Way Cool: Sierra Adventure Games as iPad Web Apps

Classic point-and-click adventure games seem like a natural fit for tablets, and especially the iPad, but right now there aren’t many of them, besides The Secret of Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky and Myst.

Martin Kool, who runs the adventure gaming site Sarien.net, plans to change that, without Apple’s approval. TouchArcade’s Eli Hodapp reports that Kool will bring classic Sierra point-and-clicks like Space Quest to the iPad, using HTML and CSS. You’ll be able to add the games as icons on the home screen, no hacking or jailbreaking required. Kool is putting the final touches on a bunch of games, and plans to have them ready within a month.

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Boxee Box Coming November 10

The Boxee Box finally has a ship date: November 10, with availability in stores a week later.

Apple Mac Event Live Coverage

We’re live from Cupertino! Join us at Technologizer.com/macfuture.

Verizon’s Galaxy Tab is $599.99

Starting on November 11th, you’ll be able to buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab from Verizon for $599.99, no contract required (or available). That puts it at $100 above the cheapest iPad and $29 below the cheapest 3G model; if you buy a Tab, it’ll be because you prefer its size, features (such as dual cameras), and/or operating system, not because Apple priced the iPad too high.

I’ll be fascinated to see how well the Tab does (and I think it’s pretty obvious that a $499.99 Tab would be about three times more appealing than a $599.99 one). I wonder how long it’ll be until there’s an appealing iPad alternative that’s meaningfully less expensive?

Apple Event: Watch It! Discuss It! Live It!

Once again, Apple will be Webcasting its Mac event today, albeit in a form only viewable on Apple devices. I recommend watching it if you can–but don’t forget to come hang out and discuss the news at our liveblog coverage.

An Indie Developer Makes a Kindle Game

Games for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader are trickling in. First came a pair of word games from Amazon itself, then came Solitaire and Scrabble from megapublisher Electronic Arts. Now, Spry Fox is stepping in with Triple Town, supposedly the first Kindle game from an independent studio.

Triple Town is a “match-three” game similar to Bejeweled, requiring the player to shuffle icons into rows of three or more. The twist is that each successful combo creates elements of a city, such as cathedrals and castles, which increase your score at the end of the game. Meanwhile, enemy icons can block you from making combinations.

Sure, Triple Town isn’t terribly innovative, but it’s definitely a sign of evolution for Kindle games. On any other platform, Triple Town would be another match-three game. On Kindle, it’s pretty unique. And that’s the point.

In a blog post, Spry Fox Chief Executive David Edery explained that Kindle gaming seemed like an untapped market. All of his developer pals either had no plans to create games for the device, or didn’t even know they could. He guessed that the Kindle has at least 2 million potential customers (Amazon doesn’t disclose sales figures), all of whom are inclined to spend lots of money on digital content, as demonstrated with e-books.

The question is whether a significant number of those customers view the Kindle as a device for anything besides reading. EA’s presence suggests that there’s a market, but Triple Town is the true test. If one indie game developer can make money on Kindle, expect lots of others to follow. I’ll be interested to see how this turns out.

Join Me for Liveblog Coverage of Apple’s Mac Event

Quick reminder: I’ll be in Cupertino Wednesday morning at 10am PT for Apple’s “Back the Mac” press confab. We know that the company will talk about OS X for the first time, and everyone seems to assume there will be a new MacBook Air (or two) as well. I predict a surprise, too–mainly because I’d like to see one.

Join me at technologizer.com/macfuture, won’t you? And tell your friends…

Don’t Dismiss 7-Inch Tablets Because of Steve Jobs

During Apple’s earnings call, Steve Jobs wiped away the possibility that Apple will release a seven-inch tablet.

“The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad,” Jobs said. Tablets must be at least 10-inches to allow for great apps, he said, otherwise there’s not enough room on the screen to reliably tap, flick and pinch.

Around the iPad’s debut, I also questioned the purpose of seven-inch tablets, but lately I’ve started to come around. My brief time with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab helped to highlight some areas where bigger isn’t necessarily better.

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KaChing Becomes Wealthfront

One year ago, I wrote about KaChing, an investment site that aimed to provide a better option than mutual funds for small investors, by letting them map their portfolios to the investment strategies of expert professional investors and talented amateurs. It was an intriguing idea, but I wondered how many real people would be comfortable entrusting their savings to a startup with a silly name, not to mention relying on the advice of finance hobbyists rather than pros.

Well, KaChing is relaunching today. It’s now called Wealthfront, and it’s phasing out the amateur advice in favor of a roster consisting entirely of professional money managers. It turns out that its founders decided that sounding a bit more serious and less seat-of-the-pants was a good idea.

Speaking of serious, the minimum amount new members need to invest is now $10,000, up from $3,000. (Founder Dan Carroll told me that the smallest investors tended to be in it in search of a quick payoff, which is just a bad idea.) And besides adding more professional managers, the site is also adding a questionnaire that aims to help investors build a portfolio that matches their goals. (KaChing was centered around a toteboard of managers ranked by “Investment IQ” and didn’t do as much to help new members allot their monies wisely.)

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Palm’s Pre 2 Looks Nice. But at This Point, WebOS Needs More Than Nice

I don’t claim to have an unerring gut when it comes to judging new technology products. But stuff that knocks my socks off does tend to go on to do reasonably well. One notable exception, however, has been the Palm Pre–I continue to think that it’s one of the best phones on the market (thanks mainly to its WebOS software), but I can’t imagine that anyone involved with it, from Palm/HP to wireless carriers, is pleased with how it’s sold so far.

