Kingdom Lores, 3D fantasy on the iPhone

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, Apple, Developer, iPhone

This one’s been poking around since last week, but we haven’t touched on it yet here on TUAW: Kingdom Lores is what looks to be a fully 3D, fantasy adventure game for the iPhone, and it looks hot. The game is being developed by Marco Giorgini, and uses a custom OpenGL rendering engine to let players do all the normal dungeon crawler stuff: kill monsters, run around, collect the loots, and generally be the fantasy hero. The game is available for download right now, though you do have to jailbreak the iPhone/iPod touch, and right now you’ve got to manually install the thing.

If you’re not courageous enough to try and install it yourself (raises hand), there are a few videos available to show off how it plays, and while it is very clearly an early alpha, it does look like fun. Unfortunately, the chances that we’ll see it in the App Store are about nil — Giorgini doesn’t even have a Mac, and he’s doing it all using the Win toolchain.

Surely someone can get this guy a MacBook and a developer kit, right? Or at least get a port rolling? A year from now, we’ll probably all be playing iPhone Spore and laughing at how primitive this looks, but right now, when it comes to running 3D on the iPhone, this is a dungeon we’d love to crawl.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Apple Reveals WWDC Plans; Keynote Set for Monday, June 9

iPhone leaves AT&T sitting pretty
The iPhone Central Depart of Statistical Analysis and Strategic Systems (yes, we do have SASS) brings you some more fascinating numbers, courtesy of Rubicon Consulting (the same firm that told us last month that iPhone users are young, rich, and technologically savvy). It seems that getting in the iPhone game…

Apple Cutting Deals For More Ringtones

According to the New York Times, multiple label executives have confirmed that Apple is looking to expand its iTunes ringtone collection by June—far more than they have in the past. Their interests include both downloadable song snippets and ringback tones (new ringers). But apparently, the labels feel that these ringtones should cost more over a hypothetical 3G iTunes Store than the current Wi-Fi option. Why do music labels feel that way? Oh, because they are a bunch of greedy dinosaurs who hate you, that’s why. [NYTimes]

Orange offers up iPhone for EMEA

Filed under: iPhone

In a short press release today, Orange announced it would bring the iPhone to “customers in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange’s African markets later this year.” The company offered no other details.

For some of these countries, it means that many carriers will be providing service for iPhone.

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Orange to grow iPhones in Europe, Middle East, and Africa
More fun with carriers! Orange, who already has an exclusive deal with Apple for providing the iPhone in France, has now announced that it’s made a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to other countries under their dominion. As of “later this year” (which we are awarding “most favored…

HouseFront
Search over 100 million homes in the US. Get estimated home values, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, Google satellite maps and more. Just enter an address and a Zip Code and tap “Get the Values” to see the results. http://www.housefront.com/widgets/iphone

WinPwn Out of Beta: PWN iPhones Now!
WinPwn, the Pwnage tool for Windows, has finally left beta and is now available for official release. WinPwn 1.0 claims to be much more stable than previous beta releases and includes many bug fixes and new features. WinPwn is an incredibly safe and powerful way of jailbreaking your iPhone. It can jailbreak any firmware and […]

Apple’s Top Designer Explains Design

John Mayer Cheats On Apple With Blackberry Bold

Rumor: Simultaneous iPhone 2.0 release for Korea, Japan

Filed under: Rumors, iPhone

3G iPhone rumors are like summer evening mosquitoes: very annoying but also impossible to ignore. Fortune is the most recent buzzing in our ears with a report that the next major iPhone release will include Korea and Japan at the same time.

Specifically, tech news coming from Korea suggests that Apple is in talks with NTT DoCoMo of Japan and Korea’s own Telecom Freetel. Both are big players in the 3G market in that part of the world. In fact, NTT DoCoMo is credited with having pioneered 3G mobile phone technology.

Both Korea and Japan are huge markets that Cupertino would certainly love to grab hold of. Of course, this will all be clear in just a few weeks. Most likely.

Now, where’s the insect repellent?

[Via MacDailyNews]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

This phone was made for talking (your contacts’ names)
I’ve heard a few people searching for a solution that would make the iPhone audibly speak the name of their contacts. So I thought I’d pass on this tip from a reader over at our sister site, Mac OS X Hints. While it’s not automated, it does offer a somewhat…

How to Better Erase an iPhone When Selling/Repairing

We knew that refurbished iPhones have their previous owner’s data on it, but how do you protect yourself when Apple won’t go through the trouble of wiping phones out before passing them on? By unsyncing everything, then loading it up with music and videos until the phone is full to overwrite the old data that was there. Does this work? We thought the contacts, calendars, SMS and phone calls were stored on the OS partition, not the media partition where videos and music files go.

If you’re sending in your iPhone for repairs at the Apple Store because it’s broken, you might not have the option of wiping your data like this. It’s not really THAT great a method either, but will be able to stop the next owner from casually recovering data. Basically, just run a restore and hope the next guy who has your phone isn’t nosy. [Securosis via TUAW]

AT&T making out like bandit on iPhone

Filed under: iPhone

Apparently AT&T is making out pretty well on this whole iPhone thing. According to a Rubicon Consulting study (NYT link, registration required) of 460 iPhone users about half (47%) switched to AT&T to get the iPhone and agreed to pay an average of $19 more per month to use the iPhone over their previous cell. Those numbers are just about right in my case from when I traded in my Treo on Sprint.

What about you guys? How many of you switched to get an iPhone and how much more are you paying per month than you were before?

[via iPhone Central]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments