Ansca Mobile Accuses Partner PapayaMobile Of Copying Its Code

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More
Ansca Mobile, the Palo Alto-based mobile development company and makers of the popular Corona SDK, is accusing its partner PapayaMobile of ripping off parts of its SDK  for use in PapayaMobile’s Social Game Engine. According to Ansca Mobile COO David Rangel, his company recently discovered that Papaya’s engine is what he calls a “blatant copy” of some aspects of the Corona SDK.
In addition, says Rangel, some of PapayaMobile’s syntax and sample code is identical to Ansca’s, and the company is using graphic assets it took from the code on the PapayaMobile website.
The code PapayaMobile is being accused of copying is available here in the Corona SDK, a free download from the Ansca Mobile website.
You can also see that the image above the “Physics Demo” on this page of PapayaMobile’s website (as of the time of writing) is an image from Ansca’s sample code packages. It even has the Ansca logo.

If you were to download the sample code, you would see that it’s very similar to Ansca’s code, Rangel says. What this means, he explains, is that they “clearly based how their physics engine works very closely on ours.”
Ansca hasn’t yet settled on legal action, but Rangel says “we do think it’s egregious and is worth calling out.”
The situation is a strange one because Ansca and PapayaMobile announced an official partnership back in August which allowed PapayaMobile’s SDK to be integrated into Corona. This made it easier for mobile game developers to add social elements to their games.
Stranger still are the accusations that Ansca reached out to PapayaMobile to try and resolve the situation, but never heard back. PapayaMobile, meanwhile, claims to not have heard of these accusations until this morning, when we contacted them for comment.
As of right now, PapayaMobile doesn’t have an official comment on the situation. The company says it needs more time to research matter in order determine what’s really going on. They’ll let us know when they have more information.
Note: We’ll update this post with that info, when it becomes available.

Ansca empowers developers of all backgrounds to create graphically rich games and apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. With an award-winning team of software veterans and a proven track-record of shipping industry-standard mobile and desktop software, They are committed to creating innovative mobile products that allows everyone to unlock their imagination.
Learn more Android and iOS’s leading social gaming network, offering a full suite of social gaming features, diverse set of monetization tools, and the fastest 2D OpenGL Social Game Engine. Our products allow developers to maximize the return on investment of their games, while virally marketing to the 30+ million active Papayans to instantly increase user acquisition. All of PapayaMobile’s SDKs and Game Engine products are open and free to use, serving as a one-stop-shop for all game developer needs. Our...
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$300 Samsung Galaxy Note Will Hit AT&T On February 19

$300 Samsung Galaxy Note Will Hit AT&T On February 19

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More
Samsung isn’t the first company to break into the phablet space, but those of you waiting for a (more than) worthy successor to devices like the Dell Streak 5 won’t have much longer to wait. AT&T has just announced that their pocket-busting Galaxy Note will be hitting their sales channels on February 19, complete with a $300 price tag.
Most of the device’s details — 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display, LTE radio, and handwriting support thanks to the included S-Pen — were revealed or reiterated at this year’s CES, but now the question is whether or not people will take the plunge on a device that’s not quite a phone and not quite a tablet.
AT&T hasn’t exactly priced the Galaxy Note to move, but they’re not alone on that front. We’ve seen Verizon adopt the $300 price tag for most of their recent high-end smartphone releases, though AT&T has typically shied away from pricing their smartphones so steeply. They’re probably hoping that the novelty of a device that hovers somewhere between being phone and a tablet will be enticing enough to justify the price, but we’ll soon see how the public at large takes to Samsung’s fabulous phablet.
If you’re the type who likes getting things before everyone else (and really, who isn’t?), you may want to wake up bright and early on the February 5th. AT&T is pushing their pre-order process with the promise of a Galaxy Note in your hands a full two days before it makes its way to store shelves, and I can imagine more than few phablet fans using that 48-hour window to rub their new purchase in other people’s faces.

