Temple Run 2: Same same, yet different

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Imangi studios announced Temple Run 2 yesterday, sequel to the hit endless running game Temple Run which was downloaded over 170 million times in 18 months across iOS and Android.

Fans of the original will find much has changed in appearance but the basic gameplay remains the same. You steal the totem and run through landscapes collecting coins and trying to avoid obstacles in your way. Swipe and tilt – up, down, left and right.

The redesigned landscapes are beautiful with scenes set in a village, a forest, down a mining shaft and even on the floating mountains of Pandora. You jump over tumbling brooks, under bridges, around strewn pottery on paths that turn, narrow and disappear with little warning. I particularly liked the mineshaft environment where you jump into a cart careening down rickety tracks – mastering the single track sharp banking move is going to take more than a *bit* of practice. You need to swipe right and left at the forks, and tilt the phone on single rail tracks.

TR 2 is heaps smoother than the original. You slide smoothly down zip lines, run up hills without breaking stride and speed around corners in a glide. Instead of demonic monkeys you now have a giant chest thumping gorilla chasing you, waiting for a trip up.

Our adventurers have new powers – gems instead of wings let you recover from death, shields against obstacles, something called ‘spawn’ (don’t know what it does yet) and more boosts and power ups to collect along the way. TR2 introduces levels – each level is a set of random objectives displayed 3 at a time, and going up levels unlocks the ability to buy more stuff with your coins.

A couple of gripes – first, the constantly rendering detailed landscapes are a processor hog and my iPhone 4S stuttered more than once especially during big scene changes. Second, the 3D rendering does not differentiate obstacles very well. Not sure if this is a deliberate move to keep the game challenging, but all too often you can’t see a rock or a turn until right on top of it.

TR2 is available free for download, supported via a range of in-app purchases. Clearly the ‘mium’ part of the ‘freemium’ model has been given a good deal of attention. In addition to coins from TR1, you can buy gems that can be used for recovering from falls for just 99c/5 gems. We do think the revenue play is more aggressive, but Imangi have developed a good game and deserve to profit from all the millions of wasted hours around the globe.

Temple Run 2 is free on iOS and will be available on Android in soon.

No more googly eyes as Vodafone shut down Crazy John’s

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Vodafone will be closing Crazy John’s stores and killing off the brand in  move to streamline retail operations. Starting Feb 20, 40 of the 60 CJ branded stores will close and remaining rebranded as Vodafone stores.

Existing customers will not be impacted in any way until the end of their contracts.

At one time the retail chain had 120 stores and turned $200 million in revenue under the leadership of John Ilhan. But it has been all downhill since his sudden death in 2007 when his widow Patricia Ilhan sold 75% of the company to Vodafone.

John Ilhan lived up to his moniker when he took Telstra to court over a $33 million dispute over trailing commissions. The bitter David-Goliath battle ended with Crazy John severing ties with Telstra and setting up as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) using the Vodafone network in 2007. After his death, Vodafone operated the business as a fully owned subsidiary but were not able to maintain profitability, particularly after the Hutchison merger.

Sad to see the final end to a very public legacy.

Spreading ‘appiness at Vodafone Appaid

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Lately wherever you turn someone is running a mobile app hackathon, but Vodafone Appaid was an application developer meet with a difference. The event held last week, brought together Australian charities and mobile application developers over 48 hours to create apps that help charities better do what they do.

We saw some truly innovative apps at the final presentation at the MCA on Saturday.

Guy Kawasaki, famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Apple evangelist, was one of the judges, along with Vodafone CEO Bill Morrow. The indomitable Dr Karl hosted the show effortlessly blending iSheep jokes with news from the Large Hadron Collider.

Here are some apps that caught our eye.

Winners - St John Ambulance and GoCatch

St John’s Ambulance (overall winners): Developers from GoCatch created a handy tool for volunteer paramedics on the road to help treat emergencies and communicate back with base in real time. GoCatch team are the brains behind an award winning taxi location app and they used these skills to develop an intuitive route management program for the St John’s paramedics.

2 Bob’s worth: Mobile app designed to encourage impulse volunteering. People with a bit of free time can use this app to scan their surroundings for volunteering opportunities on a map and lend a hand at their own convenience. Great idea but the developers weren’t able to run their demo for lack of time.

Star Dash: A simple game to keep kids happy and engaged while they battled illness while admitted in a hospital.

OzHarvest (overall runner up): Very useful tool to digitize the process of taking leftover food from restaurants and feeding it to the hungry. In 48 hours the developers created a mobile app for the restaurant owners to schedule pickups and a web-based backend for managing the pick ups.

Leukemia Foundation: A handy app to remotely monitor for patients undergoing treatment and help them report on how they are responding to various drugs.

There were many others and the judges were impressed with the quality of apps produced in a mere 48 hours.

