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Nokia debuts C2-03 at CommunicAsia (video)
Nokia's Mary McDowell announced the company's third dual-SIM device, the C2-03, at CommunicAsia. It's a portrait slider with a 320 x 240 touchscreen display paired with the company's Touch and Type interface. Like the C2-00, it's based on S40 and supports Easy Swap -- a handy feature that lets users hot swap their SIMs. Additionally, the phone sports a new version of Nokia's web browser that compresses data up to 90 percent, and Nokia Maps for Series 40 -- which provides location search and routing while offline. Amazingly, standby time is rated at a hearty 400 hours, and while the built-in memory is somewhat paltry (10MB), the storage can be expanded up to 32GB. It's expected to be released in Q3 for €77, and will roll out across India, China, the south-east Asian-Pacific region, Eurasia, the middle east, and Africa. The C2-02, a single-SIM variant will debut alongside the more intriguing sibling, but we know you're most interested in the dual-SIM darling, so hop past the break for an extended peek.
LulzSec attacks Escapist Magazine, EVE Online, and Minecraft
Hacker group LulzSec, the same group that's attacked Sony and Nintendo in the past, has tweeted that it's committed three distributed denial of service attacks against gaming companies today, bringing down EVE Online's Tranquility server, Minecraft's multiplayer services, and the Escapist Magazine's website. EVE Online's CCP has confirmed both the outage and the attack, the Escapist is unreachable at the moment, and Minecraft creator Notch says that things were down, but supposedly service has been restored. LulzSec hasn't shared a reason for the attacks just yet, but we can only guess it's, as they say, "for teh lulz." Update: The group has gone after Riot Games' League of Legends servers as well. Attempting to log in to the game gives a "server busy" message, though there's no official word from the company yet. Update: Statement from CCP after the break. EVE Online still seems to be down.
Star Fox 64 3D multiplayer is local-only, supports Download Play
A few more details about the upcoming Star Fox 64 3D for Nintendo 3DS have emerged from a Japanese retailer, specifically about the game's multiplayer mode. Unfortunately, it won't be playable online, but there will be local four-player versus battles and the game will use Download Play so your friends won't need their own cartridges. (Those cheapskates!) The retailer also says that players will be able to take photos of themselves that will show up above ships in-game, similar to the functionality used in Ridge Racer 3D. Star Fox 64 3D is still set for a July 14 release in Japan. No date has been announced for its North American arrival.
Google adding Netflix, Hulu support, offline Gmail, Calendar and Docs to Chrome OS this summer, prices hardware at $20 per month
Google's currently in the process of detailing Chrome OS' latest improvements and there are a couple of big 'uns: Netflix and Hulu support will be available right out of the box for the pair of new Chromebooks -- one from Samsung and one from Acer. An improved file manager has also been added to the upcoming version of Chrome OS, plus offline versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs -- all will be made available for Chromebook users this summer. You can learn more about these improvements in the video after the break. Far more monumental, Google's also just announced the cost of these Chromebooks and there's no upfront payment to speak of. Instead, Chrome OS laptops will be distributed on the basis of a recurring monthly subscription, which will cost $28 per user for businesses and $20 per user for schools. That includes regular software and hardware upgrades. Hardware as a service, folks! %Gallery-123369%
15% of mobile apps launched while offline
Real-time analytics firm Localytics has issued a report that says 15 percent of all mobile apps are launched while the device they are running on is offline. That's a clear sign that developers would be serving their users better if they built "offline" modes into more apps, according to Ryan Kim of GigaOm. After all, while wireless networks are expanding all the time in the form of 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi, there are still many places where you can't get connected (like in a subway). Kim is correct is his assertion that developers should keep lack of a connection in mind and build in offline modes to their apps. This is especially true for mapping applications. I travel to foreign countries a lot, and there isn't a better example of when you need access to maps then when traveling internationally. But if you don't want to pay international data fees, you're stuck with using your iPhone or iPad in Wi-Fi zones. This is why I've always been an advocate of aggressive map caching, or even building a feature into the Google Maps app that allows users to download complete tile packs of cities so that they have access to maps when not on a data network. But Kim makes another excellent argument for offline mode in apps: As a developer you want users to be as engaged with your app as possible. Adding Instapaper-like features (essentially saving content offline) or more aggressive caching to your apps would allow users to use them to some degree even when not connected to a network, rather than getting a useless login screen. Localytics used its proprietary product to come up with the numbers for offline data use on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices by comparing the time difference between when an app was opened and when its analytics data was uploaded to their servers.