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LG Nitro HD Surpasses 1 Million Units Sold

LG Nitro HD Surpasses 1 Million Units Sold

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More
comScore recently ranked LG second in the world in terms of mobile OEM market share, and it would seem the good news keeps on coming for the smiley-face company. The Nitro HD, or Optimus LTE if you’re from outside of the States, has reportedly hit 1 million units sold.
It was first available in South Korea last year in October, and LG sold 600,000 units on its home turf. After venturing into new lands, including Japan, Canada, and the US of A, another 400,000 units were sold. According to my calculator, 600,000 plus 400,000 does indeed total 1 million units.
If you remember back to our review, we had mixed feelings with the Nitro HD. The 4.5-inch 720p display is downright gorgeous, and certain hardware features like HDMI out, LTE support, and that textured back panel are quite nice. Android 2.3 Gingerbread, however, tends to lag quite a bit on the Nitro.
Luckily, the phone is slated to receive ICS in the second quarter of this year and there are obviously plenty of people who are pleased with LG’s latest endeavor.
[via CNET]

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It’s About Time: HTC To Refocus Smartphone Efforts Around “Hero” Devices

It’s About Time: HTC To Refocus Smartphone Efforts Around “Hero” Devices

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More
HTC has gotten to be remarkably good at churning out phone after phone these days, but it’s gotten to feel like each new release is too little too soon. Thankfully, the godfather of Android hardware has come to its senses, as revealed by Mobile Today.
According to HTC UK head Phil Roberson, 2012 is going to be all about giving their customers “something special.” To that end, HTC plans to focus on a smaller number of “hero” smartphones and dial back their presence in the tablet market.
“We have to get back to focusing on what made us great – amazing hardware and a great customer experience,” Roberson said. “We ended 2011 with far more products than we started out with. We tried to do too much.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. HTC’s philosophy as of late seems to have been about continually chasing the bleeding edge by pushing out new hardware before its predecessors have gotten the chance to breathe. It’s refreshing to hear (err, read) that someone at HTC feels the same way, because the glut of options ultimately becomes a big problem for consumers.
Chris Ziegler at The Verge noted that the here in the States, T-Mobile’s high-end HTC Amaze 4G debuted only 120 days after the carrier’s previous flagship Android phone hit sales channels. It’s no secret that technological advances come at a blistering pace, but to push out a new flagship device in four months could easily come as a kick in the gut for customers who splurged on the previous model in an attempt to future-proof themselves a bit.
Being on the bleeding edge is great, except for when your customers are the ones who get hurt. HTC isn’t exactly alone when it comes to this sort of behavior — Samsung’s LTE-packing Skyrocket overshadowed their original Galaxy S II model, and Motorola’s Droid RAZR Maxx trades a few millimeters for some outstanding battery life while leaving original Droid RAZR owners lamenting their luck. Still, while Samsung’s market saturating plans are doing them well, Motorola has already announced their intention to trim down their smartphone offerings for 2012.
Meanwhile, the revelation of their tablet plans (or lack thereof) doesn’t come as a huge shock. The Taiwanese company released two actual tablets in 2011, with a handful of carrier-specific variants thrown in for good measure. Alas, the tablet market has become an ever tougher nut to crack, and while HTC won’t be abandoning it completely, they’ll be spending more time and resources on their main moneymaker: smartphones.
HTC has been on shakier financial ground than it’s used to recently, and at the time they cited “increased competition” in the mobile space as one of the reasons their most recent quarterly earnings ended their six-quarter growth streak. This new move is a drastic one, but it’s worth a shot considering that their once-solid approach doesn’t seem so solid anymore. With Mobile World Congress right around the corner it shouldn’t be long before we get a better glimpse at HTC’s new strategy, though whether it actually works is another story entirely.

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Sprint’s Epic 4G Touch Gets Stripped Of Carrier IQ

Sprint’s Epic 4G Touch Gets Stripped Of Carrier IQ

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More
Sprint has been spending the past few weeks quietly pumping out software updates that remove Carrier IQ from affected devices, and now it looks like Sprint’s flagship Android device (for now) will be able to run wild and free.
Thanks to an update that started making the rounds yesterday, Samsung’s Galaxy S II variant the Epic 4G Touch joins a handful of Sprint devices to get the Carrier IQ cleanup treatment.
Aside from giving Carrier IQ the boot (which Sprint refers to as a “security update”), the new build also includes updated modems and a fix for an issue involving multiple calendar alerts. The only other notable addition in the new update is support for the Commercial Mobile Alert System, which allows Sprint to push out critical public safety updates to customers in the event of an emergency.
While this release is the first official one that removes Carrier IQ from Sprint’s Galaxy S II, Samsung has been working on a clean build for some time now. To wit, a Carrier IQ-free software build for the Epic 4G Touch was leaked one day prior to Sprint’s announcement that they would discontinue use of the oft-maligned diagnostics tool.
If your Epic 4G Touch hasn’t yet been graced with the update, it’s only a matter of time — according to Sprint, the OTA rollout will should be complete within 10 days. Of course, if you’re really impatient, you could always load up a flashy new custom ROM and be done with Carrier IQ for good.

