Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Elements Interactive B.V. releases version 2.10 of their multi-platform mobile game engine Edge. This new version adds support for more platforms including Symbian Series 80 (Nokia 9500), Symbian Series 90 (Nokia 7710) and Windows Mobile 5.0. Additionally it adds native support for the newest Visual C++ compiler, packaged with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Developers targetting Windows Desktop are able to use the Visual C++ 2005 Express edition to develop Win32 applications."

At $950 a year, it's a little expensive for the casual developer. However, it does offer a wide array of platforms for you to target your games at.

"Edge is the most powerful, true multi-platform game engine for mobile devices. The Edge platform, written from scratch in C++, enables you to produce high quality, commercial games. Compile and create multi-platform games smoothly through the generic interface for Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Symbian Series 60, Symbian UIQ and Windows Desktop."



Developers looking for another tool for game design might want to take a look at this. It's not cheap. The license is $950 for the first year!

"Shattering the mobile usability barrier, Action Engine Corporation, the mobile application platform leader, today announced it will offer its award-winning Action Engine Mobile Application Platform� software to the enterprise market through a collaboration with Microsoft Corporation. The solution will allow enterprises, such as universities, medical facilities and government agencies to offer an interconnected set of applications, running on Windows Mobile-based devices, to deliver customized content and information to students and employees who are on-the-go. ...The solution incorporates the Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft SharePoint Technology, SQL databases and the Action Engine Synchronization Engine. Using the Microsoft and Action Engine solution, customers can input data into any SharePoint or ODBC- compliant data store and present it to any wireless device application built using the Action Engine Mobile Application Platform."

"The Nuggets mobile search engine allows you to search the Internet from your mobile phone, including natural language search via SMS. As part of a new promotion, it is now available for free for a three-month trial period. The developer, Linguit GmbH, has made the service available for free for a three-month trial period extending from February to the end of April 2005 to encourage new users to try the service. No fees are changed beyond what phone operators may charge users for sending a text message to the service, while the service itself will be free."

This might be of interest to some of you. I don't know why one would want to pay for such a service as it is free from other sources. It is only available for O2, Orange, T-Mobile, and Vodafone providers at the present time according to the web site.

"Shattering the mobile usability barrier, Action Engine Corporation, the mobile application platform leader, today announced the Action Engine Challenge and free smartphone giveaways among several promotions to be offered at the 3GSM World Congress being held in Cannes, France from February 14-17, 2005. The no-risk promotions are intended to make it easier than ever for mobile device users to test drive the Action Engine Mobile Application Platform(tm) and its Brand-n-Go(tm) applications. "Action Engine makes bold claims regarding the highly intuitive, responsive, and personalized mobile applications running on our platform," said Scott G. Silk, president and CEO of Action Engine. "This show is our opportunity to prove our speed and ease of use to some of the world's most sophisticated mobile users.""



Action Engine is also giving away 20 Smartphones over the course of the 3GSM conference. You must be wearing an Action Engine sticker, and of course, be at the conference. :wink: Is anyone here planning to attend?

Microsoft has released a preview or beta version of their new search engine which is aimed directly at taking some steam out of Google's whistle. It's a scaled down interface, with-out the advertisements, and mobile device friendly. Or is it?

Engadget tested the new search using a Pocket PC, so I felt it was only right to test it out on my Smartphone. :D The search home page is pretty straight forward.



The results, however, are a little disappointing. My simple search returned 2 pages of 15 items. That's no big deal. The problem is that the result pages scroll horizontally. This is a big no-no for any mobile HTML page. I dislike it when it happens on my desktop, let alone my Smartphone. When the page loads, the screen is already off center, I have already scrolled the page left before taking this screen capture.



The search results seem fine. I'm disappointed that Microsoft failed to take the Smartphone into account when they built these pages. It is an early release, so there is an off chance that this will change, but I wouldn't count on it.

"Action Engine Corporation entered in a licensing agreement with Motorola. Under the terms of the agreement, Motorola will embed Action Engine's ADS platform on the Motorola MPx200 offered by Orange. Orange serves more than 40 million customers worldwide with international operations across 21 countries.

By pre-installing Action Engine's ADS platform on newly launched smart phones such as Motorola's MPx200, companies like Motorola can provide carriers with the ability to create and deliver a unique, custom-branded suite of data services and applications to mobile subscribers. Action Engine's ADS platform also includes a robust, carrier-grade set of over-the-air provisioning capabilities that allows operators to efficiently and cost-effectively update handsets with minimal impact to end-users."

I've seen Action Engine in...action before, and it was quite impressive. Unfortunately, I've never been with a mobile carrier that has implemented it, so I have no experience using it. If memory serves, when I saw it, the software ran using a type of Web services - a very tightly controlled user experience that was extremely bandwidth friendly. In the example I saw, a user was able to book a flight, a rental car, and a hotel. The technology seemed like a good solution to a common problem, but it required a very tight level of integration and I haven't seen Action Engine implemented very widely since that first demo. Let's hope that the Orange implementation lives up to the promise!

"Former Microsoft Corp. pointman Juha Christensen again popped into the limelight, this time as an appointment to the board of directors for wireless technology company Action Engine Corp.

�We are delighted to have someone of Juha�s caliber step into this role at Action Engine,� said Craig Eisler, the company�s chief executive officer and founder. �He has been instrumental in helping companies like Microsoft and Symbian achieve significant market success and is highly recognized across the wireless community for his contributions to the advancement of the mobile communications industry as a whole.�

Christensen recently left his post at Microsoft and said he plans to start a company focused on mobile Web services for smart phones. Christensen again discussed mobile Web services in comments about Action Engine."

Juha is sure busy post-Microsoft! The article above states he plans to start a new company, but what he actually did instead was go to work for Macromedia instead. ;-)

A few days ago I mentioned Cavics Engine 1.0 which comes with 4 games plus the promise free updates containing more games. Well, here's the first game that owners of the full version can download. There isn't much detail given about this game other than the name, Classic Caves, the fact that it contains 600 levels, and the screenshot above but it's worth checking out if you purchased the Cavics Engine.

Here's an interesting approach to selling Smartphone games... ChronoTech has created a generic engine for games that supports a number of essential features and they have created several games based on this engine. This approach is something that most game developers do - what makes ChronoTech different is that they are selling the engine rather than individual games. After you buy the engine, you get a free copy of every game they create based on it. Right now, they have four games:



"Cave Adventures - More powerful than boulderdash and supaplex.
Soko World - Sokoban style gameplay.
Yellow Man - You are a yellow man that must collect dots and avoid ghosts.
Sea Mines - Minesweeper variation."

The trial version lets you play 1 level of each game. The full version is $9.99 and has thousands of levels. Check it out! So that's less than $10 for 4 games - plus the promise of free updates containing more games in the future. Sounds like a good deal to me!