iPhone. News and Tips

On fourth of September the Dinner Dash game – an economic strategy from PlayFirst Inc, was released at AppStore.

You must make a 5-stars restaurant out of the fast-food café, what you’ve got at the start of the game. All you need is to manage your restaurant personal in a way to serve all the clients as fast as possible. If your visitors enjoy the service and environment they will pay tips to you. The more clients are happy – the more tips you’ll get. You can use the money earned to buy additional service machines, hire musicians and additional personal.

On 50 unique levels of the game you’ll come across with 6 types of customers, and don’t think they’ll allow you just sit tight and watch the gameplay. There is a campaign and one alternative game mode included.

The only disadvantage of this exciting and perfect made game is it’s high cost. The $4.99 price could invite much more customers.

Price: $9.99
[iTunes Link (US App Store only)]

Electronic Arts game development company is starting a full-scale attack on iPhone. This weekend Spore Origins – a life simulator game from EA will be presented. You will be able to see how an infusorians or flying saucers ale living in this dangerous and cruel world.

By the way, EA mobile announced a number of games for iPhone to be released soon. Here’s a short list of them:

- Yahtzee Adventures
- EA Mini Golf
- Lemonade Tycoon
- Mahjong
- Monopoly

And these will be presented in a nearby future:

- The World Edition
- SimCity
- Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09
- Need for Speed Undercover
- Sims 3

Impressive, isn’t it? It looks like EA is designating iPhone platform as a market to be conquered. The 7th of September – a date of Spore’s release, will show, how serious are EA mobile.

On 5th of September a Russian mobile operator MobileTeleSystems site announced, that MTS and Apple Inc. signed the agreement about starting the iPhone sales in Russia. The first iPhone will be sold in Russia this year.

It’s very interesting to compare this announcement with the one, that was made by another Russian Mobile Operator Megafon. They are totally identical. What does it mean? Of course that Big Apple Brother is watching all of them and say what and when to do this or that. That means that MTS and Megafon will not sell iPhones, but Apple will distribute iPhones using Russian operators.

If Beeline will put on it’s corporate site the same announcement – call me a prophet.

At the current moment an iPhone 3G can work in Russian mobile networks
only if one of the following criteria is applicable:
1. The iPhone was delivered from Europe, where it was officially unlocked.
2. iPhone is being used together with TurboSIM (also known as proxy-SIM).
The question of proxy-sim stability is as actual in Russia as it never
was. Unfortunatly, the common iPhone user got no time not only to test
and analize proxy-sim, but also to search the infinite forum threads for that small piece of information needed to choose the right proxy. So our portal decided to compare two proxy (Yessim and Tornado) and give a resume on them.

SIMcard programmator

The main problem of proxy-sim is loosing the network connect or registration failure after you travel in a subway or elevator. This defect was repaired in the last Yessim and Tornado firmware.

Alfa88 from iphones.ru prefers to use Yessim from the moment iPhone 2.0.2 firmware was released (that means about twoo weeks). There are some difficulties in patch count configuration – the right and stable config was found after a number of experiments committed.

So, here are the results. During two weeks of usage in MTS (MobileTeleSystems) mobile network his iPhone didn’t broke a connection with EDGE, even after having a subway run it successfully reconnected. The most Megafon and Beeline clients are also doesn’t experience any problems using Yessim. There were registered a few troubles with EDGE, where the connection to high speed Internet was repaired after simple phone restart.

And what about Tornado? Alfa88’s experience of using it lasted for 4 days. The results of tests were similar with the common opinion – the network connection troubles were also repaired, there were only EDGE-incompatibility unresolved. And Tornado doesn’t support 6-pin Megafon sim-cards, they should be exchanged to new versions in operator’s offices.

The Tornado’s firmware should be upgraded to the 0216 version, with the right Fake IMSI parameter. iSmartfone cards are not programmed, and don’t work stable in Moscow. But in small town like Ryazan the results are more optimistic. This is because of the strict mobile operator policy in large cities.

Tornado and Yessime use the same chip F300 and a similar algorithm. The difference is only in a way to configurate them and in dimensions – the Tornado chip is slightly more thick, but the whole module is thinner.

