I personally think simple games work very well on the Blackberry platform. Business people will be too busy to get involved in a long winded game with levels and a plot to follow, and the average person who buys a Blackberry that is not tied to a business is buying it for the internet and messaging package. This is why games like Catapult and a slew of games I have reviewed before are rated well and games that require you to follow a plot or a storyline haven’t been as successful. Android and iOS can be seen as gaming platforms, but RIM hasn’t built many handsets capable of playing games on a large screen.

Catapult is a very simple game to play, but will take a while to actually master if you ever do. The object of the game is simple, place the rock in the huge catapult and fling it as far as you can. The further it goes, the more points you get. Using the 9860 with a touch screen you just drag the rock onto the catapult, fling it backwards and you get a gauge of how fast the rock will go. You can adjust the height of the throw as well. At the top left corner you have a meter for boost, this can be used once your rock has been thrown by dragging the rock upwards. The boost increases the height of the rock, but finishes off quickly. The rock has two objects it can hit in the sky, the bulls-eye and a star. The bulls-eye increases your points and the star can be later used to buy upgrades.

The rock can land on 3 different things when it falls, the first being the ground itself, the second is a sand pit that stops the rock dead in its tracks and the third is a spring that flings the rock forward and helps you score more points. The upgrade system consists of 6 categories or variables that you can upgrade: bounce, luck, spring, rubber, boost and score. The more stars you hit, the more points you get to upgrade with. You can adjust the upgrades however you like, taking points away from one thing to bolster another. Once you’re done playing you can submit your score, view high scores or trade in your upgrade points for score points if you’ve maxed everything out.

Catapult is a simple game that can become somewhat complicated if you want it to. If you want higher scores you have to use the upgrades but the game is good fun on its own regardless. Obviously there is no reason to play other than to get the highest score. The controls or handling is very good, the game responded nicely to my finger and there wasn’t any lag in the gameplay either. This game may not offer much in the way of a story, but it does offer a lot of entertainment without a purpose. Good, solid, basic gaming.

Speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes yesterday, the CEO of Rovio, more popularly known as the studio behind Angry Birds, talked about how they handle piracy. With over 500 million downloads and physical merchandise spreading all across the world, piracy is something that would naturally happen to this multi-billion dollar brand.

Unlike the music industry, though, who try to tackle users and pirates alike with legal action left and right, Rovio has a different outlook on the problem. “We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy,” said Mikael Hed, CEO at Rovio, in an interview.

Apart from pirated Angry Birds apps, Hed also mentioned that there are “tons and tons” of merchandise in Asian countries that’s not licensed by Rovio; clearly that is all revenue being lost. However, Hed says that “It would be futile to try to eradicate all the piracy through legal means – pursuing the pirates… We are doing that too, but mostly in cases when we feel the products that pirates are doing are harmful, either to the brand image or to the customers.”

Rovio sees their customers as fans, rather than users, as is the case with the music industry. ”If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow,” he said. And this is where piracy isn’t taken as a complete evil towards the business, but instead it is seen as a means to increase the fans of the Angry Birds brand. “Piracy may not be a bad thing; it can get us more business at the end of the day.”

I like simple games with simple controls and a simple purpose. I also like complex games but not necessarily on my mobile. I feel that I need a proper gaming system to maintain interest in a complex video game, something that I just don’t get on a cell phone. Saying that, I do have over a hundred apps on my BB, Android and iOS devices with many I haven’t even tried out yet.

Toss It! is one of those simple games that while being rather repetitive, can still keep you entertained for hours. The object of the game is to throw a specific object into its respective “goal” to score points. The number of “goals” you score in a row is your best score- miss one and you’re back to zero again and have to beat your best.

You get four levels/fields to play in, the first field of play is an office and the object is to throw crumpled up pieces of paper into a rubbish bin. The second field is beer pong, where you throw a small into a cup; the third is a Rugby/American Football goal post and the fourth is a basketball court. In all these levels or fields you have wind blowing from either the left or right at a specific speed so you have to throw the object at the right angle to get it into the goal. There are no achievements other than the best score which could throw people off after a while.

