via Games Industry


Nintendo has told GamesIndustry.biz that it will not comment on new rumours of a redesigned DS handheld, branding talk "rumour and speculation".

US blog Kotaku has suggested that the company will be issuing a new DS next year, featuring two touch-sensitive screens.

According to the story, any official word on such a device would not be announced by Nintendo until after the Christmas sales period.

Sales of the handheld in Japan during the financial quarter ended June 30 have dropped, but the system is still selling well in Europe and the US. ...

"Apple has come under scrutiny on its iPhone 3G for false advertising, and now the Advertising Standards Authority, a UK ad group, has come forth to declare a specific television ad for the touch-based smartphone to be misleading to consumers."



Above is the ad in question, and while I'm not normally a fan of the Eurocratic system of slapping fines on every company they can find, it's pretty easy to see their point here: Apple makes some very bold claims about having the best browsing experience on a mobile device, but that browsing experience comes to a screeching halt as soon as you hit any Web site that uses Flash - and many of them do. These commercials fail to mention that. They also fail to highlight that nothing happens that quickly on a 3G network, but that might be splitting hairs. Java is also mentioned, but I can count the number of times I see the Sun JVM fire up on my PC on one hand - and it's almost always when I'm uploading photos on Smugmug. Is Java on a phone really needed for Web browsing? I don't think it is.

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/news...isleading.html ...

via Games Industry


Uncharted: Drake's Fortune has topped the first PlayStation 3 budget chart published by UK data specialists GfK Chart-Track.

The chart has been added to the company's retail data following Sony's introduction of a Platinum range of titles in Europe.

Other Platinum titles in the top ten include EA's FIFA 08 at four, Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction at five and Evolutions Studios' MotorStorm at nine.


The top ten PlayStation 3 budget games for the week ended August 23 follow:

1. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
2. Gran Turismo 5: Prologue
3. Buzz! Quiz TV
4. FIFA 08
5. Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction
6. Resistance: Fall of Man
7. SingStar Volume 2
8. Fight Night Round 3
9. MotorStorm
10. Virtua Tennis 3 ...

It has been a month since the iPhone 3G hit stores worldwide to an eagerly awaiting crowd. It was the second coming of the Jesus-Phone and this one was going to be the phone we deserved the first time round. New Firmware, GPS, the App Store and of course the 3G support all built into a more curvaceous body.

Things didn’t get off to a perfect start on launch day with O2s systems going down in the UK and Apple having problems with iTunes activation and the freshly launched Mobile Me. But despite these issues Apple still managed to sell over a million iPhone 3Gs in its first weekend of release.

So how does the Jesus-Phone 2.0 shape up?

The Hardware

The original iPhone was extremely well built with a metal back-plate and a solid glass front and the iPhone 3G maintains that pedigree. The metal back-plate has been replaced by a more curvy plastic one but the device still feels reassuringly heavy, solid and is more pocketable.

Sadly that is where the praise ends because the iPhone 3G has to have some of the worst Hardware I’ve ever used in a high-end phone. It fails at even the most basic tasks and a lot of the features didn’t seem to work at all.

Let me start with the most basic of features: Making voice calls. The iPhone 3G (I shall refer to it as the iFail for the remainder of this post) would regularly refuse to initiate a phone call sometimes requiring me to try 7-8 times before it decided it would let me call someone. That is something I’ve never experienced even in the early days when I had my first mobile phone.

Of course I would only be able to try and make that call if I was actually lucky enough to be in an area where I could pick up reception. The iFail seems to maintain an average reception level of 2 bars and will also drop service all together at random intervals. 3G reception is just as dodgy.

And before you even mention O2, I always carry 2 phones with me, both on the O2 network. Whenever I’ve had these problems on the iFail the other phone (usually a Nokia) has worked perfectly and has maintained full reception in most cases. Can’t blame O2 at all, it’s all down to the iFail hardware.

And reception isn’t the only hardware issue, GPS is just as problematic. The first iFail I used flat-out refused to connect to GPS at all even when out in the open on a perfect clear day. The device even failed to give me a rough location based on Cell-ID or WiFi hotspots, something that the built in Skyhook software should be able to do. The second iFail proved to be a bit better and would actually lock onto a GPS location, however it seemed to have a mind of its own and would only connect when it felt like it. Admittedly when GPS worked it was great but it’s lack of reliability meant that I couldn’t trust that it would work when I needed it to.

