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My dreams come true as Beautiful Katamari rolls onto the iPhone

We’ll after the release of the app store,  I posted an article requesting an accelerometer-controlled iPhone port of the incredibly silly ball rolling game Katamari Damacy.   For those unfortunate enough to not have played the original,  let me give you a quick rundown of this incredibly bizarre game.

Katamari Damacy places you into the character of  “The Prince of All Cosmos”,  a tiny little green dude.  Your dad,  the Hunter S. Thompson-esque  “King of All Cosmos”, has gone on a bit of a bender, and managed to screw up the whole universe by destroying all the stars.  So being a lazy king, he sends you off to do his dirty work and put all the stars back together.

Now how would you go about putting a star together?    By going down to earth and rolling up all the junk you can find.   You are given a ball called a Katamari, that anything sticks to.  And you’re tasked with rolling around this ball all across earth,  picking up all sorts of items,  starting small with tacks and rubber bands,  and moving up to plants, animals, cars, islands, etc.   As your katamari gets bigger and bigger,  it can pick up bigger items.   It’s a simple concept, but beautifully executed.   There’s nothing like playing it, and seeing a cow that you really want to roll into your katamari,  so you task yourself with making it big enough to roll up said cow.

It all sounds absurd, and of course it is.   It has a sense of humor somewhere between odd japanese game shows and monty python.   The music is also similarly absurd and you’re likely to be whistling it to yourself for weeks after playing.

So when I read this morning that Katamari for the iPhone had been released.   I was a bit more excited about it than even I was expecting to be.   The price is a bit steep at $7.99  but certainly not out of the average person’s price range, and the frame rate is a little stuttery,  but all in all it’s a fantastic port, and stays very true to the Katamari look and feel.

If you want some absurd fun that will keep you occupied for hours on end, I can’t think of a better game to buy.

Click Here to Download Beautiful Katamari for the iPhone or iPod Touch

Tags: App Store, iPhone, iPod Touch, Katamari Damacy

Good day at Cupertino – Apple sells 3 million of iPhone 3G!

Say what you will about iPhone 3g cracking problems, app troubles, long lines, activation difficulties, and rate plan hikes, it appears the public just doesn’t care. Analysts from Cote Collaborative have speculated that Apple has already sold well over the 3,000,000 mark since the release of it’s new model iPhone one month ago. Considering analysts and speculators had predicted that they would only sell 3,000,000 by the end of the quarter, Apple is sure to see a nice stock boost at the next conference call or SteveNote.

On August 22nd, Apple is scheduled to release the iPhone 3g in an additional 20 countries, nearly doubling it’s availability.

Something tells me that Apple isn’t going to have any problem hitting that 10 million mark by the end of the year.  In fact, they may surpass it by quite a bit.

On the App Store front, news is just as good.  According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, who interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs,  there have been over 60 million applications downloaded on the Apple App Store.  While the majority of the apps downloaded have been free, Apple maintains that it sells close to $1,000,000 worth of paid apps per day.  Even if sales stay at their current pace (which is unlikely due to the number of iPhones selling,  chances are they’ll at least double) Apple plans to make about $360 million dollars in revenue per year solely from Apps.

Even Steve himself was surprised by the ravenous demand for apps, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software.”

Steve also confirmed the existance of the iPhone App Kill Switch that had the blogosphere in a tizzy for the past few days.   Personally, I don’t see a problem with it.   Considering apps like “I Am Rich” and the like make it into the store,  it wouldn’t surprise me to see an app with a time bomb or virus built in make it’s way into the store, and without a way to pull it off every phone quickly, there could be a serious situation with a large number of iPhone users.

Considering that they didn’t use the kill switch on Apps like “NetShare” (which allowed you to tether your pc to your iPhone to use it for the 3g data connection),  and only removed it from the store,  leaving purchased copies enabled, makes me believe that they take the potential problems of a kill switch seriously.  I don’t think that Apple will misuse the kill switch they’ve installed.

