Windows Mobile gaming has really taken a step forward the last couple of months, and these two games really prove it. They are both made by a company called Color Stone Ltd, and they did a fantastic job. The games use OpenGL ES to accelerate their graphics and it really shows. The downside is that these games don’t run on all pocket pc’s but mostly on devices made after 2008. This does include devices such as Touch HD, Touch Pro 2, Touch Diamond 2, and probably the Diamond as well. The games look and play amazing on the beauty that is WVGA screens. Without further a due here are the games.
Flight Commander
Perhaps you have heard of an iPhone application called “Flight Control”. Well Color Stone Ltd basically copied it and it works well on Windows Mobile as well. Check the video of the original on the iPhone right here. The game is good fun and sadly there isn’t a trial version of the game available so you will have to pay 15 dollar for it. To bad, because it’s really a missed opportunity, trials help in making the decision to buy, and yeah it’s a shame but why is this game $1 on the iPhone and $15 on Windows Mobile? Something has to change if Windows Mobile is to gain more popularity. Find the game here: Flight Commander@handago
Tower Defense
Tower defense is like the above an OpenGL ES accelerated game and plays awesome on WVGA Windows Mobile devices. This is arguably the best tower defense game there is on the platform and if you are a fan you should get this without hesitation. This jewel of a WVGA game will have you spend hours and hours and before you know it your battery is dry. The game has 6 different towers and all can be upgraded. There are 3 difficulty modes available which gives a great replay value. you can find Tower Defense here
Be sure to check these games out, and hopefully there will be trial versions available soon. Be on the lookout for full reviews of these games soon. Oh and you can purchase them in most online PPC/Windows mobile shops, just google for it. Enjoy the gaming.
A fun Windows Phone game can be hard to find these days. But the one reviewed here today is a real gem, and best of all it’s completely free wvga game. Totem Star Lite is a simple but fun puzzle game for the Windows Mobile platform. Totem Star Lite does it’s thing perfectly on the WVGA resolution, and as an enthusiastic gamer who loves the new WVGA devices, and games that work on these phones I just had to do a review of this puzzle game.
Totem Star Lite is obtainable for free via the developer website – Touch Dimensions. Where you can find the game as a .cab file for your phone. The game in cab format can be either downloaded to your mobile phone or copied over via Windows with Bluetooth or Active Sync. This WVGA game requires that you have Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed on your Windows Mobile Smartphone device. You can get it by searching around in the search engines or the Microsoft site.
This WVGA Game that used to be known as “Dream Catcher Lite” but for unknown reason was renamed to Totem Star Lite. In this game you lead the destiny of your fellow tribesmen through the stars or so say the creators of this game. Totem Star is set in the Native American desert sunset. The goal of the game is to draw patterns around stars of similar shape or color. You can also make combination in as the authors say – ‘an infinite variety of patterns’ which in the real world will is quite finite. But there are plenty combinations possible and a lot to be found out in the game play.
Totem Star Lite does not have a steep learning curve at all, but you will soon discover that the game is much deeper as it seems to be from the beginning. The goal of the game is to make a lot of patterns from the stars that appear in the game area. The combinations can be found in the bottom right corner of the screen. Just below a totem pole that you have to fill up to have your fellow tribesmen build more buildings, which results into a new pattern and a higher score.
Sometimes a certain star color is not available and you can make combinations to force it to spawn and complete your goal. The combinations you can make in the game can be found on Touch Dimensions site that you can find through Google.
The game play is fun, and keeps you busy for quite some time. The background music is very relaxing and the entire atmosphere of the game is just great. These days finger friendly applications and games are really hot. But because of how the game is made it’s often better to use the stylus. The patterns you have to draw can be quite small and thus your finger can be in the way. The game plays fine with your finger as long as you are not that concerned about getting the best high score that day. In the options menu of the game you can view your current high score and switch between music/sound disabled or enabled. Other than that it’s just a great little WVGA game that works on all devices it was tested on, WQVGA and more. Be sure to try this gem of a game, which on top of it all is free.
This game was tested on the following devices: HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC Touch Diamond 2, Samsung i900 (Omnia), Samsung Omnia 2 and Samsung Omnia Pro. And will most likely work on the HTC Touch HD 2.
Enjoy the gaming!
The Android market is slowly become more of a mess because of the sheer amount of android applications uploaded to it every month. If you are browsing through the latest additions you often find a lot of junk and it’s often hard to even understand what this Android app you are looking at does. Though they these Android applications are free, they are often also just a complete waste of your time.
The real high quality applications that also happen to be free are hard to find in the Android Market, especially for new users (like the lucky HTC Hero Sprint owners for instance!). Because it’s hard to find and hard to understand what certain applications do we made a list of a few apps that you really don’t want to pass on. If you are looking for Android Games go here.
GDocs for google Android
If you are using an Android device I’m sure you also own a google mail account, if you don’t you are obviously missing out on the amazing google account integration of the Android operating system.
If you have a google account I’m sure you have seen, heard or toyed around with goole documents. Google documents allows you to store your documents online and edit them from everywhere around the world on your Android phone.
GDocs allows you to edit these documents from anywhere you are in the world while using your Android phone to do the editing. GDocs is an amazing piece of software and it’s great to touch your documents up, find some information or do anything else with your stored documents. Find out more about GDocs in the following location: http://sites.google.com/site/gdocsforandroid/
Palringo for Google Android
Many Android users out there love to use their device to chat with friends and or family. I’ll don’t go around the bush on this one, if you are looking for an instant messenger client for Android you have to get Palringo. Palringo makes the default IM client look like the first ICQ client ever released. Palringo supports nearly every messaging protocol that excists:
- Google Talk
- AIM
- Yahoo
- MSN
- ICQ
- iChat
- Jabber
- And many more but you will find out when you use this application
Because Palringo supports all these protocols it makes it the best Android application for IM by far. It’s just very convenient to have everyone in one package and always use the same application for a certain task. If you have Palringo open you receive system notifications if you get a message and because we used it often while traveling (lose 3G network quite often) we have noticed that it works great on the Edge and even GRPS networks. To find Palringo just search for it in the android market.
