Posimotion Helix gaming grip

Posimotion have overcome these fears with the $19.99 Helix gaming grip. This is basically a steering wheel style of holder allowing you to keep a good hold on your device and improves the tactile input whilst playing games. The design of the Helix is such that the iPhone can be installed in both portrait or landscape modes.

If you dont own an iPhone but have an iPod Touch then the Helix is for you too. Posimotion provide an adapter that mates with the Helix to provide a cradle to securely hold your iPod Touch as well.

I was able to try out the Helix when I visited the Posimotion offices in Florida. I found it easy to use, but not being an avid gamer I handed it over to the experts to show me how effective it really is. We have one in for review at the moment so more details will follow soon.

In the mean time the Helix gaming grip will be available from Best Buy and online from the Posimotion store for $19.99 plus taxes and shipping.

Posimotion Helix with iPod adapter

Posimotion Helix with iPod adapter

Posimotion Helix in portrait mode

Posimotion Helix in landscape mode

When I met Posimotion there was a special offer being promoted with the Helix: A free copy of their latest game Twisted Abyss. When I visited them the game was not quite complete, but was shaping up very nicely. Twisted Abyss is a 3D submarine shoot-em-up with the combat vessels modelled on aquatic creatures taking on their unique attributes in the game.

Twisted Abyss free with Posimotion Helix

Twisted Abyss free with Posimotion Helix

Twisted Abyss free with Posimotion Helix

Twisted Abyss free with Posimotion Helix

We will have more about Twisted Abyss very soon…

The Posimotion Helix gaming grip Press Release follows:

PosiMotion is pleased to announce that the Helix, a gaming accessory for the iPhone and iPod touch, is now available in Best Buy stores. It can be found in the Best Buy Mobile section, as well as bestbuy.com ($19.99USD).

Helix has a grip-enhancing soft touch that vastly improves gaming performance. Both extremely light and portable, Helix offers a sleek aesthetic and ergonomic design for enhanced playing comfort and control.

Features include:
• Compatible with iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPod touch 2G, 3G
• Devices fit securely in portrait and landscape orientation
• Comfortably wide handles for accurate steering control
• Sturdy, durable construction
• Simple wire management
• Ideal for racing, first person shooters, action RPG’s, flight simulators, side-scrollers… virtually any game.

Check out the new Helix video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew-IivonhQ

For more info about Helix, visit http://www.posimotion.com/helix

Posimotion Helix gaming grip.

The idea behind the Powermat system is one of simplicity – charge as many devices as you can using a single socket. For this to work you need to remove the main obstacles; those obstacles are generally in the form of custom, proprietary and generally different power adapters. What you have with the Powermat system is a charging mat that you place your device on and, well, it charges it – without the wires/adapters.

This site is called Wired4iPhone for a reason: we like iPhones. As such I will mainly concentrate on the iPhone Powermat solution and only briefly mention these ‘other devices’ that apparently exist. So, the obvious question is how do you charge your iPhone without connecting a lead? Well, basically you stick it in a Powermat case which has a direct connection into the “dock-connector” and a power receiver on the back. The case itself is sturdy, made out of a slightly rubberised plastic and adds around 3mm to the depth of the phone and about 6-8mm to the bottom where the dock connector fits into it. While it’s not overly bulky, the receiver does tend to cause an unsightly bulge in your pocket – perhaps if the case had been designed to blend into the receiver a bit more rather than sticking out so much then it may have ‘felt’ a bit better in your pocket. While in the case you can easily get to the power, and volume buttons but the silent switch is tricky to control though – it is easy to flick it away to put it into silent but, because of it’s proximity to the case, it is hard to actually pull back to turn silent mode off. The case also has openings at the base for the microphone and speaker.

So, your iPhone has it’s new jacket on so what next? Well, you need to charge it! This is beautifully simple – put it on the charging mat. Yes, that’s it – no fiddling with the lead, simply place it on one of the ‘dots’ on the mat. These ‘dots’ are magnetic so if you are very slightly off target it will pull it into place. You will also get a confirmatory noise and the white LED will glow (both the sound and lights can be turned off). This particular mat has 3 charge points but you will also be able to buy single point mats in the near future – these were on display at MWC but are not yet on the Powermat website. The Powermat will not overcharge your iPhone as it detects when it is fully charged and turns off the supply. I’m pretty sure it is all more technological that this but from an end-user point of view it’s all very simple!