However both these problems are trumped by the iFails worst feature: Battery Life. The iFail has the worst battery life of any device I’ve ever used, including the first-generation N95. Sure it will last all day if you turn 3G and WiFi off and don’t check your email too often but I’m a person who actually uses his phone.

Let me try and put this into perspective: After 2.5 hours of using the iFail as I would any other phone I had 20% battery left from a full charge. What was I doing? Checking email, taking pictures and uploading them to Moblog, making a phone call or two and using the browser to check and update Twitter. I wasn’t even listening to music while doing all that. So even if the iFail had no faults and had the most compelling features in the mobile world, I wouldn’t be able to use them as I’d run out of charge before my day had even begun.

Software

When it came to Software I wasn’t expecting any problems. Apples UI is fantastic and intuitive and had just been updated. Unfortunately the new updates seem to have slowed down the UI and OS. Applications (both native and installed) freeze when being opened, Safari stutters when you scroll round a page and I’ve experienced my first crashes on an iPhone. In a word, it’s Buggy.

More annoying than these minor speed issues are the limitations the device has when compared to other phones on the market. We all know that the iPhone can’t send MMS and can’t record video, which is a bad start. There really is no excuse for these basic features to be missing and I’d assume these would be more important to the average user than GPS or even HSDPA.

However power-users who are used to having smartphones will notice more limitations like the absence of an option to copy/paste text and, crucially, the inability to run non-native apps in the background. Before you start shouting, yes I get that most users wouldn’t miss either of those features but in my opinion it’s features like this that are crucial to making a phone a truly multi-purpose device.

The lack of background apps is particularly annoying, something I’ve become used to after years of S60 (and even WinMo) use. The last.fm application is useless to me as I can’t play the music in the background while ...

After finally getting my thoughts on the iPhone 3G out into a blog post last week I felt it was finally time to go back to using a Nokia S60 device again. I’d really missed the S60 experience and I’ve wanted to try some of the new devices running the latest software (top of my list right now is the Nokia E71).

As has become the norm I posted my thought to Twitter and got this reply from Frank:



That got me thinking about what I really missed about the S60 experience while I was using the iPhone and here is what I came up with.

1) Video - It hasn’t always been the case but recently Video has become important to me. I love absorbing everything related to New Media and Social Media and the emergence of some interesting video-based services have got me really interested in video again. My favourite of these has to be Qik, a service which allows you to live-stream video directly from your device to the internet something I have regularly noticed I’d want to do in lots of situations recently. Other video services like Phreadz and Seesmic are on my radar too and video taken on your phone is the ideal way for me to dive in to their world.

2) Geo-Tagging - The easy way. The iPhone can Geo-Tag images but I just haven’t found a good way to upload that data to my preferred destination (Moblog). If I email it Apple strips out the location data and 3rd Party Apps also seem to have a problem retaining the data. On S60 devices this is just easier to do and I’ve never had problems with the data being stripped out. On top of that I really want to get back to using Sports Tracker (a better name is Life Tracker). Being able to upload that data and share it with others is pretty compelling and not something you can do with the iPhone yet.

3) Background Application - This is probably what I missed most and given that I normally have at least 3 apps going in the background when on an S60 device it’s hardy surprise. As I mentioned in my iPhone post this is something that I think really hinders the iPhone experience. A great example is Last.fm which i can use on an S60 device and let it run in the background while doing anything else with the device but on the iPhone I’m stuck in the App and if I go anywhere else the App is shut down. I’m sure that we’ll eventually see some iPhone Apps that are allowed to run in the background but until then this is a big winner for S60 and also Windows Mobile.

4) Bluetooth - Yes, I know the iPhone has Bluetooth but what can I do with it? I can’t send files to other phones or to my laptop using it. I can’t connect to any headset that I like or any other Bluetooth accessories that I might want to use. Bluetooth on the iPhone is totally toothless and there really is no good excuse as to why Apple have limited it so much. I had hoped that the iPhone 3G would have improved matters but as it hasn’t I have little confidence that we’ll see improvements in future iPhone hardware or software.

