MobileCrunch |  |
- HTC Vigor Spotted In The Wild, Possibly Packing Verizon LTE
- Life Is Crime: If You Try To Shakedown My Virtual TechCrunch Office, I Will Virtually Beat You Down
- Facebook Kills Daily Deals, But Keeps Check-In Deals
- Samsung Galaxy S II U.S. Variants Pose For The Camera
- Video: This Isn’t The iPhone 5… But I Kind Of Wish It Was
- FEMA’s New Android App Arrives Just In Time For Hurricane Irene
- OpenFeint Announces Replacement for UDIDs on iOS
- Apple Hires iPhone Hacker Nicholas Allegra (@Comex)
- Apple Patent Describes Solar-Powered iPhone, Notebook Charger
| HTC Vigor Spotted In The Wild, Possibly Packing Verizon LTE Posted: 26 Aug 2011 10:47 PM PDT  As far as Verizon devices are concerned, the Droid Bionic probably holds the crown for “Most Anticipated Handset,” but newly leaked shots of the HTC Vigor may steal a bit of that spotlight. Rumored to be the newest addition to Verizon’s LTE line up, the Vigor sports a name that’s downright ancient in comparison: it was first spotted in a trademark application from 2009. The Vigor made waves earlier this month when an ersatz version was spotted on a Dutch retailer’s website, but the real deal sports a less angular body that matches up nicely with HTC and Verizon’s design language. Specifically, with its funky textured back plate and red camera trim, the Vigor could easily pass for another entry in Verizon’s Incredible series. The four capacitive buttons on the Vigor’s face mean it won’t be one of the first handsets to run Ice Cream Sandwich, but its rumored specs will dazzle many a phone geek regardless. Under the hood, the Vigor reportedly has a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal flash storage and Beats by Dre audio. A 4.3 inch HD display graces the front, and if it were on, HTC’s Sense UI would be running the show. Note that the Vigor is largely free of branding at this point, leaving the claims of its LTE compatibility and Beats audio processing in question. The device is likely in the test phases now, which could explain the overall lack of flourish, but here’s hoping the rumors hold true. Without the Galaxy S II on board, this may end up being one of Verizon’s heavy-hitters come the holidays. [via Droid Life]
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| Life Is Crime: If You Try To Shakedown My Virtual TechCrunch Office, I Will Virtually Beat You Down Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:16 PM PDT  There’s a simple fundamental reason why Grand Theft Auto exploded into a phenomenon. Everyone has criminal tendencies sometimes. And virtually indulging them is a hell of a lot better then actually indulging them and dealing with the moral consequences — or the physical consequences. Like prison. But what if you could make the Grand Theft Auto concept even more immersive by tying it to the real world? That’s what Life Is Crime is all about. The new mobile game by Red Robot Labs — a startup founded by Mike Ouye, Pete Hawley, and John Harris, former executives at Playdom, EA and SCEE — allows you to put a life of crime onto your phone. It’s a location-based game launching today for Android devices that’s likely to be highly addictive. Think of it as Foursquare meets Grand Theft Auto meet Spymaster (remember Spymaster?) meets Gowalla — well, the old Gowalla, before they recently stated they were killing off the virtual goods element. The point is to go around your city and battle others to control properties. The point isn’t to “check-in”, it’s to attack other players with everything you’ve got in order to take over a city. “The social utility guys have taught people how to check-in, but it’s not a real deep gaming experience,” Ouye says. “We’re going after location gaming. It’s about discovery of new places while playing a game,” he continues. Life Is Crime uses real maps that are custom-tailored by the Red Robot Labs team to include virtual representations of key landmarks in a city. Right now, Seattle (where Red Robot Labs is unveiling the game at PAX today) is built out. Soon, San Francisco and other cities across the U.S. will be too. These maps incentivize people to fight over the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. But any location is fair game. The team added the TechCrunch office, for example. The fighting nature of the game is pretty straightforward. You find someone you want to fight and it becomes a battle backed by your weapons and stats. If you have a higher reputation score than your opponent, you’re likely to take them down in a fight. But maybe they have a better weapon than you to even that out a bit. At first, the game will mainly be a single-player experience. But down the line, the Red Robot guys hope people form virtual gangs to battle other gangs for location supremacy. One idea the team has is to have Android vs. iPhone teams when the iPhone version launches later this fall. Maybe Jason and I will play it on OMG/JK. At one point, the Red Robot team got about 200 Googlers playing it at the Googleplex, we’re told. Eventually, as gangs form within the game, there will be different levels individual users can rise to within the gang. Another element of the game is to pick up and drop off virtual goods with other users — both sides are rewarded in the game for this action. There are around 200 items within the game right now, and a lot of customizations for users. More broadly, Life Is Crime is just step one of the location-based gaming platform that Red Robot Labs hopes to build. Their intention is to have three games on the platform this year — two built by them, and one by a third-party. “Location games are wide open right now,” Ouye says. “And we’re going after it, because they’re really sticky,” he continues. “We’re competing for the 30 seconds or 1 minute when you’re in line waiting. Do you want to commit a virtual crime in than span, or do you want to check-in?” You hear that Foursquare? Man up. Time to fight. You can find Life Is Crime in the Android Market here. Click to view slideshow.Red Robot Labs is a mobile gaming start-up located in Palo Alto, California. The company was founded in January 2011 by a team of industry veterans who are passionate...