Rather annoyingly the Powermat iPhone case does not use the standard iPhone sync lead, instead the case has a micro-USB connection (the lead is included). The case is actually quite tricky to remove so unless you have another micro-USB lead in the car then you will start to get fed up with the whole set up…

Another disadvantage is the likelihood that you are the only person you know with a Powermat set up. This means when you go away you either need to take the Powermat with you (a normal charger is way smaller) or remove the case (somewhat defeating the point). This is, however, a chicken and egg situation: as more people use Powermat, more charging points will be available, but without the availability of public or commonplace mats then fewer people might be inclined to use the system…

All is not lost though, at MWC the company were showing off their OEM kit along with a camcorder battery, smartphone battery and kettle all with Powermat built in. Once companies see the potential of such a system then it should be easier to get your device(s) charged.

As well as the iPhone case you can also get an add-on for a Nintendo DS, back plate for Blackberry, iPod dock and the Powercube. I managed to get a Powercube and iPod dock for this review.

The iPod dock is adjustable according to which model you have and does a good job of holding your ipod in place thanks to a rubber grip. Again, to charge you place the dock on the charge mat. The Powercube is for practically everything else. It contains a receiver, a mini-USB fly-lead and a box of adapters. The adapters fit onto the mini-USB and allow you to connect various phones and devices. It’s quite handy and they’ve even printed the adaptor type onto each one in case you get your Samsung mixed up with Sony Ericsson! This brings us back to the chicken and egg again, you have more adapters and leads than if you just took a single charger but then if more places had a Powermat available then it would actually give you less to carry.

Overall it’s a good system. The parts are well made and don’t feel cheap. Perhaps that is because they’re not cheap! The set up below costs a rather staggering £169.96 (Powermat £69.99, iPhone case £34.99, iPod dock £34.99, Powercube £29.99). Again, once something like this becomes more common place then the prices may drop – or at least I would hope so!

The whole thing works well but is let down somewhat by the lack of places, for example hotels, who offer a Powermat as a service. But then more people must embrace the technology before anything like that will happen. If they hurry up and market the replacement smart phone batteries they had on show, as well as pushing the OEM take up, then it could speed up the whole process.

Having played with the 3G version of OS4 for a few days there are a few new features that are quite small but are really useful.

Firstly the Spotlight Search has been extended to include messages (previously only mail was searched). Also, at the end of the results list are two quick links to search in Google and in Wikipedia. This opens up the relevant search page in Safari.

The next new feature is the integrated spell-check. Unrecognised words are underlined in red and then when you tap on the word you are given a few suggestions as to what word you intended writing. This, along with the good old spelling corrections, makes typing in the iPhone even more fulfilling.

Searching in Safari has also been improved. The Google/Yahoo! search bar now offers suggested searches just like when you use the normal Google/Yahoo! websites.

Maps has a new view mode so you now have the option of map, satellite, hybrid or list. List simply shows a list of the directions for your route or just shows your search result(s) in text form.

Whenever the GPS (or other ‘My Location’ services) are running you now get an arrow showing in the status bar. I can only assume that this has been added as am aid to multitasking so you an easily see if there’s an app running that’s using the GPS.

Sending messages has become friendlier for the cheap-skates among us (or those who tweet by SMS) with the new option of a ‘character count’. After writing 3 lines of a message a count appears above the send button saying, for example, 89/160. At the moment it will also simply say 254/160 but you have to work out for yourself how many messages that will take up! Remember though, this is still beta so it may well be improved upon.

App folders work really well and have been covered by various blogs across the web. Simply drag an app on top of another one to create a folder and then rename it and add/arrange further apps. You can fit up to 12 apps into a folder and can also place them in the dock thereby giving you quick access to 48 apps regardless of which home screen you are currently on.

The Camera app now has 5x digital zoom, for what it’s worth. Simply tap the screen and a slider will appear. It’s digital zoom though so not completely wonderful, but still, it’s something new so worth a mention!