The game itself was very simple to follow and master. I found the beer pong and basketball levels to be the hardest as the balls had to go into a hole not that much larger than the balls themselves. Meanwhile the paper and football levels were much easier and the football level especially got rather tedious. I also found that the game isn’t always accurate with the wind levels indicating one thing while the ball would act like it either had the opposite or no wind affecting it.

It’s too bad that the game doesn’t allow you choose from an assortment of objects which could have made things more interesting and increased the game’s life. Otherwise the game was a good way to waste your free time but I don’t see myself playing this in the long run. You can get the game for free or purchase it for $1.50; the only difference I saw was that the free game had advertisements. The ads weren’t distracting nor did they affect the gameplay. Overall it’s a fun game if only for a little while before the boredom sets in.

Over the weekend, world renowned security firm Symantec unveiled in a blog post that they have discovered 13 apps on the official Android Marketplace which contain a backdoor Trojan.

Android.Counterclank is a new botnet Trojan which basically allows a backdoor open to allow hackers to carry out specific commands on the Android handset, in addition to stealing private data.

“For each of these malicious applications, the malicious code has been grafted on to the main application in a package called “apperhand”. When the package is executed, a service with the same name may be seen running on a compromised device. Another sign of an infection is the presence of the Search icon above on the home screen.”

Going through the stats of the below listed applications, the number of infected handsets is well over a million, at least.

While most of iApps7 apps have been taken down, the rest of the apps, as of posting this article, are sadly still online.

This once again brings into question Google’s policy on security regarding Marketplace apps and how easily malicious apps can infect thousands of people before they’re pulled down.

One of the best features of Windows Phone, apart from the wonderful user interface, have been the exclusive Xbox Live titles available to them. Although yes, some SonyEricsson phones do have a PlayStation certification which enables them to play PS titles, they remain limited to the Xperia range. Lately an interview with Forbes magazine has indicated that this all might soon begin to change, and we might actually see Xbox titles becoming available on Android/iOS. According to the interview by the Microsoft spokesman,

While the Xbox Live experiences and games always work best on the Windows platform, we understand that some Xbox fans may be using other types of devices. To satisfy that need, we are working to extend a few of our Xbox experiences and titles to other platforms.

Although its too early to say, it does seem like Microsoft is thinking of giving up that exclusivity to Xbox titles which Windows Phone users enjoy. Is such a move wise in the long run? Only time will tell. As of today there are already two titles available for iOS, XBOX Live and Kinectimals, both of which are said to be quite popular.

At Microsoft’s BUILD conference in California in September last year the company showed off Windows 8 and gave us a lot of information about what the next generation of its operating system will be like. Even though Windows 7 has been a big sales success, concerns about slow uptake, especially in businesses, have popped up from time to time.

In the latest worldwide figures from StatCounter about desktop operating systems, Windows 7 has the lead over Windows XP, a situation that it has just recently acquired (in October 2011). That means an OS released in October 2009 has just passed an OS released in 2001. Surely that can’t be a very comforting situation for Redmond.

Add to that, that Windows XP is still the number one OS in large markets around the world, including China, and we suspect that this is a headache that Steve Ballmer is making his teams work hard at – how to get users to switch to Windows 8 faster than they did to Windows 7. It certainly doesn’t help that research company Gartner has said it expects the uptake of Windows 8 will be slower than that of Windows 7.

The developer preview version of Windows 8 that was introduced at BUILD last year has, by all accounts, been well received. Undoubtedly we still have lots to find out about Microsoft’s plans for the OS, even after CES last week.

So how will Windows 8 be received once it is officially introduced?

Obviously we don’t know, but one key issue, I think, will be how well Windows 8 runs on existing hardware. Microsoft’s Vice President of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, said last year, “everything that runs on Windows 7 runs on Windows 8.” For Microsoft’s sake, I hope that’s true even though I fully expect the latest 2012 hardware will run the new OS better than computers from 2011 or earlier.

One other thing I think will be important is the integration between touch and traditional interface. Windows 8 will just be “one operating system,” for both tablets and computers; that much has Microsoft said. For example, on a computer with a touchscreen, you can use the Metro interface for touch, and what looks like Windows 7 with keyboard and mouse. How well apps, information and other types of integration works between the two modes will be important for usability.

