Playing on the Go

Obviously the iPhone could always make phone calls, but that required a contract from ATT and included luxury rates just because the user was on an iPhone. Well, for those looking for an economical alternative, look no further than Fring! Fring is a Voip application that provides instant messaging as well as voip calls.

The user can place calls to land line phones through either Skype or a SIP server. Also, if the desired party being contacted is on their computer, Skype to Skype or MSN voice chat can also come in handy.

All this boils down to, whenever the user is in a WiFi hotspot, he can call just about anyone for free or near free. The nice thing is that since the Internet knows to international boundaries, a user in Europe, Asia, or wherever can call his friends no matter where they are and still get charged the same. Skype does not function this way but SIP services usually do.

Next time I go to Rome, I’m just going to walk to my favorite hotspot and talk to all my peeps for free! After all, if it can work theoretically, why not put it into practice and profit from it!

Since the release of Apple’s Iphone/Ipod touch SDK, we really haven’t heard very much news about its developments. At least, not until this video came out. Demonstrated above is a revolution in mobile gaming. The iPhone and iPod Touch have unique hardware for a slew of purposes. Mobile gaming is one neither have ever seen. OpenGL and accelorometers working in perfect harmony deliver a mobile gaming experience second only to a console.

Could this be the start of a mobile gaming revolution? Nintendo changed the console market when it released Wii-mote. At first glance, you don’t know what the heck it is, but over time it lends to a thrilling gaming experience. The secret of the Wii-mote were the accelorometers and the advantage of the iPod Touch is, you guessed it, ACCELOROMETERS!!

I believe that looming in the ether of the not-so-distant future are hand-held gaming devices based on accelorometers. Sure the grapics might not be up to par but the experience will be unique and origional. So, kudos to the SDK for unlocking these abilities.

Years ago, nokia dazzled us with the arrival of the N-gage. Well, it was that spectacular. The half phone, half portable gaming device couldn’t find a middle ground between the two functions and decided to take the form of a bulky phone that could play second-rate games. Needless to say, such a device tanked it big time with consumers.

However, a glimmer still shone for the fanboys as Nokia decided to relaunch the N-gage a few months back. The underhanded thing is that Nokia made many of its new smart-er phones compatible with N-gage software with little notification of the buyer. It must’ve been in some basement at Nokia because no body expected any more of come out of the N-gage project. Just this week, Nokia released the N-gage service enabling users with designated phones to buy and play slightly-better-than-average cell phone games.

I guess this step by Nokia doesn’t exactly hurt anyone since most compatible phone owners will choose to ignore it and continue to use the features they know, love and trust.

AMD, the other processor company decided to relaunch Puma, their mobile processor. Actually it really wasn’t a lanuch, more of an announcement saying that Puma will be launched in Q2 this year. AMD demonstrated Puma’s capabilities vs an Intel processor.

Puma might be all fine and dandy, but it’s having a very difficult time of getting out of the factory and into laptops. Puma was initially announced last year but it never came. Its “relaunch” in Q2 is expected to be delayed as well.

The only thing definite are Puma’s specifications, which haven’t changed since last year at its first announcement. For ideal power efficiency, Puma will be able to dynamically scale each core independently while executing a thread. Puma also sports a DirectX 10 graphics controller that puts Intel’s X3100 controller to shame. Puma-based systems will range from $699 to $2,500 later this year….hopefully

Recently, Intel announced the first step to a new generation of mobile processors, the Centrino Atom. Although mobile processors have been around for decades, the intention of the Atom is much different. Today’s mobile processors in cell phones, mp3 players, and hand-held gaming devices can only handle one task at a time efficiently, however, if they are commanded to preform a extensive task, they fail miserably. This is not so with the Atom.

Intel engineers are constructing a seamless integration in not only the hardware, but the software as well. Their final objective is to achieve the performance of a PC and the simplicity of….any product made by Apple (pretty darn simple). A processor of this power and capability will revolutionize the mobile market. Soon, all devices utilizing this technology will have abilities far greater than the iPhone for hundreds of dollars less. Such a device would combine: Navigation, Entertainment, Communication, and stunning user interface without the user noticing any limitations. One universal device would greatly assist the nerd who fills his pockets with many “necessary” gadgets by freeing up some pocket space and lightening his load (just in case he has to run away from a jock).