And, finally, the unified inbox! This is great! Changes mailboxes was such a hassle but now from your inbox it’s a single tap to get to the list of accounts where you can either view a single mailbox or everything together. You can still view all the other folders (Trash, Sent etc) easily too. Another enhancement to the Mail app is threaded email. If you have multiple emails with the same subject / recipient then you can view these in a single thread. Mail will show the number of messages and a double arrow to signify this.

UPDATES:

The Calendar app has had a little update too – but it’s very useful. You can now select which calendars you want to display for example if you have a few Mobile Me calendars as well as a GMail calendar. Also added is a Birthdays calendar – the data for this is pulled from your contacts list and is not editable (i.e. you can’t add an alert for them).

Something I missed earlier with the updates to the Mail app is the new option to resize image attachments. When you press ‘send’ you are asked if you want to resize the image or use the original size.

Over the air Notes syncing has also been added. The Notes app now has an accounts button where you can choose which notes are shown in the list – this includes ‘all notes’, Mobile Me notes’, ‘gmail notes’ and ‘notes on the iPhone’.

In the Settings there are a couple of new additions too. You can now turn off all cellular data and not just 3G like you could previously. Also, once you have given an app permission to use your location then you can manually turn on/off that permission in the Location Services settings.

I mentioned earlier about the spell-check feature when inputting text. Something I missed was the option to ‘Replace’. When you select text you now get the option to Cut, Copy, Paste or Replace. Replace simply gives you a selection of a few similar looking words to change to. This would be useful when you accidentally select the wrong word via the spell-checker!

And, finally, for this update the iPod’s ‘On-The-Go Playlists’ have been removed! Before you reel in horror I should explain that they have been replaced with just good, old fashioned, playlists. Tap on ‘Add Playlist’, give it a title and then pick the songs you want to add.

If we find any further forgotten features we’ll make sure we post them here at Wired4iPhone.com

Powermat products are already available in the UK at John Lewis and Amazon among others) but some new products such as a single-device Powermat bundled with an iPhone case will be available in a wider range of high street stores.

We have secured one of these cases and a Powermat and will be reviewing the set up in the coming weeks.

So, what are the other options? Well, as Apple rightly advertise: ‘There’s an App for That’ although in this case there are 3 that do the job and are currently available in the UK AppStore. In alphabetical order we have: ‘Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album‘, ‘iAlbum Player‘ and ‘Quick Music‘.

Here follows a brief rundown of the pros and cons of each app.

iAlbumPlayer

I didn’t get off to a good start with this app. On first run it told me I had no music on my iPhone and that I should change some auto-skip settings. I couldn’t even FIND any settings but later realised it is one of those annoying apps that require you to close it to change any settings. Once closed you go to the main iPhone settings and scroll down to find the app. Here you can turn on/off ‘autoplay at launch’ and ‘auto-skip’. Auto-skip has two further settings to choose a minimum rating and a mysterious ‘track lacking’ (which I THINK is the minimum number of tracks in an album). Both these have an option of ‘never’ implying the app should play the album regardless of rating or number of tracks. However, even after setting both to ‘never’ the app still told me to change the auto-skip settings and that there were no music albums on my iPhone. Occasionally it would play an album and the screen did look nice and clear but by this point I’d given up with iAlbumPlayer. In theory I should be able to press the stack of CDs on the main screen and it plays me a random album but it’s too buggy for me to even bother. I’m impatient, and this app has now felt my wrath! A shame really, as this seems to have the nicest looking display once it decides to actually play something!

Album Mixer: Shuffle by Album

On launch you are faced with a big ‘shuffle albums’ button along with ‘filter’, ‘settings’ and some play controls. Good, the settings are easy to get to! Within the settings you can select how many albums you want the app to shuffle, set the app to shuffle on launch and also choose shake to shuffle. As I mainly use my iPhone in the car I always turn off shake to shuffle features as pot holes and speed bumps usually give undesired results…! For the purpose of this review I turned it on, shook my phone and, yes, it worked! In use it is as simple as pressing the big ‘shuffle albums’ button and a playlist of random albums is generated. It shows the album art on screen and, as the playlist is already generated, closing the app or putting your iPod/iPhone into standby means you can still listen to the albums in order. Back in the app you can shuffle the albums at any time, skip between tracks and also skip between albums.  You also have a ‘filter’ button that puts all your music genres and playlists into a single list. Selecting multiple items from this list will filter which albums will be chosen when you next shuffle. I like this app; it does what it was designed for with enough settings to fine tune your playlist too. The only downside, in my opinion, is the track names are illegible at the bottom and the artist and album title are quite small too.