Today, HP announced the first WebOS phone to emerge since the company bought Palm. It’s the Pre 2, shipping this week in France and at an unspecified future date in the US. It looks like–well, like the Pre only better, with more modern specs (such as a 1-GHz CPU) and a meaty-sounding software update in WebOS 2.0. If it’s all it’s cracked up to be, it sounds like a phone that Palm Pre lovers will love even more.

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Introspectr Indexes all of your Web Activity

Social networks threw the order of the inbox into disarray. Now, a start-up is seeking to encapsulate every interaction–regardless of where it occurs–into a unified search engine.

A private beta of Introspectr launched last Wednesday following its demo at NYC Tech Meetup that Tuesday night. I was there, and liked what I saw.

Introspectr indexes your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. It also pulls in content from external URLs such as Bit.ly links embedded in Tweets.

Co-founder Simon Murtha-Smith demonstrated finding a lost apple crisp recipe. The recipe was not named; it was simply referred to as “AC” in a message, followed by a URL. Introspectr still managed to locate the recipe.

The idea is not exactly new, but something like Introspectr could become a necessity for those of us who have an active social life. Gmail solved the e-mail search problem, but e-mail only captures a fragment of today’s conversations.

Google’s Buzz was an attempt to pull social networking into Gmail, but from my perspective it was an oddball addition that didn’t fit. Introspectr is what Google’s inbox should behave like today. It’s simple, and it works.

Microsoft Office 365: One-Stop Shopping for Desktop and Web Productivity

At an event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft announced something called Office 365. It’s less of a new product or service and more of an attempt to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to offload IT infrastructure and acquire the Microsoft productivity applications and services they want on a pay-as-they-go basis. (It’s the successor to an existing offering called the Business Productivity Office Suite.)

Office 365′s components include Outlook and a hosted version of the Exchange server, a hosted version of the Lync unified communications server, hosted Sharepoint, the Office Web Apps, and the full-blown Office Pro Plus suite in its traditional desktop form. New Web-based tools will aim to make it easy to sign up for 365 and manage its various bits and pieces in one place. The company is beta-testing the service now and plans to fully roll it out next year.

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A Reliable Source Dismisses Rumors of a 7-Inch iPad

Okay, no 7-inch iPad anytime soon.

Blackberry Style Brings Back the Flip Phone

I doubt that anyone expects the clamshell phone to make a comeback, but that’s not stopping the Blackberry Style 9670, a flip phone that’s coming to Sprint on October 31.

The Style has a 624 MHz processor, 5 megapixel camera, microSD storage, GPS, Wi-Fi, and the Blackberry 6 operating system. It costs $100 with a two-year contract, after a $100 mail-in rebate. Coverage, which requires a data plan, starts at $70 per month.

Is it wrong that I’m totally fascinated by this product? Sprint and Research in Motion justify the Style’s existence by claiming that 100 million people currently use flip phones. They don’t say how many of those people would want a clamshell with smartphone guts. Usually, flip phones are dirt-cheap, and don’t require data plans. That’s the allure.

Which is not to say that a flip smartphone (a fartphone?) has no appeal. Have you ever tried to emphatically hang up an iPhone? You can’t. Ever tried to answer a call on a touch screen phone without looking at it? Good luck. With the flip phone, you flick it open with your thumb and forefinger to answer the call. You snap it closed with gusto. It’s wonderful.

But $100 wonderful? I don’t know.

Is the New MacBook Air the First Apple Netbook?

Remember Steve Jobs demolishing the whole idea of netbooks back at Apple’s iPad launch in January? I’m a netbook fan, but I still found his takedown awfully entertaining.

Jobs was, of course, positioning the iPad as Apple’s answer to the netbook. But that didn’t make the iPad a netbook, or anything very much like a netbook at all. It was sort of like comparing the world’s best motorcycle to a bunch of ho-hum subcompact cars.

But if the rumors are true, Apple will soon announce a new version of its MacBook Air thin-and-light notebook with an 11.6″ display and a pricetag meaningfully lower than the current Air. Any such machine would still cost much more than a run-of-the-mill netbook, and have a far higher cool factor–and at 11.6″, it could have the acceptably comfy keyboard that smaller netbooks often lack. Even so, it may be as close to an “Apple netbook” as we’ll see. And assuming that such a product is indeed imminent, it’ll be fascinating to see Apple make a machine with at least a hint of netbookishness after the world stopped paying all that much attention to netbooks–and years after pundits gave up insisting that the company needed to get into the game.

Is Kinect for Xbox 360 Sold Out? Don’t Buy That

Sold out products make a company look good, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft is boasting about Kinect for Xbox 360′s supposedly limited availability.

In a press release announcing Kinect’s launch titles, Microsoft says pre-orders for the motion-sensing camera are “rapidly selling out.” Larry Hryb, director of programming for Xbox Live, wrote on his blog that “if you have not placed your order yet you may want to take care of that.”

I wouldn’t bother heeding his advice, at least if you live in the United States. Come November 4, I have a feeling you’ll be able to walk into a games retailer, see Kinect for yourself and make an informed decision on whether to buy. No need to rush.

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