Smartphones

J'adore France and the French people. But I'm pretty disappointed with Musee du Louvre, a free but painfully brief virtual tour of the famous museum.

The app consists of four main sections. In Louvre: The Visit, you get a video tour of seven well-known areas of the museum, including The Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.

However, each "tour" lasts less than 20 seconds, and the default language is French. If you tap the screen to bring up the controls and then tap the language icon, you can select English (or German or Japanese), but there'… Read more

"Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that."

Those are the words I wrote on Friday to sum up a review of Flixster's movie app for BlackBerry phones. The trouble is, I goofed. I was apparently a day early, reviewing the previous Flixster for BlackBerry, which did deserve the critiques I dished out, and not the Flixster update that was set to release on Saturday (we still don't see it in the BlackBerry App World as of Sunday, but keep checking the store and this post for an update). A re-review--or rather, a … Read more

It's not like us to get too excited about an iPhone case, but this one shines--literally--because it's the very device I was wishing for last month while traveling in Europe.

Beamer, as the name connotes, is an iPhone case with a built-in LED light you can turn on to use as both a flashlight and a camera flash. Just the thing I needed when I wanted to shoot the Leaning Tower of Pisa at night with my iPhone, having left my real camera back at our hotel.

And it sure would have helped in Paris when we returned … Read more

Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.

We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.

The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry … Read more

One of the latest misconception to make its way around the blogspehere was that the Motorola Milestone features multitouch functionality whereas its Droid counterpart does not. As it turns out, Verizon's first Google Android smartphone does offer multitouch, just not in the same capacity. What's the difference and, more importantly, who made the decision to water down this feature for the Droid?

Made popular by the iPhone, pinching and pulling has become the preferred method for zooming in on a smart phone. While Verizon's Droid handset is built using the same Android 2.0 OS as the Milestone, users are left using a less-accurate double-tap.

The Milestone has multitouch built directly into the Android framework while the Droid relies on APIs that come with the 2.0 SDK. That means that it's up to app developers to implement the features.

For reasons unknown, however, Google hasn't integrated the capability into apps such as Google Maps. Though it could be added into future updates of select titles, the question remains: Who decided to leave basic multitouch off of Droid?

… Read more

It's been a few days since Opera unwrapped its latest beta browser for mobile phones, and we've had some more time to get acquainted. Opera Mobile 10 beta (download), which runs on certain Symbian Series 60 smartphones, adds some improvements to its password manager and has made a few tweaks under the hood. However, its most significant alterations are in its visual design. Bottom line: We like it, and we like how similar it is to Opera Mini 5 beta, a recent overhaul of the free Opera browser for Java phones.

There are some downsides with the version 10 beta browser that have cropped up--these go beyond the known issues and bugs. Opera's smartphone browser continues to struggle with accurately rendering complex pages. When zooming in on CNET Download.com on the Nokia N97, we saw text and graphics overlap. While Web sites often redirect to a URL optimized for mobile phones, we'd still like to see graphically rich pages rendered more faithfully in Opera Mobile on those that don't have specialized versions.

Its responsiveness was also an issue on the Nokia N97 test phone, but we suspect this has more to do with the device than with Opera. CNET reviewers dinged the Nokia N97 for its choice of an inconsistently responsive resistive touch screen instead of the capacitive touch screen that's found on the iPhone.

Even if you don't have a compatible Nokia, Samsung, or Sony Ericsson phone to test Opera Mobile 10 beta with yourself, you can watch our First Look video to see the new browser beta's features--its new tabs interface shines.… Read more

Welcome to today's episode of Recycling Old PC Games for Fun and Profit. Our first contestant: Doom Classic, the first-person shooter that spawned a thousand imitators, several hundred ports, and one horrendous movie.

Next up: Command & Conquer Red Alert, the real-time strategy classic responsible for a massive drop in global productivity.

In my youth I was a tremendous fan of both games, so it stands to reason that I'd welcome them to my iPhone. However, neither is getting a permanent home.

Let's start with Doom. While id Software's official port offers a pixel-perfect recreation, the game is 16 years old--and it shows.

Indeed, juxtaposed with Doom Resurrection, a made-for-iPhone game with 21st century graphics, Doom Classic looks positively ancient. It plays that way, too: You can't even jump.

Part of this is personal bias: I don't think FPS games work well on small screens, especially when touch controls are involved. For me, Doom Classic feels cramped, confined, and seriously out of date.… Read more

Consumer demand for smartphones seems to be unstoppable.

In the third quarter, vendors shipped a record 43.3 million devices, up 4.2 percent from last year's third quarter and up 3.2 percent from this year's second quarter, says a report released Thursday by market researcher IDC.

Among smartphone vendors, Nokia still enjoys the greatest market share, according to IDC, with a 37.9 percent slice for the third quarter.… Read more

It's been about a month since we got a peek at the first generation of the Slacker Radio streaming music app for the Android platform. We liked what we saw. On Thursday, other Android users can also cast their own vote about Slacker Radio 1.0 for Android by downloading it for free from the Market application on their Android smartphone.

Like Slacker Radio on other mobile platforms--and also similar to other streaming radio and music discovery apps like Pandora and Last.fm--the app lets you stream music from pre-programmed genres and stations, or from stations you set … Read more