GigaOM

Ever since Apple put out its Software Developer Kit in March, game developers have been racing to create titles for the presumed market victor. But how much of a demand for them is there really? Based on the data from Cellufun, AOL’s designated mobile game portal since April, quite a lot. The company just told us that compared with other phone owners, iPhone gamers are generating four times the number of page views on Cellufun titles and double the time playing. (That’s an average of 21 minutes of game play and 65 page views per iPhone player session, compared to 11 minutes and 15 page views for sessions on other phones.) Pretty impressive, given Cellufun’s 5 million monthly uniques and 70 million page views. If the numbers are just as good for other game developers, expect to see the iPhone game catalog get a lot bigger soon.

Image credit: www.Cellufun.com

Google has released a Google Talk client for the iPhone that allows instant messaging as long as the application is open. I’d like to think of this as a nifty way around rising texting costs, but that’s unlikely, given how much time my phone spends in my pocket. If this type of mobile app takes off, it will raise a usability question for the high-end phone and MID apps developers. So much of our PC lives revolve around multiple applications staying open — and around the user focusing on the machine — but that isn’t how people use their mobile devices. So how do you build a phone that allows for multiple programs to be open, and how do you alert users to changes in the app’s status without going through carriers?

For a while there, covering the chip industry was like covering a race run by a rabbit and a cheetah. AMD was the rabbit, while Intel — with its much larger market cap and greater profits — was the cheetah. Evey now and then the rabbit would fool you into thinking he was going to pull ahead, but we all knew who was going to win. In the past few years, however, two things have brought more runners and more diversity to the course: a challenge to the x86 architecture, and the iPhone.

I could probably find a way to credit the iPhone for changing the furniture industry if I tried hard enough (it could be the new Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game for tech journalists.) But in this case the iPhone pushed the real Internet — as opposed to a carrier-defined portal — out to mobile consumers and showed them how compelling such access could be. That made clear to carriers that data usage, which was already on the rise, could become a huge revenue booster if consumers were given the right type of devices. Which prompted chip makers to see gold in the form of the 33.2 million high-end handsets sold around the world. Continue »

In a mobile world, the conversation opener is less likely to be, “How are you?” and more likely to be, “Where are you?” Since the goal of social networking technology seems to be to get us to speak less and look at screens more (all hail the mighty text ad), Nokia’s purchase of Plazes makes all the sense in the world. In fact by buying the social mapping service, the handset maker is merely continuing efforts that began with its $8.1 billion NavTeq acquisition, which should close soon.

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I played with the demo version of Samsung’s consumer-oriented iPhone killer in April and found it fun, but maybe a bit too much gadget crammed into too small of a space for me. It’ll be out on June 20 with a $200 price tag on the Sprint network, and today reviews appeared in a variety of places. David Pogue points out that the Instinct is long on features and short on polish when compared with the iPhone; Walt Mossberg agrees, saying the hardware is nice, but Apple’s software beats the Instinct’s hands down.

The lack of zing in the Instinct is a shame, and it shows how hardware and software can combine to create a novel design or a novelty design. The touch experience on the Instinct is a novelty design. It’s what Samsung calls a haptic touch screen, which means it vibrates when a user touches in a command. Pogue calls it gimmicky and he’s right, but I liked it anyhow. However, it’s hard to think of ways to integrate that vibration into features that push the Instinct to go beyond the constraints of a modern cell phone.

In contrast, the iPhone’s novel use of accelerometers and software give it the ability to orient itself (something the Instinct can’t do). That’s a feature that provides a similar Wow factor as haptic touch, but also can be used to change that way games are designed, turning the movement of the device into a type of joystick. That’s novel. Regardless of its novelty screen, people will buy the Instinct and it will certainly follow the iPhone in bringing touch as a user interface to the masses.