Jeremiah Rice
Contributing since July, 2012
-
1288articles
Page 62
About Jeremiah Rice
Jeremiah is a US-based blogger who bought a Nexus One the day it came out and never looked back. In his spare time he watches Star Trek, cooks eggs, and completely fails to write novels.
Latest Articles
Odds are pretty good that you’ve hear this phrase from grizzled SNES-era gamers entering their thirties: “Games are too easy these days!” (Of course, younger gamers will use the same tone to complain about a lack of regenerating health and auto-saves.) If you long for the days of three lives and no continues… then even you might not be hardcore enough for One Single Life. This freshman game from developer FreshTone takes the “permanent death” idea to extremes by allowing you, well, one single life.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
The real-time strategy genre has a lot to recommend it: tactical thinking, fast-paced unit and resource management, and multiplayer atmosphere that's unlike anything else in gaming. But it's hard to escape the fact that in order to have a real RTS, you just need a mouse. Precise movements and commands are nigh impossible on a touchscreen. Sega's Total War Battles: Shogun is a spinoff from their wildly successful Total War PC franchise, which breaks with tradition and tries to adapt the RTS genre to the touchscreen. Unfortunately, just about everything that makes a strategy game enjoyable is lost in translation.
Walt Disney World Resort might be home to the Most Magical Place on Earth®, but with 30,000 acres and millions of visitors every year, it's awfully easy to have a bad day there. To that end, Disney has released its very own guide app, covering all four theme parks and the various satellite tourist areas around Disney World. The most useful feature is probably the detailed maps, complete with annotations for rides, shops, restaurants, et cetera, and GPS tracking to help you find your way around. (Incidentally, they'll also point you to the nearest restrooms.) You can even make a reservation at one of the restaurants without leaving the app.
If you're not familiar with Vector Unit, you should be - they're responsible for such Android racing hits as Riptide GP and Shine Runner. Their latest title, Beach Buggy Blitz, has the player racing through a pristine tropical wonderland. You'll see white beaches, verdant forests and adorable local wildlife, all of which will be crushed under the tires of your 4-wheel-drive PETA-punisher of choice. Like Shine Runner, there are no opponents - just get the best time. Powerups augment multiple vehicles and racers for a surprisingly complete experience. Those of you who aren't fans of touchscreen controls will be glad to know that Beach Buggy Blitz supports tilt controls and external gamepads.
It's a big day for Netflix: the Android app for both smartphones and tablets has been updated to version 2.0. So with this earth-shattering update to everyone's favorite streaming service, they've added... a WiFi switch. That's it. It makes sure you won't use your mobile data while streaming movies or TV shows. There doesn't seem to be much else to justify a full version bump from 1.8.1.
Amazon's new 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD is impressive enough in its own right, thanks to high-end features and a competitive price of $299. But at the Kindle press event today, CEO Jeff Bezos announced something truly groundbreaking: a Kindle Fire with a 4G LTE connection and an unprecedented data plan. For $499 (the price of the iPad 3, among many others) you get the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, a 4G LTE data connection (almost certainly AT&T) and access to a $49.99-a-year data plan. That's twelve months of 4G LTE, with the unfortunate limit of 250MB a month.
Alarm clocks are thick on the ground on the Google Play Store, which is surprising in itself, since Android has a perfectly capable alarm clock built in. There are popular alternatives like DoubleTwist's slick-looking Alarm Clock, and various options for softly lulling you to sleep with music. Now there's a new option that's become quite popular on iOS (though we won't hold it against them), which uses your smartphone or tablet's sensors to wake you up at the right time. Sleep Time Alarm Clock is a free download, and it's compatible with just about everything out there.
If you long for the sound of a Packard engine sputtering to life inside an aluminum death machine, you'll definitely want to check out Bombshells: Hell's Belles. But don't look for killer gams on the nose art: Glu Mobile's latest offers plenty of eye candy sitting right inside the cockpit. Bombshells is an air combat game in the vein of Crimson Skies or SkyDrift, with a definite slant towards cartoony, arcade-style gameplay rather than simulation. The game is a free download from the Google Play Store, and like most of Glu's offerings, it's supported by in-app purchases.
Photoshop Touch may be a long way from coming anywhere near the capabilities of its desktop alternative, but Adobe is closing the gap bit by bit. The 1.3 update issued today adds a handful of new features, the most important of which is support for images up to 12 megapixels in density. Even that won't be enough to keep up with current mid-range DSLRs, but it should let designers play with the photos taken from any Android tablets in the near future. Unfortunately, the $9.99 app is still exclusively formatted for and restricted to tablets - something that Galaxy Note owners are surely a little miffed at.
