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.
“If you’re looking to price compare a product that’s right in front of you, why type out its name and dig through irrelevant results when you can just scan the barcode?”
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.
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