I am actually very excited about seeing what Microsoft comes up with for Windows 8 and how it develops over the coming months. Hopefully, after the public beta has been in circulation a while, Redmond will announce a launch date. Then we can start preparing for what is set to be another big Microsoft Windows launch.

Photo by BUILDWindows.

Ever wanted to work as a valet and get to drive all those fancy cars customers leave for you to park? Yes? Well this app doesn’t let you drive them or park as much as it lets you figure out how to get your car out of a parking disaster.

The object of the game is very simple, you have a red car you need to get out of a parking lot and in its way are several other cars of varying shapes and sizes. You can move the other cars forward and back in order to sort out the puzzle and get your little red sports car out.  On screen you have the parking lot itself that you have to get out of and on the right there’s a control panel with various settings and options displayed. The settings include difficulty levels, number of puzzles and whether you want to undo, redo or reset the game as well as return to the main menu. There is also a meter with the number of moves you have taken so far to get the car out, the less moves you make, the higher your score is in the stats menu.

The game started out pretty easy but the puzzles became more difficult too quickly. In the beginning they were challenging and the obvious method of extracting the vehicle required a small amount of thinking and maneuvering. However it wasn’t long before the puzzles became complex and extracting that little red car became confusing and almost a bit frustrating.

I did like the game when I first played it but after it got too hard it was too discouraging to play. It’s certainly not the kind of game you would relax to but it does help exercise your problem solving skills and that’s what I liked about it. I did not like the progression of difficulty from average to very hard; there should have been a more gradual progression. Overall Aces Traffic Pack is a decent game despite its limited playability and leap of difficulty levels and worth a go especially since it’s free and challenging. Also you get to move a little sports car back and forth.

When Google launched the Sky Map app back in 2009, it was a good proof of concept demo to show how precise the GPS and internal gyroscope and proximity sensors are on first generation Android devices. As the global community of Android users has increased, and perhaps in part due to there not being a high profile app for charting the skies, Google has decided to make their Sky Map go open source.

“Today, we are delighted to announce that we are going to share Sky Map in a different way: we are donating Sky Map to the community. We are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in an exciting partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects. Sky Map’s development will now be driven by the students, with Google engineers remaining closely involved as advisors. Additionally, we have open-sourced the app so that other astronomy enthusiasts can take the code and augment it as they wish,” posted the Google team on their blog.

So good luck to all the budding astronomers out there, who have a knack for Android app development. Sky Map is a powerful platform to develop on for a full fledged augmented reality app to map out the sky. Better graphics, in-depth information on star clusters, galaxies and planets would be much welcomed on the existing, barebones app.

A report by BGR that came out on Tuesday fired speculation that RIM has been trying to woo various smartphone makers to take over their company, Samsung in particular.

“Jim is going hard after Samsung,” told a source to BGR, with knowledge of the negotiations. As news of these behind the scenes negotiations came to light, RIM’s share prices jumped more than 10%.

However, Samsung came out with a statement yesterday, telling Reuters that they haven’t even been approached by RIM for any takeover talks. ”We haven’t considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM),” Samsung spokesman James Chung said.

While Samsung has claimed that they are not interested in buying RIM as a whole, perhaps at the right price point (as share price of RIM tumbles further after this news of denial by Samsung), it is very much possible that Samsung may buy part of RIM’s patent portfolio.

WhatsApp, the extremely popular cross-device messaging platform that works on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone has become the target of a hoax. The two messages circulating amongst it’s various users are as follows:

WhatsApp is going to cost us money soon. The only way that it will stay free is if you are a frequent user i.e. you have at least 10 people you are chatting with. To become a frequent user send this message to 10 people who receive it (2 ticks) and your WhatsApp logo should turn Red to indicate a frequent user.

and

“Whatsapp is shutting down on 28th jan Message from Jim Balsamic (CEO of Whatsapp) we have had an over usage of user names on whatsapp Messenger. We are requesting all users to forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. Please DO NOT ignore this message or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill. We are also aware of the issue involving the pictures updates not showing. We are working diligently at fixing this problem and it will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation from the Whatsapp team”

WhatsApp posted a message on it’s official blog stating that these messages are a hoax and there is no truth to them. So if you’re a WhatsApp user and have received any of the above two messages, please do not forward it to everyone on your list. Simply chuck it.