In the past decade, many different innovations in the nano-technology sector have to left us discover copious amounts of chips in our daily lives.

Example: Wifi, it became a standard in laptops some years back. Since then, engineers have been able to shrink it down to fit inside of cell phones and other small devices. All this development to add a convenience to your life and another chip in your pocket.

Moore’s Law states, “The number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.” Basically, all electronics are inherently becoming exponentially more complicated, expensive, and smaller. Moore’s Law was originated by by Intel’s cofounder Gordon E. Moore in 1965.

Today, Intel still holds true to Moore’s Law. It costs $3 billion to $5 billion to build a single semiconductor fabrication plant but in a few years, that number could rise to $12 billion. Processors are simply becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that transistors in a high-end chip are no wider than the nucleus of a small cell. Intel is destined to carry on this process till it’s death or until another, more economical, process is discovered.

You’re probably weirded out that a mobile gaming blog would be covering such an obscure topic. Well, at one point I believed that I could activate Traffic Preemption circuits simply by using the IR on my PSP. Sad but true. That thinking, however, wasn’t far from a real possibility. IR can be a medium of communication to trigger Traffic Preemption. It just seems absurd that a PSP could have such capabilities.

The Facts

• Traffic Preemption systems are activated by a 10-14hz flashing light
• Once the Preemption system is activated, it stops traffic in other directions safely and turns the user’s lights green
• Newer lights use a Encryption System so homebrewers can’t active Preemption
• This is illegal in most states and i do not condone its usage. I only know information

What is a hz?
1hz=60flashes per minute. Therefore, 1hz=1 flash per second. Theoretically, if you were to possess a strobe light, able to flash 10 times a second and bright enough to be detected, then the light should turn green.

Why 10-14hz?
The faster the flash, the higher the priority, the faster the light turns green. Police and EMS use different frequencies because they have different priorities.

Wouldn’t the encryption kinda kill the fun?
Yes it would. But, out of the hundreds of thousands of Traffic Signals in this country, only a very small hand-full use the encryption. Since the encryption is expensive, it’s doubtful that you’ll run into more than 1 in your preemption fantasies.

How can I get me one of those?
2 choices, either you
Buy One OR
Make One

Drawbacks of buying
Costs $300 dollars for a very simple rig.

In fact, behind the housing, This is all it is

Drawbacks of Building
Can you read schematics? I’m sort of in the dark about those things. The I-hacked page on how to build one is the closest thing you can get to building a pretty good one but it’s very difficult to follow. If you understand the bizarre nomenclature of electronics then be my guest, but i’d prefer something much more simple.

Vital Components
In the end, all you need is,
1) A power source
2) A controller device that can open and close a circuit 10-14 times in one second
3) An LED Array. The more LEDs the better!

Please Help ME!!
If you know of a controller device, something commonly found, please be so kind as to leave a comment I would greatly appreciate it!

Last week, Yahoo announced that it would release an update to its scarsly know mobile application GO! To put the new features quite bluntly, Yahoo is making yet another attempt for the user to become totally dependent upon them for News and Web Searches. GO 3.0 currently in beta and looks very web 2.0 (ie lots of pretty buttons). Hopefully it’s as productive as attractive.

This spontaneous development strikes me as a plee by Yahoo for preserving its sovereignty from Microsoft. In fact, Yahoo has fired 1000 of its employees, including the entire design team! Yahoo is going to shove every idea through development as fast as possible to shun Microsoft’s plans of take-over and to prove that it’s still alive. Ultimately, we as consumers have the most to profit because with such rivilaries, many creative and hopefully free products are created for our explicit use.

This past week, the Japanese companies: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched a new satellite into space. This satellite, however, will probably be the most beneficial to rural or mobile gamers on the ground. This because the new satellite boasts 1.2 gb/s internet!

Now you might be wondering, how fast is 1.2gb/s? Well, with that kind of speed, you could probably download files faster than a server can…..well, SERVE them! But keep in mind that this is no ordinary wired internet connection. Blazing fast speeds hundreds of miles from the source of the connection? I wish i could do that with my wireless router.

The coverage of this satellite is projected to reach Japan and Southeast Asia in June this year. It’s going to be hard to believe that it’ll be possible to play WOW in Vietnam Rice Paddies…assuming thats the kind of thing you like to do JUST because you CAN!