Android Market launches movie rentals, thousands of titles available to your PC, phone or tablet
Google just announced movie rentals in the Android Market at its I/O conference. Chris from the Android services team just hit the stage at Moscone and demonstrated renting movies on the Android Market from your phone, tablet or PC with a single click. "Pinning" mirrors the experience with apps and books, you can select it on your PC and download to the device in the background for offline viewing. Movies are live in the market right now, support on all Android 2.2 or higher devices is expected "in a couple of weeks" and tablets will get support bundled with their upgrade to Android 3.1. On the PC, it ties back to the recently expanded YouTube rental service with the same restrictions (30 days to watch, 24 hour window once you start watching) and pricing, making that per-movie VOD price a bit easier to swallow with its cross-platform support and we even spied a few HD selections for $4.99. Keep an eye on the liveblog for more information. %Gallery-123218%
Test Drive Unlimited 2 slammed with game-breaking launch bugs
Bad news for those who picked up Test Drive Unlimited 2 this week: the game is apparently falling apart, thanks to a few game-breaking bugs across various systems, including "permanent loading screen" problems and issues where the game's save file will get corrupted or not load. A number of network-reliant game components have been taken offline already, and the official Twitter account says the Eden Games team is working as fast as it can to sort things out. Programmers have been pulled in from other projects with the dev promising that "no one is going home until we get this working." So, if you bought the game and encountered these issues, sit tight. If you were thinking about picking up the game this weekend, it might be prudent to wait until everything gets sorted out. In the meantime, there are lots of other games to play, or there's even this thing called "outside" we've heard about, whatever that is. Update: The producer has posted on the forums to say that most issues have been fixed, and all content should be back online. Enjoy virtual Ibiza -- "outside" isn't that big a deal anyway. [Thanks, Tony]
5 productivity tips for Mail.app
Like Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills 90210 and her flings with Dylan, Brandon and Colin, I've been around the block with mail clients, both on the Mac and PC side.That said, I prefer Mail.app. While Mail.app is simple enough for less advanced users, it also contains some niceties for power users. Here are five tips to help enhance your experience in Mail.app. Threaded/Grouping Messages Making sense of who said what and when they said it in relation to who in an email string can be mind numbing. Thankfully, Mail.app has the ability to organize emails by thread, lumping them together by subject. To enable this feature, select on the mail box or folder that you'd like to view messages in threaded form and then click on "Organize by Thread" from the "View" menu. Messages will then be viewed as threads on an individual folder level basis. For instance, when applied to Folder 1, in which subfolders A, B and C reside, only messages residing in Folder 1 will be threaded.
Rhapsody on Android now works offline, but still goes online too (video)
Rhapsody member on Android? Your life just got a little sweeter. Following up on August's iPhone update and in the footsteps of other downloadable streaming services like Slacker Radio, Rhapsody's Android app now offers playlists that don't turn into pauselists when you go offline. Subscribers paying the $10 per month can now make a list of whatever tracks they want (including full albums of content available on the service) and download those to the phone, where they can be played back even if there isn't even a whiff of network connectivity in the air. Naturally we're guessing the DRM is strong with these tracks and they'll surely only be playable through the Rhapsody app itself, but if you have a long flight ahead and need a bunch of fresh tunes to come along you could certainly do worse.
Updated: All realms now online
Updated: All realms are now available. Re: Rolling Realm Restarts 10/14/2010 All realms are online and available for play! See you all ingame source After announcing rolling restarts on all U.S. and Oceanic realms last night, Blizzard has confirmed that all U.S. realms are currently offline due to an unforeseen technical issue. We will have more information when those issues are resolved. Re: Rolling Realm Restarts 10/14/2010 All US realms are temporarily unavailable due to an unforeseen technical issue. We are unable to provide an estimate on when these issues will be resolved. source
TUAW's Daily App: Phases
Phases is one of those apps that has a lot of information you wouldn't really think of or need -- until you actually have an app available to give it to you. Basically, Phases tells you everything you need to know about the moon, from when it wanes and waxes, rises and sets, and when and where it appears in the sky. Sure, it might not be the most pressing information to have, but it's kind of fun to check and see if it really is a full moon out, or find out just when the moon will be up in the evening. And you don't even need an Internet connection -- the app has a database of over 20,000 cities, so even if you can't hook up to the 'net, you can still get information from the app. It's just 99 cents in the store right now, so if the clean design and surprising amount of data available in this one appeals to you, definitely give it a download.
