iPhone 1.98 – Some Silly Fun

Friday, and some time to play with the less serious side of the phone.

First some wallpaper. Sciphone is a repository of cellphone and iphone wallpaper. Most of it is either tasteful or tasteless, hopelessly cute or hopelessly crass. Occasionally there is a photo, however, that is striking and cellphone apt, at least in my eye. Here’s what I’ve chosen, with homage to Wegman. One wonders what Andy Warhol or Ray Lichtenstein would have done with the wallpaper medium. Or even Pablo Picasso. Another hit towards the future, perhaps.

As an official project, I installed the Cisco VPN client. The major sticking point was the long url that advertises it … 80 some characters. TinyUrl reduced it to 25. There were a couple of certificate warnings along the way to add to the confusion (and, if kept in place, to encourage unhealthy habits.)

Then finally, another game. Tap Tap Revenge, or TTR, is a crazy disco fever Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. (An earlier version of the game was indeed called Tap Tap Revolution.) The video below shows it in play, though I wonder how they got two earphones on the system :). The lead to this came from TechCrunch via the Washington Post which noted “The game, which was released by new startup Tapulous, is currently number 7 on the list of top free applications overall (ahead of AOL Radio and MySpace Mobile) and number 1 on the top games list.” [1]

Here’s a quick video of the game in play.

If Carl Icahn and Steve Balmer knew what they were headed into, they would be trying to buy Sony or Nintendo, rather than Yahoo.

[1] Michael Arrington, Tap Tap Revenge For iPhone Launches Late, Surges Up App Store Rankingsm TechCrunch.com, Tuesday, July 15, 2008; 1:44 AM. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071500548.html