GadgetNewsBlog

According to Engadget, Amazon has remotely wiped copies of George Orwell’s classics, 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles, refunding the purchase price of affected users.

We’re not yet certain, but users of the iPhone Kindle app are probably similarly effected.

It remains unlikely that Amazon broke into any houses, repossessed any copies of same, and left change on the bureau. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: We know Vimeo isn’t iPhone friendly. We wish it were. Help us all by writing your favorite video sites and content producers encouraging them to use iPhone friendly formats for videos about iPhones.

Cali Lewis tweets:

This iPhone 3GS Rig is on my wish list as soon as an iPhone or Touch does 720p

We bet Matt wants one. Us too.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Macro.org, from the developer behind Tumblr and Instapaper, has a post up highlighting the latest App Store controversy — that all web-embedded apps must be rated 17+ and now don’t get Promo Codes — and comes to this conclusion:

Apple thinks reviews can take 8-30 days and web-capable apps need nudity warnings and the management interface can be buggy as s**t and they don’t need us to be able to reach them and nobody really needs to take any of this very seriously. Because it’s working for them. They’re making a killing taking their 30% commission on the 1.5 billion copies of $0.99 top-25 games that they’ve sold. Who cares if the App Store discourages good developers from putting serious effort into it? Apple doesn’t need to care. And, clearly, they don’t.

The whole post is definitely worth reading, and brings to mind the classic riff — “any incompetence sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from malice”. Read the rest of this entry »

Ballz! Pro — If you’ve played a mobile game in the last 5 years, chances are you’ve played some variation of the match-3 puzzle popularized by games like Bejeweled. Easy and addicting, match-3 games are a dime a dozen in the App Store. Often, it’s the same game with different icons.

Purplezoo Productions has changed the same-old, same-old with their new game Ballz! Pro Version for iPhone and iPod touch. Ballz (the original) was a traditional match-3 with smiley icons.

While loosely based on the original, Ballz Pro is a whole new game all together. Ballz Pro adds extra challenge with locking squares, extra help from the exploding bonus ball, large Ballz, 3 shuffles to extend gameplay when you run out of moves, and a localized and worldwide scoreboard. The whole game is wrapped in a sportier new theme that features animated sports Ballz similar the grimacing blocks in Topple 2. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s bound to be plenty of you who have no real recollection of Pong in its original form, but for those of you who do, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is an iPhone app designed to let you relive the experience of the classic paddle and ball game.

Even with its clean adaptation to iPhone and touch, if you have no interest in retro games Ball & Bat Retro won’t impress you much. Even for someone who appreciates the classic games, revisiting some of them on a device that can do all that the iPhone can do is a bit like baking a freezer pizza in a convection oven. Nonetheless, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is a set of four games – tennis, football, squash, and squash practice – for your iPhone or touch that is pretty much as retro as it gets. Read the rest of this entry »