May 20th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Gaming Gear | 1 Comment »
Last week, during the Nordic Game 2008 expo, I decided to take my Zeemote on the trip in order to find out how it reacts to ‘travel conditions’ and what people think about the device.
My first issue started even before I left my house. Where to leave the thing!? I have my left pocket filled with keys, my richt pocket held my N73 and my backpockets… well I surely didn’t want to sit on this marvellous machine! So finally I gave in and put it next to my N73 with the hope that the two wouldn’t damage each-other.
During my wait at the airport, I quickly grabbed out the Zeemote and found out that the Zeemote and my N73 where good friends. No harm done, both still looking like new. While playing at the airport, I noticed that a few people where looking at what I was doing. Not the babes though, I had to settle with the geeks.
During the Nordic Game 2008 event, I pulled the Zeemote out of my pocket while speaking with various people that where affiliated to the mobile or handheld gaming industries. Without a doubt, they all agreed that this is the first step into improving interaction between the player and the mobile game. Needless to say, most people did expect accelerometer support as they started waving it around as soon as they got their hands on it. The only doubts I heard where if the Zeemote would be available widely enough for gamers to obtain it.
It’s safe to say that industry experts from various platforms agree that the Zeemote is great. Now, let’s hope consumers will start to get a go at it soon.
LOL Zeemote as a babe magnet! 🙂 It is a great device but not that good perhaps.
I have pretty much done integrating the SDK but I can say although works great in practice it will (in our games case at least) only really be of any use with MIDP2 CLDC 1.1 Nokia and SonyEricsson devices from a developer standpoint – there were just too many hurdles to cross with some non-Nokia/SonyErixsson device types.
Also our newer mobile produce is normally budget ad-wrapped these days which eats memory footprint also and some devices cannot be supported in that fashion due to the fact that the Zeemote SDK also eats up valuable memory footprint on some lower spec devices that have limited jar size (Moto RAZR V3 is one!)
Overall I’m moving most development across to Nokia and SonyEricsson phones anyway as that’s where most of the money is now as I’ve said all along… sure there is some revenue in the others but personally I won’t be supporting Zeemote on those at least they will be shipped without Zeemote support for the above reasons mostly.
There are so many devices now it is not possible to test Zeemote on all of them so some functionality has to be asssumed if the phone is at least MIDP2 CLDC 1.1 compatible IMHO as a smaller mobile developer.
Bottom line here though is – least we support it now I guess at any rate 🙂