“The concepts produced for App Aid were so impressive considering they only had 48 hours to come up with an idea. St John Ambulance proved to our panel that their idea could assist in saving lives on a state and a national level. The passion from the winning team was clearly demonstrated through their inspiring and convincing pitch.”

- Guy Kawasaki, on first place App

The only gripe with this otherwise well run event was that the teams did not get enough time to fully showcase their ideas. After 48 hours of non-stop effort they deserved more than 5 mins to describe and demo their creations.

 

Apple Store takes over the Telstra shop in iOS 6 Maps

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In a bold move, Apple Store takes over the Telstra shop across the road in iOS 6 Maps

iPhone 5 went on sale today but the news was marred by the terrible reviews of Apple Maps popping up from around the planet.

Too many times in the past Apple have rejected features and functionality stating they are not ready for primetime. Remember Adobe Flash? Clearly Maps in its current form would fall squarely in the not-ready category and Apple should have waited to get it right before unilaterally replacing the well established Google Maps in iOS 6.

This tumblr blog is already filled up with user submitted images of missing, distorted and inaccurate data, and there are reports that Google have already submitted a Maps app waiting for approval with Apple.

This report from guardian.co.uk

Google, I hear from roundabout sources, is enjoying the bad press Apple is suffering. It would be surprising if its mappers could resist some schadenfreude, since they are very proud of their work; having it rejected wholesale must be galling.

Predictably Apple take no responsibility for the mess. While they haven’t yet accused users of holding the phone wrong, Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told AllThingsD

“Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover and Siri integration, and free turn by turn navigation. We launched this new map service knowing that it is a major initiative and we are just getting started with it. We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get. We’re also working with developers to integrate some of the amazing transit apps in the App Store into iOS Maps. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”

People can report  inaccuracies by tapping on the page curl on the bottom right corner of Maps which brings up a screen to capture feedback. Yes it is a matter of time before the problem is fixed. But in the short term Apple seem to be okay to let users suffer the downgrade.

 

Apple iOS 6: worth the upgrade?

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Today Apple rolled out the all new iOS6 to older iPhones (3GS, 4 and 4S), iPads (2 and New) and the iPod (4th gen). iOS6 was first announced earlier this year at WWDC and the new iPhone 5 will showcase all of it’s new features in full rounded corner glory. But older devices will also get the iOS6 experience, albeit in a somewhat limited way.

The update is available Over The Air (OTA) or by plugging the into iTunes. Apple have introduced over 200 modifications, most good, some okay and for the first time, some not good at all. Here is how it breaks up -

The Good

1. Siri Update. Siri was launched last year but failed to live up to the hype – poor voice recognition and server delays meant that it never reached beyond a novelty trick to impress friends. iOS 6 gives Siri a big boost – now you can post tweets and updates and it integrates with movies, sports and restaurant guides (not available yet for Australia).

2. Passbook. Apple’s new app for managing coupons and passes in the one place. Just a few merchants at launch but more committing support everyday. Initially Australians will be able to use Passbook with Virgin boarding passes, Event cinemas, Ticketek and a few others. Plus international chains like Target and Starbucks are likely to get on board in time.

From Apple AU

“Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon.”

3. New Facebook app. Facebook rewrote the iPhone 5 app from scratch integrating deeply into all aspects of the phone make it a breeze to use. But as a sneaky aside, they (Facebook) overwrote people’s personal email ids with UserName@facebook.com which directs all messages to the Facebook inbox. iOS 6 update will push Facebook emails instead of actual email ids when contacts are synched up unless people manually update their email addresses stored within Facebook.

…plus about 150 more

The Bad

1. Server traffic. With millions of users downloading iOS6 simultaneously today, the installs are painfully slow. Better to wait a few days before things settle down a bit.

2. Minor glitches. Already there are user reports of issues like problems with WiFi connectivity and synching contacts. Going by past experience rolling out a new OS update to millions of users always throws up unexpected bugs. Patience is recommended.

The Ugly

This section title is a stretch, but go with the flow hey!

1. Apple Maps. The new homegrown Maps app replaces Google maps and is very much work-in-progress. It lacks features that we’ve come to take completely for granted – streetview, turn by turn navigation, traffic information. Even the map data is outdated with limited info on non-metro locations particularly in Australia, in some places theres cloud cover obscuring the satellite view. 3D maps are limited to large cities and Flyover is mostly a gimmick. In practical terms Apple Maps is definitely a step backward.

Google do not have a dedicated maps app for iOS, but you can browse to maps.google.com in your iPhone safari browser, and choose to ‘Install the web app on your phone’. This will create a link to Google Maps on your phone. It is a web app but you almost wont know the difference.

2. Removed YouTube. Apple are really going after Google hard. In a unique move, iOS6 actually deletes the YouTube app from the phone. Of course you can just browse to the app store and just download it again. But a strange and somewhat petty move on Apple’s part.

