The Iphone Blog

Archive for the ‘I Cafe’ Category

Just proving that the iPhone is mostly used as a home gadget, analyst firm Localytics looked at the usage data of a number of iPhone apps, figured out the timezones, and found that most apps get played at 9pm on weeknights and all through the weekend. You mean people use their toys when they actually have time to play? Who would have thought!

Sarcasm aside, it does show that the iPhone is far more “personal than professional”, and for all its work related possibilities, the iPhone excels at entertainment. It seems common sense that this time period would be where you’d find heavy use, as it’s when people unwind after their day’s work.

[via Venture Beat]

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Capcom’s much discussed transition of Street Fighter IV has finally landed on the iPhone—and it’s not cheap. The $10 app (link) features eight playable characters:  Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Dhalsim, Blanka, M. Bison and  Abel, and the venerable M. Bison is the final boss. It’s odd that a port of the newest SF game only has a single of the new characters: Abel. The game uses an onscreen joystick and buttons, has a built-in training mode for new users, and can handle head to head over bluetooth.

The graphics look pretty good for an iPhone game, though it’s very tempting to compare them to the console version.

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The Game Developers’ Conference is a major event for the behind the scenes work of actually crafting the applications that we play. This year they’ve included an iPhone Games Summit, which kicked off this morning, and today’s talks will be on creating server software for iPhone games; social networks; a postmortem on Call of Duty: World at War Zombies; and how Epic brought Unreal 3 to the iPhone.

Day two will be on business and marketing.

The talk about creating servers for iPhone multiplayers has been presented by ngmoco, who are giving a presentation on the multiplayer aspect of Eliminate. TUAW have written up their presentation here, which gives an interesting rundown of the problems they faced.

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If you know or come into personal contact with an Android user, you’ve probably had that nifty little Google Goggles app thrown in your face a few times already. It’s a handy little app that uses visual recognition to identify objects and products and direct you to the Internet to find and buy said objects. Think of it as one of those barcode scanner apps, minus the need for a barcode.

Well, the day has finally come for the iPhone to get a visual search app of its own. In this installment of “Does it Work?” we take a look at oMoby, which hit the App Store a few weeks ago and claims to make searching simple by letting you snap photos of any product and locating it for purchase on the Internet.

Think oMoby will work? Check out our assessment after the jump.

According to the developers’, oMoby works a little by computer vision and a little by “magic.” When you snap a photo of an object in the app, the “computer vision” goes to work to identify the object, and when that fails, the app turns to a network of humans to help solve the mystery. The instructional video posted on YouTube is a bit more explanatory, as it describes how the app looks for characteristics in an image, instead of mainly text or logos.

The Test:

When you open oMoby, the app launches right into camera mode, ready for you to snap away. I started with a few simple media items: a digital camera, a DVD (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and a paperback book (Into the Wild) to test the waters without rocking the boat.

Immediately after taking a photo, the app reverted back to my “history” screen, which displayed all of the items in my list of queried items. For each item, a thumbnail shows to the left and text to the right would read “Searching” and “Analyzing Image.”

After a few minutes, the text changed to read “We will notify you when the product is identified.”

After another few minutes and after closing the app, I received a push notification on the icon on my home screen, letting me know that an item I had searched for had been identified. The digital camera I took a photo of had been identified..correctly!

Opening the results page for the item shows a list of options, such as sharing your result via e-mail, or searching information on the item through sites like Google, Bing, and Wikipedia. The real meat of the app comes in the list of shopping links offered for 10 websites like Best Buy, eBay, Walmart, Google Products, or Overstock. You also have the option of posting your results on social sites like Facebook or Twitter. Even better, all of this searching on other sites is done inside the app.

So oMoby successfully identified my digital camera, but the rest of the media items didn’t go over so well—at first. It took much more time than the digital camera to identify at all—by about half an hour—and when the app finally did identify them, they showed as incredibly vague titles: “book,” “comic book” (for the DVD—wrong).

So I did more searches of some more difficult items, using the tips offered in the instructional video, and also retook photos of the items that were vaguely identified. The same vague identifications were given for these and took almost twice as long to get:

Lysol cleaning wipes — “Food Item”

Burt’s Bees hand lotion — “Bees”

Picture frame from Target — “Wood Thing”

Sharpie marker — “Sketch Pen”

Apple iPhone earbuds — “Earphones”

I’m not kidding about “Wood Thing,” either.

