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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

Apple’s netbook/tablet to be based on ARM architecture?

In other news that doesn’t surprise me at all, rumors are swirling that Apple’s entrance into the netbook/tablet arena will not be running an intel based chip.   To be honest, I’m not sure why this is shocking anyone.

Apple has always been big on playing with the wording of it’s public statements.  At the last Jobs keynote, the CEO of Apple stated that they didn’t know how to make an inexpensive Mac without compromising quality.   So whatever this device is, you can bet on the fact that it will NOT be a full on Mac.   Hence, it probably won’t run a full on intel processor.   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  Apple does not want to release a cheap product that will cannibalize the sales of it’s oh-so-popular MacBook line.

So what IS this mystery device that is hidden beneath the bowels of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino California?  Likely something that is based more on the iPhone archetecture than anything else.  In fact I’d expect it to resemble Nokia’s N-series tablets more than an iMac or a Macbook Air.  This article from Computerworld, makes a good argument for that as well:

To recap, here are the reasons, I believe that Apple will choose the ARM platform for their upcoming Netbook/Tablets.

1. Apple has an internal PA Semi team working on future ARM chips for the iPhone/iPod Touch
2. ARM chips cost an order of magnatude less (to license) than Intel equivalents
3. ARM chips take up less space on a motherboard
4. ARM chips use many times less power, enabling much longer battery life and much sleeker design.
5. You won’t need to virtualize Windows on these types of devices.  Most other Apple applications can be easily ported between chips.
6. Apple wants more control over the processors, which it can’t have with Intel.
7. While a variant of the iPhone version of OSX is the most likely of candidates, Snow Leopard’s optimization release might also be for ARM as well.

So Whatever we’re looking at here. It isn’t a Mac.  I can be pretty sure of that.  With companies starting to produce netbooks running Android,  I can totally see Apple modifying the iPhone OS and subsequently the App Store, so that they will run on a netbook style device.

Hopefully the App Store will become device aware,  only allowing you to download apps written for your specific device, as that would seem to provide the most Apple-like user experience.

So what are the advantages to this new kind of device?   Likely a bigger / higher resolution display,  possibly a physical keyboard, perhaps USB ports for extending the functionality, a faster processor and graphics chip allowing for more complex / graphically intensive apps and games.   Not to mention the fact that a physical keyboard would likely entice devs to write some good office software for the platform as well.

Regardless of what is coming.  I certainly am in the camp that believes that this (comparatively) low-priced device will NOT be a full on Mac, but more of an extension of the iPhone / iPod touch platform.  Either way, January can’t come fast enough.  I want to find out!

Tags: Apple, iPhone, netbook

iPhone to get human-powered Amazon product search!

Well now this is pretty damned cool.  Following hot on the heels of iPhone apps like SnapTell,  Amazon is taking the whole photo-based product search philosophy to a new level.

Coming tomorrow (hopefully) to the iPhone App Store, is an Amazon Mobile Search App which will apparently let you take a picture of ANYTHING and magically bring you to it’s amazon product page if it has one.

Here’s some more information from the New York Times:

December 3, 2008, 8:30 am

Amazon.com Invades the Apple App Store

By Brad Stone

Amazon.com will join the iPhone frenzy on Wednesday with a new application available free for download through Apple’s App Store.

The software is relatively straightforward, offering a way for iPhone or iPod Touch owners to browse through all the products offered by Amazon.com, as well as by third-party retailers like Target and Macy’s that make their products available online through Amazon.

There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.

Amazon Remembers is similar to other features Amazon has introduced this year in its ongoing effort to filch sales from other Web sites and retailers. TextBuyIt, a mobile messaging service introduced in April, lets people send a text message to Amazon at 262966 with the name of a product or a search term. It then replies with a number of buying options.

Another new feature that Amazon introduced this year, Universal Wish List, is a Web browser toolbar that lets people directly add the products they covet to their Amazon account when they see them on other Web sites.

This is really pretty damned cool.  Though It’s a shame that the results are less than instantaneous.  I wish that Amazon had applied a two-fold approach to this application.   For example, if you take a picture of a book or dvd cover, it would first get put through the SnapTell like algorithm approach.  If it was successful, you get instant results.  If not, you get a message that you’ve been sent into an extented search queue, and that you should get results in within a couple of hours.

Of course I can still run SnapTell on my phone for the simple stuff,  and send the more complicated things to Amazon,  but it would have been nice to do this all in one app.

Either way I’ll be checking the App Store for this one as soon as it’s released.

Tags: Amazon, iPhone, SnapTell

Is the Blackberry Storm an iPhone killer?

I woke up this morning to an interesting article on GigaOm, that talked about the possibility of the new touchscreen Blackberry,  the Blackberry Storm, being an iPhone killer.  Jim Courtney raised a few good points in the article, no doubt, but an iPhone killer?  I think not.

Let’s go through his article point by point shall we? … After the jump.

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Tags: Blackberry Bold, Blackberry Storm, iPhone

The iPod is dead. Long live the iPhone!

In an interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak warned of the coming death of the iPod as a product saying:

“The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one. Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while”

“It’s kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap and they are not selling as much,”

It’s strange to see comments like that about what is likely the single most popular piece of consumer electronics in 20 years, but Steve absolutely hit the nail on the head.  The iPod is on it’s way out.  But does that really change anything for Apple?  Hardly.

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Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod

Is Windows Mobile on its way to the deadpool?

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that the next major version of it’s mobile OS, Windows Mobile 7, would be delayed yet again.  When the last version of Windows Mobile was released, the world was iPhone and Android free, and the only touchscreen phones you could buy ran Palm OS or Windows Mobile and needed a stylus.  In the world of technology, that was a generation ago.  In a modern context, Windows Mobile 6.1 looks positively archaic, and before Windows Mobile 7 makes it’s way to market, it will only continue to decline comparatively.  Is Windows Mobile on the way to the Deadpool right along with PalmOS?  Find out after the jump!

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Tags: Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Microsoft, Windows Mobile