The folks at Zumobi are well known for the widgetized apps they have developed, primarily for Windows Mobile.  So, I was pretty interested to find out what they had put together when I saw their name cropping up in the Palm Pre App Catalog.  What I found was Sporting News Pro Baseball.

If you are a fan of Major League Baseball, then this is going to be a fantastic app for you.  From one simple screen, you can find everything you need to know about all the latest in the world of baseball.  There is a live scoreboard on the right hand side, which will keep you up to date on every game across the league.  Of course, every fan of baseball has a favorite team, and you can easily select your favorites and have those scores scroll separately across the top of the main screen.  If you are a fantasy baseball player, you can setup your fantasy team to have those scores appear in this area as well.

Tap any game from the scoreboard to get more information about that game, including complete game stats and the game play-by-play. 

From the left hand side of the screen, you can access more detailed information, such as batting and pitching stats from around the league.  This will show you the league leaders in categories like: batting average, hits, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, ERA, strikeouts, WHIP, walks, wins-losses, saves, games started, and appearances.

From the main screen, you can also get the latest fantasy news and updates, league news, and even standings from each division. 

There are my Washington Nationals, still well over 10 games behind.

You can even focus in on a specific team, or one of your favorite teams to get all of the game specific stats and news. 

From here, you can even set your favorite team’s schedule to appear on your calendar, or even get in-game notifications, so you will always remain completely up to date. 

I was really impressed by this app.  It gives you a great deal of information, not quite everything a fanatic might want, but enough to keep fully informed on the sport.  Fantastic!  I am really looking forward to what Zumobi will bring for other sports like hockey and football.

Windows Mobile 6.5 is coming soon, but will it be enough of an improvement to salvage it’s share in mobile devices? According to Businessweek, with RIM and Apple quickly gaining users including converting Windows Mobile users over, Microsoft will have a difficult time to win back people to using its mobile platform.

Read More …

I may have said this before, but I am something of a comic book junkie.  Oh heck, I am like the comic book version of an alcoholic.  I walk past the comic book store, and the smell of the slightly oxidized paper and cheap ink just drags me off to a different place.  Before I know it, I have slipped into old habits and my wallet is $200 lighter.  So, in order to avoid any slips, I make sure to cross the street before I go anywhere near a comic book shop.

Despite this weakness, I have managed to remain current with some of my favorite comic book characters via the Internet, which is nice, but a bit less than mobile.  Heck, even paper and ink comics are easy to read on the train.  Computers on the other hand…so, wouldn’t it be nice if you could make comics more mobile. 

I mean, sure, some other folks have tried, but it never seemed to work out well on Windows Mobile and other platforms.  The strip always just faded into nothing in order to be viewable on the screen, or just required so much scrolling that it was impossible to read.  No one figured out a reasonable solution until now, so let’s go ahead and see if Comixology has found the better way.

In Comics, Comixology presents their comic books one panel at a time, using the entire screen to present all of the art work. 

What I really liked here was the ease with which you could switch between vertical and horizontal panels, simply by rotating the screen. 

The rest of the navigation is based on dividing the screen into thirds.  Tap the right portion to move ahead to the next panel, tap the left to go back, and tap the center for the settings and other options.  You can even use the iPhone pinch and grab gesture to zoom in or out on a panel.  Don’t worry if you cannot remember all of that, there is a great tutorial to help you out if you need a reminder.

Once I got the hang of the motions (which were really not all that complicated), I found this was a pretty good system.  It still did not come close to the experience of reading real paper and ink comics, but it was a close enough approximation that you can enjoy the storyline without sacrificing too much of the experience. 

Of course, nothing in this program is going to amount to a hill of beans without a good collection of titles to read.  I was disappointed not to find any of the mainstream titles or comic book publishers in the library of offerings.  Still, I was impressed by the growing list of titles available through this app.  Sure, some of them were duds, but there were also quite a few hidden gems in there, just waiting to be explored.

Comixology’s other claim to fame with this one, was offering one of the first apps to test the waters of apple’s new in-app purchasing model.  From within the Comics app, you can purchase and download individual comic titles.  Don’t worry, though, many titles offer at least one comic for free, so you can test them out.  And you will want to take advantage of this.  Like I said, there are some great comics in here, but there are also plenty of duds, and you will want to be able to tell the two apart before you start spending any money on things.

