Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
Push email specialist emoze seems to be improving in all areas. Their free push service has just been extended to anyone with any POP3 account (i.e. no GMail or Exchange needed). And, unlike the GMail dedicated client, this one's native Symbian OS, so it's faster and leaner. Well worth checking out if you've been lusting after push email but didn't know how to get started.
Before you get too discouraged by Ewan's 'sharing' analysis(!), here's a nice (Flash) demonstration of what can be achieved by Ovi's Share (/Twango) - working on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, the slideshow is equivalent to a small book...
No matter how you break it down, having your application downloaded 100,000 times every day is a crazy number, and one worth shouting about. So that's what Opera have done. Opera Mini is the software getting the accolade (on top of last week's upgrade announcement), and the free browser with a proxy rendering client deserves it.
While most people have been getting excited about the pre-announcement of Opera Mobile 9.5, the hugely popular (and free) little sister, Opera Mini 4, has just had a big back-end (i.e. the bit that does the work) upgrade, which (among other changes, listed below) should improve browsing speed by (up to) another 20%.
Twango the media sharing / community site that Nokia acquired last year has now been Ovi-fied. Its been rebranded as Share on Ovi and has a new look and feel to go with the new name. There are also user experience improvements in navigating, sharing and searching for media on the site and a restructured back end to allow it to scale to millions of users. Read on for more.
So AAS forum member 'kflyer' emailed me a few days ago, "wondering whether viruses can really affect a current smartphone. I've read your view on this question, but AAS itself has adverts for AntiVirus clients!" As it's a long, long time since my last rail against the fraudulent anti-virus industry, I thought it high time for an update. Read on.
A video has appeared on YouTube offering a sneak preview from Motorola in regards to the Mobile World Congress. There are no specific details on devices, but the video does show various people lugging around a TV set and DVD player. Might this suggest another video focused phone from Moto, perhaps with an accomapnying video download or purchase service? Read on for more.
Always interesting to read good third party face-offs. Here, SMS Text News' Ben has been trialling both DataViz's RoadSync and Nokia's free Mail for Exchange for a staggering nine months. Here's his verdict, although personally the latter's price can't really be beaten(!)