So if you enjoy having an iPhone, delivered from USA, but can’t make a call – use a proxy-sim to start communicating.

They say, the Russian fruit-company fans can sign in to register in a queue of those, who want to be the first ones to buy iPhone3G.

The information is still unclear and looks like a rumors, so consult the Megafon operator site for details.

This week beats all the expectations – we can’t remember so many applications to be released at AppStore in such a small period of time.

Let’s look at the FLOverload game. Player should build the plumb to deliver water to consumers. You should build tubes as fast as you can, or water will run out the pipe system. Rotate the tube elements to connect them together.

Some people on the forum say that’s a Pipe Dream game remake, that was released in 1994. Well, all the new features are remade from the old ones.
See the video for details.

Price: $1.99.

[iTunes link]

On a grand meeting, dedicated to the iphones.ru portal birthday, SeaBreeze summed up the results of Guess-the-Date-of-Forum-BirthDay competition. The winners was given the iTunes certificates, kindly presented by our partners from iTS.Play portal.

So, here are the awardees!
Moon-Angel can buy as much soft and music as the $30 certificate can permit;
Littlerich enjoys the $20 AppStore certificate;
Larka could create an account with the prize $10 on it.

A tobbogan riders will be able to enjoy their favorite sport even laying on the Florida beach. But only if they will be also have their own iPhone.

The guys from inXile Entertainment announced that their successful web-based game Line Rider will engage AppStore in a nearby future. The estimated price is $2.99.

The original Line Rider was presented in 2006. It became famous in a short period of time, that stimulated the developers to port the application on Nintendo Wii and DS platforms.

Player supposed to create his own snow traces and to ride a sleigh on them.
The flash-version of the game is available on the developers site. Attention – Microsoft Silverlite (an MS-developed analogue of Adobe Flash) should be installed on your machine.

See the video for details.

Let’s continue discussing cars, remotly controlled from iPhone. Oh yes, just toy cars at the moment – there are no any daredevils except Mythbusters who are ready to trust control of their car to a small distant control device.

But the first step had been made. Jozef Pruiza from Czech created an electronic scheme, that allows to control a toy car remotely using iPhone application.

You can control you car moving your thumb in a coordinate system, designated on the iPhone screen.

Well, we failed to find something similar made in Russia, but came across with a an app, that can get us familiar with the Road Rules in Russian language.

Repository : http://weho.ru/iphone

New Kate 2.o have been recently released in the new Installer. This is not beta-version, but a real commercial release.

All the bugs are fixed, there were also some changes made in the program to increase the performance stability.

Yes, and forget our previous comments about Winterboard and Kate uncompatibility – now Kate fully supports this useful weather forecast application.

P.S. All the Kate previous version licences are also valid.

As you already know, Apple is going to present new iPod Nano and iPod Touch on the 9th of September. There are also rumors spreading, that new iTunes will be announced that day also.

Kevin Rouls, the father founder of this music and application distribution service, said that iTunes will be changed a lot. The main aspects to be upgraded are personal music content management and a way users buy online tracks.

The only we can is just calm down and wait for more detailed comments.

Update by Vlade: Another rumors: they say, there will be a interactive music album function added. That means, that some bonus content will be presented to you on a whole album purchase. That could be some posters, singers photos, lyrics and etc.

Well known blogger iLounge have recently published a number of hot blueprints, where it looks like new iPod’s are pictured.

As we can see, the fourth generation iPod Nano will look like the second one, but the screen will be slightly enlarged.

The iPod Touch Second Edition is looking like an iPhone 3G, but the size will not change a lot. You can also see the volume buttons on the left side of the device and some unusual slot situated at top left cover. Some people think that a GPS module will be attached there.

See the pictures, collect rumors and wait for 9th of September when the exact information will be announced.

A new app appeared in Cydia to manage icons into folders.

pictures are clickable

All you need is create a folder, assign an icon for it, put all the necessary applications there and tap the Home button.

pictures are clickable

Now the program is in beta-testing stage. The only bug found is that springboard needs more time to restart.

