Recently in Mobile Category

I frequently find myself writing about the mobile and web interface of Playyoo, and other services and products. But the fact is, Playyoo's mobile interface is a web site, styled for mobile phones, and Playyoo's "web site" can, at least in principle, be accessed using a mobile device powerful enough to support it.

The distinction, clearly, is not in the technology, but in the type of user activity we're trying to support in each case. The mobile interface is strongly tuned to deliver the right content quickly, and to bypass conventional search mechanisms. The "web" interface is designed to support a more engaged. more complex set of activities, and in many ways is the auxiliary interface in Playyoo (as opposed to, say, mobile Facebook or mobile Flickr, which, whilst useful, are essentially heavily watered down token efforts).

The term "mobile" can equally well describe the user's situation as well as the target device. But "web" is far less specific, and implicitly it means "the user is sitting in front of a computer with a large screen and a broadband connection". And more and more this is going to become a very shaky assumption.

So what's the opposite of "mobile" ?

We're starting to see some really good quality games coming into Playyoo. There was some concern, both inside and outside the team, that we would be overwhelmed by trivial games made with the Game Creator, but actually, we're seeing both some pretty imaginative stuff coming out of the Game Creator, and some really good games coming from Flash Lite developers.

Today's "Pick of the Day", Orang Bunian, by Faisal Arbain, is just one of many examples.

Now we have to ramp up the site's features to do justice to the quality of the user generated content...

According to Mark Doherty, Adobe’s Developer Evangelist in EMEA for mobile, the latest mega-device from LG, the Viewty, can run Flash Lite 2.1 content

This phone looks like both a geek magnet and a fashion victim must-have, and in my opinion makes the iPhone look a bit...old.

I can't afford one, and anyway, I'm a incurable Sony Ericsson fanboy, but if had some spare cash around it would be far more likely to end up boosting LG's bottom line than Apple's.

Technorati Tags:
mobile, Flash Lite, LG

Well, by the time you read this, the Playyoo Game Creator Beta will be open to all comers (or I'll be giving away confidential secrets). All you need to do to try it out is sign up. No strings attached (well, apart from the fact that we might end up giving you $10,000)

In no time at all, you can actually start making your own games. So far, we've got 6 different types for you to use as starting points. "Revenge" is our take on the classic "whack a mole", and I've immediately confirmed my status as a hopeless geek by choosing a target so obvious, so old, that I should be ashamed of myself...

Whack A Bill. Note the humourous blue screen of death

A slightly more creative undertaking, and one I'm a little more proud of, is a memory game made up of images of Iceland, and which reveals an Icelandic flag when you solve it. We've got a few tricks up our sleeve for this one...

But for me, the piece-de-resistance (that's French for" pretty tricky to implement") is Line Lander, a cross between the famous Line Rider and the venerable Lunar Lander. Build your own planet and land your own spacecraft on it, fiddling with the laws of physics along the way (oh yes I can, Scotty):

Unfortunately, we haven't yet solved the challenge of making me any good at actually playing the things...

Well, it is a Beta.

We've been going through quite a lot of phones whilst developing and testing Playyoo. Personally I've had my hands on the Nokia N73 (s'okay, I suppose), the Sony Ericsson W810i (not bad but small screen), the Nokia N95 (a loose collection of partially debugged applications rattling around in a box designed by a large committee), and now the Sony Ericsson W910i.

The W910i is, without a doubt, the nicest phone I've ever used. It is small, slim, but has a huge screen and fantastic build quality. The software is well integrated, and whilst it adds new features, none of these will prevent a long term Sony Ericsson user finding the stuff they already know about immediately. It has an excellent slider keypad and the usual top level Sony Ericsson ergonomics.

It makes my personal K810i look very old.

For anybody who appreciates good industrial design, it is a real treat. I just demands to be picked up and played with.

I haven't even used the music features yet, or even read the manual. But I have used the built in Flash Lite 2.0 player extensively, testing Playyoo prototype games...

I'm still hopeless at Lunar Lander, but I'm getting pretty good at snake. Hopefully when we go live in a few weeks, somebody will use our authoring tools to build a lunar lander that is actually easy enough for me.

But if anybody is looking for the perfect Flash Lite games phone, I'd say the Sony Ericsson W910i fits that description.