5) Tethering - I work away from home a lot and while WiFi is usually easy to find it’s good to know that I can always use my HSDPA phone as an internet connection if I ever get stuck. Unless of course I’m carrying an iPhone. Traditional tethering via cable or Bluetooth are missing from the iPhones arsenal which is surprising given that so many devices on the market support this, and not just Smartphones. Again when the iPhone 3G was announced and Apple indicated it was starting to aim at business user I hoped that tethering would be a new addition. Unfortunately it wasn’t and I doubt it will be added in future either. It’s also worth mentioning that if you use an S60 device there is the fantastic Joikuspot application that allows you to turn your phone into a WiFi hotspot, another thing I’ve really missed.

6) Copy/Paste - This one of those features that you might not realise is that important to you until you find yourself without it. I repeatedly found myself wishing the iPhone had the S60 pencil key in the month I was using the Apple device. On S60 devices it’s a joy to use (once you realise you can do it) especially moving text between different apps. This is by no means a vital feature but considering Apples great implementation of the screenshot feature (which could also be considered a minor addition) I hope it’s something they’ll throw in to a future update.

7) Options - Wasn’t sure how to title this one. Basically while I was using the iPhone I felt trapped having to do things the Apple way. I’ve already mentioned how closed the iPhone is in terms of Bluetooth, tethering and even Geo-Tagging. What I missed even more was being able to just plug in the phone and view its contents without having to use iTunes (which I loath) or iPhoto. I regularly use Linux and my daily PC right now is an Asus Eee 900 from which I can do nothing but charge my iPhone. With S60 you have far more options to interact with the device and load music, photos and other content and I miss that flexibility. I know ...

Lino has updated his Nintendo DS Emulator for Windows, heres whats new:


Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...

Total PSP hardware and software sales figures for Japan have been announced. The console itself has shifted over ten million units in the period from December 12, 2004 and August 24, 2008. Software sales-wise, Capcom's Monster Hunter juggernaut is leading the charge. Here's the totals for the top selling PSP games so far in Japan:

1. Monster Hunter 2nd G (Capcom) March 27, 2008 Release: 2,396,642 copies sold
2. Monster Hunter 2nd (Capcom) February 22, 2007 Release: 1,706,387 copies sold
3. Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII (Square Enix) September 13, 2007: 790,705 copies sold
4. Monster Hunter Portable (Capcom) December 1, 2005: 668,964 copies sold
5. Phantasy Star Portable (SEGA) July 31, 2008: 545,242 copies sold

The PSP seems to have really taken off in the last two years here in Japan.

Via Kotaku ...

An issue of Dengeki PlayStation that goes on sale August 29th in Japan, Final Fantasy XIII director and writer Motomu Toriyama and FFXIII Versus director Tetsuya Nomura talk about the possibility of Japan getting a Final Fantasy XIII Xbox 360 version. Nomura says that he himself was "surprised" at the FFXIII Xbox 360 Asia version news, saying that Microsoft's comment ("It would be nice if the game came out") was taken to mean that it was actually confirmed for Asia. More interesting than that cluster**** is Toriyama's comment about whether or not Final Fantasy XIII will be released in Japan on the Xbox 360 platform:


Obviously Toriyama is not mincing words. He's being crystal clear. But, really, why not release it on the Xbox 360 in Japan? Sales of the game in both America and Europe (in multiple languages) on both platforms are likely to exceed the Japanese sales markets — so what's the point of no mulit-platform for domestic consumers? From a business stand point, Toriyama's statement seems rather odd.

via Kotaku ...

Heres the details

GP2X Wiz Game System



features
Color: Black
Powered by a 533Mhz 3D accelerator plus flash engine
12 games embedded in the console including demos for upcoming official games
1 gigabyte flash memory
SD card supported
OS: Linux
Battery: 2000mAh lithium polymer, loads via USB or A/C
Size:121x61x18 mm

GP2X is going in the next round with a completely reworked new gadget, the GP2X Wiz!

Powered by a 533Mhz 3D flash engine, the GP2X Wiz is the long-awaited update to the beloved Linux based handheld, offering updated multi-media features, a long serving rechargeable battery, a touch screen and a new sleek design.

Play games, read e-books, see videos and play music files. Let the GP2X Wiz be your all-round multimedia parter for all situations.

Box contents
GP2X Wiz! console
USB Cable
Stylus Pen
Quick User Guide
Manual CD
Touch Pen
USB Cable
Headphones

Preorder/Buy the Wiz here --> http://www.play-asia.com/SOap-23-83-...j-70-2z59.html ...