King Camera Is a Dark Room For Your iPhone Photos (Mashable)

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: King Camera

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Quick Pitch: King Camera is an iPhone app for enhancing photos with instant looks or custom photo effects.

Genius Idea: Giving iPhone photographers their own personal dark room.

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Instagram has championed the instantness of the mobile photo-sharing movement with a selection of filters users can apply for fast iPhone photo styling. Camera+ traffics in a seemingly never-ending selection of photo effects. Now King Camera, an iPhone application released by Saycheezzz late last week, offers iPhone photographers the best of both worlds.

The $2.99 application [iTunes link], which will go on sale Wednesday for a launch sale price of $0.99, is meant to be a personal dark room for mobile photographers. It includes an array of features housed within its four primary modules: Camera, Photodesk, Quickmatik and Promatik.

The application user snaps or selects library photos with the Camera module. For each shot, the Camera module automatically adjusts the focus and tries to properly expose the photo, though users can manually adjust the focus and exposure settings.

In fact, King Camera users who wish to expand beyond the simple default point-and-shoot settings can choose from four different trigger modifiers, take time-lapse shots and enable the big button to tap anywhere on the screen to take a photo.

The Photodesk is where all Camera captures and altered shots are saved in photo stacks. Here users can tap to edit a photo in Quickmatik to apply one of 45 different prefabricated looks (like filters in other apps) or choose Promatik to make and apply their own effects.

"The app is for anyone who loves taking photos," says Saycheezzz co-founder Yanik Chauvin. "Beginners will enjoy the simplicity of the Quickmatik, and more advanced users with love making their own Looks in the Photoshop-like Promatik."

On a test run, I found the 45 available Quickmatik instant looks to be a tad disappointing in comparison to Instagram filters. Still, having the ability to scale each effect up or down with a slider is certainly a nice touch, and the selection of borders and cropping options are plentiful.

More impressive is the limitless creativity that the Promatik module allows. This iPhone photo editing dark room is a feature-rich module that is best suited for more advanced photo editors but still accessible to novices. Users can crop, rotate and adjust white balance and coloring in photos, as well add textures, vignettes and borders. They can also save a collection of applied effects as their own look.

King Camera has the obligatory photo-sharing options built in as well -- one-tap sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and email is available for all photos saved to the Photodesk.

We've still barely scratched the surface in terms of King Camera's features; the application will not disappoint those with a penchant for both creativity and control in the photo editing process.

King Camera is the first photography application by Saycheezzz, a self-funded startup started by professional photographers Chauvin and Martin Perreault. Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Will you let your unborn baby use your iPhone to pick its own name? (Yahoo! News)

We've known for a while that technology buffs are popping up at younger and younger ages, but an iPhone app designed for unborn babies is a whole new concept. Kick to Pick is a 99 cent iPhone app meant to let your still-developing child pick its own name before making his or her debut.

To use the app you must first place your smartphone on a baby bump, preferably when the young one is feeling rambunctious. As the app scrolls through a list of baby names, it detects the slightest kicks using the iPhone's internal accelerometers. A kick monitor is displayed on the screen and will inform you when a kick is detected. Small to medium kicks will not count as "picks," but larger movements will, stopping the name scroll and showing you what the unborn baby has chosen.

There are thousands of names included, but if you'd like to limit your youngster's choice to more modern names — and prevent monikers like "Almond Algernon" from popping up — you can customize the list to your liking. The app is just a buck on the iTunes App Store, but whether it will spark a revolution of near-random baby naming — as opposed to just going with whatever the Twilight movies offer — remains to be seen.

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Fresh iPhone Apps for May 31: AOL TV, Parkbud, To-Fu: The Trials of Chi, Tower Defense: Lost Earth (Appolicious)

The long weekend is over, but while returning to work after three days off can be a bit depressing, we have a few cool apps to kick off the week. Starting out is AOL TV, which integrates services like Hulu, Netflix and local TV stations to let users keep track of everything they can see on just about every service. After that is Parkbud, an app for finding your parking spaces and keeping track of parking meters to cut the stress of receiving tickets. We’ve also got a couple of quality games on tap – To-Fu: The Trials of Chi, a puzzle-platformer, and Tower Defense: Lost Earth, a robust and challenging TD strategy game.

Your conduit to everything TV is on your iPhone in AOL TV. The app keys you in to whatever’s on and allows you to check out schedules of all sorts, helping to stay up on what’s playing on your local stations, or even what’s available on Netflix and Hulu. All those services are funneled into one place in AOL TV, and the app allows you to bookmark shows, check out when they’ll be on, or track down missed episodes on Hulu, iTunes or Netflix.

AOL TV also has extra functionality for TiVo users. You can actually schedule your TiVo recordings from the app, or push DVDs and Instant videos to your Netflix queues. You can also check out information about various TV shows and actors on IMDb.

Don’t waste time and cause yourself frustration trying to remember where you left your car. Parkbud takes care of that information for you, keeping track of where you parked and giving you directions using Google Maps back to that location.