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| Facebook Kills Daily Deals, But Keeps Check-In Deals Posted: 26 Aug 2011 04:22 PM PDT  After quietly announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused some confusion. You see, with the decision to kill off Facebook Places earlier in the week, everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything? No, says Facebook. Daily Deals are separate from Check-in Deals. The Check-in Deals will work a bit different with the end of Places, but the company will continue to support and enhance that product. Daily Deals are dead — and my email account thanks them for that. Facebook’s statement on the matter:
In more violent terms that may be easier to understand: they’re killing off their Groupon-killer, but keeping half of their Foursquare-killer while killing off the other half of their Foursquare-killer. Below, a reminder of what the still-alive Check-in Deals will look like on the Facebook iPhone app: Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It...
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| Samsung Galaxy S II U.S. Variants Pose For The Camera Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:19 PM PDT  We’ve heard quite a bit about the Galaxy S II, which isn’t all that surprising seeing that it sold 3 million units in its first 55 on the market. As people from other parts of the globe got to experience the wonder that is the GSII, we here in the States played the waiting game. But it’s so close I can almost taste the Gingerbread. On August 29, Samsung will finally unveil the GSII’s U.S. iterations in the Big Apple for T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. If you haven’t already heard, Verizon is holding off on the GSII. In the lead up to the event, this image was leaked to PocketNow, which shows all three little beasts posing for the camera. They’re all a bit different in design, most notably T-Mobile’s Hercules. If what we’ve previously heard about the Hercules is true, T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II will sport a larger 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, as opposed to the original GSII’s 4.3-inch screen. Of course, T-Mobile’s variant may not be called the Hercules. We actually don’t know what any of the carrier names will be, although we sure have heard quite a few: the Attain (AT&T), the Within (Sprint), the Function (Verizon), and even the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (also Sprint?). What a nasty mouthful, right? Either way, it doesn’t really matter what the phone’s called because it’ll be a hit no matter what. Just take a look at the specs: a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread, TouchWiz 4.0, 8-meagapixel rear camera (1080p video capture), 2-megapixel front-facing shooter, and a 4.3-inch 480×800 Super AMOLED Plus display. Of course, things like screen size may be different from one carrier to the next (read: Hercules), but all in all those should be the specs we’re looking at. There’s also one minor change in the U.S. variants compared to the international version, which would be the loss of that snazzy little home button. Instead, the phones will sport the same four buttons we’ve grown used to on Android.
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| Video: This Isn’t The iPhone 5… But I Kind Of Wish It Was Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:15 PM PDT  When it comes to massive news, the past two weeks have been absolutely insane. Google buying Motorola? HTC To Buy Beats? Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple?! What better way to cleanse the palette than a quick tromp into a conceptual rabbit hole? 3D animation shop AatmaStudio has released a concept video showing what they imagine as the iPhone of the future, and… well.. I’m ready to pre-order.
