Screen event in London, I tracked down Smaato founder Ragnar Kruse and got to the bottom of iPhone (and Symbian) mobile advertising. And if you’re a developer, Smaato.com is the place to try first for this sort of thing.
Review: The Proporta USB TurboCharger 1200
You may have seen my previous Proporta charger reviews over on AAS, of the Micro and the original Travel Charger. Both solid products, and both of which were replaced by a slightly tacky alternative last year because of supply problems with the original devices. Thankfully, as I write this mid-2009, things seem to have reverted to the original supplier and there are two new models available. Featured here is the diminutive USB TurboCharger 1200 and there’s also a big brother, the TurboCharger 3400, which we’ll review in due course.
The general idea’s still the same though. You charge the USB TurboCharger 1200 up from any convenient USB source – either a computer’s USB port or one of Proporta’s own 12V or mains-to-USB adapters (incidentally these latter two come with the recommended ‘World Pack’ version of the product, along with a range of international mains pin converters), and then you can dispense this to just about any portable device, be it a Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Apple phone, be it a Nintendo DS Lite or even just something that charges over microUSB or miniUSB. (more…)
Pricing sanity seems to have prevailed in the iPhone App Store
Phase 1 in the iPhone App Store was the initial ramp up and the very first applications – this didn’t take long to work through, only a matter of weeks. Applications were sensibly priced. Serious app? Call it $15 or so, commensurate with the work taken to create it.
Then we had 6 months of utter craziness. With applications appearing in their thousands (literally – though 900 of each thousand was complete rubbish), the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that developers had to price their apps at a dollar or so to stand any chance at all of success – anything more expensive and sales wouldn’t be high enough to make it into the top 25/50 table – which, as we all know, is where the real stars live. (more…)
The importance of RAM and a hope for Monday
RAM – i.e. Random Access Memory, is all important. It’s the workspace which your phone’s OS runs in. And a critical parameter, in terms of what you can do with your smartphone, is how much RAM it has free. Free for you to do stuff. Like run a web browser, play a game, and so on.
Over and over again, in reviewing iPhone games for IPAL, I come across user reviews saying ‘Game is buggy, just crashes every time’. Now, no developer worth their salt would release a game that kept crashing. What’s happening is that the iPhone is physically running out of RAM. Starting with perhaps 40MB free, some of the fabulous 3D games need just about all of this and when the RAM runs out, the OS panics and shuts the game down. Result: one unhappy user. On my iPod Touch, with 60MB free most of the time (again, after the OS has loaded its bits and pieces up), I never, repeat never, hit RAM limits, incidentally.
iPhone 3.0 and Video Recording – now with YouTube Uploading
So the devkits have been explored, the interviews taken and the rumours integrated. It’s now a dead cert that video recording will hit the iPhone for its big 3.0 June re-launch. And that a basic ‘iMovie’ application will be there for splicing clips together.
“Big deal”, owners of other smartphones might think, “my phone has had high-resolution video recording for years”. And they’re right, I used a Nokia N93 to record my summer holiday in 2006 in full VGA resolution with stereo sound. It was sunny and it was glorious.
But Apple are set to go one better and by doing what they do best – making things easy for users while staying away from the bleeding edge. (more…)
Nothing’s worse than a really bad day
OK, so maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. Or maybe it was the chocolate cake that my daughter upended onto the kitchen carpet. Or maybe it was the frustration of wading through another couple of hundred applications, new in the iPhone App Store since yesterday. Either way, it’s been a bad day.
Of the 20,000 applications in the store, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that only around two to three hundred are actually any good at all. Add the same number again which are so niche that only a dozen people across the world might want them and you are left with over 19,000 apps which are completely and utterly pointless. Or rubbish. Or both.
But one app caught my eye today: Nothing.
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A triple case whammy from Proporta
You’ve got to love Proporta, one of the world’s leading phone accessory makers. Not only are they British(!), they’re great people, they even have their own chatty office blog.
And, for the Apple iPhone, they’ve put together three cases and have kindly sent over samples for review on All About iPhone. In no particular order, here’s a look at their Perfora case, their Maya pouch and the all-conquering Alu-Leather Edge case. All three have their merits, as shown below…
All your third party applications broken after iTunes 8.1? Me too. Here’s the fix.
I got a shock today when starting up applications on my iPod Touch. Nearly every third party application was broken. Each quit back to the launcher after a second or so. After a few minutes panic and the usual restarts and soft resets (none of which worked), the penny dropped. I’d upgraded to iTunes 8.1 yesterday and the application problem was only since my sync. In other words, something in the new iTunes had blatted all over my applications.
In my year of owning an iPod Touch, this was my first real showstopping problem. But what to do? I’d be very surprised if this was a Touch problem – I’m guessing this is equally applicable to the iPhone as well. Half an hour’s Googling and I came across a reference to a similar problem encountered on a previous iTunes update by some users. I decided to try their solution – and also to try the iTunes/iPod backup system for real.
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The App Store update system is broken, I tell you…
Up until about a month ago, I’d been very impressed by the way the App Store app (if you see what I mean) kept me up to speed with updates to my installed applications. However, I’m now as wary of App Store’s claimed updates as I would be of a cornered lion…
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