Parkbud also includes a lot of other handy features for your parking situation. It includes a meter alarm so you can get back and avoid a ticket, and a camera and photo-editing feature so you can keep track of rates and other information. Parkbud will show you where parking garages are near you, and lets you take notes about restrictions in an area to help you avoid any citations.

Puzzle-platformer To-Fu puts you in control of a sling-shot-capable block of tofu wearing a headband. In each of the game’s 100 side-scrolling levels, your job is to fling To-Fu from one patch of wall or floor to another. Using the game’s touch controls, you’ll stretch To-Fu in the direction you want to send him and then release, flinging him in a straight line until he hits a wall or platform to stick to.

Your primary goal in To-Fu is to reach a glowing pink fortune cookie at the end of each level, but each level includes a bunch of floating orbs called Chi that you can collect. Snagging all of them earns you a badge, as does making it to the end of the level using only a certain number of flings, and getting all the badges on each level will take some skill and probably multiple attempts. It’s a challenging game, but To-Fu is simple to learn and includes a lot of content for just a buck.

There are a whole lot of tower defense games in the iTunes App Store – but how many of them are actually called Tower Defense? The game follows the story of people fleeing a destroyed and polluted Earth for a new planet, where hostile aliens need to be shut down by powerful defenses. In Tower Defense’s campaign mode, players will work through 40 different levels on varying terrain, each with variable difficulty settings to give you exactly the challenge you’re looking for.

Tower Defense packs four different gameplay modes, each with different types of objectives. Developer Com2uS plans more downloadable content for the future, expanding on the nine available towers and number of maps available. The game also packs Game Center support for leaderboards and achievements.

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Green Your Tech: 5 excellent eco apps for your iPad or iPhone (Yahoo! News)

Apps that bring tree huggers and iPhone and iPad lovers together for the greater green are few and far between. While they might be in relatively short supply at the moment, there are a handful of green apps out there to help minimize your impact on the earth.

So, go on — green up your device. We'll give you a head start with 5 environmentally friendly apps we dug up and planted with care for you below. (Stay tuned for 6 more in our next Green Your Tech.) All of them are educational, fun, and easy to use.

1. My Carbon Footprint
Price: Free
Download: My Carbon Footprint

Brave enough to see what your carbon footprint really looks like? Then let My Carbon Footprint be the judge of how clean and green you are. Te ll the enlightening app how you live, work, eat, and entertain yourself, and it tells you how you impact Mother Earth and her fragile atmosphere. The app sends you a fresh daily crop of encouraging eco-tips and rewards you with cool badges and bragging rights on Facebook for good, green behavior. Bonus: You get to be the fearless leader of your very own virtual planet.

2. Solar Panel Advisor
Price: $1.99
Download: Solar Panel Advisor

Solar Panel Advisor is a bright, eco-educational app that lets your iPad or iPad 2 show what a solar panel could do for you. (But don't expect your tablet to charge itself or anything else by the sun, okay?) Launch the app, face your iPad in the direction of the sun, and find out how much solar power could be generated by any size solar panel under the same strength of rays. You'll learn how solar energy takes the heat off the atmosphere and your electricity bill, plus how cloud cover and precipitation impact solar energy output. People who've already unplugged and gone sustainable can use the app to remotely monitor solar panels at home and get automatic panel maintenance and cleaning reminders.

Too bad Solar Panel Advisor doesn't use the free (and pollution-free) energy of the sun to power your tablet like Voltaic's Solar Spark iPad charging case would, for example. Want more mobile solar gadget choices? Check out our hot list of sun-loving iPad and iPhone chargers and more.

3. Beekeeping Guide
Price: $2.99
Download: Beekeeping Guide

When you give honeybees a safe, pesticide-free place to buzz (and get busy), you protect the winged hexapods from Colony Collapse Disorder, help them them pollinate our landscape, and do your part to ensure the future of our food supply. Get your own hive off the ground with Beekeeping Guide, an easy-read ebook app with everything you need to know to create your own honeybee sanctuary. If New York City apartment dwellers can raise bees on their rooftops, imagine what you could do in your backyard. 

4. My Recycle List
Price: Free
Download: My Recycle List

Recycling: It's good for the bottle, and it's good for the can — that is, if you know how and where to recycle them. 1-800-Recycling.com's free app uses your iPhone's built-in GPS tech to take the guesswork out of finding recycling locations near you. Its user-friendly database lists some 120,000 locations in the United States and Canada. Search it by zip code (or with the interactive map) to locate drop-off centers. Leave it to the app to untangle which recycling facilities accept what and how, including: e-waste, plastic, metal, paper, glass, household appliances, hazardous substances, and automobile and yard waste.

E-waste recycling centers aren't the only place to eco-consciously ditch your unwanted gadgetry. Check out our insider's list of e-cycling alternatives, and turn your antiquated electronics into the other kind of green we should save

— money.

5. Control4 My Home
Price: Free
Download: Control4

Control4 My Home turns your iPad into an energy-efficiency remote for every appliance, light, and electricity-sucking device or utility in your house. You'll have total control over your home (or workplace's) computers, web cameras, and home theater, cooling, heating, and security systems, all with the swipe of a finger across your tablet's screen. There's only one catch: The app only works with existing (incredible and incredibly pricey) Control4 all-in-one energy-saving automated home systems. But you get the omnipotence to mess with the volume, music, lights, and thermostat anywhere in the house, any time — without anyone knowing it was you. Oh, yeah!

