Hasta La Gadget!

What can you do when no one’s got a phone to jam with you? Why, you can be a geeky one-man band, of course! Web developer Steffest (just one name, like Sting or Madonna) managed to do just that by strapping a couple of Android devices (possibly an Archos 5 and a HTC Desire), a couple of WinMo handhelds (looks like a HP iPAQ h1940 and a HTC Touch Diamond), and an iPod touch on top of a portable speaker. All this just for a forthcoming presentation on mobile cross development — Steffest had to painstakingly write the same audio program “in Java for Android, in C# for Windows Mobile and in Objective-C for iPhone.” Oh, and it doesn’t just end there — turns out this dude can also pluck tap away a good Neil Diamond classic on this five-way nerd-o-strummer. Get on board and check out the video after the break.

Continue reading Phone guitar: iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Android got all night to set the world right (video)

Phone guitar: iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Android got all night to set the world right (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 May 2010 04:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Backing away from a previous position, are we Nintendo? Just a month after Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime claimed that the iPhone OS (you know, that operating system used on the iPod touch, iPhone family and the iPad) wasn’t a “viable profit platform for game development,” along comes the company’s president to say that, in fact, Apple is the primary “enemy of the future.” That’s according to Times Online, who says that the Big N’s CEO (Satoru Iwata) feels that the battle with Sony is a “victory already won,” and who clearly believes that the next wave of gaming won’t be of the traditional sit-on-your-coach-and-slam-buttons variety. ‘Course, the PSP never has been able to hang with the DS family, but even the Wii has a ways to go before it catches the mighty PlayStation 2 in terms of global sales. Going forward, the company is purportedly looking to revive the element of “surprise” in Nintendo products, but it might be best served by simply catching up to the competition and supporting this wild concept known as “HD gaming” over “HDMI.”

Nintendo CEO: battle with Sony is over, Apple is the ‘enemy of the future’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 May 2010 14:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s decision to block third-party toolkits and middleware — particularly Flash — from being used to develop iPhone and iPad apps has certainly prompted a fair amount of debate around the web, and now it sounds like Steve and the gang might face some even harsher scrutiny: a single-sourced piece in the New York Post reports that the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are currently tussling over which agency should be tasked with a potential antitrust inquiry into the matter. That would certainly make some noise in the industry, but it doesn’t mean much for those of us here in reality quite yet: assuming the report is true, an inquiry would still just be the very first step — whichever agency is ultimately put in charge would then have to launch a formal investigation and then finally file and win a lawsuit for any changes to occur. That’s a timeframe measured in months, if not years.

All that said, we can see why the feds are interested: Apple’s slowly moving into an ever-more dominant position in the mobile market, and forcing developers to make a hard choice about which platforms to target certainly puts the squeeze on competitors. We’ll be following this one closely — stay tuned.

Apple to face antitrust inquiry over iPhone coding restrictions? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 11:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s no official transcript yet, but the Wall Street Journal just live-blogged an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, in which he responded to the Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash” letter posted this morning. Substantively, Narayen didn’t offer much we haven’t heard Adobe say before, but his frustration with Apple is palpable even in summary form: he called Jobs’ points a “smokescreen,” said Flash is an “open specification,” and further said Apple’s restrictions are “cumbersome” to developers and have “nothing to do with technology.” What’s more, he also said Jobs’ claims about Flash affecting battery life are “patently false,” and suggested that any Flash-related crashes on OS X have more to do with Apple’s operating system than Adobe’s software.

Perhaps most importantly, Narayen reiterated that Adobe is fundamentally about making it easier for devs to write multiplatform tools — a stance Jobs specifically took issue with in his letter, saying multiplatform tools lead to bad user experiences. Apple and Adobe and the rest of us can argue about battery life and performance all night, but that’s clearly the central philosophical difference between these two companies, and we doubt it’s ever going to change. That is, unless Adobe absolutely kills it with Flash 10.1 on Android 2.2 — and given our experiences with Flash on smartphones and netbooks thus far, we’ll be honest when we say that’s going to be a major challenge. We’ll link over to the full transcript when it goes up, but for now, hit the source link for the liveblog.

Update: We’ve now embedded video of the interview for you after the break. Much better than a transcript, don’t you think?

Continue reading Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions (update: video)

Adobe’s CEO: Jobs’ Flash letter is a ‘smokescreen’ for ‘cumbersome’ restrictions (update: video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell’s Android-loving Thunder already boomed about its future “integrated web video Hulu app,” but now we’re also getting confirmation, albeit an unintentional one, from Hulu itself that an Android app for the streaming service is in the works. A reader spotted the incriminating info above when searching for more info about just such a program — as you can see, “Hulu App for Android devices” is specifically named in the blurb below the link to Hulu Labs. The actual Labs page has no new info, and our suspicion is it will stay that way until Android 2.2 brings integrated Flash support to the platform. We’re also seeing a reference to an iPhone OS application, but since that bit of text trails off, it’s a more equivocal implication — though not an illogical one at all. Either way, this is the most concrete indication we’ve had yet that Hulu is going mobile, in what seems to be a pretty big way.

[Thanks, Zach S.]

Hulu app for Android revealed by Google search originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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