I found the purchasing experience to be pretty good.  It worked about as well as any purchase from the iTunes app store.  Just tap purchase, and away you go.  I did find, however, that downloads were a bit slow, often taking multiple attempts to get an entire file from the Internet.

Once you have downloaded comics, you can find them in the My Comics screen, ready to read.  You can organize them by:

• Just Downloaded
• Previously Views
• Downloading
• Title
• Creator
• Publisher
• Genre

This makes it extremely easy to draw connections between books.  If you find one you like, it is easy to find another in your library by the same creator or series.  And if you are like me and still crave that paper and ink copy, well, your iPhone can even point you in the direction of your nearest comic book shop.

I may never find anything which will compare to the experience of reading real paper and ink comics.  But the truth is that this is about as close as any program has come to approximating that experience.  I thought the controls were fantastic, and the app did a great job of making the comics accessible and readable.  I also liked the fact that it was easy to purchase comics (especially the myriad of free titles) although downloading was a bit of a chore.  Still, I think this app could be wildly successful with that cross genre uber-geek: the iPhone-using comic book fan, if only they could line up some of the mainstream titles or comic book publishers.  Give me a good superhero title, like Superman or X-Men.  Even better, use this as a platform to bring back some of the long dead titles of the 40’s and 50’s, before the book Seduction of the Innocent  changes things forever.  Now, that would be a real trick.

Newegg is selling a re-certified black Zune 4 for $49.00 plus free shipping!!!  That is $50 under the normal price.  I LOVE my Zune 4.  Its small, but packs a wonderful music punch.  Absolutely perfect for the gym!!!  Our very own JAMM bossman Doug did a flash player competition a few months back, and the Zune won his heart.  So, if you are not sure if you want to buy, read his thoughts.  If you need a player, this is a great choice at an awesome price!!!

Are you a competitive person?  Do you compete with close friends or family members?  Are you so competitive that if you got a high score in a video game that you would want to rub that in the face of share that wonderful accomplishment with someone you love?  If you answered yes to these questions, then you are the type of customer that Apple and Palm may have had in mind when they designed one of my favorite features on the iPhone OS and webOS, the built-in screenshot function.

My wife and I have had a “friendly” competition with Bejeweled on the iPhone.  She quickly beat my highest score and then I never had a chance…until our son was born.  I found that a game like Bejeweled is a great way to pass the time when you are feeding an infant with one arm, which really gets in the way of other games like Resident Evil 4 or Need for Speed Underground.  To make a long story short, I finally destroyed beat my wife’s high score in Bejeweled.  Now the problem was that she was not around for me to prove it and I know she wouldn’t believe me unless I showed her proof.

Enter the great screenshot feature that Apple built into their iPhone OS.  All you do is press the power/top button and at the same time hit the home button.  Your screen will flash for a second and whatever was on your screen will be saved to your iPhone.  All I had to do was send her a MMS attach the screenshot to an email to share this life-altering accomplishment with my wife.

Like Apple, Palm also built a screenshot function into the Pre.  Their solution requires holding down the Orange + Shift + P buttons.  While I find the iPhone method quicker and easier, I ultimately prefer the execution of the Palm screenshot function.  The iPhone puts the screenshots in your Camera Roll, which is also where all photos you take with the camera and any pictures you save from a third party app are stored.  The Pre saves the screenshots in a category called Screen captures and that is all that goes into that category.  The Pre also has more meaningful names since it will actually include the name of the program you took the screenshot of in the file name.  If that wasn’t enough, Palm also stores both a .JPG and .PNG version of the screenshot if you connect your Pre to a computer in Mass Storage Mode.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what keys to I use if I am using Windows Mobile…or S60…or Android…or a Blackberry?  The quick answer is, without installing third party software, you don’t.

Big props to Apple and Palm for including a feature that has been overlooked by many others over the years.  I know that I really appreciate the fact that I can easily take screenshots of any app that I am reviewing without having to fool with third party software.

Does anyone else regularly use the screenshot functions on your phones?  If so, what do you use the screenshot feature to do?