Come back for the next Green Your Tech, when we safely spill 6 more excellent eco-apps just for you and your iPad or iPhone.

[Image credit: mindfrieze]

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How Cellfish developed a slam dunk iPhone app for the NBA (Appolicious)

As you prepare to watch the Miami Heat take on the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA Finals, you might want to tap into the NBA FanCam app before tip-off.

Developed by Cellfish, the free app lets users take pictures of themselves that are then uniformed with gear from any desired NBA team. As detailed by Appolicious Advisor Dan Kricke, NBA FanCam “might just help you be that superfan” that still has posters and pennants up on their wall (at least virtually).

In this edition of Meet the Makers we sit down with mobile media pioneer and CellFish CEO Fabrice Sergent, a serial entrepreneur who started the company in 2004. Sergent discusses how CellFish secured a partnership with the NBA, how FanCam became a top selling free sports app, and the specific differences in creating and marketing apps on iOS versus Android.

Appolicious: Cellfish came into its own in 2006 -- eons ago in the mobile media space.  How profoundly have the iOS and Android application platforms transformed your business?

Fabrice Sergent: The iOS and Android application platforms have transformed Cellfish’s business profoundly. A pioneer in the mobile media space since 2006, Cellfish had been focused primarily on feature phones. However, with the proliferation of other mobile device platforms, Android and iOS has incentivized us to rebuild our business models and marketing strategies. As our focus broadens to include smartphone-centric users, we have become more nimble in our innovation for building applications, implementing different marketing strategies and creating more exciting products. We have recognized the insatiable appetite - with ever-changing tastes - of smartphone users, and realize that we must differentiate ourselves from the crowded marketplace by appealing to their existing brand fanaticism. As a result, we strategically partnered with iconic brands that possess robust fan bases, affording us access to their millions of loyal followers.

APPO: As an early mover in both the Internet and mobile media industry, compare and contrast the climate today for mobile applications with what existed during the dot-com boom in the late nineties.

FS: The climate today for mobile applications is both similar and different with what existed during the dot-com boom in the late nineties. Whereas consumers didn’t even know what applications were less than a decade ago, there were few successful revenue-generating business models, despite the growing base of Internet users inflating the bubble. Today, we have a similar user base for mobile, but based on our ability to learn from why the dot-com bubble burst, there is the opportunity to create sound business models to maximize revenue. Mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids have revolutionized the industry, exploding it into mainstream consumer awareness and adoption.

APPO: Last month you teamed up with the National Basketball Association to launch the NBA FanCam application.  How were you able to secure a partnership with the NBA?

FS: In Fall 2010, Cellfish acquired Airborne Mobile, a leading mobile-application publisher, which combined Cellfish’s original-content publishing activities with Airborne Mobile’s distribution of renowned brands, including the NBA. Immediately, Cellfish began focusing on creating and distributing branded mobile content for high-usage value.  However, we had to leverage and extend the existing NBA relationship that was part of the acquisition to also include smartphone applications. Within three days of launch on April 28th, the NBA FanCam application reached #1 in free sports apps, besting competing apps from WatchESPN, ESPN ScoreCenter and NFL Mobile. Even more noteworthy, the same app ranked 25th overall and generated 92,752 downloads since launch (as of 5/17/11).

APPO: What exactly do you mean by the term "fan-fueled" mobile content, and how do you plan to incorporate that into future apps?

FS: Instead of pre-packaged images and ring-tones, Cellfish offers users a platform to design and customize their own branded content, along with the unprecedented, in-app ability to share it with their social networks. Since launching in 2006, Cellfish has focused on music fans. Leveraging the global popularity of ring-tones, Cellfish created BlingTones, the world’s first wireless record label, featuring exclusive, original content for fans. Over the past two years with the proliferation of smartphones, Cellfish has evolved with more engaging, exclusive, “fan-fueled” content beyond music fans through the recent acquisition of Airborne Studios. Today, Cellfish targets television fans (FOX’s Family Guy, The Cleveland Show) and sports fans (NBA, NHL, NFL, NFLPA). Through these exclusive licensing agreements, Cellfish offers Android and iPhone apps, videos and widgets. The recent convergence between mobile and social finally enables fans to share their passions with other fans via their mobile devices.

APPO: Are there any plans to bring NBA FanCam to Android users?

FS: Yes, bringing the NBA FanCam app to Android users in time for next season is in our Fall 2011 road-map.

APPO: Describe the challenges and opportunities that exist developing apps for both the Android and iOS platforms.

FS: Because Android and Apple are different platforms in development, monetization and regulation, we had to quickly determine ways for minimizing and balancing the differences to best maximize the strengths of each. Many developers currently focus on iOS only, but we immediately embraced both platforms in order to reach the largest audience.

