App review: Infinity Blade (iPhone)
Aww, would you look at that, the iPhone's trying to play big boy games ! Following in the well received footsteps of Rage HD , today marks the debut of Infinity Blade , the second in what's hopefully a wave of gorgeous-looking iOS games boasting advanced 3D graphics, if not 3D gameplay. Epic Games has put aside the chainsaw-equipped projectile weaponry of its wildly successful Gears of War console series to deliver the first mobile game built around its Unreal Engine 3 . You won't be surprised to hear that it's utterly delicious to look at, and the visuals certainly helped transport us to this alien realm of swords, axes, shields, and magical rings -- where body armor is optional, but helmets apparently are not
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: action game, actiongame, actionrpg, beautiful, chair, engine, graphics, impressions, infinity, magical, projectile, unreal
ARM intros next-gen Mali-T604 embedded GPU, Samsung first to get it
Promising "visually rich user experiences not previously seen in consumer electronics devices," ARM has introduced its latest embedded GPU architecture, Mali-T604, at its Technology Conference 2010 in California today. Though we're unlikely to see it in devices any time soon, the introduction means that the new design is available to ARM licensees -- and notably, the company points out that partner Samsung will be the first to get hooked up. Considering Sammy competes in the high-end embedded system-on-chip space already with its ARM-based Hummingbird line of cores, adding in the Mali-T604 is probably the next logical step for them.
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: arm, directx, entry, experiences, gpgpu, gpu, graphics, hummingbird, introduction, mali-t604, opencl, samsung, technology
Nokia SVP of Symbian Smartphones talks portrait QWERTY, Symbian ‘bashing,’ and MeeGo devices
Jo Harlow, Nokia's Senior VP of Symbian Smartphones was in Amsterdam for the kickoff of the Symbian Exchange and Exposition, giving us the chance for a sit down with the seven year Nokia veteran.
Categories: Mobile Phone, Other Tags: appeal, approach, features, graphics, improvements, including-split, joharlow, meego, nokia, smartphones, stephen-elop, symbian, talks-portrait, transcript
App Review: Angry Birds (Android)
What does it take to make an addictive game? Not much -- just throw in some super simple controls, cute graphics, and basic physics
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone, nexus one, Other Tags: backstory, birds, entry, graphics, kamikaze, mission, mobile, nexus one, review, rovio mobile, slingshot, special
App review: The Incident
Like its contemporary, Canabalt , The Incident is a game that knows exactly what it is -- and is not -- and plays to those strengths to a T. The basic premise of this iPhone title is simple enough, and in that simplicity (as with many great games) lies its power
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: device, entry, falling, flashing-white, graphics, mobile, review, right-decisions
HTC EVO 4G’s graphics capped at 30FPS?
Reports are flying in from across the internet -- and by that we mean the xda-developers and Google Code forums -- that the EVO 4G might have something of a framerate issue. It seems that the device is "locked in" at 30 frames per second both in 2D (Canvas) and 3D (openGL) modes, while anecdotally, a phone like the Hero hits 54fps on average and has "smoother scrolling" in the menus
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone, nexus one, Other Tags: benchmarks, case-the-nexus, developers, frames per second, google-code, graphics, graphics-capped, hero, hero-carrying, open gl, sense-ui
Smokescreen makes Flash content visible on iPhone and iPad (video)
Mind you, it's just a preview release, but Chris Smoak's Smokescreen does exactly what it promises: enable Flash content to play on Apple's iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad.
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: animated, binaries, engadget, entry, extracts, flash, graphics, iphone, javascript, result, simon-willison, video
Nokia N8 benchmarked against N97, makes it look old and busted
Nokia's new hotness, the N8 , is starting our week off in fine style. Finest Fones , what looks to be a Symbian-only mobile news site, is reporting its own tests done with the handset that show it comfortably outpacing its predecessor. Of course, in these fog of war-obscured times (before proper hardware is dished out), we can't really be sure of the veracity of what we read, but Symbian^3 's newfound ability to exploit graphics hardware seems to be paying off relative to the more primordial ways of the S60 5th software on the N97 .
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: benchmarks, fpc bench 3d, graphics, hardware-seems, makes-it-look, mobile, nokia, nokia n86, nokia-n97, nokian86, outpacing-its, reporting-its, veracity
Socle Technology’s ARM-powered, 1080p tablet platform due later this year
Socle Technology, a system-on-a-chip manufacturer based in Taiwan, has just announced its sPad A11 design and development platform. Consisting of the GlobalFoundries 65nm chipset, the ARM 1176 CPU and FPU core, Mali 3D Graphic Core, and a full HD 1080p Video CODEC application processor, this bad boy supports multitasking, 3D graphics, and sports a camera, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone Tags: 1080P, graphics, half, linux, platform, result, slate, socle, spad, video, year
Samsung’s Galaxy S has four times the polygon power of Snapdragon
When we got some hands-on time with the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S , it was painfully apparent that the thing has some serious power under the hood. Now we have a better idea of just how much power, with reports indicating that it has the graphics oomph (thanks to its PowerVR SGX540 GPU) to push 90 million triangles per second
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone Tags: Clone, graphical-power, graphics, handset, polygon, polygon-power, polygons, powervr, samsung galaxy s, snapdragon, system-on-chip