HTC Touch HD
HTC Touch HD: multi-touched by the hand of Ballmer?

Pictures and video of a mysterious leaked handset running HTC’s TouchFlo 3D OS suggests Windows Mobile 6.5 will embrace multi-touch.

If Windows Mobile 6.5 does support multi-touch, it’ll put it back in the game against the iPhone and finger-friendly Android phones like the HTC Hero.

This news reaches us before any WinMo 6.5 screen has been repeatedly jabbed in anger as the initial launch isn’t due until October 1.

It had seemed that Microsoft were waiting for late 2010, and the scheduled release of the alleged back to the drawing-board re-write that will be Windows Mobile 7.
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Chillingo Ltd, Europe’s premier iPhone publisher and First Star Software, Inc. have announced today at the  Game Developers Conference  (GDC) in San Francisco that they have signed a worldwide deal to co-publish the iPhone and iPod Touch version of theoriginal game in the multi-million unit selling Boulder Dash series.

Boulder Dash for iPhone and iPod Touch contains all 80 caves (levels) of the original cult classic as well as the 4 original bonus caves.

Now celebrating its 25th year anniversary, this world-renowned tricky puzzle and dexterity game first made its debut in the early 80s across several personal computer platforms, including Atari,
Commodore 64 and DOS. It is one of the few gaming titles to be ported from a personal computer game to a coin-operated arcade game, four different times in fact, and still enjoys a large loyal fan base today. The hit game’s principle remains: players have to collect sparkling diamonds whilst avoiding numerous traps and enemies, all the while watching out for falling boulders, in a race against time.

“We are very honoured to be adding one of the classic brands in gaming history to our product catalogue. Working on the Boulder Dash franchise is an exciting challenge.” said Chris Byatte, Managing Director and co-Founder for Chillingo.

“We are looking forward to working with First Star Software to launching this great title on the iPhone”. Chillingo are the publishers of successful iPhone titles including the award winning Zen Bound that has won mutilple awards in the recent Independent Games Festival (IGF) Mobile 2009 and the International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA). Other No.1 Chart toppers include “iDracula – Undead Awakening” which recently raced up the App Store charts days after its release.

First Star Software’s president, Richard M. Spitalny said: “We are particularly excited about working with Chillingo in making Boulder Dash® available across all Apple App Stores worldwide. We have re-engineered Boulder Dash for iPhone and iPod Touch from the ground up to make use of multi-touch; ‘pinch’ zoom; the ability to switch  between portrait and landscape modes on the fly; and other features of the iPhone, whilst retaining the playability and spirit of the original game.”

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The iPhone and iPod Touch can become the dominant gaming platform because of constant connectivity and the App Store model, NGmoco founder Neil Young says.

In order to be successful at creating iPhone games, NGmoco founder Neil Young asked one question: What would Nintendo do? Speaking at a keynote at the Game Developers Conference on Monday, Young said many expected Sony (NYSE: SNE)’s PlayStation Portable to mop the floor with Nintendo’s DS because it had much better specs and strong multimedia capabilities, and was easier to port games to. But Nintendo was able to dominate the handheld gaming market because it emphasized the unique features of its hardware and designed games that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Young said developers should adopt a similar philosophy when making games for Apple’s smartphone and utilize things like the iPhone’s touch screen, accelerometer, location information, and connectivity to create a great gaming experience. “Don’t let the haters tell you it sucks compared to the DS or the PSP,” Young said of the iPhone as a gaming platform. “It doesn’t. It’s good. It’s clear that the quality of iPhone games is eclipsing its console counterparts, and that’s even more acute when you compare it against the prior generation.”

The iPhone 3G can become a better platform for mobile gaming than Sony or Nintendo because it’s always connected, users always carry it, and there aren’t many first-party games to compete with, Young said. When you include the iPod Touch, Apple’s 30 million users equals a larger installed base than the DS or PSP at the same point in their lifespan. But more importantly, Apple’s App Store has revolutionized distribution by creating a frictionless way for users to search for, buy, download, and install games over the air, Young said.

“It’s like having a Wal-Mart or Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) in your pocket,” Young said.

Since its debut last year, the App Store has seen more than 800 million apps, and there are more than 25,000 mobile programs in the catalog. The most popular category by far is games, as Young said it represents about 60% of the market. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the major game developers, as companies likeElectronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) and THQ have released high-profile games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The App Store represents a tremendous opportunity for game publishers of all sizes, but Young said this can also make it tough to get noticed among the crowd because there are about 165 new apps a day. He said companies need to focus on their “superpower,” or a distinguishing feature that makes their product stand out.

Additionally, gaming on the iPhone will lead to different life cycles and price points that developers need to get used to. For example, Young pointed to his company’s game “Rolando,” which is scheduled to release three iterations over 11 months with about 40 hours of game play for less than the price of a DS or PSP game. But this can still be profitable because the App Store distribution model strips away a lot of costs and because of the viral nature of the game.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Electronic Arts’ iPhone version of Scrabble now supports Facebook Connect, offering players the chance to compete against friends whether they’re sitting at a desk or standing on the bus. Announced Tuesday at Game Developers Conference, the update to the Scrabble app will integrate seamlessly with the game’s Facebook version. iPhone and iPod Touch users who have purchased the app will be able to create new games or join games with their Facebook-using friends.

Multi-platform gaming between PCs and perpetually-connected devices like the iPhone seems like a no-brainer, and a digital board game like Scrabble serves as a rather handy proof of concept. Here’s how it’ll work.