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Sony-Ericsson XPERIA Arc

Sony-Ericsson XPERIA Arc

GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900 / GSM 850Yes, Capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors- Scratch-resistant surface
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Multi-touch input method
- Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Timescape/Mediascape UI- Photocall
- 512 MB RAM
- microSD, up to 32GB, 8 GB included
- 1GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon- MP3, WAV ringtones
- 3.5 mm audio jack- Android OS, v2.3 (Gingerbread)
- HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
- Wi-Fi hotspot
- GPS with A-GPS support
- Digital compass
- Push email
- Instant MessagingBuiltin, 8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, touch focus, image stabilization, geo-tagging, face and smile detection, video (720p@30fps)Yes, via third-party application- HDMI port
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
- MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player
- MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV player
- TrackID music recognition
- NeoReader barcode scanner
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail,
- YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk
- Facebook andReviewer: Dave Date: 10 Dec 2011, 22:30 GMT
I'm also using this phone and it definitely does not have secondary camera,...if it has they're hiding it from me bloody well...also weird having video call as you need to have back of phone facing you so they can see you,yet because of this you can't see them unless you're infront of q mirror looking at your screen this way...Sony Ericsson ***ked up I think.

Reviewer: yadan Date: 09 Dec 2011, 21:28 GMT
I was so foolish for not checking out the Arc's scheduling functions before I bought it. Most users don't care too much about calendar functions, but scheduling clients is very important to me.
The Arc doesn't have a function for editing a single entry in a repeating series without changint the rest of the entries in that series. This is really a downer, since much cheaper and less sophisticated PDA's all provide this option. Sony Ericsson has confirmed that they have no update that corrects this deficiency, so if scheduling is vital to you, DON'T BUY THIS PHONE.

Reviewer: Arijit Date: 30 Oct 2011, 05:33 GMT
Good Operating System ; Best Color Resolution ; But One Problem carry that very phone--"No Secondary camera"........

Reviewer: Udayapakash K Date: 26 Sep 2011, 11:27 GMT
system slow and high radiation pls modification

Reviewer: mohammad Date: 11 Sep 2011, 07:30 GMT
that is the best smartphone with HD video and 850*480 resoulation and8.1 mp camera and arc body.


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Huawei brings the world's thinnest smartphone, just 6.68mm

Huawei brings the world's thinnest smartphone, just 6.68mm

Huawei just brought its biggest guns to CES 2012, and in the smartphone world a big gun is a thin smartphone. The Huawei Ascend P1 S is officially the world’s slimmest smartphone at the unbelievable 0.26-inches (6.68mm), easily beating the 7.1mm thick Motorola Droid Razr.

And if you ever thought there was a gap between Chinese phone makers and first tier companies like Samsung, you’d better rethink as the Ascend P1 S has cutting-edge hardware with TI’s OMAP 4460 dual-core chip with the Cortex-A9 based processor clocked at 1.5GHz and aided by SGX 540 graphics.

The Huawei Ascend P1 S has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 540 x 960 pixels and that resolution might be the only compromise. The handset is running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, so you’re not losing anything in terms of software.

On the back, the Ascend P1 S has an 8 megapixel backside-illuminated (BSI) camera allowing 1080p video recording, while up front there’s a 1.3 megapixel snapper. Huawei has managed to squeeze in an 1800mAh battery, and the usual set of connectivity options.

Additionally, Huawei is announcing the younger sibling model - the Huawei Ascend P1, which is almost identical, but has a slightly thicker 0.3-inch (7.69mm) body.

The two handsets are arriving in metallic black, ceramic white and cherry-blossom pink in Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America, Australia, the Middle East and China in the second quarter of 2012.