Verdict: is the iOS 6 worth the upgrade

Yes it is, but proceed with caution and not right away.

Did you get the updates? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

 

Samsung deny Galaxy S4, but Galaxy S3 getting Jellybean soon

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Samsung categorically denied rumours that an all new 5″ Galaxy S4 device was being released in Feb 2013. Pity!

But they have confirmed that Galaxy S3, which currently runs ICS, will be upgraded to Android 4.1 Jellybean in October with Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz user interface.

Jellybean will bring a suite of new features to S3 -

1. Voice recognition and context based cards with Google Now with support for Australian accents.

2. Smoother system performance with Project Butter.

3. Better NFC support with Android Beam, though Galaxy S3 already improves upon it with S Beam which uses WiFi Direct in addition to NFC for faster communication and file transfer between devices.

4. Improved Google apps – contacts, calendar, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Play, Movies and more.

Android Jellybean upgrade brings a fantastic improvement in performance and is packed with usability tweaks. We only hope Samsung use a light hand when ‘improving’ it with TouchWiz.

 

 

 

iPhone 5 vs Galaxy S3: Fight

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Browse around the interwebs for iPhone 5 news and inevitably you will run into comments by Android and Windows fans dissing the new phone for being too meh! Is there any merit to these claims? We pit the all new iPhone5 against the very successful Galaxy S3.

Size:

iPhone5: 4.87 x 2.31 x 0.31 inches

Galaxy S3: 5.37 x 2.77 x 0.33 inches

Apple announced that the iPhone 5 was the thinnest phone ever. While not strictly true, at 7.6mm thickness it is certainly one of the thinnest around especially for a phone this packed with tech. At 8.6mm the Galaxy S3 is a millimeter thicker.

Galaxy S3 is quite obviously the bigger phone by far, both in size and weight and which one you like comes down to personal preference of how much phone you like to hold.

Screen:

iPhone 5:  4″ screen, 1146 x 640, 326 pixels per inch

Galaxy S3:  4.8″ screen, 1280 x 720, 306 pixels per inch

The S3 has a much bigger screen, but iPhone 5 Retina display is higher resolution. In reality both phone displays are pretty amazing as the human eye cannot differentiate pixels after 300 ppi, so the difference in pixel density is academic.

Storage and memory:

iPhone 5:  16GB, 32GB and 64GB. 1 GB RAM

Galaxy S3:  16GB, 32GB and 64GB. 2 GB RAM

iPhone 5 comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions, same as the Galaxy S3. But Galaxy S3 offers the option to adding an SD card for expansion and portability. Apple iPhones have never had the option for expanded memory and that is why most apps ported from iOS to Android do not offer the option to be moved to memory card which can be rather annoying.

Why do you need that much storage? 1 min of video with the 1080p HD camera can take up about 200 MB of space, and movies, games and music chew through storage pretty quick. Also it is a lot cheaper to add more storage when you run short rather than upgrading the phone.

The iPhone 5 has 1 GB RAM (made by Samsung!) – exactly half of S3′s 2 GB. Apple claim that the iOS6 doesn’t need that much RAM to run. But thanks to all that memory, the S3 can do cool multi tasking tricks like playing full HD video while also browsing the web or making phone calls. Will the difference in RAM translate into a difference in performance? We’ll know only when the live benchmark tests come out.

Processor:

iPhone 5: Dual core A6 CPU

Galaxy S3: 1.5 GHz Quad core Exynos CPU

Apple claim the new processor is twice as fast as the iPhone 4S. In Australia the Galaxy S3 non-LTE version has a quad core processor while the LTE version is dual core due to technical limitations. When we pit the two 4G LTE models against each other on CPU, both are about equal in power and speed. Of course Apple are known to squeeze every bit of speed out of their hardware and the iPhone 5 may yet surprise in real life tests.

Battery:

iPhone 5: 8 hours talk, 8 hours browsing, 10 hours video playback

Galaxy S3: 8 hours talk, 2100mAh battery

Android phones will usually do better on talk time compared to screen time as the large screens need a lot of juice to keep fully lit. Interestingly Windows phones are better at display power management as they have predominantly white text on black backgrounds that consume less power. It will be interesting to see how the iPhone 5 battery stacks up in real life. LTE is a big power hog and battery life will fluctuate wildly depending on whether LTE is on or off.

Build:

iPhone 5:  Glass and aluminium

Galaxy S3: Polycarbonate plastic

The new iPhone does away with the glass backplate of iPhone 4S, replacing it with two tone aluminium. This makes the phone less prone to breakage and also lighter in weight compared to its predecessor.

The Galaxy S3 is heavier even though it is made of lighter polycarbonate plastic, main reason being the massive 2100 mAh battery. The plastic body feels flimsy but is actually quite durable and scratch resistant.

