Mobitrends

After Wildcharge, Psyclone TouchCharge kit is next in line to provide wireless power to mass market consumer applications. While I don’t know precisely which vendor is providing with the actual wireless power technology (both companies are “just” device manufacturers), this reminds me of the awesome powercast demo I had during last year’s CES. Would be curious to know which vendor has now taken the lead over that field.

Update: actually I just met Wildcharge’s CEO and it appears that Psyclone is their first OEM deal - I guess it’s not just for nothing that the technology was so similar …

If you have a cool idea around LBS you want to demonstrate, you really should go there !

Obviously, the Fring application on iPhone has disabled VoIP when on 3G connection - I guest that was the only way for them to have their way into the app store … Too bad as SIP and skype work great when on WiFI !

Wireless USB (aka UWB aka Wimedia aka 802.15.3) can stream HD movies over the air, and we just got our hands on a cool reference design kit to play with ! It’s about 15USD on large quantities added to the total bill of materials price, this is getting pretty cheap!

Since the latest Mac event, where Jobs talked big about iPhone being the next-gen portable gaming platform, I decided it was time to give it a try. I had only been testing the semi-pro apps and hobbyists games, I wanted to give a shoot at those blockbuster high-budget/high-expectations games. I chose Spore as it certainly reached a climax in the last couple weeks at my RSS buzz-o-meter.
Spore is edited by EA, and I had high expectations on the quality of the game itself. Well, I’ve been most disappointed for quite a lot of reasons, although the game itself is “cute”, you drive your little monster through changing mazes to eat other monster’s DNA and evolve, the realization is really poor:

• The accelerometer is not precise enough to play - especially on a vibrating environment such as the underground. Every change of seating position will require a re-calibration of the “zero” position - really painful…
• The intro movie scene is just being played by the quicktime movie player - pressing the screen during the intro shows the control - that’s so cheap and lame !
• While playing if you ever hit the home key (c’mon guys it’s under the thumb - of course you’re going to hit it), the game exits and your progression is lost … same when you get a phone call… that’s really a pain
• The gamme is really totally linear, and although I’ve reached level 19 it feels like I’m still wandering in the same environments… and I really have no clue why I’m moving my monster : there is not scenario there

As a conclusion I’d say that it’s amateur work - the game looks like a student project and it’s totally not worth the 9€ 8.99€ EA asks for it - should they have not invested so much in marketing over the “SPORE” brand, that game would have had no more than a 1/5 star rating… I was really expecting more for iPhone high-end games hope we get to see some better stuff soon.

Thanks @sdelbecque for pointing out this app - “Character” is an iPhone app available free on App Store that lets you search for you WoW avatars and retriever their stats/items/stuuf and displays them live on your iPhone. Wanna show your latest cool epic loot to your frinds in real life, now you can do it straight from your iPhone !

Hey dear fellow readers - I wanted to share this stupid beliefs that we have in old Europe (France?). WiFi gives headaches ! For real ! And in Europe we’re so stupid that when a bunch of lazy public workers in public libraries yell that putting a WiFi Hotspot in their library give them headaches - they got it removed. Honestly this is depressing to see those uneducated guys that manage to get global knowledge banned from their dusty places…
A few facts : in France, WiFi Hotspots can never emit more than 200mW. Emission is unidirectional, thus powers decreases in 1/r^3. The Librarian is usually sth like ten meters away from the access point - thus gets less than a couple of mW in their heads. If he forbids WiFi than I don’t want to see him use a cell phone or a microwave oven (several hundreds Watts - over one MILLION tmes more radiations).
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there is Municipal WiFi and Community WiFi (Fon, Meraki…).

Now the best you get with Adael (Café WISP) is 20mins free WiFi - that kind of behavior forced me to move to a 3g+ USB stick - it’s weird to see that telcos have won the battle of WiFi - it has become so hard, hectic and rare to find working WiFi that I got almost forced on paying some money to telcos to make sure that I can get network access whenever I need it.
I’m pretty sad about this - WiFi is in my opinion not a reliable technology - it doesn’t propagate well, you have no real way of knowing where antenna is and thus I always am reluctant to pay while I know that I might not get decent service and thus value for money. I really hope that FON could do something here but I feel it hard to be optimistic as there is still so much to do…

Testing out the latest wordpress app for iPhone - just released !
Taking a pict crashes the app but hey nobody’s perfect and app crashing seem natural on iPhone …

Update: adding pict from library works…