Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Coming To iPhone

Rockstar Games have announced that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, from Rockstar Leeds, is coming to iPhone Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars iPhoneand iPod Touch later this year. The award winning game is making it’s way from the Nintendo DS to the PSP platform and now the iPhone & iPod Touch.

“Chinatown Wars is a perfect match for the iPhone and iPod touch,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “We are very excited to bring this incredibly ambitious version of Liberty City, with this level of detail and immersive gameplay on Apple’s new gaming platforms.”

The game follows the story of Huang Lee, a young Triad who travels to Liberty City after the mysterious death of his father. Players will navigate their way through the streets as they uncover the truth behind an epic tale of crime and corruption within the Triad crime syndicate, delivering the unprecedented amount of depth that has become a true trademark of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

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Custom Home Screens Based Upon User Location

A recent patent filing made by Apple suggests that the iPhone could provide a customized home screen depending on the current user location.

Custom iPhone Home Screen

The filing was revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office this week. The filing was dated February 21st 2008 for “Transitional Data Set”, it describes an invention that would display specific applications populated based on dynamic factors such as location.

“The user can create a set of location-aware applications that can be populated by transitional data sets,” the filing reads. “A transitional data set is a data set that can change based on the current location of the mobile device… as determined by a positioning technology (e.g., GPS, cell tower triangulation, Wi-Fi).”

“If the user’s home is in New York, then the user may configure a “weather” widget to display the weather in New York as a default,” the filing reads, “and such default information can be persistent. If the user travels to San Francisco, the user can touch the “Here” button… and the “weather” widget will automatically display the weather for San Francisco… Thus each time the user travels to San Francisco, the location-aware mobile device… can automatically populate the “weather widget with transitional data associated with San Francisco.”

iPhone 3GS Capable Of HD (720p/1080i) Video

In April it was rumoured that the iPhone 3GS would be able to play 720p and 1080i HD video via the Apple AV Cables. Apple LogoWhen the device was finally released it was found that the video still played like its predecessors only supporting SD 2.5Mbps MPEG 4 or H264 video. But this turned out to a set limit by Apple, possibly to save the battery life of the device or to keep the old iPhone videos working on the new 3GS model.

A user of the Chinese website WeiPhone did a lot of testing with the iPhone 3GS and they discovered that it can in fact smoothly play HD video at 30Mbps at a 1080i (1980×1080) resolution. This was achieved by uploading various HD movies to the iPhone 3GS using the program FileAid and then running them via the iPhones built-in video player.

Playing back HD video on a iPhone is very useful on the small screen and the battery usage would drain a lot quicker. However is you used Apple’s Component AV Cables and it would be possible to run HD video from the iPhone.

Apple Patent Details File-Transfer in Call

iPhone File Transfer

Apple has a new patent titled “Auto Messaging to Currently Connected Caller.” This patent focuses around the idea of sending documents, emails, text messagess, files, etc. to the person who you are calling.

Quote:
While a user of a mobile device is using telephony services, the user may want to send a message or a file to another part . . . To send this information, the user may have to disconnect the call, and then perform a lookup of the caller’s contact information prior to being able to send the message or file. This multi-step process can be tedious for the user.

The data could be sent through various network types like GSM, GPRS, Edge, Wi-Fi, WiMax and Bluetooth. Apple’s interface would provide users with a way to access all the file sharing features while on call the system would be capable to directing the various types of data correctly all at once.

iPhone File Transfer 2

Apple is doing a lot of looking into file sharing technology for it mobiles. A similar patent that AppleInsider discovered in June details how an iPhone could share media like music, video, podcasts, images, voice mails with other iPhone users.

Numeric Battery On iPhone Killing Battery Life?

There has been many reports that enabling the numeric battery feature on the iPhone actually kills the battery life Apple Logoquicker. Some people have reportedly found a massive increase in battery life after turning off this simple feature. Especially those with jailbroken phones who use SBSettings to turn on the feature.

Some people oriignally thought the battery died quicker, but thought it was a psychological thing and that you thought it was as you could see the percentage go down. However I’ve now turned off the numeric battery for good and hope I get better battery life as currently it’s not lasting a whole day with light use.

Re-Appearing Mail From Yahoo! Mail?

I’ve been experiencing this problem a lot lately as every few days even after I’d deleted some email pushed to me from Yahoo LogoYahoo! Mail, it would re-appear a few days later saying it had been unread.

I’ve been trying to think of a cause of this, it could be that when I delete mail I don’t give it long enough for it to sync back with the server; but it runs as a background process so surly it can, right?

Or maybe it’s a problem with Yahoo! Mail, which it could be but I’ll be testing out some things to test it and see if I can work all this out as it’s not convenient finding 10’s of emails re-appear.

Re-Appearing Mail

Dev-Team Confirm No Need For New Jailbreak Tools For 3.0.1

The iPhone Dev-Team have confirmed that there is no need for them to release new tools for Jailbrakejailbreaking the latest firmware 3.0.1.

They released this information:

The 3.0.1 release is a “branch” from 3.0 that occurs (code-wise) before all the 3.1 betas. The programs redsn0w needs to change for the jailbreak are identical when you compare the 3.0 and 3.0.1 versions. It seems pretty much the only changes Apple made were for the SMS bug, which affects programs that redsn0w doesn’t touch. That’s why you can re-use redsn0w 0.8 on 3.0.1 even though it was written for 3.0.

And since 3.0.1 doesn’t touch the baseband either, ultrasn0w 0.9 works for those needing the soft unlock. Just install it from the repo666.ultrasn0w.com repository using Cydia as usual.

We’ll at some point fix redsn0w to recognize both 3.0 and 3.0.1 IPSW’s, but really that’s the only change that would be made to it. Everything else would be identical, so there’s no need to wait for the “proper” version that recognizes the 3.0.1 IPSW as valid.

So to jailbreak the new firmware just use the old tools and you should have no problems.

Apple Releases iPhone OS 3.0.1

Apple earlier today released the latest iPhone OS, version 3.0.1. This update fixes the major SMS security issue that theyiphone_os_3 have finally fixed.

There hasn’t been many changes in the latest firmware release that have been found other than the SMS fix, feel free to email them in if you find any.

If you want to jailbreak your device it has been reported that in most cases it works fine but maybe wait a while until everything gets checked out.

Apple Seeds iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 To Developers

Apple has released iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 (build 7C116a) and the iPhone SDK 3.1 Beta 3 (build 9M2808) to developers. So far there are no interesting developments that have been found, though it is suspected that Apple might be implementing tools for use in Augmented Reality applications that require the ability to overlay real-time downloaded data on top of live video.

iPhone OS & SDK 3.1 Beta

The new features include:
• Copy and paste videos. There is a 15 MB limit for copying/pasting videos or images.
• Tethering Counter – If you go to Settings -> Genral -> Usage on your iPhone, you’ll notice Tethering data which shows how much tethering you’ve used.
• Springboard Icons – When you hold down the Springboard icons they no longer vibrate.
• Baseband Updated – The baseband has been updated to 05.11.04.
• Camera API Additions.