More specifically, for Android: The cost of developing and designing for more than one handset type and manufacturer is challenging. From a marketing standpoint, the lack of a unified application store for Android makes it difficult to cross-promote, upsell, etc. For example, we have apps in the Android Market that also are being sold on Verizon's V Cast App Store and Amazon’s storefront. As these apps are all available on the same handset, it can create consumer confusion.

More specifically, for Apple: That said, the application review process is much stricter with Apple. While it is challenging to target a specific launch date with Apple, it certainly protects us against probable brand infringement. In the Android Market, there are hundreds of cases of brand infringement every day, and it’s often a struggle to reconcile them.

APPO: For an app like NBA FanCam, after the initial buzz and publicity, what do you do to drive downloads and keep momentum going over time?

FS: For driving downloads and maintaining momentum, Cellfish is harnessing and integrating mobile and social media. The NBA has integrated our NBA FanCam app into their social, mobile and application media, which delivers constant users to our apps, allowing them to upload photos to their personal Facebook wall to be shared with friends. Additionally, the NBA FanCam app allows users to post to the NBA Wall, enabling consumers to share their photos with the NBA’s 8 million fans, while creating a perpetual stream of social traffic (down the road, this can be expanded to the 30 individual teams, reaching 18+ million fans). Moreover, the NBA is promoting its partnership with Cellfish via Facebook posts, tweets via the NBA and its 30 teams, NBA website, NBA mobile site, NBA GameTime app and NBA SMS alerts. The consumer call-to-action is to download content such as applications, wallpaper, themes and ring-tones, available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Java- and BREW-feature phones.

APPO: What are the three biggest things that keep you up at night in the mobile media space?

How can mobile media play a greater role in charities’ donor outreach efforts?

With mobile content discoverability in its infancy, how and when will it evolve?

With broadband access being cost-prohibitive in developing countries, will smartphones soon become globally ubiquitous?

APPO: What's next for you and your company?

FS: With 100 percent growth year-over-year of smartphone sales in the U.S. and close to 50 percent penetration, the market is close to a tipping point. More importantly, social media is growing rapidly, and is increasingly being accessed via mobile phones. The convergence between mobile and social is most exciting to Cellfish as it continues to position itself at this crossroads with applications maximizing both of these technologies.

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The Heist leads iPhone Games of the Week (Appolicious)

How often do you get to play a mobile game that comes with a real-life prize at the end? That’s what you get when you play The Heist. It’s a bank robbery game that ends with players opening a vault to discover a tangible reward. It heads up this week’s best games list, not because of what you can win for playing it, but  because it’s a quality puzzler with lots of challenge, not to mention four different kinds of puzzles packed within. Read all about it below, and check out what else we’ve been playing all week.

Developer tap tap tap also consists of the same people behind MacHeist, and they’ve put together an interesting puzzle title with a lot of variety in The Heist. First off, the game packs 60 puzzles that come in four different varieties and four different difficulties. They’re all riffs on the kinds of games you’ve played before, like Sudoku, but high-quality graphics and some challenge keep them interesting. You’ll feel like you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck. Your goal in The Heist is to solve puzzles in order to defeat the security systems that protect a vault. As you knock them down, eventually you’ll get the vault open – where you can claim a real-life, free prize for your trouble. It’s a nice incentive to go with a game that’s fun on its own, and The Heist also includes Game Center support and a handful of achievements to give you a reason to keep playing.

Gamers will have heard of Portal and Portal 2, the first-person physics puzzlers in which players have to use interconnected portals to solve puzzles. The player can use a “portal gun” to shoot a blue portal and an orange portal at walls, and stepping through one hole causes the player to exit out the other. It’s a trippy experience, and D-Capitatrix captures it in an iOS version. The difference is, this puzzler trades the 3-D first-person environment for a 2-D perspective that works really well. By tapping and dragging, you can place portals around each level and then tilt your device to roll a disembodied robot head around the stage. On each level are three batteries the head needs to collect before you can return it to its robot body. The goal is to rebuild robots across a whole bunch of levels made up of interesting, smart puzzles.

Related: Five iPhone games if you only have five minutes

Touchgrind, an iOS skateboarding game, is already a great concept – the game is played by touching two fingers to a skateboard on the screen to act as though the player is riding it. Swiping and moving those fingers causes the player to do tricks with the board and rack up points. Touchgrind BMX is the same premise, but instead of a skateboard, it uses a BMX bike. Like its predecessor, this is a well-made game with great physics and interesting controls, plus a quality graphical presentation. Each level requires you to execute a number of stunts and complete objectives before moving on, and doing well unlocks new bikes, paint jobs and other content along the way.

PopCap Games’ new label, 4th & Battery, has released a new free game for Apple’s iOS devices, and it’s at least as much fun as the developer’s previous title, Unpleasant Horse. Candy Train is actually a reboot of an older title from PopCap. The frantic game is all about building train tracks using tiles that are scattered around the screen. Each tile’s piece of track is different, and by tapping them, players can rotate them to make complete tracks around the screen. All the time you’re creating new tracks, the candy train is following your paths, so the pressure mounts along the way to keep the train from running out of track and crashing. It gets hectic and very challenging as you pick up additional cars and increase the length of your train, and you can’t complain about the price tag.

