Filed under: iPod touch

I was first introduced to the wonders of the mobile Wi-Fi hotspot at Macworld earlier this year -- our own Mike Rose was carrying one around, and it was like magic. A Wi-Fi connection for up to five people anywhere you go? Yes please. I don't think the charges make it necessarily feasible for someone on a budget (say, a humble blogger like yours truly) to carry around every day, but it's certainly handy to have around, especially if you're traveling.

And now Sprint is apparently looking to piggyback one of these devices on Apple's iPod touch. Macrumors reports on new filings to the FCC that show a device that's almost a case; it's designed to be attached to the back of Apple's handheld, providing local Wi-Fi service anywhere you happen to be. It's called The Peel, and it doesn't connect to the iPod touch at all except physically -- it's just a case that wraps around and sets up a Wi-Fi spot whenever it's hooked up.

It's worth nothing that this isn't the first time Sprint has tried to pair up their 4G service with an Apple device -- you might remember the iPad 4G case that came out a while back. Makes a lot of sense -- Apple's devices need a connection, and Sprint has a much better chance of making you get one if you've already got a device to use it with. We'll keep an eye out for an official release of The Peel.

As promised, RPGnet has transformed another Reiner Knizia card game into an iPhone/iPad app. The coders' last such project was the very well done Money. This time around, it's High Society [US$2.99], and RPGnet has kept the interface and look of the games almost exactly the same but swapped the bidding, set-collecting gameplay from Money with the bidding, card-collecting gameplay from the High Society tabletop game. Like with the first app, High Society is smooth and intuitive, allowing you to easily wrap your head around the new challenges and strategy. While they appear similar, the two games are quite different – as different as two light, auction-based card games can be.

The High Society card game was originally released in 1995, and it has since been published in a variety of editions. The RPGnet app takes its art from the latest physical version, currently in print from Gryphon Games (there's even a code in the app for a 10 percent discount off the card game, which almost covers the price of the app). Keep reading to find out if that discount is something you'll be interested in.

There are rumors about the next iPod touch getting a front-facing camera with support for FaceTime. Once it gets an A4 processor and some more RAM, we can't see why it wouldn't.

Since there's no phone app, however, how will users initiate FaceTime calls from an iPod touch? According to Boy Genius Report (BGR), the FaceTime app will look for a registered email address.

Paraphrasing an anonymous source, BGR claims that users will register their Apple IDs (typically a MobileMe email address) on a given device. That way, iPod touch owners can initiate a FaceTime call via this registered address. Push notifications will inform you of an incoming FaceTime call.

It's still unclear how an iPod touch will initiate a call with an iPhone, as that currently requires the iPhone's phone number. BGR speculates that the registered email address method will be carried over to all devices. iPods are typically refreshed in September, so we'll see if anything about this surfaces before then.

[Via Engadget]

Firefox Home is now available for iOS. Although not a full-featured web browser in its own right, the app is probably as close as we're going to get to running Firefox on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Firefox Home is a strange app, so first let's look at what it is. According to the description at Mozilla's page, "Firefox Home provides access to your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and open tabs on your iPhone." So virtually all Firefox data on your Mac or PC transfers to the cloud and gets synced to Firefox Home... at least after you download and install the Firefox Sync add-on, restart Firefox, set up a Firefox Sync account, then enter your Firefox Sync username, password, and secret phrase into Firefox Home on your iPhone/iPod touch. It's not terribly complicated, but anyone used to the one-click simplicity of syncing Safari on the Mac with Safari in iOS may well wonder whether all of this will be worth the bother.

That's a good question once you look at what Firefox Home isn't. Click the "Read More" link to find out.

People have been plugging their iPods into their cars almost since their introduction. I had a headphone-to-cassette adapter back in the day. How glorious!

Now, BMW has announced that their cars will take advantage of "iPod Out," a new feature of iOS 4. Essentially, it allows a very iPod-like UI to appear on the car's in-dash display, making navigation, playback, etc. instantly familiar to the iPod owner. No more learning the car manufacturer's UI vs. the iPod's. BMW's solution will also add support for genius playlists.

Now don't go rushing out to the dealer just yet. BMW expects to have this feature in all of their cars (Minis, too) by next year. Until then, we'll just have to make do.

At least I still have my cassette adapter.

