The Gungle » Devices

iPhone OS upgrades: for a few dollars less

Ben Green — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:26:41 +0000

We still see a significant difference between iPhone and iPod touch users upgrades, which isn’t surprising given the $5 upgrade requirement for the iPod touch. 91% of iPhone requests are 3.0 or 3.1, compared to only 35% of iPod touch requests

via AdMob Metrics blog.

GigaOm on Sony Ericsson’s make.believe marketing

Ben Green — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:34:07 +0000

Sony Ericsson is hoping that a brand makeover can somehow heal its critically wounded handset business. The joint venture between Ericsson and Sony said today that it will adopt Sony’s “make.believe” tagline in its marketing campaigns to “reinforce its entertainment credentials” with consumers

GigaOm Why Sony Ericsson Is Living in a Land of Make.Believe .

Of course, not so long ago The Register were wondering whether gesture-based gaming on a handset was make.believe.

iPhone AR: Augmented ID from TAT

Ben Green — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:53:15 +0000

In the future, people will point phones at you to check your interwebs while you speak.

Notable about the video, and others, is the emphasis on the corporeal identity – face recognition, real-time video of people – seems to continue the anchorage of online identities to literal pictorial and video evidence. Facebook is a good example of this.

—

Elsewhere in AR TwittARound “shows live tweets around your location on the horizon“. I found his summary of technologies used illuminating:

The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

This setup is related to the non-availability of public APIs for live video on the iPhone, meaning developers can’t publish via the app store:

But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.

In early July, a number of developers and academics write the above in their Open Letter to Apple: Let us Augment Reality with the iPhone!. It will be interesting to see what Apple’s plans are in this space.

Melbourne CHISIG Event – Mobile User Experience

Ben Green — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:05:43 +0000

On Monday, July 20, Oliver Wiedlich will be presenting on the mobile user experience followed by a panel discussion including myself, Oliver, Julian Wong and Rod Farmer.

6-8pm at Horse Bazaar, which is just behind that car with the boot open:

View Larger Map

Should be outstanding – here’s the full details at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc. site..

Sony Ericsson announces Yari, gesture phone for gaming Emos

Ben Green — Sat, 30 May 2009 06:37:52 +0000

As The Register mentions, it’s a little fantastic that these games can be played without looking at the screen. Mind you, I’m not even sure the hair is real in this ad, so let’s not nitpick.

Incidentally, Yari is a Japanese word for spear:

Yari (?^?) is the Japanese term for spear, or more specifically, the straight-headed spear. The martial art of wielding the yari is called s?jutsu. Yari measured anywhere from one meter to upwards of six meters (3.3 to 20 feet). The longer versions were called ?mi no yari while shorter ones were known as mochi yari or tae yari. The longest versions were carried by foot troops (ashigaru), while the samurai usually carried the shorter versions.
Wikipedia: Yari

The Press Release includes two photos, both of which show the Gaming carousel UI, which is not very compelling (see right).

But the camera has face and smile recognition though, so maybe it’s actually rad.
See Sony Ericsson Press Release for full specs.

Via: Sony Ericsson rolls out Wii-style gaming phone • Register Hardware.

Engadget have a leaked copy of the Palm Pre Gesture Guide

Ben Green — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:21:34 +0000

It’s unfinished, so the gestures appear on rough device image.

Notable:

Close by swiping upwards
Swipe either way to delete an item from a list – seems like a wasted gesture option.
Move cursor?
Select Text

Engadget.

Vodafone App Store

Ben Green — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:01:59 +0000

Vodafone have announced the launch on their app store by year end in Britain, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

They’ll concentrate on apps for Symbian devices initally
People will be able to buy apps and have them charged on their phone bill
It’s a 70/30 revenue split between the developer and Vodafone

Vodafone claims that geotargetting will be their advantage over handset and software vendor offerings – their ownership of the network provides the location of the person which the app should be able to use. I don’t really see how that’s heaps different than location enabled iPhone apps that use teh GPS.

From BusinessWeek: Vodafone Announces App Store

Samsung i7500 Video

Ben Green — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:10:56 +0000

Boy Genius Report have a video of the Samsung i7500, the first non-HTC Android phone.

Thoughts:

It has a lot of buttons
There’s no sliding keyboard, and no stylus
The camera is 5 MP, it has a flash
It has video but it doesn’t focus
It probably doesn’t have GPS
“The keyboard is not really that good yet…”
When you’re taking a photo, it shows you a preview of the previous photo taken. Which is weird.

Android 1.5 Features & UI Update

Ben Green — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:37:12 +0000

The Android Developers forum has a full list of Android 1.5 features.

There are some UI element updates that may break the layout of some existing Android apps:

You can see in this example that the buttons and checkboxes have a new appearance. Even though these changes do not affect binary nor source compatibility, they might still break the UI of your apps. As part of the UI refresh, the minimum size of some of the widgets has changed. For instance, Android 1.1 buttons have a minimum size of 44×48 pixels whereas Android 1.5 buttons now have a minimum size of 24×48 pixels

From source: UI Framework changes in Android 1.5

Its been a big week

Ben Green — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:42:17 +0000

Started work at Symplicit. Unpacked an unprecedented amount of Appley goodness. And, hey, look mum, I’m moblogging. Are ya proud?