Box.net's iPad project at D7 Consulting: How the iPad works at work
Here's another update from the folks at Box.net on how the iPad deployment at D7 Consulting is going. Through TUAW, Box.net found a company to give 20 free iPads to. Box.net helped D7 set up a workflow that's built and run around Apple's tablet and their service. The first fruits of that collaboration are starting to grow, and as you can see in the video above, Box.net is getting some solid feedback from D7. Box.net is looking at using that feedback to develop future features for their software, including some methods for offline access. Another exciting forthcoming feature concerns more ways to share not only text and documents but also "rich content," including drawings and audio notes about those documents. CIO magazine talked to D7's president Joseph Daniels, who described five lessons he's learned in implementing the project so far. There's a lot of good stuff in there, especially if you're considering using iPads on your job. For the rest of us, what's probably most surprising is that iPads can take all kinds of abuse without having issues. The one problem D7 has had so far is overheating; on a job in the deserts of Las Vegas, an iPad did overheat on them after being in the sun. But 20 minutes in the AC got it back up and working just fine. Another problem is a lack of enterprise support from Apple directly. Don't forget that, while it has a lot of applications on the job, the iPad is still a consumer-targeted device, and D7 has bumped up against that designation a few times already. It's very interesting stuff. It looks like this collaboration is paying off for all involved, including those of us who are just watching to learn from the sidelines. We'll continue to watch how the project is going, and we'll provide you with another on-location look at the project here in a while. In the meantime, if you have questions for Box.net or D7, post them in the comments below. If Sean Lindo (of Box.net) or Terrell Woods (of D7) don't reply directly, we'll make sure to ask in the future.
Rhapsody for iPhone updated, now takes its music offline (in a good way)
We heard back in mid-March that Rhapsody for iPhone was getting an offline mode for downloading music and playing at times of no reception (like most subway rides). Good news, folks, today is the day the app get this coveted update. Lest we forget, too, with this summer's OS 4 release finally enables background music, Real's aural offering just got even more enticing. Press release after the break, or hit up the iTunes link to download now -- don't forget, though, that a monthly subscription plan is still required for playback.
The Apple Store is back online
Yes, as expected, the Apple Store is down for the morning, presumably to update us with brand new MacBook Pros and whatever else Apple has cooked up for a release. We'll keep an eye on the website along with you readers, and when we see what's been updated, we'll let you know. Do be patient -- as many of us are traveling to Macworld today, we might actually be on the roads and/or in the air when it happens, but we'll update as soon as we can. Stay tuned. Update: It's back up, and it appears the new hotness is... Aperture 3. Thanks to all who sent this in!
Satire: Xbox Live prepares for its 'annual' holiday weekend outage [update]
Update: The joke's on us, folks. The source article is, of course, satirical -- something we conveyed rather poorly in the story below. We've seen no signs of Xbox Live so much as flinching this holiday, so far, and it has continued to provide us with a legitimate excuse to ignore that one cousin that nobody seems to know but someone keeps inviting for Christmas lunch. If you can give us your forgiveness for the error, that would be a really fine gift. Can't wait to get home to the family for the holiday this weekend ... and then completely ignore them with a Left 4 Dead 2 marathon on Xbox Live? You're not the only one. Microsoft is bracing itself for a flood of online gameplay this weekend, including players trying catch up on all of the games they were too busy (baking cookies and wrapping presents) to play since November, as well as all the new folks who just unwrapped new games from under the tree. It's become a holiday tradition -- last year two years, the outage lasted for 11 days, from the weekend before Christmas to the end of the year, and spawned not only a free game, but a class action lawsuit to boot. Previously, the problem was compounded by most of the tech staff being offline with their families, but this year, we're sure Microsoft has both servers and staff on notice to solve problems the second a clatter happens to arise. And if not, maybe we'll get another free game. Hopefully one better than Undertow.