There was no news however on the MobileMe front, making me think that Apple’s first foray into cloud computing has been less of a success than they would have liked.

This doesn’t surprise me though.  A lot of people payed $99 on launch day to pick up MobileMe, and have been nearly unable to use it for the entire time they’ve HAD their iPhone 3gs.  Apple has offered a free year to some of the people most affected by the outages, but that doesn’t exactly make me want to go out and buy a copy for myself.

Something tells me that MobileMe will eventually become a free part of the ownership of an iPhone, possibly with the next generation device, and only the owners of iPod touch devices will be required to pay for it.  Considering how much of a subsidy Apple makes from AT&T,  you’d think they could throw in the service for free, especially considering that the general public is more or less beta testing it for them.

These numbers though, are a testament to just how good a device the iPhone 3g is.   If any other company or any other device had gone through as botched a launch as the iPhone 3g went through, the company would be going out of business.   Here’s to hoping that they learned their lesson from this launch and are working to make the next one far more smooth.

Tags: App Store, Apple, iPhone 3g, MobileMe

Why T-Mobile’s “App Store” idea has failure written all over it

It’s obvious to most that Apple’s iPhone App Store, while having a few stumbles, is nothing short of a stellar success.  So like most things Apple,  other companies are starting to jump on the bandwagon to get their version of it out.

First out of the gate this time was T-Mobile USA.   And again, like most Apple competitors, they feel the need to make their service faster, better, bigger, and more useful.  Unfortunately, also like most Apple competitors, I don’t think they really thought it through the way they should have.

According to Silicon Alley Insider,  T-Mobile is planning an App Store that will run on EVERY SINGLE ONE of the carrier’s devices.  Is it just me, or is the idea of having an app store on like 15 different platforms kinda insane?

Apparently the store will be open to almost any developer, with devs getting a pretty significant share of the money that one developer called “very generous”.  A good financial incentive is a good way to get people developing for the system, but I have a question.   If you’re writing an app for this app store,  do you have to write a version that’s compatible with every phone on T-Mobile?  Or can you pick and choose which phones will support it?

If it’s the first case, I can’t imagine many developers wanting to scale an app to run on the lowliest Samsung flip phone, and on the highest powered Android device.  That means that most apps will probably default to the lowest common denominator :  Java.  Leaving most of these apps to be bloated, slow, and generally unusable.

If it’s the second case, and developers can pick and choose (which I think is more likely), you’ll likely see a bunch of apps for Android and Windows Mobile phones, with a small number for the lower end phones.   The problem with this scenario is, that the general consumer doesn’t know what the model of their phone is, unless its a fairly popular device (RAZR, iPhone, Instinct, etc.).    Most customers will say “Wait, do I have the Samsung t409 or the Samsung t439?  I dont know, agh forget it!”.

The only way to get around a problem like that, is for the store to be able to autodetect the type of phone, and display only apps for that specific phone.

To me, the only thing that this is going to become, is a huge bloated hard to navigate mess.

As a long-time T-Mobile customer, the one thing I know they’ve never been able to do well is to set up a WAP frontend interface for a phone,  let alone an App Store (they’ve had an Applications link in the WAP frontend for months now with not a thing in it).

With the extreme variety of screen sizes, resolutions, processor speeds, and graphics capabilities of the phones on the T-Mobile, especially including the higher powered upcoming Blackberries, Windows Mobile Devices, and Android phones,  It’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a store that actually functions well with the extreme variety of devices.  Apple has it easy, while they have 3 devices that can access their App Store (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPhone 3g), they can all run the same software, making it far easier to maintain a store of applications.

Sorry T-Mobile, but I don’t see this working out well for you.

Tags: App Store, t-mobile

Wordpress iPhone App released!

Great news for all of you Wordpress bloggers out there!   Today Wordpress for iPhone was released onto the App Store.   Quoting the site:

Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds. Download it now!

The demo video looks pretty slick, though I don’t know why the audio is so bad.   I’m looking forward to giving it a try when I get around to picking up an iPhone.

Tags: App Store, iPhone, Wordpress