These 2 free applications for Android devices are just amazing, be sure to at the very least try them out!
Next to the great buzz going around the internet HTC also released a new Android hand set. The HTC Tattoo. Rumors and screenshots have been going around the web for some months now, but a couple of weeks ago HTC officially announced the Tattoo and it has landed in our hands (albeit it being for only one week).
The Tattoo looks great, it's a standard design phone and feels great in the hand (and pants!)
What it boils down to is that HTC Tattoo is the cheaper smartphone version of the HTC Hero. The hardware it sports is a little bit less impressive then it’s bigger brother. The biggest difference here is the screen type and screen size. More on that later.
Design
The design of the HTC Tattoo is great, it looks really basic but that just means that it’s sporting a proven design that has worked in the past and still holds true. The device has all the buttons we always see from HTC, search, home, menu, back a call and end button. Instead of a trackball this time they choose to install a 4 way navigation pad which works, but just really feels less ‘smooth’ then the HTC Hero/Dream and the HTC Magic. It works though, the interface is as snappy as the HTC Hero (and HTC Hero Sprint) with their current software upgrade. One thing we haven’t seen before though is the removable covers, HTC is really trying to get to the ‘general public’ with this affordable and personal looking device (well if you choose to find another cover for it).
The Screen
Ok now we get to the one thing that really makes this phone different and we guess cheaper then the other Android smartphones HTC has released thus far. The screen is only 2.8 inches diagonal and runs at a resolution of 320×240 (QVGA) where all the other Android phones released thus far have a resolution of 480×320 (HVGA). This is quite a drop in resolution also considering these days lots of smartphones have been coming out with WVGA screens, though not in the Android segment yet.
The screen is also of the resistive type instead of capacitive, meaning the screen is pressure sensitive and it’s not made of hard glass. The screen does seem quite responsive but not as responsive as the devices with capacitive touch screens. The screen does the job though, considering this is for HTC standards a budget phone.
The Hardware
The HTC Tattoo Smartphone is built around the same CPU as all their Android phones so far released (the Qualcomm MSM7225) and quite frankly does the job. But we are waiting for the first HTC Android cell phone that sports a Snapdragon CPU (HTC Dragon is rumored). Enough of the sidestepping now, the CPU does its job, and considering the Tattoo has a smaller resolution then its predecessors the UI should actually run smoother then the Hero, though as said before it’s smooth, and smooth is smooth.
The camera is 3.2 megapixels and it’s abit of a downgrade comparing it to the Hero but it makes decent pictures and it’s fine for using it for twitter/facebook and other social networking from your mobile device. The battery life is the same as any other android phone we tested so far from HTC, with heavy use you get a day, with smaller usage you get 2 days and that’s fine. There is nothing more to say without basicly just copying it from the other HTC Android set reviews, it seems to be a lot of the same thus far.
The Conclusion
The HTC Tattoo Smartphone is positioned as a low end Android device, and even though it has the same CPU speed as all its predecessors the device really is just that. Everything is a bit worse than the other Android phones out there. Lower resolution, less megapixels then the Hero(the other phone with HTC Sense UI). The resistive screen is a letdown, but other than that it’s a good device. Then again why not put down 150 dollars more for a HTC Hero (or a little more expensive contract)? We would certainly recommend it if you don’t have any problems with paying a little bit more.
Some time ago we wrote an article on some must have applications for the HTC Hero, of course there are many articles written about this in the past. But since android just got a lot more users in the form of the Sprint users getting a HTC Hero it’s time to find some great and currently popular games. The two games reviewed below are two of the best, and are currently on the top of the download list in the Android market. Thousands and thousands are enjoying these games, and I’m sure you will too.
Android Game: Robo Defense Free
Robo defense is a standard tower defense games. There is a home screen where you can find achievements and rewards game. You gain points by defeating opponents and levels. In the free version you can choose your difficulty (basic level). As you start the game you get instructions how to use the game. Then you get a map where you can place your robots/turrets. On the screen you see the points you have accumulated on this round and your ‘health’ which basically is means how many hits your structure can take before the foes run from one side to the other side of the screen. So the goal is to make sure these enemies don’t pass and destroy you. There is different kinds of weapons some do area of effect damage and some just do straight up damage to one foe. The game is really the most awesome tower defense game you can find on Android. Feel free to try the free version and if you enjoy tower defense games I’m sure you will spend the $2.99 on it.
Android Game: Colorix
Colorix is a puzzle game which right of the bat looks amazing. It’s a tetris kind of game instead of different shapes you get these balls that fall down the screen and you have to make certain combinations that are explained before you start the first level. The interaction with the game is dealt with in two ways. You swipe up or down to change the order of the marbles and to move them left or right you swipe to the left or right. So the game play is really simple, and let’s face it – that is what mobile gaming is all about. Gaming on mobile devices is all about the simple puzzle games that are easy to control, these games are always the best in gameplay and value. Every try a 3D shooter? Haven’t been much fun for us at least. In this category Colorix is one of the best games out there. You can puzzle your heart out for ours and ours. And the game will only set you back $2.99.
Hopefully if you are a new HTC Hero Sprint owner you have all ready tried or bought these amazing games. If not be sure to try these games out, and keep on gaming!
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