Camera:

iPhone 5 – Rear: 8MP, LED flash, 1080p HD video.

Samsung Galaxy S3 – Rear: 8MP, LED flash, 1080p HD video.

Both cameras are similar on paper with 8 MP resolution and LED flash, and 1080p video. Both phones also have front cameras with 720p video. The iPhone 5 camera software has been updated for faster photos, image stabilization, face recognition and panorama photos.

Galaxy S3 camera is one of its biggest strengths with a suite of features including face recognition, burst mode, panorama mode, best click and more. Pictures from the S3 camera are stunning, as are the promotional iPhone 5 shots.

Connectors

iPhone 5: Smaller data connector called lightning

Samsung Galaxy S3: Standard micro USB 2.0 port

Apple have introduced yet another non-standard connector called Lightning which in reality is just the usual USB 2.0 port configured in a way to make them more money. The new port will not work with any of the existing Apple accessories and will need a $35.00 adaptor to work with older docks.

Galaxy S3 port is exactly the same as the iPhone 5 but in the globally accepted standard micro USB configuration.

Operating System:

iPhone 5: iOS 6

Galaxy S3: Android ICS with TouchWiz, upgrading soon to Jellybean

This here is the main point of difference between the two phones. The iOS 6 comes with new features like Apple 3D Maps, turn-by-turn navigation, a new Facebook app built from ground up,  improved Siri voice recognition, iCloud storage, updates to the camera software,  all new Passbook app and another 650,000 apps in the Appstore. iOS6 integrates seamlessly into the Apple/Mac environment.

Galaxy S3 runs on Android Icecream Sandwich operating system customised with Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay. Samsung have added a heap of features on top of the Google OS – improved voice recognition (S Voice), improved NFC based file transfer (S Beam), face recognition tools, new camera features, and unique almost novelty additions like smart stay, smart alerts and direct call. The S3 is set to receive a Jelly Bean upgrade soon and we hope Samsung will TouchWiz it with a lighter hand.

Pricing:

iPhone 5 16GB – Outright: $799

Galaxy S3 16 GB – Outright: $549

iPhone 5 16GB – 2 year contract: $18/month on Virgin Big Plan 29

Galaxy S3 16 GB – 2 year contract: $20/month on Virgin Big Plan 29

Verdict:

Both iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 are excellent phones with comparable hardware specifications. Anyone would be very happy with either phone depending on what operating system they preferred. But we expected more than ‘comparable’ from the much awaited iPhone 5 – we expected a smartphone that blew minds with its awesomeness! And that this new iPhone does not do.

 

5 tips on choosing the best plan for iPhone 5

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Planning to get a new iPhone 5 on contract? Here are 5 tips to guide you along.

1. Watch included data and excess data rates. All iPhone 5 plans come with included data, but it can range from a tiny 200 MB all the way to 4GB, more if you add on a data pack. iPhone 5 is 4G enabled which means high speed data wherever there is coverage. But 4G speeds make it all too easy to go over included data allowance and you dont want to be slugged with excess usage charges a month down the track. If you are likely to be online while out and about, try and pick the highest level of included data you can afford.

2. Pick the contract term right for you. You can get the iPhone 5 outright at the  Apple online store and pair it with a no contract SIM, or get the phone on a 12 or 24 month contract.  Nowadays new phones are released every few months. And if you like to be up to speed with the latest in gadgets, the flexibility of outright purchase or 12 month plans may be the better option to a 2 year contract.

3. Check network coverage at home, commute and work. Telstra and Optus/Virgin are still in the process of rolling out their 4G networks, and Vodafone will go live early 2013. Make sure you check the coverage to know what data speeds to expect. iPhone 5 is designed to fall back to 3G or even 2G networks when higher speeds are unavailable.

4. Get the plan right for your usage, not the one that looks cheapest on paper. Most people find it hard to change their calling habits, so pick the plan thats meets your current usage pattern. Cheaper plans come with less included value and if you exceed the plan inclusions, expect to pay significant excess charges. Better to pick a plan that is a few dollars more per month to avoid paying hundreds in excess charges. Use our free mobile deal finder tool to work out which one plan is best for your usage.

5. Consider your existing contract. The iPhone 5 will be around tomorrow so don’t rush to break your existing contract and pay early termination fees. If you are getting towards the end of your current contract, call your provider to negotiate a recontract for the iPhone 5. Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Virgin all run customer retention programs and would love to have you locked in with them again right away, rather than wait till the end of your contract and risk losing you to another provider.

Bonus tip: The iPhone 5 comes in 16, 32 and 64 GB storage options. Pick the highest storage you can afford. The 8 MP camera with HD video can fill up the phone very quickly and unlike Android phones, the iPhone 5 doesn’t allow you to add memory cards when you run out of space.