Up to now, there's been no shortage of rudimentary BitTorrent apps for Android, both in the areas of actual download clients (usually pretty poor stuff) and remote managers for desktop torrent programs. But now, downloaders have access to one of the most popular and celebrated torrent clients out there: µTorrent, often called uTorrent or MicroTorrent. The officially blessed BitTorrent client is now available as a beta Android app, downloadable to any Android device running Eclair or later.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
So you're a graphic designer who's constantly inspired by the colors around you. That's fine and dandy, but just try putting "that sort of yellow-orange I saw on the aspen leaves in Durango last Saturday" into Dreamweaver and see what happens. Well, chromatically frustrated artists, we have a solution for you. SwatchMatic takes a look at the colors streaming into your Android smartphone's camera, and creates live, continually shifting dynamic color palettes from the relevant scene. Tap on the screen and you get your palette, output in HSV, RGB, and WEB values. It's a neat little color tool, and best of all, it's free.
There's been a fundamental problem holding back the development of gadgets for the last decade or so. While processing power, storage capacity, wireless speed, and even display quality are growing at a phenomenal and steady rate, lithium ion batteries really haven't changed at all. The best that manufacturers can do is either create smaller components to make more space for the battery bay or make those components more efficient. LG Chem has created one of the first truly exciting innovations in battery tech in a long time: a Li-ion battery that's flexible enough to twist into almost any shape necessary.
What we do in life echoes in eternity. But what you do in between classes or on the bus home might not matter quite so much. Even so, you can squeeze in some fantasy-flavored gladiatorial combat with Glu Mobile's latest high-profile title, Blood & Glory: Legend. The sequel to the original Blood & Glory expands with new stages and a new story, advanced via a motion comic-style cutscenes. Like most of Glu's recent offerings, the game is free, but you can upgrade your appearance and weapons with in-app purchases.
ESPN Bowl Bound App Becomes ESPN College Football, Tempts The Wrath Of NCAA Fans Everywhere
ESPN Bowl Bound App Becomes ESPN College Football
Long-awaited updates to popular apps are usually met with adulation, but ESPN's college football app may be an exception. The old Bowl Bound app is now the more generically titled ESPN College Football, with a few new bells and whistles added into the mix. ESPN news for all Bowl Championship Series teams is complemented by video clips that promise to be constantly updated, and users can save their favorite teams for quick and easy access to news and live scores.
South Korean manufacturer Pantech still hasn't made it big in the U.S. market, but their partnership with AT&T has proven to be a steady one so far. The Magnus, AKA the P9090 that we spotted earlier this week, would seem to be Pantech's first high-end device for AT&T, and the first photos of the device have now hit the Internet. It looks like a pretty standard slate phone, with the interesting addition of an asymmetrical duo-tone plastic back. Details are pretty scarce at the moment, though it looks like the lighter gray panel is probably a battery cover.
Games from the NES era and earlier (and those styled after them) do very well on mobile platforms, if only because modern controls schemes just aren't easily compatible with touchscreens. Activision isn't the first to bring their wide collection of ancient titles to Android, but theirs might just be the most complete. The brand new Activision Anthology amasses the most popular Atari 2600 games published by the gaming giant and its subsidiaries, crammed into a single app with an impressively nostalgic presentation.
A few of your friendly neighborhood Android Police writers collect the official Android vinyl figurines, but it's got to be said that they leave something to be desired in the interactive department. (By the way, if anyone has the Star Trek Android from Comic-Con 2012, I may actually trade you an arm and/or leg for it.) One Kickstarter project aims to change that, by making a 4-inch, animated, Bluetooth-controlled toy robot modeled after everyone's favorite green mascot. Be The Robot ("BERO") is currently just over a quarter of the way towards full funding, with a month left to go.
Jelly Bean may be all the rage at the moment, but the CyanogenMod team hasn't forgotten about their Ice Cream Sandwich implementation. Tucked in with the newly updated CyanogenMod 9.1 is support for the brand new SimplyTapp near-field communication system. SimplyTap is the labor of love of two dedicated CyanogenMod users, with the aim of broadening NFC payment usage via a more open implementation of the embattled standard. Currently the Tapp app is only compatible with CyanogenMod 9.1 - CM10 is moving a little too quickly to reliably add the necessary code.