Fire up the Scrabble app on your iPhone, and you’ll be prompted to log in to Facebook. You’ll be able to track all of your Scrabble stats, as well as gather information on your friends. An icon will reveal whether opponents are playing on an iPhone or on a browser. You’ll also be able to chat with your opponent, in case you’d like to gloat or find out where they are.

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The Pre, Palm’s ridiculously slick new mobile phone, stole the show at CES this year. Good looks helped, but mainly it was the Pre’s iPhone-like touchscreen technology that wowed the industry crowd. Sure, the Pre has a built-in keyboard, but all anyone wanted to do was drag their fingers along the screen and make magic happen: pop windows open, scroll through sites, fling the contact list to the bottom of the display. The gestures were intuitive, fun, and basically copies of Apple’s.

Two weeks later, Apple COO Tim Cook expressed his irritation (without directly naming Palm) to analysts on a conference call: “We will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we’ll use whatever weapons we have at our disposal. I don’t know that I can be clearer than that.”

Them there are fighting words. Suddenly, Apple and other tech companies are preparing to slug it out over gestures that humans have been making since we developed opposable digits. Patents and patent applications by Apple, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and others describe moves in language you might hear at a thumb-wrestling match: the pinch, the de-pinch, the flick, the perpendicular-moving breach (aka the check mark). Gesture-based computing is about to go mainstream, and the battle to define how we navigate the digital world has begun. It’s going to be ugly—and potentially fatal to the movement.

Since the birth of the PC, companies sought a way to ditch the keyboard, a Moore’s-law-ignoring, design-constraining anachronism tethered to increasingly powerful machines. But early attempts at touch were buggy and clumsy (forcing users to, say, learn Palm’s Graffiti handwriting language or cope with input-challenged tablet PCs). So we stuck with keyboards and mice, control-X’ing, control-S’ing, and double-clicking away. Then came the Wii and the iPhone, and suddenly the gesture era was upon us.

Now that sensors are getting cheaper, touch and movement control are everywhere. Everyone has a killer gesture. The just-debuted Touch Pro2 mobile by HTC, for example, turns on its speaker when you flip the phone over and lay it down. Nokia is devising ways to trip functions simply by waving your hand in front of the screen. Although only 5 percent of phones have touchscreens today, that should increase to nearly 30 percent by 2013, according to research firm StrategyAnalytics.

In the PC market, where the search for growth is desperate, gesture-based computing is seen as a savior. HP considers it an entrée to the third world, where many languages don’t map well to a standard keyboard. The company’s India team recently finished a seven-city tour in which engineers, hoping to learn what to incorporate into devices, did nothing but watch how locals touch and gesture to one another. And Microsoft is making multitouch a vital part of Windows 7. Its researchers learned that when people deal with devices tactilely, they tend to anthropomorphize them—and that means more time spent on Microsoft products. “In a usability test, we noticed that folks were lingering,” says Ian LeGrow, Microsoft’s top Windows user-interface manager. “They wanted to keep interacting with the PCs after the tests were done.”

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LG shows off its new watch-shaped mobile video phone, which has a touch-screen dialling system, a camera and a speaker built-in to enable users to make video calls.
Photo: AFP

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December 30, 2008 – 9:46AM

South Korea’s LG Electronics has unveiled what it described as the world’s first watch-shaped mobile video phone.

The “3G watch phone” model has a touch-screen dialling system with a camera and a speaker built in to enable users to make video calls over a high speed internet connection, LG Electronic said in a statement.

It also recognises voices, transforms text to speech, has a Bluetooth function and plays MP3 music.

The product has a 3.63-centimetre screen and is 13.9 millimetres thick. It will be on display at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8 to 11.

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Now this is interesting when it comes to two smartphones with touchscreens, so we thought what the hell lets have a war and the war is “Nokia 5800 Xpress Music Vs Blackberry Storm 9500”.

Now we are not going into the full specs here because all we want to know is, who will win the touchscreen war, displays nowadays is what it all about and how responsive the User Interface (UI), now lets have a brief look into the smartphones then you can decide who the winner is.

Shall we start with the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, this handset has a 3.2-inch touchscreen with 640×360 pixel resolution, 16 million colors and 16:9 ratio which is pretty impressive, it uses the cool accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate plus has handwriting recognition and the user interface is pretty responsive indeed, so all in all pretty damn good.

Now we have the BlackBerry Storm 9500, now this smartphone has a 3.25-Inch TFT touchscreen, 65K colors/360 x 480 pixels and also has the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, this screen however has springs below the display which is the first in any phone; so pretty clever really. The Storm has an on-screen keyboard with SureType and Multi-tap technology, oh and not forgetting the light sensing screen.

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This multi-touch implementation, called ThinSight, can see other devices and respond to say, infrared, as well.

A computer screen that also acts as a two-handed touch interface and a crude infrared camera has been developed by researchers at Microsoft’s labs in the UK.

Users can operate the display with both hands, in a similar manner to the display in the film Minority Report. But this screen can also recognise particular hand gestures as well as objects placed within a centimetre of its surface.

“It can sense much more than fingers, and is essentially a low resolution scanner and camera,” says lead researcher Shahram Izadi. The screen can even communicate wirelessly with other devices nearby using the same infrared technology it uses to see.

The technology – dubbed ThinSight – was developed by adding an extra layer of electronics behind a normal laptop screen. This adds a couple of centimetres to the overall thickness, but completely transforms its abilities.

Here is the NewScientist.com interview with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. The video demo is below – a must see.

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