I got an email yesterday, from our friends at Astraware.  As you may recall, last year, they merged with Handmark to make a mobile development powerhouse.  Now, Astraware is starting to reap the benefits of that partnership, and it means some great news for customers…and a little bad news for longtime fans.

First, the good news.  Astraware’s website (www.astraware.com) has now adopted Handmark’s powerful database and checkout system.  That means a whole host of new features will be coming to their site, including:

• Shop By Device, so you’ll only see the games that are compatible with your phone;
• SMS message delivery so you can download your purchase direct from an SMS link;
• and additional payment options including direct operator billing.

Now for the bad news.  Astraware’s Club Astraware is going the way of the dodo.  Unfortunately, it is not compatible with the new system, and is going to be shut down.  So, if you have any remaining Club Astraware points, you had been work on using them all before October 1, when they will expire forever.  On the plus side, though, every current Club Astraware member will be receiving a discount code which will allow them to check out all of the fantastic software options at www.handmark.com, and get a sneak peek at all of the new e-commerce solutions which will be coming to Astraware.

The best news of all, of course, is that all of the great folks behind the Astraware games you have come to love are going to be staying with the company during these changes.  In facts, according to Howard and the Astraware team:

allowing us to concentrate on coming up with new concepts and making them fun is even easier now we won’t get distracted by having to run over to our poor old webserver every 10 minutes to fan it and bring it drinks. (And yes, we’ll be moving it somewhere nice – perhaps we’ll let it create and play sudoku puzzles in its long and happy retirement!)

So, sit back, and give yourself a moment to wistfully think about the last days of Club Astraware.  Then, get yourself ready for the next great brainstorm to come out of ASTRAsoft…I mean Astraware studios.

One of my favorite things to do is scour the internet for updates to my favorite programs.  I’m also constantly looking for new and interesting programs to try out.  For the past couple of weeks, you’ve been finding a compiled list of some of the new and updated programs for Windows Mobile that we find out about during the week.  Check out the list below and as always, please feel free to drop us a note in the comments section if there is an update that we have overlooked.  We’d love to help get the word out!

• G-Race (ageye) is a new program released this week that allows a means of complex timing, working as an elaborate stopwatch.
• G-Alarm (ageye) has been updated to version 2.2 this week, incorporating some stability fixes.
• GoNews Touch (SBSH Software) has been quietly updated to version 1.12, adding support for emailing of articles (something that was amiss in their previous version) as well as some fixes for bugs.  Here’s the changelog:

New: Email article feature in article view.

Fix: Article view D-Pad Left/Right does not work.

Fix: After deleting channels, overlap exists in channel display.

Fix: Crash when downloading and selecting categories.

Fix: Improve the Left/Right gesture capture in article view.

Fix: Rename label to folder in Google Reader syncing; support multi-folders.

Other minor bug fixes.

• SPB Traveler (SPB Software) has been updated to version 2.6.  Here’s the changelog:

Trip Assistant UI redesigned:

• Automatic next trip item loading
• Download from Web Companion and Tripit improved
• Optional adding appointments to calendar
• Multiple calendar appointments fixed
• Separated current/old trips in list

Asian languages support in Phrase Book implemented

Web Companion improved:

• Flight search tool
• Date/time format customization

Minor UI fixes

Yay, it’s the weekend, and just to brighten it up I thought I’d announce the contest winners!
The Magic Cats didn’t have to do much work this week, lazy things!

So here we go:

Ray

Geocacher1

Uzzia0

And Darkcorner, I have a feeling you may get to see the Magic Cats next week as I’ve a very special contest coming up!

Winners – watch for an email from me!

You know, I think I’m really liking Firemint’s style. You might have heard of one of their other games, Flight Control? Well, they’re also the makers of Real Racing, a premium $9.99 racing title for the iPhone. Now one of the first things that comes to mind when most iPhone users (myself included) see a $10 app — let alone a game — is: is it even worth it? I’ve bought a couple of apps and games at this price point and have been sorely disappointed. A $10 app in the App Store’s primarily $0.99 climate had better really bring home the bacon. Well, folks, I’m glad to report that Firemint is absolutely worth the price of admission, and it’s one of the most polished experiences you’ll find on the App Store to date. It’s also one hell of a racing game.

