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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Firemint to be Acquired by EA

All of your favorite titles such as Real Racing and Flight Control are about to be snatched up by EA as independent mobile studio Firemint will be acquired by the game giant within the next four weeks. EA announced this morning that they’ll likely close the deal soon, but aren’t yet releasing any financial details on the acquisition.

“The Firemint team is remarkable for its critical and commercial success,” said Barry Cottle, Executive Vice President and General Manger of EA Interactive. “Having them as part of EAi will accelerate our position as worldwide leader in game development for mobile devices and online gaming platforms.”

The agreement follows EA’s recent acquisition of Mobile Post Production Inc. (MPP), the worldwide leader in high quality cross-platform development and porting of games for smartphones.

Firement recently released Real Racing 2 HD for iPad, delivering a 1080p racing experience straight to your television set via the Digital AV Adapter. Whether the trend of great mobile apps from the Firemint team at EA or elsewhere is unknown, but we sure hope the same great group of game developers can continue to deliver top notch experiences to the iPad outside of EA’s usual slew of cookie-cutter titles.

[via EA]

iOS 4.3.3 Coming Within Two Weeks

According to BGR, Apple is looking to roll out an iOS 4.3.3 update within two weeks and “possibly sooner” which, as previously announced, will improve the way iPhones and iPad 3G models handle the location database file required to quickly fetch nearby antenna and WiFi hotspot information.

We’ve been sent the OS and while we haven’t loaded it on our iPhone just yet, here is what we have been told it will address:

- The update will no longer back up the location database to iTunes.

- The size of the location database will be reduced.

- The location database will be deleted entirely when Location Services are turned off.

The website also reports iOS 4.3.3 will address battery life issues and introduce iPod bug fixes. On March 21st, BGR reported iOS 4.3.1 would be released within “one or two weeks” and they made a similar prediction for iOS 4.3.2, which came out on April 14th. Apple announced in its Location Tracking Q&A that an update coming out in the “next few weeks” would fix several bugs related to location tracking. With BGR posting a screenshot of the final firmware file, it’s very likely that Apple will release the update later this week.

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,

- ceases backing up this cache, and

- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Update: as pointed out by one of our readers, the image above confirms build number of the new OS will be 8J2.

Kickstarter: Taposé - Bringing Microsoft Courier to the iPad

Remember Microsoft’s Courier booklet PC? It was an interactive tablet with dual-touchscreens and folded like a booklet that Microsoft abandoned about a year and a half ago. Well, Benjamin Monnig and Ricky Drake are taking the idea of the Courier to an iPad app simply called Taposé and have launched a Kickstarter project to help with funding.

Taposé brings Courier functionality to the iPad. The creativity, productivity, and attractive user interface merged into one outstanding product. The split interface design (similar to the Courier idea) allows users to interact with multiple apps simultaneously in one app - Taposé.

Kickstarter video and a “How It Evolved” video after the break.

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Apple, Location Services & The “Improved Traffic Service”

In Apple’s official response to the location tracking issue uncovered by security researchers last week, an interesting tidbit seems to confirm that the company is seriously committed to delivering improved mapping and navigation software to iPhone users by focusing on building a new “traffic service” to roll out publicly in the next couple of years. From the Q&A:

What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

The wording of the statement isn’t clear (some suggest “traffic” may be related to “internet traffic” according to specific locations), but let’s just play along and assume it’s linked to the turn-by-turn navigation software and new mapping features for iOS devices Apple has been rumored to be working on for a very long time. If “traffic” is related to navigation and mobile maps, there’s plenty room for speculation after today’s press release: in the past years, several job listings on Apple’s website hinted at open positions in the iOS team for map engineers and navigation experts, suggesting that Apple was working on its own proprietary solution to ditch Google Maps on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The acquisitions of mapping companies Placebase and Poly9 in 2009 and 2010, respectively, gave some credence to the reports that pointed at Apple willing to become the next major player in the mobile mapping scene. Read more