On 31st of August Sega company realeased an upgrade of it’s successful iPhone game – Super Monkey Ball 1.0.1.

What’s new in this version:
- An improved game control;
- The tutorial was added;
- Hints and tips added;
- An autosave is enabled when Home button is pressed.
-
The price left the same: $9.99
[iTunes Link]

The Investor Village engineers spent a month on collecting IMEI numbers of first-gen and second-gen iPhones. The results are available in this table. The research was organized to find out, how many iPhones were sold.

IMEI is a abbreviator for International Mobile Equipment Identifier, a unique for every phone 15-digits number, that completely identifies every mobile, manufactured in a world. It is written into phone on a factory and is used by GSM-operators in identification purposes. They can simply identify using IMEI, where your stolen mobile was put online, even if your own SIM-card was replaced.

Guys from Ars Techica made a table out of this boring numbers.

From the beginning of 2008 there were 2 420 000 iPhone GSM and 5 649 000 iPhone 3G sold, that completes 8 069 000 different iPhones. If we will add this number to 3 704 000 iPhones that were sold in 2007, we’ll get an amazing 11 773 000 iPhones, living their lives in their owner pockets all over the world at the moment.

Some journalists (so do our colleagues from Gizmodo staff) have received the acquaintances to Apple Party, that will be held in San-Francisco on 9th of September.

Does it make you to remember something that was held earlier? What should we wait? Probably A new iPod to be presented in Frisco? Just look at the acquaintance card – the proportions of pictured iPod screen slightly differs from the current iPods (now they are equipped with 4:3 screen). What does the man on the picture handle? And what’s loading on this uncommon screen?

Enigmatic, amazing and exciting… Let’s wait a little for the moment, when Apple will show it’s cards.

An American publisher, that is issuing Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine, decided to point their sight to a sphere, that was left uncovered till this moment. At the end of September the first number of new iPhone magazine named iPhone Life will be issued.

The pilot will cost $25 and will cover a number of aspects, from preparing DVD movies to be played on iPhone and accessories reviews to iPhones hints and tricks and celebrities-meets-iPhone subject.

What is really good, that some virtual bloggers will get a chance to become a real journalists. Or probably you know any different way, how the iPhone news appears in this Interned-wide-wired world leaving the bloggers aside?

And of course you know, all the Russian iPhone news are colecting at iphones.ru and inews76.com (smile).

Here’s a common e-mail from common software user to common software developer.
“Dear Santa Developer, please give me a shareware or uncommercial version of your perfect utility. I really want to try it before I’ll make a decisions to buy it or not”.

The current tendencies in AppStore show, that only 1% of those, who download a lite-version of application, buy it officially. In spite of it, the lite-version of app can be on the top of the ratings, have a hundreds of positive reports. But the full version of the same application will be able only to envy the lite’s popularity…

That totally meets the Arthur Shopengauer’s philosophy. He postulated, that The Happines (an ability to run a software in our terminology) is phantom, because even a man achieves a goal (downloads a lite-version) he doesn’t get a moment of happiness just receiving a satiety and getting bored (leaves an interest to a full-version of app).

Don’t bother the Developers. Let them work in comfortable environment without any stupid requests to give everything and without any charge…

© photo by zerto

On 2nd of September a Russian Megafon mobile operator made the announcement about signing a contract with Apple Inc, that apply to iPhone 3G sale in Russia. The first official iPhone will be sold in Russia this year.

Some days ago there was a post about the Blue Skies game coming. And finally it’s available in AppStore and costs $9.99.

The controls are simple and intuitive – ypu should use an accelerometer and multitouch-scheme. Yor attack helicopter will engage numerous tanks, bunkers, aviation units… All of them should be melted with a storm of fire and steel, coming out of your gunship. That shouldn’t be an easy walk – 30 levels are long enough, the armor is not bullet-proof, and fuel tanks are getting empty just in the most heat!

pictures are clickable

Buy it or not – that would be the only your decision. But those who have bought it are storming the enemy horde at the moment. And why are you still here???

See the video from developers site to get familiar with a gameplay.

[iTunes link]