Bittorrent, the infamous sharing protocol is the world’s largest way of sharing music, video, games, applications and everything else has always come under harsh criticism for its, “questionable,” practices. Some embrace it and others scorn it but why is that so? Lets consider the facts…Shall we???

People who hate bittorrent and want to squash it

Government
The Pirate Bay was temporarily shutdown last week because the Swedish government finally decided to sensor Gottfrid Svartholm’s (owner of the pirate bay) ports. This action was in violation of EU law therefore winning Gottfrid’s “Largest Bittorrent Tracker,” back online. The Government wants to do something, but are poorly managed.

RIAA and MPAA
The two most militant groups in the battle against online piracy are the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America). These two and constantly hammering trackers trying every way possible to shut them down. Even now, in some cubical in some office building, there is a task force of people dreaming up of a new way to kill the infamy. The RIAA and MPAA have righteous intentions of protecting the profits of Albums and Movies, however i believe that the internet is one frontier they can never fully conquer.

ISP
Your Internet Service Provider is probably the most powerful organization of counter-pirates. Some ISPs, like comcast, have a history of blocking seeder’s upload speeds, slowing bringing downloads to a halt. My ISP, cox, sends users letters to inform them that they’re downloading copy-written material and then threaten to temporarily shut down the user’s internet if they do not comply. These instances are rare but extremely effective, how the heck am i gonna check my email with interweb?

Why they’ll never succeed

Volume
There are MILLIONS of transfers in bittorrent every MONTH. Out of those prodigious numbers only a small handful are arrested a year. If the Government really wanted to get then we’d have in increase our penitentiary capacity.

Inability for laws to allow a Tracker to be shutdown
Gottfrid operated thepiratebay.org in the same building as Scandinavian IRAA. They couldn’t do anything about it because it was difficult to find a law that he was breaking. There is no cookie-cutter law that says that bittorrent trackers are in violation of anything.

Failure of DRM
DRM (Digital Rights Management) was originally intended to solve all the RIAA’s problems by equipping encryption onto song files making them only playable on certain machines. The supposed product was that only the buyer could hear the song he bought and no one else. Well, thats and fine and dandy but the RIAA never realized that people can still download MP3s (which have no encryption) and still listen to shared music with minimal loss of bit-rate.

Nature of the Internet
The movie, “Steal this movie,” alluded to this fact. The Internet was created for the spread of information and data without restrictions. It was built so that no one computer could be superior to any other. The Government’s idea of stopping this flow of information is simply not compatible with the protocol of the entire internet. It can never be controlled or stopped unless the masses of people do it willingly.

But how does this all apply to mobile gaming? The with all the piracy occurring on the internet some of it is bound to spill out onto mobile platforms. Mobile game makes might pursue a course of DRM to protect their games from freeloaders

Android, the brainchild of the Open Handset Alliance(OHA) has released their prototype low-end model running the most recent Andriod release. While it’s encouraging to see that OHA, after all their hype, has made something physical, it doesn’t strike me as overly awe-inspiring.

The Android SDK, along with its inept documentation, featured an Android emulator to debug the developers’ works. This emulator is a carbon copy of OHA’s phyical prototype, which was ported with apps and the background origionally on the emulator. The protoype utilizes an ARM9 mobile processor which means decent, but not ready to run any intensive programs.

The only improvement that I can see with this realease of a phyical phone is that……it’s finally physical! Google and OHA have achieved a marginal success, but I believe that it’s time to save the bottles of celebratory bubbly and work on getting Android into the hands of the consumer.

First, what the heck is 45 nm processor?

Well, 45nm is the newest processor architecture pioneered by Intel. 45 nm(nano meter) denotes the actual diameter of the processor. The 45nm spec is the likely successor of the 65nm processor, which is found in most computers today. The Intel Core 2 Duo fleet is now comprised of both 45nm and 65nm core processors.

The first 45nm Intel processor is the Yorkfield XE and was released on November 11, 2007. The quad-core Yorkfield XE features a 3.0 GHz clock, 12 mb L2 Cache, in other words, faster that greased lightning. The Penyrn core, released on January 6 2008, is the successor to the Yorkfield XE, and has become the more widely accepted of the two.

