I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s a PlayStation app coming soon for the iPhone and Android handsets. The bad news is that it doesn’t actually do what you’re hoping it does–i.e. play games.
The app is more of a supplemental resource for PlayStation owners. You can use it to check things like trophies and friends’ statuses, discover information about new games, read the PlayStation Blog, and share info via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. PlayStation phone it’s not.
The app is coming “very soon” to European markets like the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. More markets will follow later.
EA is having a downright massive sale on iPhone apps this week, in celebration of the coming holiday. The gaming giant has discounted more than 70 iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps to $0.99 down from prices ranging between $1.99 and $7.99.
There are a of familiar titles on this. Here are a few choice picks:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Need For Speed Hot Pursuit NBA Elite 11 Fifa 11 Madden NFL 11 Tiger Woods PGA Tour The Sims 3 Spore Creatures Monopoly Risk: The Official Game Clue Scrabble The Simpsons Arcade Wolfenstein RPG Tetris American Idol: The Game Littlest Pet Shop
You can find a more complete list of the games over at Touch Arcade. Looks like the holiday push is paying off for EA. The company is currently dominating the iTunes app sales list between its discounts and those perennial favorite Angry Birds.
Of course you knew this was coming, you probably just didn’t expect it so soon. If Apple keeps up with its usual schedule, we don’t expect an iPhone 4 successor to rear its head until summer 2011, but already some KIRF scientists are making forward-looking projections and produced what it thinks might be theKIRF iPhone to go tête-à-tête with the presumed iPhone 5. Resolution’s apparently low, but it does its best to make up for it with dual SIM capabilities, WiFi, Bluetooth, a microSD slot, built-in camera with flash, an all-too familiar UI — all at a price guaranteed to assuage regret: about 700 yuan (US $106). The future is now, why wait? Video after the break.
Here’s a belated entry for those of you who are compiling year-end best of mobile app lists. People are tossing around words like “magic” and “future” upon giving Visual Quest’s new app a spin, and we’ve got to say, from demos we’ve seen, we’re pretty impressed.
Word Lens is an augmented reality language translator–hold it up in front of a sign in a different language, and the thing will translate it in real time. All in all, it’s pretty fantastic, and a lot more useful than most of the games and other apps that tend to dominate the iTunes sales lists.
The app itself is free, but there’s $4.99 fee for Word Lens’ various language packs. At present, the app only does Spanish to English and English to Spanish. More languages will be coming soon.
Octavio Good, a developer behind the app explained its process thusly, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Neat.
Word Lens for the iPhone is one of the most amazing apps we have ever seen. Take a look at this, but put down any hot liquids first.
It’s an augmented-reality, OCR-capable translation app, but that’s a poor description. A better one would be “magic.” World Lens looks at any printed text through the iPhone’s camera, reads it, translates between Spanish and English. That’s pretty impressive already — it does it in real time — but it also matches the color, font and perspective of the text, and remaps it onto the image. It’s as if the world itself has been translated.
We’ve tested the app, and it works just as shown in the video. In demo mode, it can rearrange (or blank out) any text in the camera’s field of vision. You need to purchase translation packs to do the actual translation.
In our tests, it worked smoothly, although the words had a tendency to wiggle around a bit, switching between English and Spanish and flipping between alternate translations. You could get the gist of a sentence, but not read it clearly. Holding the camera very steady helped mitigate the “wiggling” effect.
Word Lens is a taste of science fiction, something like a visual version of the universal translator or the Babelfish. Only instead of being a convenient device to avoid movie subtitles, it’s a real, functioning tool.
Word Lens is free, and will do some fancy rearranging of words to show you how it works. The Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries are in-app purchases, for $5 each, and the app runs offline — perfect for when you’re traveling. You can pick your coffee back up, now.
Augmented reality and optical character recognition have just come into their own, beautifully intertwined into an instant translation app for the iPhone. Download Word Lens, pay $4.99 for a language pack, then point it at a sign and watch as it replaces every word with one in your native tongue. It’s a little bit like Pleco, but without the whole language learning stuff. We just gave it a spin, and while it’s not quite as accurate as this video claims, it’s still breathtaking to behold — especially as it doesn’t require an internet connection to do any lookup. Sadly, it only translates to and from English and Spanish for now. Still, Babelfish, eat your heart out.
Update: Looks like it only works on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch for now.
Bringing this up with your local AT&T rep is liable to get you laughed out of the store, but things are a little different up in Canada where one of the major carriers is now offering an unlock service — for a fee. If you’re on Rogers (or its budget subsidiary, Fido) and you’re a customer in good standing with an iPhone that you’ve previously purchased from them and you’re not currently in a contract, you can pay $50 Canadian — that’s $50 US, for those of you not up to speed on current conversion rates — to have Rogers’ customer service reps flip a switch that’ll cause the phone to magically unlock the next time you restore it while connected to iTunes. Considering the restrictions, they should probably be offering the service for free, but it’s a start.
We don’t normally cover the “business crime” beat, but there’s a pretty interesting gadget angle here. As part of a larger crack down on insider trading, three technology executives and a “salesman for an ‘expert network'” have been arrested for leaking confidential tips to hedge funds. What sort of secrets, you ask? A certain executive for Flextronics, Walter Shimoon, happened to pass on information concerning an iPhone update and the iPad well before they became official (Flextronics supplied Apple parts). “At Apple you can get fired for saying K48 … outside of a, you know, outside of a meeting that doesn’t have K48 people in it. That’s how crazy they are about it,” he said during an October 2009 phone call intercepted by authorities, where K48 was the codename for the iPad, which didn’t see the light of day until 2010 (we’re assuming here that’s not all he said). The others arrested hail from AMD (leaking financial details) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and a fifth person already pled guilty (a former Dell global supply manager). Remember, kids, crime doesn’t pay.
Looking for a bit more integration than your usual iPhone car dock or FM transmitter can provide? Then you might want to consider Oxygen Audio’s new O’Car head unit, which packs a swiveling iPhone dock that’s considerably discreet than some other similar units out there. It’s also, of course, a full-fledged car radio, and it packs a 4x55W amp that Oxygen says delivers “perfect quality sound” to your car’s speakers. If that’s all a bit too much for you, however, Oxygen has also announced the decidedly more standard-looking O’Dock unit that simply mounts on your dash or windshield — check it out after the break. Unfortunately, there’s still no word on pricing or availability for either unit, but we’re assuming those details will be made available at CES next month.
Iconic Stand is seemingly still a concept, but an interesting one for sure. Korean-designed iPhone stands, they’re made of birch and have a serious natural feel to them. The makers have seen fit to design the stands with various famous logos for properties such as Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger built right into them. And while a nice little iPhone stand (which will apparently hold your phone whether it’s nude or Bumper-wearing) with an iconic logo on it sounds pretty neat to us, we can’t imagine these are actually… you know… licensed. Another example is after the break, hit up the source for a plethora of images.
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