Hasta La Gadget!

Ardent old school Final Fantasy fans know: the mobile versions of classic FF games can be rather costly. Square Enix, the franchise’s publisher, is well aware of how much your nostalgia values the series, and Final Fantasy V is no different at $16. Perhaps you’ve already got the game on Super Nintendo and iOS, but needed another platform to try it out on? At very least, the mobile version has some fancy new graphics and a handful of added job types to help ease the pain of paying so, so much for a far from new game. Head below for a trailer of FFV for Android in action.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Mobile

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Source: Google Play

It’s been a long while since Maxthon updated its iOS app, and hot on the heels of iOS 7, it finally has. Not only does it offer the usual speed and performance enhancements, the latest update to the mobile browser also reveals easier access to social media, a unique “shake-and-send” feature that lets you send content to the cloud by shaking the phone, localization in 15 more languages and a new “Push Away Menu” that supposedly helps you navigate the web one-handed. Seeing as Safari didn’t get a ton of updates with iOS 7, it might prove useful to hit the source and seek out a possible alternative.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Apple

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Source: Maxthon (App Store)

Unless BlackBerry bosses embark on some wild scorched earth policy as they retreat from the smartphone business, their hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, should prove to be fertile ground for other mobile companies looking to expand. Motorola could become one of the first to capitalize on the situation, having just opened a small office in Kitchener-Waterloo, where its parent company Google has already had an R&D base since 2006. Speaking to the Financial Post, Motorola Canada’s engineering director, Derek Phillips, said he has “big plans” for the area and is “optimistic” about finding the right mobile tech talent. He stopped short of saying he wants BB workers specifically, instead pointing to other sources of brainpower like the University of Waterloo (which happens to be the home of the Lazaridis-backed Quantum-Nano Centre). For the sake of the 4,500 people recently left unemployed due to BlackBerry’s strategic failures, however, we hope he was just being diplomatic.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google, Blackberry

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Via: Punit Soni (Google+), Android Central

Source: Financial Post

It’s called MobileBench: an industry consortium planning to offer “more effective” performance assessments on mobile devices — most likely centered on, but not limited to, Android. Unsurprisingly after recent developments, Samsung joins as a founding member, alongside Broadcom, Huawei, Oppo, and Spreadtrum. While that’s who’s in, who isn’t? Well, both NVIDIA (responsible for the Tegra series of mobile chips) and the increasingly ubiquitous Qualcomm, which makes the Snapdragon mobile processor range. Between them, they power the likes of Microsoft’s Surface series, Amazon’s new Kindle Fire range, not to mention numerous flagship devices from LG, Samsung, Sony and Motorola.

The group gathered for the first time yesterday in Shenzhen, China and outlined how it aims to offer more useful tools for mobile platform designers and “more reliable indices” for assessing user experience. MobileBench plans to establish impartial guidelines and a more sophisticated evaluation methodology for both its first benchmark tool, MobileBench and MobileBench-UX, for testing system-level applications. The benchmarking tool will assess hardware performance, including high-level processes like video and image viewing, camera use and other real-life use cases, with one of the primary aims being result consistency and less deviation between repeated tests. Another app is planned for consumer use in the future, likely similar to the benchmarking apps Engadget uses in its reviews. The bigger question is how much the consortium can achieve without wider adoption inside the industry — it’s apparently “actively seeking” more members.

Filed under: Mobile, Samsung

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Source: MobileBench consortium (PDF)

If you haven’t already heard the news, our very own Myriam Joire won’t be “our very own” much longer, as she has accepted a position with Pebble. Since this is her last week on the staff, this will be her final podcast as a co-host; don’t worry, she’ll still be back from time to time in a guest capacity, but if you’re awake, you won’t want to miss this week’s episode before she moves on to the wearables frontier. Join us!

Filed under: Announcements, Mobile

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