Related: Casey's Contraptions tops iPad Games of the Week

As Storm, a magical character, you’ll have to navigate a whole mess of platforming puzzles in Storm in a Teacup. And yes, you ride around in a teacup as you brave the game’s cartoony graphics and challenging levels. Rather than jumping, Storm has a limited capability to hover, which is activated by tapping a virtual button. It takes a little getting used to, but using Storm’s hovering power gets intuitive before too long. It also makes for careful, skillful navigation of the game’s 40 levels. Platforming fans will have a good time here, and Storm’s visuals make it a treat to play.

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Fresh iPhone Apps for May 20: PhotoForge2, BeatForge, Storm in a Teacup, Arno the Hunter (Appolicious)

Leading the way into the weekend is PhotoForge2, a great app to have after snapping a bunch of photos on your iPhone. You can use the newly rebuilt PhotoForge to edit images with a lot of the power you’d see on a desktop computer. We also have BeatForge, an unrelated forge app that lets you create musical sequences quickly and easily, and a pair of quality games: Storm in a Teacup, an imaginative physics-based platformer, and Arno the Hunter, a casual game with some beautiful graphics and tough bosses.

There’s some pretty solid image-editing software at the heart of the PhotoForge2, allowing users to access and edit full-resolution photos on their mobile devices. The app supports layers just like desktop photo editing software, which means you can mix multiple elements together easily to create some great images, and do more than just change colors or remove red eye like with many apps.

PhotoForge2 is filled with tools and effects to help you get exactly what you want out of your photos. You can resize, crop and add textures quickly and easily, and create camera effects by mixing lenses, flashes and film types just like you can in apps such as Hipstamatic. You can also adjust a lot of other levels and features, like contrast, white balance and shadows and highlights.

Turn your iPhone into a music instrument using BeatForge. The app has a pretty simple premise: it fills your device’s screen with a grid filled with buttons. Tapping any button adds a sound, either a percussive beat or a melodic note. As you tap more buttons and add more sounds, BeatForge plays them in the order you choose them in a loop, creating a beat and a song that you can create quickly and easily.

Along the way, you can define generalities about how BeatForge sounds – like which key the sounds come in or what genre they fit in. Different colors denote different sounds on the grid, so you’ll get a visual interface for what you hear, which makes editing and reworking your sequence easy.

As Storm, an elemental-type character, you’re tasked with flying your way through side-scrolling platforming levels. You control Storm, who rides around in a teacup, using virtual buttons to steer and to activate his powers of flight. By tapping a lightning bolt-emblazoned button, Storm takes flight for a short time – you’ll need to manage your flight power carefully by tapping the button quickly and gauging your momentum.

Storm in a Teacup carries 40 side-scrolling levels you can work through, with 15 achievements to earn along the way. The game also has leaderboard support from Apple’s Game Center service and Crystal.

Some pretty incredible graphics adorn Arno the Hunter, in which you play a bow-and-arrow-wielding crab in some lush settings. Each level is a self-contained arena in which you can run left and right, dodging enemy attacks while firing arrows to take out flying creatures and earn points. Tilting allows you to move to avoid getting blown up, while power-ups dropped from the creatures give you a lot more abilities.

There are only three levels in Arno, but that’s not a bad trade-off for the price and the visuals found within. Each level also culminates with a big boss battle, which is a lot of harrowing fun to play through. You can also earn several achievements along the way to test your skills.

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China Telecom in touch with Apple on CDMA iPhone (Reuters)

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China Telecom Corp Ltd, the smallest of the country's three wireless carriers, has contacted Apple Inc to introduce the popular iPhone based on CDMA (code division multiple access) technology, Chairman Wang Xiaochu said on Friday.

Larger rival China Unicom is the only operator in China, which has 886 million mobile phone users, to offer the iPhone so far. However, some analysts say China Telecom could be next after an exclusive agreement with Unicom expires this year.

"We're not denying that we're in touch with iPhone (Apple), but I cannot comment on the progress," Wang told reporters after a shareholders' meeting.

Shareholders also approved an up to 90 billion yuan ($14 billion) bond issue, including 60 billion yuan overseas and the remainder domestically.

Some of the proceeds would be used to develop its CDMA network, executives said.

"From what we see now, we'll need money to acquire our parent's CDMA network. But other than that, we won't need to issue a huge amount of bonds," Wang said.

Wang also said China Telecom would consider Hong Kong as a first priority for issuing overseas bonds, although it had no immediate plan for a yuan bond in the Chinese territory.

China Telecom, a relative newcomer to China's mobile market, operates the country's largest fixed-line network and is aggressively promoting broadband over that channel.

China Telecom had 103.10 million mobile phone users as of April, including 17.84 million 3G subscribers.

China Telecom shares, which have gained more than 10 percent this year, were up 1.8 percent in Friday afternoon trading, outperforming the Hang Seng Index's 0.06 percent gain.

