Monthly Archives: February 2009
iPhone owners make up 14% of mobile game downloaders
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Hardware, Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store
Hot off the heels of the news that the iPhone is dominating independent mobile gaming comes this interesting statistic: 14% of all people downloading mobile games are doing so on an iPhone. Market research group comScore says that not only is the iPhone picking up double digits of all game downloads overall, but that 32.4% of all iPhone users have downloaded a game. We’re not sure if this means purchased a game over the air or bought it in iTunes’ App Store and then transferred it onto the phone, but that’s a lot of downloading.
And the numbers are increasing — 8.5 million Americans downloaded mobile games onto their devices in November of last year, up 17 percent from the year before. And smartphones in general are growing — last year, there were zero smartphones sitting in the top 10 mobile devices for downloading, says a comScore analyst, and this year, six of the ten on the list are smartphones. Sounds like an emerging market to us, and the iPhone is sitting right on top.
Google will have your latitude and longitude
Filed under: Software, Freeware, iPhone, iPod touch
Google has launched new location-based social software which is available to many smartphone users today. Latitude will share your location with others and allow you to to view your friends’ locations as well.
You can then contact them using text messaging, instant message or a phone call. The service is opt-in, so you won’t be found if you don’t want to be.
If daVinci had designed the iPhone
Filed under: Accessories, Humor, Odds and ends, iPhone
The steampunk mod meme is not going away. From the Mac mini to R2D2, all sorts of hardware is being made to look Victorian. No one knows why.
Artist Kevin Tong continues the tradition with the iPhone … sort of. The iSteamPhone T-shirt presents the iPhone in a blown-apart presentation like you might find in a daVinci sketch pad. Even the “parts” of the iPhone are vintage. Note the analog clock and what looks like a muffler in the center.
Test your hearing with Audiometry for the iPhone
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPod Family, Software, Odds and ends, Apple, iPhone, App Store
I was just listening to the great Sound Opinions music podcast the other day, and they had a woman on who was campaigning against hearing damage. In fact, she actually called out iPod headphones (as I was listening to the show on my iPhone) as one of today’s leading causes of hearing damage — too many people are listening to music through those headphones way too loud.
Unfortunately, the iPhone can’t fix your ears (yet), but it can help you figure out if there’s a problem: Audiometry is a 99 cent app that will test your hearing for you through a range of frequencies, and let you know whether your ears are blown out or whether you’ve still got some good vibrations left. The app plays a tone at each frequency, asks you whether or not you heard it (though you’ve got to be honest — there were a few times I could hear the tone stopping and starting but not the tone itself), and then gives you a results list on how you did.
App makes time lapse photography easy for iPhone
Filed under: Accessories, Software, iPhone
iPhone TimeLapse Test from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Here’s a fun application. TimeLapse [App Store link] uses your iPhone’s camera to take photos at regular intervals. You can have one photo snapped as infrequently as every 24 hours, or as often as every 10 seconds, which is about as fast as it can snap and store a photo. After you’ve collected all of your photos (I told it to stop after 300), you can easily dump them into iMovie or QuickTime Pro and make a simple time lapse movie. Neat!