Quick Music

This app isn’t specifically an album shuffler but it does have it as one of it’s advertised features.The main purpose of the app is to select music quickly. You can shuffle all your tracks; define your favourite artist and play only their tracks; define and play your favourite album; play tracks by a single random artist; and, the important one, play a random album. The settings are accessible from within the app and give you the option to start any of the play modes at startup (eg play favourite album at startup). You can also set your favourite artist and album here. Looking solely at the shuffle album feature here, it is slightly lacking. Yes, it will play a random album but as it only chooses a single album it means once the album finishes you need to open the app again to choose the next one. On a short journey this would be fine but on a long trip where you would normally listen to 4 or 5 albums it would get slightly frustrating having to continuously restart the app and/or press the ‘Play a random album’ button. When an album is playing the bulk of the screen is taken up by the play options and the artwork and track title seems squeezed in at the top. You can, however, put the iPhone into standby and view the full album artwork by viewing the lock screen though.

The purpose of reviewing these apps was to find a way to reinstate the Shuffle by Album feature that Apple disabled. As such, the clear winner is AlbumMixer: Shuffle by Album although the text size used in the app is miniscule, the actual album shuffle feature is very well implemented. Second place, and only because it isn’t actually specifically an album, shuffler, is Quick Music. Third place goes to iAlbumPlayer as it is too buggy to use.

Zombies is a turn-based game where your aim is to, rather unsurprisingly, kill the zombies. This is not, however, the usual gore-laden shooter commonly associated with zombie games but, rather, an amusing little gem that is so addictive in it’s simplicity. How many other zombie-based games have the lead character saying in their best British accent ‘oh dear’ when devoured by the living dead?!

It is, apparently, based on a daleks turn-based game and the aim is to destroy the zombies by making them collide. When they do collide they burst into flames with a groan. To keep things interesting there are ‘banish’ spells dotted about on some levels and also the ‘flee’ button. Banish spells destroy any zombies one ‘square’ away from you so it’s handy to pick them up and save them for some of the later levels. The flee button sends you to a random point on the screen accompanied by a python-esque ‘run away’ which does, sometimes, result in another ‘oh dear’ situation…

As you progress to the third set of levels you find yourself surrounded by a random number of zombies and banish spells. It keeps things interesting to say the least!

Zombies has a catchy theme tune as well as some amusing character voices but does lack some features. The ability to edit or remove players from the roster would be appreciated and I, personally, would like to see a level editor allowing you to create your own levels with, perhaps, the ability to share these with other users.

All in all for a (currently) 59p game it is fun and addictive – the randomly generated levels keep it fresh every time. Zombies is one of those games you can just pick up and play for 5 minutes while standing in the queue at Morrisons!

A good start and I’m looking forward to the updates!

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?

Now through a stinging attack on the unlocking community Geohot is calling for information warfare on all the sites and sellers (SCUM) who continue to sell his and the Dev Teams freeware Software to unsuspecting users.
This was started in his recent blog posted at http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ where he publicly refused the $10,000 reward offered for the development of the unlock on the ground of his own integrity. Good on you! He is calling on all to inform the public that they should never have to buy any unlocking software as it will always remain FREE from the Dev Team and Geohot, and the more people who know this the less of a market these scum will have. So read his article, and pass it on!

The release notes claim that 3.1.2:

• Resolves sporadic issues that may cause iPhone not to wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

The update is available from iTunes in the usual way!

The official feature list is as follows:

iPhone OS 3.1 Software Update

This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• Genius recommendations for Applications
• iTunes 9 support
- Genius Mixes
- Organize your apps directly in iTunes
- Improved syncing options for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and photos
- iTunes U content organization
• Redeem iTunes Gift cards, codes and certificates in the App Store
• Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
• Browse and download ringtones wirelessly from the iTunes Store*
• Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll
• Option to “Save as new clip” when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
• Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
• Paste phone numbers into the Keypad
• Option to use Home button to turn on Accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
• Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)
• Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
• Fixes issue that caused some app icons to display incorrectly