(Editing by Chris Lewis)

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Infinity Blade update leads iPhone Games of the Week (Appolicious)

Yeah, we know: Infinity Blade, taking the top spot in yet another Best Games of the Week list. I’d apologize if the game just weren’t so great, and developer ChAIR has just been making it better and better with each new update since its release. The latest addition is the biggest and best yet: an online multiplayer mode in which players can square-off against each other in one-on-one sword-fighting action, taking the part of the protagonist Knight or the enemy Titans. The update really reinvigorates Infinity Blade yet again, so check it out, and some other great offerings, below.

We’ve talked many a time about how good Infinity Blade is. It packs beautiful graphics care of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3, and developer ChAIR has been good to its players by providing some major content updates, the last of which hugely increased the size of the game – some say doubling it. All of that was done for free, and it was great, but the latest update to Infinity Blade is something altogether awesome and totally revamps the game. It’s a player vs. player online battle mode that puts one player in the role of the heroic warrior around whom the game is based, and the other in the shoes, boots, armor or chains of one of the huge monsters that occupies the God King’s tower. Multiplayer breathes all new life into an already stellar title, making it fresh once more – plus it’s on sale. You should download this immediately.

Puzzler Glo Flo is of the rare breed of iOS games that will hook you in and keep you coming back. It’s a beautifully simple game with a great neon art style that’ll appeal to all ages, but which is still challenging even for adults. The premise is pretty easy to grasp: on a grid, several colored bugs are positioned, usually in pairs or groups. The goal is to draw a line through each bug of the same color in order to join them all, following the grid and moving either horizontally or vertically. Lines can’t cross each other or themselves, though – each must be a continuous straight shot, though the path the player takes is up to him or her. Glo Flo gets complex when multiple bugs are added, forcing you to think spatially in order to figure out where to draw the paths for each set of bugs so that they don’t crowd out the others. With about 60 puzzles to solve that range in difficulty (plus a Time Attack mode) and Game Center support, there’s a lot of value in Glo Flo for just a buck.

Zombie Glider’s simple, hand-drawn and somewhat childish appearance belies a tricky and engaging high-scoring game that gets tough to put down once you’ve picked it up. Basically, you use a slider on the left side of the screen to control a zombie flying on a hang glider as he raids medieval towns. The goal is to dip the glider down to snatch unsuspecting humans – the zombie snacks on their brains and then tosses them back to earth, where they can bounce around and kill other humans. Points are racked-up for snagging fleeing villagers, freeing imprisoned zombies from the stocks and smashing things, all of which are just done by flying into them. It’s deceptively simple but a lot of fun, partially because doing well allows you to upgrade your zombie’s anti-arrow armor and glider’s crash protection, and partially because the game has a great sense of humor. Snatch up a fat human and he’ll start shoveling food into his mouth in a panic, or snag a scientist and he’ll gulp down the potion he’s carrying, gaining momentary super-strength before becoming a zombie snack.

Ten thousand years before Square Enix’s iOS-exclusive role-playing game Chaos Rings’ story takes place, there’s Chaos Rings Omega, an annoying to type but fun to play game that brings a lot of Square’s old-school role-playing sensibilities to the iPhone. Omega is another portion of the Chaos Rings story and maintains the high production values and quality storytelling of the previous title, along with its classic RPG elements that fans have always enjoyed. It’s an expensive title, but Chaos Rings ? has a lot to offer, like monthly content updates and refinements over the original. RPG fans should have a great time here.

There are a lot of Angry Birds clones out there, but Siege Hero stands out because it’s a game that takes the formula made insanely famous by Rovio Mobile’s bird-slinging title – using projectiles to collapse buildings – and turns the game into a first-person affair. You aim and fire your various kinds of projectiles at structures and enemy Vikings by tapping where you want those projectiles to go. The challenge comes in attempting to fire the right projectiles at the right spots on each building in order to collapse it. You’ll also have to carefully plan your implosions in order to save characters considered “good” while destroying those that are bad. A wealth of weapons and levels, plus Game Center leaderboards, keep Siege Hero interesting, but really it’s just a casual game full of well-designed levels that’s a lot of fun.

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Fresh iPhone Apps for May 16: 8coupons, Zombie Glider, Doodle vs Brute: World Domination (Appolicious)

Start the week off right with 8coupons, which lets you track down hidden deals using your iPhone’s GPS capabilities. Also check out Zombie Glider, a game which puts you in control of a hang-gliding zombie with a taste for human gray matter, and Doodle vs. Brute: World Domination, a side-scrolling action title set in an pen-and-ink world.

Find “hidden” deals all over the place with 8coupons, an app that uses your iOS device’s GPS technology to zero-in on sales and bargains being held at stores all over your area. The service aggregates deals from lots of different services, including Groupon, LivingSocial and Restaurant.com, as well as locals sales from weekly ads, and tracks them all on your device’s Google Maps.

There are more than 4,000 sources for deals that get pulled that 8coupons draws on, and you can also add your own deals and check out bargains spotted by the community. The app can make use of your iPhone’s camera, as well, overlaying locations for different offers using augmented reality.