Working Your Way Up
There’s a lot of meat to real racing, but the basic skeletal structure is this: you enter a qualifying race and to try beat a certain track time — once you do so, you can participate in an event for one of the four car classes. There are 24 races in eight events, three difficulties for you to compete in, and cars for you to unlock as you win. If at any point you tire of just racing in career mode, you can participate in a quick race or time trial with the cars you’ve unlocked, you can play a local multiplayer match over wi-fi, or enter an online league. The leagues are a bit more complicated than a simple match, since some are timed events and you never actually see other players in-game. Instead, you complete against the lap times of other players as they complete them. You’ll usually have a little while to complete a race before your final score is due — which means you can repeat a race until you get the best score you possibly can — but on the higher levels of play I heard the timer can be as low as ten minutes per track. Considering the fact that I take about 4-5 mins to finish a race, this would give pros maybe three times to try for an optimal time before they submit their final score. There aren’t any prizes for kicking ass and chewing bubble gum (err, winning a race), but there is glory.

A Smooth Ride
But speaking of glory — haha, segue! — have you seen how glorious this game looks? Real Racing nails the sense of speed and the feeling of being behind the wheel. Your HUD will shift forward and back as you speed up, slow down, or collide with other cars. The only thing that isn’t well done is the vibration — you’ll feel the roughness of certain patches of road via the iPhone, but the device stays strangely still when you smash into another car at 120mph. Aside from that little hiccup, Real Racing is one of the more realistic racers on the iPhone so far. You don’t shift gears, but you’ll want to smartly brake and slow down around corners instead of trying to drift and ballerina dance around one Fast and Furious style — well, unless you like losing.

The steering is pretty much perfect in Real Racing, and Firemint has set up controls for most any gamer under the sun. You can touch to steer, touch to brake or accelerate, or just leave everything on automatic and focus on not steering yourself into the wall. There’s a great little feature in Real Racing to help you out while you get used to the controls: it’s called Brake Assist. Imagine sitting beside a very conservative driver who slams on the brakes for you every time you reach a corner, just enough so that you can concentrate on accelerating properly around the bend. That would be brake assist, and you can scale it up and down using a handy dandy slider. I liked it at first, but I turned it off as my driving got gradually less pathetic. Lastly, you can touch the top of the screen to glance at the rear-view mirror, or touch the top-right and toggle the in-dash view or a 3rd-person behind-the-car perspective.

Vroom and Vroom
Make no mistake: this must have been Firemint’s motto, since the game throws frames almost non-stop at you like a champ (tested on a 2G and 3GS). Once you get to some of the higher class races you might need to run a memory program like iStat to redeem some RAM points, but overall Real Racing runs very, very smoothly. Even when you’re in the menus, a lot of care has gone into the design of the UI so as not to take you out of the experience. There’s slick lobby music as you select your cars and all the beeps of a hi-tech sounding interface as you tap on buttons. Oh, and speaking of sound:
It’s also a pretty darn loud game. I lent my iPhone to a friend one time while I did some chores, and I could hear the roar of the engine from two rooms down when on max volume. Another great feature of the game is how seamlessly they provide access to the iPod library. When you pause the game you’ll see a music icon on the lower right — just tap this, set up your own playlist, and rock out.

Conclusion

So the question now is: should you buy Real Racing? Let me make this easy on you: if you like racing, the shapes of steering wheels, or the words “1st place” at all, then yeah, you should probably buy Real Racing. I said it at the start of this review, and I’ll say it again: its one of the few games on the App Store that really feels like it deserves the current “9.99″ feature price point. This is the kind of quality that consoles like the PSP and the DS struggle to achieve and with a control scheme that’s really unique to the iPhone, and when you look at it that way, Real Racing’s a steal. Really.

—

The App Store link to Firemint’s Real Racing ($9.99) is right here.

Sony announced that their eBook store and readers will support the ePub standard format by the end of the year.  This will enable Sony Readers to be able to use content from multiple sources.  As one of my fellow JAMMers commented, I can’t believe that, Sony, King of Proprietary Formats, is actually adopting a standard format.  I agree 100% with that!  It is definitely a step in the right direction.  Plus, for all Sony Reader owners, there will be updates so all can enjoy this broad format.  I think this pushes Sony one step closer to competing with Amazon.

That brings me to another point that would help Sony.  PARTNER WITH BORDERS!!!  A partnership and wireless is all that is holding Sony back.  My new Sony 505 arrived yesterday, and its a great little device.  I am not giving up on this point…

Via Mobile Tech Review