A few years ago, the game company Wizkids – best known for collectible offerings like Mage Knight and HeroClix – took a stab at the everything-in-the-box game market with an offering called Tsuro: The Way of the Path. The game had decent graphics and a vague Asian theme but looked (and was) pretty simple. You have a pawn that moves as far as it can along the path that it's on. Each turn, you have to extend the path by playing a tile in front of your pawn, and get a little bit closer but hopefully not too close to crashing into another player or running off the board.

Tsuro got a lukewarm reception from the boardgame community, and Wizkids eventually stopped producing the game (but it will soon be picked up by Mayfair subsidy Kosmos) Now, a graphically-simple version of the game lives in the App Store, and it makes an easy and light filler even easier.

The app comes in two versions, one for the iPad called Pathology HD that costs US$2.99, and one for the iPhone/iPod touch that's just called Pathology and costs $1.99. Looks and gameplay are the same on both devices, and there's only a little bit lost when playing on the small screen. Still, even a game this graphically simple is much more engaging on the iPad's bigger screen. Read on to find out how "the Way of the Path" operates and why it takes the idea of a filler game to the extreme.

Any dice game review is required by law to compare the new game to Yahtzee (if we don't, we lose our right to ever roll a d6 again). So, let's get this out of the way early: the Roll Through The Ages app [$2.99], released last week, shares but three features with Yahtzee: it uses dice, you roll them three times (keeping the ones you like between throws) and you mark things off on a scorecard after each roll.

Instead of collecting simple numbers, in Roll Through The Ages, the goal is to quickly build up an ancient civilization from three small cities to, well, that's the challenge: do you go for more cities? Monuments? Developments? Goods? Or a little bit of everything?

RTtA (which is how the name appears when installed on your iDevice) faithfully implements the tabletop game, but it doesn't do so elegantly. Right now, the app is pretty much a trial-and-error mess with no tutorial or well-written rulebook explaining what it is you want to actually do in the game. Still, by using the limited in-app help menu and some online resources (the video pasted at the bottom of this review was quite helpful), we managed to struggle through.

Of course, anyone who's played the tabletop version of Roll Through The Ages should be able to adapt to the iPhone version in mere minutes. The app had better improve fast, thought, in order to attract people who aren't familiar with the dice version, lest it suffer the fate of getting lost in the never-ending barrage of good game apps. Thankfully, there's some precedent for board game apps that start weak and improve quickly. The Small World app didn't have a good way to learn the game at the beginning, either, but look at it now.

Read on to see if you want to give RTtA a chance now, wait for the improvements to come or pass altogether.

Yes, iPod touch owners, your long nightmare of paying $5 or $10 for operating system upgrades would appear to be over. The next version of the system formerly known as iPhone OS will be downloadable on June 21, and this time you'll get it absolutely free, just like the iPhone users.

Apple's quirky accounting for iPhone sales -- which the company cited as a reason it was able to offer free updates for those devices, but not for the all-the-profit-at-once iPod touch units -- has been left behind, so now the equal playing field includes all the iDevices. Enjoy your upgrade!

Did I say "all?" Sorry -- only the 2nd & 3rd generation iPod touch need apply. The new OS won't run on the first-gen devices.

Updated to include 2nd and 3rd generation devices.

The Apple sieve continues to leak as a new prototype shows up in Vietnam and promptly hits the web. This time, it's an iPod touch with a 2 megapixel camera. For now, only the iPhone and iPod nano have cameras.

Tinhte has the story once again (you'll remember they posted photo and video of a 4G iPhone). In the video above, the prototype is seen running a diagnostic utility, from which we can glean that it's got 64GB of storage, a 2 megapixel camera and a backside illuminated sensor built by Omnivision. It also behaves as expected when connected to a Mac. The "DVT-1" stamp on the back identifies this as a pre-production unit most likely produced for testing.

It was reported by the Associated Press last week that a pair of mobile phone vendors were responsible for the iPhone prototype leak, but it's unclear how this one found its way to Tinhte. What is clear is that Apple's security isn't what it used to be.

You'll find a gallery of images at Engadget.

Keltis is a relatively new marquee family of board games – in Europe, at least – with a somewhat meandering history. The series started as the Lost Cities card game, which evolved into the original board game in the series, Keltis. That game won the Spiel des Jahres, Germany's highest board game honor, in 2008. Since then, there have been two expansions: a card game version (different from the original Lost Cities card game) and, most recently, a new board game called Keltis Oracle. U.S. board gamers will most likely recognize the Keltis games in the similar Lost Cities: The Board Game. Are you wondering why the European version of the game made it into your iDevice? Because the developers in Tribeflame are based in Finland.