The immediate advantage of the 45nm core as opposed to the 65nm are few but great. First, the lead in the 65nm core has been omitted in the 45nm allowing for less unused space and thus shorter processing times. Because of its small size, the 45nm uses about 33% less power than the 65nm.

How does this apply to the mobile gamer?
Simply, leave the charger at home! The power and energy economy of the 45nm core allows for even the most zealous gamer to play long without a thought for power cord or complaint about the latency. These cores will go on sale with HP in late January 2008.

This past week, Sony released the Mylo 2 to replace the Mylo internet communicator. Now you ask, what’s the Mylo? Well i can’t blame you, the Mylo’s fame has been dwarfed by the PSP ever since it was released. The Mylo 1 only had about 2 features that differentiated it from the PSP and that was 1) A microphone for skype calls 2) A full QWERTY keyboard. The Mylo 1 was pretty much a toy that didn’t do very much aimed at the compulsive spenders of America and Japan.

The Mylo 2, however, has a few new features in both hard and software. First, the Internet Browser is a major leap from the previous version’s. It now includes flash able to play youtube videos just as you would on your computer! There is also a text RSS reader that functions much like google reader.

In terms of hardware changes, the Mylo 2 scrolls differently than the original Mylo. Mylo’s PSP style D-pad had been replaced by a stylish wheel. The QWERTY keyboard is also larger to make for quick instant messaging. Finally, the Mylo 2 sports a Camera, the pictures of which could probably be uploaded to flickr or photobucket when the user is in a wifi Hot Spot.

My verdict is: the Mylo 2 is nice, a major improvement over the Mylo 1, but the Mylo brand is completely random and serves no tangible purpose. The wireless b internet only works within a hotspot and is slow at that. Ultimately, a PSP 2000 will get you more bang for your buck and can easily relieve boredom through those award-winning PSP UMD games.

The release of the Apple “Air” was a shocking development. While huddling by warmth of my LCD, Steve Job’s presentation of the Air took me by complete surprise. Well, not entirely because I predicted its release about 2 months ago, but with that aside the Air struck me as an amazing product as it did the nerds at MacWorld. However, like every apple product, it has serious drawbacks.

Pros
Amazingly light- 3 pounds (48 ipod nanos)
Soild State Harddrive-Quiet, Fast, and Cool
Backlit Keyboard- Type in the dark
Multi-Touch Finger Pad- Perform gestures for certain Apple Apps
Media Control Keys- Change or pause the song without moving the mouse

Cons
Lack of ports (Headphone Jack, 1 USB, and Micro DVI) Don’t try to use a USB mouse and Flash drive at the same time!
No CD Drive- Apple is implementing a remote CD system where it can read CDs in other computers but that’s nothing new really
Non-upgradeable Battery- Pay Apple more money to replace it when your battery starts to die
Slow Processor (1.6 ghz) Try racing a Macbook on boot times
Price- ($1,700) To get to a descent speed of 1.8 ghz and 64 Solid State, it’ll run you over $3,098

Verdict
Like all apple products, it really matters how much money you have (and once you spend said money a better toy comes around 6 months later for less). This machine is revolutionary, it boldly rejects the CD drive in the interest of weight and form. However, its slim design catches most buyers off-guard that they don’t consider the compromises.

In comparison to the MacBook the Air-
Is $700 more
Has a 20% slower processor
Has 1 Gig of memory More
Doesn’t have a CD Drive
Has 7 less ports
Will probably snap in half when dropped

So there you have it. In my own opinion, forget it and go for the Asus Eee Pc

Like the shiny ball dropped in times square in the first second of new
years, so did a voip app for the iPod touch deep in the Internet. The
much anticipated app was created by the people over at touchmods.wordpress.com/.
It allows touch owners to call landline phones for free from an iPod
touch.

You may ne asking yourself,”Why would people make a voip app for a
device that doesn’t have a microphone?” Well not for long! The über
nerds devised a microphone out of a dock extender and, with a little
sodering, enabled the user to both talk and listen.

This is the first voip 3rd party app to emerge for the touch. However,
since I own an iPhone without any service contract, cuz seriously, an
AT&T iPhone plan starts at like $60, a voip app would help whenever I
find wifi. Sadly, the app is only supported on the touch with the
iPhone in development. If there’s anybody out there with an iPod touch
or hopefully soon, an iPhone who hasn’t unlocked before, now is the
time, because anybody can utilize this brilliant app for free.