Now, just how much of this is actually feasible with current tech? None of it, really — but a good chunk of it is within the realm of plausibility if we consider said tech’s foreseeable evolution. The Design: That design looks far thinner than the 8mm barrier that no one has really managed to crack yet (unless we’re counting those which tuck the thick bits into one lumped region, taper the rest, and then base measurements on the thinnest part of the profile — which is kind of cheating.) With that said, the thickest bits of most modern smartphones tend to be the radios and the camera sensors, and these are getting slimmer and slimmer every few months. Just two weeks ago, for example, OmniVision announced an 8-megapixel camera module that comes in at a build height of just 4.4mm.. The Keyboard: Projection keyboards have been done before (IBM patented them in 1992!), but never quite like this. Though they never really seemed to take off, the few projection keyboards that do exist are generally dedicated Bluetooth/USB accessories, as opposed to being integrated into the handset itself. Even as rather clunky, separate components, the projection was one color, red laser-based stuff — nothing like the high-resolution, beautifully scaling board you see here. But these days, we’ve got itty-bitty pico projectors, and folks like Microsoft/PrimeSense dumping millions into IR-based motion tracking. Let those technologies continue to evolve, and we’re probably but a few years from something like the concept keyboard shown here. The Holographic Projector: As for projecting video into thin air, without any sort of screen to reflect the light… that’s something that’ll probably be stuck in concept videos and the Star Wars Universe until further notice. Damn you, physics! It’s probably for the better, really: while interacting with a floating screen seems futuristic and fun, the absence of any sort of tactility would be a rather miserable user experience. Apple’s iPhone was introduced at MacWorld in January 2007 and officially went on sale June 29, 2007, selling 146,000 units within the first weekend of launch. The phone has...
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| FEMA’s New Android App Arrives Just In Time For Hurricane Irene Posted: 26 Aug 2011 12:34 PM PDT  FEMA’s had a mobile version of their website available for a while now, but all that information does you no good if you can’t get an internet connection. Given the fragility of mobile networks during disasters, going without web access is a very real possibility. Enter FEMA’s new, self-titled Android app, which puts a wealth of emergency preparedness information right in the palm of your hand just in case. The app contains information and advice on what to do for disasters ranging from earthquakes to wildfires, and everything in-between. Also present is the emergency kit checklist, which outlines all the items and provisions one may need to get through some trying times. Very useful, especially because some things they recommend (like a “whistle to signal for help”) aren’t exactly the first things to come up when brainstorming the contents of a survival kit. For those worst case scenarios when the best bet is to head for a nearby shelter, the app lists locations where it should be safe to hunker down. It also provides a quick way for disaster survivors to apply for federal assistance, although it’s my sincerest hope that none of you readers will ever have to. While it’s essentially a pocketable version of the FEMA site, it’s a valuable resource in it’s own right, especially with Hurricane Irene poised to barrel up the East Coast in coming days. Creating an app is a smart move for FEMA, especially considering the state of most mobile networks during an emergency situation. Cellular networks are quickly jammed up by handsets try to make calls, as some of you may have noticed during this past week’s earthquake. FEMA recommends sticking to text messages and emails when trying to contact others, and that the app works fine sans data connection only helps. One less thing for the network has to cope with will hopefully mean everyone can get in touch with everyone else without too much headache. For more information on Hurricane Irene, head over to the New York Times or check out our post with additional Irene resources.
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| OpenFeint Announces Replacement for UDIDs on iOS Posted: 26 Aug 2011 10:27 AM PDT  On the heels of Apple’s decision to phase out developer access to the UDID (unique device identifier) on iOS devices, mobile social gaming network OpenFeint is offering up a an alternative solution. The company announced today that it’s launching a single sign-on system for social game developers that will replace UDIDs on iOS. The system will become available later this fall. The change to UDID access was noted in the latest set of iOS5 release notes, where it was listed as “deprecated.” The UDID, an alphanumeric string unique to each Apple device, is currently used by mobile ad networks, game networks, analytics providers, developers and app testing systems, like TestFlight, for example. In some cases, developers are even using the UDID to verify whether users are accessing their app from a new device. In other words, this sort of change is a very, very big deal. However, with OpenFeint’s new system, the gaming developer community, at least, will have another option. Users will opt-in to OpenFeint’s new single-sign on system, which then gives the developer access to OpenFeint’s OFUID, a universal account system for the gaming network’s cross-platform users. Using the OFUID, developers can examine and analyze users’ behavior across games in order to better understand what’s working within their apps and what needs to be fixed. It will also help game developers’ with their ad targeting efforts. All data accessed will be anonymized to protect user privacy, says OpenFeint. Unfortunately, unlike Apple’s UDID, OFUID only works when the user chooses to sign in to OpenFeint. And clearly, it’s not a universal replacement for the UDID, since OpenFeint is focused only on mobile gaming. In addition, OpenFeint announced an accompanying “install trade program” for developers to promote the new system. OpenFeint says it will guarantee developers 1.5 new app installs for every new install of its “Game Channel,” a new app that’s needed for the single sign-on system to work. Developers interested in early access can sign up to participate in the new program here. OpenFeint has now over 6,900 games on its network and over 115 million registered users. It was acquired by Japanese mobile gaming company GREE in April for $104 million. The best social gaming network for both Android and iOS devices.