Source: phonearena

Vuzix SMART glasses bring Augmented Reality into focus at CES

Vuzix SMART glasses bring Augmented Reality into focus at CES

 

 

Vuzix Corporation came to CES 2012 armed with a video eyewear technology that, as they put it in the press release, "breaks the boundaries of conventional optics and display solutions". SMART Glasses Technology is based on integrated HD display engines and waveguide optics, as opposed to refractive and/or reflective optics used so far. What does that actually mean and is this technology really going to make Head Mounted Displays lose their association with bulkiness and strange looks? Read on for a report straight from the CES 2012 floor.

The wares proudly displayed in Las Vegas crown years of internal R&D work coupled with a recent licensing deal with Nokia. The SMART Glasses Technology relies on a compact HD display engine churning out images with brightness and contrast good enough for outdoor use. The output passes through a 1.4 mm thick plastic waveguide lens and the resulting image is extended in 2D into the user's eyes.

Since the projected images are merged with the real world information, you can safely watch a movie on the go without bumping into things. But the company sees the technology as much more than just wearable TV. The glasses are meant to work in unison with Internet connected mobile devices, which leaves the door wide open to augmented reality (AR) based applications.

Whatever AR magic the glasses are set to perform, the software will have a lot of hardware to rely upon. SMART Glasses, or at least some varieties of them, will be able to record and transmit everything that the user sees. They will also be capable of recognizing their environment and their position in the real word.

Throw in some integrated head tracking and options for multiple camera technologies that "broaden the users' sensory perception across a greatly expanded light spectrum" and you can see why, apart from the consumer markets, Vuzix is also eyeing the commercial and industrial markets. It's probably with the last two in mind that the company came up with some pretty interesting form factors, like that helmet mounted monocle for example. Consumers can rest assured, however, that all this cutting edge technology nicely fits into an ordinary pair of shades. Finally, making a fashion statement will cease to be a compulsory part of the deal.


Source: gizmag

Sony Xperia S coming this month

Sony Xperia S coming this month, sooner than expected

The Xperia S is the first handset to come out of Sony, who bought out the Ericsson part of Sony Ericsson couple of months ago.

And as such, the device has been highly anticipated since its announcement at CES 2012. UK users will be glad to find out that the Xperia S is scheduled to be released on January 30. Initially, it was believed that the handset will be ready for customers to buy no earlier than March 9.

Currently, the Xperia S can be found on pre-order at Play.com for £450, which also happens to be the cheapest offer around. Clove and Ebuyer also have the device on pre-order.

Of course, if you are more of a contract person, the Xperia S will be offered on subsidized offers from major UK carriers, too. ThreeUK and O2 are definitely on the list, but T-Mobile UK and Orange UK are expected to join in as well.

Source: gsmarena

the LG Nitro HD

As of yesterday, both the LG Nitro HD and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket in White are available through AT&T both online and in stores. The Nitro HD is the latest Android Gingerbread smartphone from LG and features a dual-core processor as well as a namesake 720p HD display. The white Galaxy S II Skyrocket, which also features a dual-core CPU and large 4.5-inch display, brings a new color option to a handset that has already been available a few weeks now. Both handsets support AT&T’s LTE network and both will set you back $249.99 after contracts and rebates. Head over to AT&T’s site now to learn more or make a purchase.

LG Nitro HD Specs
General
Form Factor:    Candybar slate 
AKA:    LG Optimus LTE 
Date Released (YYYY/MM/DD):    ? 
Size
Weight:    135g 
Dimensions:    132.9 x 67.9 x 10.4 mm 
Display
Resolution:    1280x720 
Size:    4.5 inches 
Type:    LCD IPS 
Camera
Video:    720p HD 
Flash:    LED 
Auto-focus:    Yes 
Megapixels:    8 megapixel front, 1.3 megapixel rear 
Connectivity
GPS:    Yes 
USB:    MicroUSB 
Bluetooth:    Bluetooth 3.0 
Wi-Fi:    Yes 
HDMI:    Yes 
Multimedia
Headset Jack:    3.5mm 
Radio:    ? 
Battery
Type:    1,830 mAh li-ion 
Hardware/OS
Operating System:    Android 2.3 
Internal Memory:    4GB 
External Memory:    microSD (up to 32GB) 
RAM:    1GB 
Processor:    1.5GHz dual-core

source :  LG Nitro HD