In any case, the universal app (US$4.99) that's now available on the iPad and iPhone (and iPod touch) is the latest Keltis game. Is it the greatest? To some, maybe. It's certainly the most player-friendly of the batch, and it looks good on the iPad screen. The game works, but as you can see in the galleries below, it's crowded when packed into the iPhone's 480 x 320 pixel screen. Read on to see what the Oracle can do for you.

Perhaps you've seen them, in Word Wars or another Scrabble movie; people who are a wee bit obsessive about their word games. For the iPhone-carrying among them, there is the official Scrabble app or Words With Friends. For people who like a little more variety in their word game apps, there are a hundred other options. Today, we look at one of the better ones, Bananagrams [$.99], which is quickly developing a fanatic player base similar to the Scrabble fans.

In bookstores, libraries, and cafes around the world, people are playing Bananagrams face to face. There is also an online version through Facebook. While Bananagrams shares a lot of gameplay with Scrabble, it's really much more similar to a less famous game called Pick Two!, which was released in 1993, and to the homebrew game of Speed Scrabble. Since Bananagrams hit it big a few years ago, Parker Brothers has responded with the Scrabble Apple, and the Bananagrams company also released Pairs in Pears. There was also an official Bananagrams tie-in book. As we said, there are a lot of word game freaks fans who like to build crosswords competitively. If you're interested in ways to play a quick game like this on the iPhone, read on to see what all the fuss is about.

We've covered quite a few board and card games in this ongoing series of iPhone / iPad app reviews, but I haven't been as excited about any of them as I was when I saw that there was not just one but two Skat apps available for the iDevices. Considering that Skat is my absolute favorite card game of all time (in second place: SWCCG, an entirely different beast), I knew I'd need to download them both (at US$4.99 each, sadly) and see if either one offered an experience that is in any way similar to playing against real humans. The answer: as much as a touch-screen interface can replace your friends, they do.

The first of the two apps is called Skat and its icon looks like this . The other is called ProSkat and has this icon . Skat's icon is much better-looking and does a better job of instantly identifying the app as Skat, but in almost every other aspect, ProSkat is the winner. Read on to see why both of these apps have their place and how they allow you to cleverly bid and take tricks in style on your iPhone.

The tile game Kachina came to the iPhone/iPod touch platform in waves. First, the app appeared as a single-player puzzle game using the Kachina rules. Then, an upgrade with in-app purchase allowed you to spend US$2.99 to get multiplayer functionality. Now, the Kachina app [$2.99] that you can find in the App Store is the full-featured version that includes both the puzzle and multiplayer modes. The developer, Gourami Games, has posted a mea culpa of sorts, saying:

The in-app upgrade has been removed and all copies are now enabled to play 2,3,4,5 player games. Now with an option to chose the computers difficulty level. Those of you that have made the in-app upgrade purchase, Thank you for your support, and we will make it up to you in a future update that will automatically detect the sale.

We like the idea behind the Kachina game, which uses Hopi spirit imagery and tests your math skills as you race for the high score, but this is a situation where too many serious bugs destroy what's really an elegant game. Read on to see what we mean.

Are you a developer trying to install 4.0 firmware on your 3rd gen iPod touch? You may run into install problems based on device eligibility. That means that Xcode or iTunes will complain that it cannot install the beta firmware onto your device and may tell you that you are attempting an ineligible install.



Whether using Xcode or iTunes, your iPod will be left in recovery mode -- and you might think you'll need to restore the device and wait for however many hours you'll need to re-sync all your music, videos and apps back ...

Good news: you can kick yourself out of recovery mode and back to your previous firmware install without doing that. Just use a tool like iRecovery. As I discussed in an older post on TUAW, you can use iRecovery to set your iPod to boot back into normal user mode.

Download iRecovery from iHackintosh. Run iRecovery from the command line and supply the -s flag. Wait for the "]" prompt, and do not type anything except a carriage return (press return, wait and repeat if nothing happens within 30 seconds) until you see that prompt appear. It helps to only have one iDevice attached to your OS X desktop.

Once you have the prompt, enter the following commands:

] setenv auto-boot true
] saveenv
] /exit

After exiting iRecovery, you return to the command line. Reboot your phone by pressing the home and sleep buttons for 10 seconds, per the instructions on the iHackintosh, and your iPhone should boot back to its previous firmwall install without re-entering recovery mode.