However, literally an hour later, while I was putting together this here review you’re reading, I checked my iPhone to see that I had 10 push notifications from oMoby. I opened the app to see that every item in my history had been updated and that each item had been more specifically identified, with titles for the media items and more specifics on the others: “Lysol Dual Action,” “Burt’s Bees,” “Picture Frame,” “Sharpie” and “Apple Earphones.”

I guess it really does work by magic.

Conclusion:

In short, yes, the app does work. Patience and precision is absolutely necessary for the app to work as promised, though, and seeing as this is a fairly new app, it’s going to take a bit to work out some kinks. oMoby insists that the more the app is used and the more users correct misidentified items, the better the app will work. So we have to kudos for the “community” aspect to the app.

As a tip, do take the developers’ advice to take as clear of a photo as possible, to make things easier for the magical elves working behind the scenes. And although oMoby insists text isn’t necessary to make the app better identify objects, if you’re snapping a photo of a product with any branding or specific identifiers on it (i.e. the picture frame from above), you’re most likely not going to get the results you really want. Sure, if you snap a photo of a picture frame, you should expect to have the app identify it as a picture frame. But that’s not quite what users of this app are using it for, anyhow. The magic seems a bit lost, in this sense.

The final verdict? … It works. Go download it!

oMoby

Price: FREE

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Two programmers with TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine Group created a proof of concept botnet, which showed that smartphones are just as susceptible to the attacks of black hat hackers as anyone else. The pair created a “weather” app called WeatherFist, and distributed it through Android marketplace and on jailbroken iPhones. While in this form, it was relatively benign, just gathering the users location data and phone-numbers, at the recent RSA Conference they showed that it could easily transition it into a more traditional botnet, which would steal their information and spread spam.

I think it’s an important point to remember that iPhones, like traditional computers, can be usurped by people with less than honorable intentions. If you’ve jailbroken and are picking up random apps over Cydia, remember that literally anything can be there, and you have no idea of the intentions of its creators.

[via Sophos]

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Today’s contestant is FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger, who wrote that Apple is poised to produce 4-5 million iPads in the first half of this year. He believes all the talk about delays and bottlenecks were “false alarms”, and that Apple will also see a boost in their other products. He’s also estimating substantially more units produced of the iPod and desktops, but fewer iPhones:

“[Berger] sees Apple building 9.3 million iPods in the March quarter, up from his previous estimate of 4 million, with desktop units increasing to 1 million from 500,000, and notebooks now at 1.7 million, up from 1 million. By contrast, he has reduced his iPhone build forecast for the quarter to 6 million, from 7.5 million.”

You can be one of those lucky first five million, by winning an iPad through our competition here.

[via Barron's]

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Say what? With  iPhone releases, Verizon has been know to distribute PowerPoint slides illustrating why customers should not purchase the iPhone. With the iPad coming next month, Verizon is back again, but with a different message. According to Verizon’s internal slides, the iPad represents an opportunity for big red to sell data plans and specifically the very excellent Verizon MiFi.

Anyone planning on the ultimate combo of the iPad and Verizon MiFi?

via Engadget

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Apple today released iPhone OS 3.2 SDK Beta 4, which includes updated development tools for the iPad. We’re not sure what’s new, but Apple seems to be pushing a steady stream of updates to iPhone OS 3.2 SDK.

If you are a developer, head over to developer.apple.com for the update.

via MacRumors

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Pocket Gamer is reporting that the Kings of the Iron Fist tournament might be making its way to your iPhone. According to their source, Namco has been working on the application for a while, and ”the game is being finished up and it plays rather nicely.”

Details are scarce, with Pocket Gamer thinking it might be a port of the PSP version of Tekken 6, though a complete remake is not out of the question. Street Fighter IV is already on its way to the iPhone, so it only makes sense for other major franchises to try and get in on the action. It just remains to be seen if the controls will be completely unwieldily or not.

[via Cult of Mac]

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Doodle Jump, the insanely fun $0.99 iPhone app, has passed 3 million sales since its release in March 2009. Gathering almost $3 million in revenue in that single year, I guess it goes to show that a decent concept and some good press can go a very, very long way. The game’s developers—Lima Sky—are claiming that this number of sales is a first for any indie developer, a stat I don’t know enough about to disagree with.

While the developers do keep pushing out minor updates and holiday themed palette swaps, the fundamental gameplay has remained unchanged, and the game has enough positive buzz behind it to keep moving units. Congratulations to the developers for making an affordable and crazy fun application!

[via Crunch Gear]

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