The zombie hordes can’t seem to get to the humans and their brains inside walled medieval cities, but one zombie has a plan -- ride in a hang glider fired from a cannon, and attack the humans from the air. In Zombie Glider, you are that zombie, and as you soar over the humans’ fortresses, you’ll dip down and snatch humans as they flee, snacking on their brains and then tossing them back to take out other humans as they bounce like deadly projectiles.

Not all the humans are defenseless, however. Archers on towers, rooftops and flying machines will try to stop you, and running into structures will take you out immediately. But along the way you can fortify your human attack vehicle by upgrading it by spending brain points you accumulate for notching up high scores.

The doodle world and the ink world have been war for some time, but now the tide is turning with you – a giant cybernetic King Kong-like gorilla called The Brute that has been assigned with destroying doodle cities and wiping out doodle military. You’ll stalk across side-scrolling city levels as the Brute, tapping away to punch small stick-man troops before they can hit you with all manner of weapons and artillery.

As you progress through Doodle vs. Brute, you’ll gather currency called “tech points” that you can use to upgrade the Brute’s cybernetics, adding another level of strategy to the game. Do you want to gather more health from power-ups, or send doodles screaming in terror before you with the power of mind manipulation? How you approach each level is up to you, but your scores are tracked on Game Center’s leaderboards.

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Rumors: Next-gen iPhone will have edge-to-edge screen, ‘4G’ name (Appolicious)

Now that the release date of the iPhone 5 seems to be set in the common consciousness of people who don’t actually know for sure – September – new rumors are springing to light about Apple’s (AAPL) next smartphone: namely, what the screen will be like and what it’ll be called.

In the screen department, a new rumor from PC World suggests the next-gen iPhone will have a screen that stretches the width of the front of the phone, going from edge to edge and foregoing the black plastic bezel that surrounds the screen on earlier iPhone versions. The latest piece of evidence comes from a Chinese phone case manufacturer, Kulcase LTD., which is “selling an item under the listing "Newest design crystal case for apple iPhone 5G,” according to the PC World story.

Kulcase has the cases listed on alibaba.com, but it’s tough to tell how legitimate they are. The cases suggest a new spot for the iPhone’s rear camera flash and the edg-to-edge screen, but whether they’re actually based on leaked plans is anybody’s guess.

As PC World points out, the track record of third-party manufacturers with actually forecasting upcoming iOS hardware is sketchy. On the one hand, China’s market for mobile devices is highly competitive, so leaks to happen and sometimes they result in an early look at design through cases such as these. On the other, Apple has been known to change designs at the eleventh hour and throw a monkey wrench into the plans of intrepid but underhanded companies.

And speaking of last-minute changes, while an early chance to buy Chinese phone cases could hint at the look of the next-gen iPhone, we might not know what to call it for a while.

Rumors have been kicking around that give a number of names to Apple’s next iPhone. Originally called the iPhone 5 by the Internet at large, which follows the iPhone 4 in logic and counting, we could be looking at two other potential names for the device: the iPhone 4S, and the iPhone 4G.

We heard previously that a version of the iPhone 4 was being passed around to game developers as part of an upcoming push from Apple to amp up the iPhone’s profile as a gaming machine. The device that’s being given to developers so they know how to develop for the upcoming iPhone is called an iPhone 4GS, and in it is basically the same as an iPhone 4, but with the distinction of having the iPad 2’s beefier A5 dual-core processor chip embedded within.

So that’s where the 4S name comes from – it’s possible that a spiffed-up iPhone 4 will hit shelves that’ll look the same, but with significant hardware improvements. It’s also possible that an AT&T (T) marketing gimmick could control the name of the next iPhone.

A story from 9to5Mac suggests that AT&T is really pushing the whole “4G” initiative, so much so that it’s renaming previously not-so-4G phones as “4G.” The standards for what qualifies as a 4G phone are actually pretty low, and AT&T has started rebranding a lot of phones available now that include technology known as High Speed Packet Access, or HSPA, as 4G, even though they’re not necessarily any faster than they were before they had that extra “G” added to the name.

The iPhone 4 actually has HSPA technology inside as well, but it’s not active. In its recent marketing materials, AT&T has made 14.4 megabytes-per-second part of what it considers to be 4G, and that’s the same speed as the iPhone’s internal Qualcomm (QCOM) chip. “Most industry watchers expect the next iPhone to run on some version of the Qualcomm chip that the Verizon (VZ) has which would let it do double radio duty and be operable on all US networks,” the 9to5Mac story says.

The next big thing in mobile is most definitely going to be the battle for 4G, so it wouldn’t be surprising if that marketing made into the iPhone’s presentation.

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Keep detailed health stats in one place with HealthyCloud iPhone app (Appolicious)

APPOLICIOUS ADVISOR RATING:

2 of 5 bars PRICE: $3.99TASTY: Keep detailed health stats in one place with HealthyCloud iPhone appBUMMER: This app is buggy, and you probably won't use all of the sections.COOL: Nutrition tracker includes a calorie database, and there's a comprehensive database of exercises.

