Tag: facetime
Why the Apple A4 is the iPod Touch’s Killer Feature
by Ranju Chaudhary on Sep.02, 2010, under Gadgets, Top Gadgets
As expected, a massive upgrade to the iPod touch was announced earlier today at Apple’s special event. Although the most outwardly impressive revisions come by way of front and rear facing cameras and the retina display, perhaps more significant was the announcement that the device would house the same chip capably powering the iPhone 4 and the iPad — the Apple A4.
The A4 mobile ARM processor is of particular importance when considering Apple’s mobile future. With today’s revelations that Apple has sold 275 million iPods and that 1.5 billion games and entertainment titles have been downloaded on the iPod touch alone, it’s not a stretch to see why Game Center was a cornerstone of the presentation.
While Nintendo and Sony have both been busy manufacturing dedicated mobile gaming platforms, Apple has seized control of over 50% of the worldwide mobile gaming market with multi-function devices like the iPod touch. Although Apple has the market share, the more dedicated game design houses have, for the most part, stayed, in the Nintendo and Sony camps. For Apple to maintain market dominance, it’s going to have to start catering to more serious gamers, and that’s exactly what Game Center is all about.
A cornerstone of the presentation was codename Project Sword. Developed by Chair Entertainment, makers of the Xbox Live hit Shadow Complex, Project Sword will utilize the Unreal 3 engine, making it undoubtedly CPU-intensive. Despite all of that, let’s not sell its surface features short.
The A4 might be the linchpin of the device, but Apple has historically pushed more units based on looks than outright performance. The addition of a front facing camera to the iPod touch will put FaceTime in the hands of millions of new users, which could be enough to tip the scales toward actual usefulness.
Android Devices Get Video Calling via Adobe
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jul.21, 2010, under Latest Web Technologies
A new Adobe AIR demo is making the rounds today; it shows how Android phones can be used for user-to-user video calls.
Built using an upcoming release of AIR 2.5, this app is theAndroid
and Adobe developer communities’ answer to FaceTime. The more generous in spirit would call this move “cheeky.” At any rate, it throws yet another log on the bonfire that is the Adobe-Apple public dialog.
The app was originally called “FlashTime,” but the name was changed to avoid some confusion.
Mark Doherty, Adobe’s Flash Platform Evangelist for mobile, said this isn’t an official release from Adobe; rather, it’s something he built over the course of three days to test the features of AIR 2.5 for Android. We’d love to show you his demo video here, but unfortunately, that clip is currently password-protected and not for public consumption.
Doherty doesn’t plan to release the app as a product, but he said he will open-source the code. He expects the code to be stable and finished by next week; interested parties should contact Doherty directly.
AIR and Flash for Android were announced first in February.
Android and Adobe as entities have been getting awfully chummy with one another ever since Apple declared war on Flash. With jingoistic barbs flying from all sides, it’s hard to have an unbiased, logical conversation uncolored by emotion when it comes to this subject. But without weighing in on one side or the other of the grander to-Flash-or-not-to-Flash debate, we can say that Android device users deserve the same ability to make video calls that iPhone 4 users now have, and we applaud the developers of any application that will help users have this ability.
One of the added bonuses of working on an open platform is that you can create apps like this and use the devices’ hardware in innovative, interesting and even “cheeky” ways without being blacklisted by the OS creator or device manufacturer. We can’t wait to see other Android video-calling apps in action.
What’s your opinion of this demo so far? Do you think more video-calling apps for Android phones will be coming up soon?