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| Apple Hires iPhone Hacker Nicholas Allegra (@Comex) Posted: 26 Aug 2011 08:59 AM PDT  Apple has just hired yet another member of the iPhone jailbreaking community, Nicholas Allegra, also known as “@comex” on Twitter. Allegra is best known for the JailBreakMe website which made the process of jailbreaking the iPhone as simple as visiting a webpage using mobile Safari. The 19-year old hacker from Chappaqua, New York, posted the news of his hire on Twitter, stating that he will be starting an internship with Apple week after next. Allegra was one of the most visible members of the jailbreaking community, regularly finding security vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS software, which made it possible to hack iPhones, iPod Touches and even iPads. Typically, these holes were exploited through the use of specialized jailbreaking software applications which required the phone or other device to be connected to the computer via a USB cable. But JailBreakMe was far easier to use – visitors just launched the website from their mobile device. The site featured a familiar-looking “slide to jailbreak” bar at the bottom of the page. One simple gesture, and the device was hacked. It made jailbreaking accessible to anyone, even non-technical users. Traditionally, Apple discouraged jailbreaking, as it allows for the installation of third-party applications outside the official iTunes App Store. The concern is that once a phone or other device is jailbroken, it’s easier to illegally pirate applications which would otherwise be sold in the App Store, earning revenue for developers and Apple alike. However, not all jailbreakers are interested in stealing apps – sometimes, like their Android-rooting counterparts, they just want control over their handset. On jailbroken iOS devices, users can make tweaks to the software and install widgets, themes and other unapproved applications by way of third-party “jailbreak” app stores like Cydia, Icy and ThemeIt. In recent months, Apple has begun to take notice of the now-burgeoning jailbreak community, estimated to include 10% of all iPhones. For example, Apple hired Peter Hajas in June, the creator of a popular jailbreak app known as Mobile Notifier, which bears a striking resemblance to the new notification system in iOS5. The move prompted discussion as to whether Apple was reconsidering its position in regards to jailbreaking – maybe it’s now being thought of as a farm league for discovering new talent? Jailbreaking is going even more mainstream this year, thanks to its first-ever hacker convention called MyGreatFest. According to event organizers, Allegra was planning on attending the conference, but whether he still will is now unclear. Says MyGreatFest organizer Craig Fox, “I think it’s a great move for Allegra, but it’s sad for the jailbreaking community to lose such a bright and young hacker.” Image credit: Forbes, which outed @comex earlier this month
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| Apple Patent Describes Solar-Powered iPhone, Notebook Charger Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:46 AM PDT  Among the 16 new patents granted to Apple this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, was this fairly interesting one describing a solar-powered charging system for electronic devices. The patent details a system that includes a voltage converter and controller that would work alongside a solar power source. The voltage converter would be attached to a solar power source by way of an input cable. It would also be attached to an “electronic load” via an output cable. That “electronic load” could be a “portable electronic device,” says the filing – which basically means almost anything Apple makes, from iPhones to MacBooks. The voltage converter is configured to monitor an amount of power drawn by the device at its output, while the controller is configured to control the voltage converter in order to reduce the amount of power drawn subsequently, if it goes over a certain predetermined threshold. In other words, it’s a key part to a solar power charging system for electronics. Apple has previously filed patents for an auxiliary solar cell, that would work as a backup power source for mobile devices, as well as a method for covering a device in solar cells. However, it’s not likely that we’ll see solar-powered gadgets from Apple (or anyone, for that matter), until the costs associated with their production are reduced. Image credits: Patently Apple; Tmcnet.com Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...
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