Is WoW's audience still increasing?
I'm not sure how much of this is legit, but stick with us for the information first, and then stay for the debunking. Edward Hunter over at Gamasutra decided to do some poking around in comScore's MediaMetrix application (which can track, based on a survey of a few million users, access to various applications on a computer -- which programs are run when), and he found something that surprised him: despite the economic downturn and the emergence of a few other popular MMOs recently, World of Warcraft's audience is estimated globally at 13.1 million. In other words, it's still growing from the last official numbers (11.5 million players worldwide) we heard.Now, the first issue we'd have with these numbers is the situation in China -- Hunter doesn't mention it at all, and in fact his graph (from comScore) doesn't have any dips at all in it, even though the game, and presumably its millions of players, went offline over there earlier this year. That right there throws a wrench into all of these estimations -- it's very likely comScore's information is just plain wrong.
WoW back online in China
The long wait is finally over -- World of Warcraft's servers are finally back online in China after they went offline all the way back at the beginning of June, due to a switch between former host The9 and current host NetEase. It took a while for the government to approve the move (and some have even suggested that the delay wasn't completely legit), but things are finally back to business as usual, according to a few sources out of China.A few more interesting facts have arisen with this news as well: apparently NetEase has spent over a million yuan (about $146,000) per day to keep up and maintain the game and its servers during the past month of closed beta and free play. Of course, that includes customer support and all the other costs. Even with that price, however, the company is still expected to grow. We haven't heard any population numbers worldwide for WoW since this whole deal began, but you have to think that they lost at least a few players due to all of the problems. Of course, the release of Wrath over there may bring back some players, but even though they were planning to have it out before all of this happened, the switchover has delayed it even further. All they need is more government approval, but as the outage proved, that can sometimes be hard to get.
EVE Online API sends apps offline
As many EVE Online players likely already know, Tranquility's server hamsters decided to take an unscheduled nap yesterday, causing the entirety of New Eden to grind to a screeching halt. While we're glad to note that the servers came up some time later without any major problems, the forums and API remained offline until this morning's regular maintenance at 7:00 AM Eastern. While the folks at CCP were able to get the forums back online and working without incident, they opted to leave the API offline today while they're trying to figure out what happened. Better safe than sorry, we think.For those of you who are occasional EVE Online players (are there really such beasts?) you'll notice the API shutdown in terms of changes not tracking properly in EVEmon, Capsuleer, or any other external programs that make calls to the API to pull your character information. The hope is that full functionality will be restored after tomorrow morning's regularly scheduled daily downtime. If not, might we suggest breaking out some chocolate covered espresso beans for the server hamsters?
PlayStation Network to go offline tomorrow, 8/18
The PlayStation Network will be undergoing a few hours of downtime tomorrow during what Sony calls "maintenance." The entire PSN will be down from noon EST to 2PM EST. Ignore that this is happening exactly at the same time as Sony's press conference tomorrow. While the PSN is down, PS3 and PSP owners will not be able to access the PlayStation Store or play games online.Wait, you're not ignoring the fact that this is happening during the press conference? Well, it's time for your conspiracy theories. See you in the comments section.[Thanks, falcon!]
WoW currently free to play in China, fate still being decided by government
The trials and tribulations continue for Chinese MMO players, WoW, and its new Chinese provider NetEase. IncGamers is reporting that the beta of the game is continuing - effectively making the game free to play for those lucky enough to be taking part - while the Chinese government decides if enough changes have been made, such as the removal of corpses, gore and other unpleasant parts of the MMO experience, for the game to get a Chinese relaunch.Since handing over the baton from from The9, things have not gone very well. After an extended hiatus which saw the game's servers offline while the data was transferred over, the game is still awaiting the final go-ahead from GAPP (the General Administration of Press and Publication). The beta was originally supposed to last around a week but because of the delay has been going on for nearly a month. However IncGamers is also reporting that according to NetEase, all the internal testing has been completed and once the GAPP are done, the game should launch pretty quickly.