A comprehensive look at your health statistics can now be kept in a single app, HealthyCloud — complete health tracking by healthycloud, for iPhone and iPod Touch. This HealthyCloud app isn't the company's first — in fact, with the exception of Body Fitness, each tracking section is available as its own individual app.

Within HealthyCloud, users can track stats such as blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, temperature, water intake, weight, fitness and nutrition. Although the app provides for a large variety of tests, it seems like many sections, such as the asthma tracker if you don't suffer asthma, or the complete blood count tracker, wouldn't be that applicable in day-to-day life.

The section of HealthyCloud that probably will see the most use is the Nutrition & Exercise Tracker. I found the weight tracker to be comprehensive, offering inputs for body metrics and notes. The history screen and graph can provide an overall picture of your fluctuations for the past seven or 14 days, or three, six or 12 months. I was less enthused about the nutrition tracker, which will set a daily calorie goal based on your preference for weight loss or gain. For one, there's a glitch in the displayed end date — if you select losing two pounds per week, the app estimates a completion date roughly a year in the future. If you choose a half-pound loss per week, HealthyCloud says you'll hit your goal in a matter of months. The daily calorie goal was problematic, too — in one scenario the app suggested an intake of just 623 calories. That's just irresponsible.

The complete HealthyCloud app runs $3.99, and if the separate apps were all paid, I could see how this price is warranted, but all of HealthyCloud's tracking apps are free. I would highly recommend trying out the free HealthyCloud services to see if they'll work for you before spending your cash here.

Download the free Appolicious iPhone app

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iPhone, Apps Set Guinness World Records (PC World)

Move over Nintendo and Sony. The iPhone 4 and Apple's App Store nabbed a few gaming titles in the Guinness World Records 2011 Gamer's Edition.

The iPhone 4 was named the "Fastest-Selling Portable Gaming System" after selling an estimated 1.5 million units when it launched on June 24, 2010.

Guinness compares the iPhone 4's numbers to that of the PSP, which sold 200,000 units at launch in 2005 and the DS which sold 500,000 consoles during launch week in November 2004.

Apple's App Store also received high marks, earning the title "Most Popular Application Marketplace." Guinness notes that as of September 2010 the store hosted about 260,000 apps, 61 of which are "flatulence simulators, a genre that includes such masterpieces as Fart Machine, Fart Ocarina andiFart -- Epic Rip Edition."

Cheap humor aside, Guinness World Records Gaming Editor Gaz Deaves said the iPhone was a game changer in both video game and mobile space.

"The release of the iPhone has not just changed the mobile industry, but the video game world too," Deaves said in a statement. "With the never-ending App Store selection and an intuitive device, Apple has created a gigantic new space for itself in the casual games genre that literally brings e ntertainment to users wherever they may be."

A few staple casual game Apps also made it into book.

Angry Birds was named the "Top Paid-For App Store Game in Most Countries," Plants vs. Zombines was named the "Fastest-Selling iPhone/iPod Strategy Game," and Tap Tap Revenge was named the "Most Popular iPhone Game Series."

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iPhone tracking: What you need to know

CNN tracks producer's iPhoneSTORY HIGHLIGHTS Researchers reveal iPhone tracking file that shows users' locations
This location info is stored on the phone and on a synced computer
The data is unencrypted, so researchers worry it could be stolen Here are tips on how to stop this information from being collected (CNN) -- News that iPhones and iPad 3Gs apparently collect continuous information about the whereabouts of their users and store that data in a secret file has lots of Apple fans worried about their privacy.

Two researchers on Wednesday unveiled the details of this secret file, called "consolidated.db," which stores location info going back to June 2010. That's when Apple updated its mobile operating system, called iOS, to version 4.0.

Apple hasn't commented on these allegations, and it appears the company does not have continuous access to this location data, according to the researchers, one of whom says he is a former Apple employee.

All of this may be confusing for iPhone owners, especially since this news terrifies some and seems like a lot of fun to others. To help clear things up, here's a quick round-up of what you need to know about iPhone tracking and your security:

How does the iPhone collect this location data?

It uses cell phone towers to triangulate an approximate location. This isn't as accurate as GPS, which uses satellites to pinpoint a phone's whereabouts.

How often is a location recorded?

At seemingly random intervals, but fairly often, according to Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan, the researchers and journalists who publicized this secret location file.

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Is your iPhone tracking your movements and keeping a secret file?

The Guardian newspaper has stirred up major buzz on the Web today with a report that two security researchers have apparently discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of a user's every movement and stores it on a secret file inside the device.

Moreover, writes The Guardian's Charles Arthur, the data -- which contains latitude and longitude and timestamp -- are then copied to the owner's computer when the devices are synchronized.

He says researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have posted details on their blogs and on a website that addresses key questions.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo's Sam Biddle used the data he found on his phone to post a map that he calls "jarringly accurate" of his travels up and down the East Coast over the past year.

Biddle writes that the phone appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing, meaning it doesn't help to switch off "location services."

How troubling is this? Here's how security researcher Allan puts it:

"Neither Pete nor myself think there is any sort of conspiracy going on, however we're both worried about this level of detailed location data being out there in the wild."

Biddle says he has asked Apple for commentary.

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