Obviously, the big Apple news this week was the announcement of the iPad 2 (watch our First Look video here). Just as most people expected, the new device offers front- and rear-facing cameras, a faster processor, and FaceTime capabilities, and even has a slightly different design than the original. The iPad 2 will be available on both the AT&T and Verizon networks March 11 and comes in both white and black, and there are several different models and price points to choose from.

Even though I mentioned in an earlier post that I probably wouldn't buy the new iPad 2, now that I've seen it, I can't help but try to think of ways to afford it. I'm thinking of selling my original iPad, or maybe I'll try to use my tax refund to foot the bill, but I bet I'm not the only one making these calculations. My question to you is: did any of you plan on not buying the new iPad, but, after the unveiling, couldn't help but change your mind? Let me know in the comments.

This week's apps are both games. The first challenges you to escape the fiery clutches of a volcano, and in the second you direct a band of heroes to battle fearsome foes.

Volcano Escape (99 cents) is an arcade platformer type of game where your challenge is to see how high you can climb as you escape the rising lava of a volcano. The control system includes onscreen joysticks for movement and firing your weapon, and you have a jump button in the upper right for jumping ever higher, away from the rising lava. As you climb, you'll encounter bad guys you need to shoot so they can't take away from your health (you get three hearts to start off). You'll also be able to collect boxes that give you power-ups like shields and jet packs. Collecting boxes also lets you unlock new characters to play. If you can manage to stay away from the rising lava and clear your path of baddies, you'll be on your way to new high scores.

Volcano Escape is a game that I really want to like, but it definitely has a few problems. On my iPhone 4, the gameplay is a bit choppy; at one point, I even force-quit all my apps and rebooted my iPhone, which still didn't work. It's also difficult to tell where the level of the lava is on your first several games, making it a surprise sometimes when you die. The jump button is also problematic because it's above the shooting controls, and I'd often end up pressing the wrong button. If they fix these issues, it would be easy to recommend this game, but you may want to wait before paying any money.

Overall, Volcano Escape is a pretty fun game in spite of its problems. It's a shame that the good-looking graphics and game concept seem to be undermined by a few minor problems. Once they fix a few of the issues or allow for more control customization, this game will be great for anyone who wants an easy-to-pick-up time waster.

Battleheart ($2.99) takes the RPG battle mechanic of fighting in a party of characters and distills it down to the basics for great single-player action. A quick early tutorial shows you how to move two characters and how to use their skills (a sword-wielding fighter and a healing cleric), but later you can hire more characters of different classes to balance out your four-character party. As you progress through the game, your character management skills are put to the test, and you'll definitely have moments of panic trying to get each character to perform exactly the way you want.

As you complete battles in Battleheart, you'll earn money you can use to hire new character classes and buy new and more powerful items. After every five levels of experience gain, you'll also be able to add class-specific skills you can use in battles. The rogue character has a backstab ability you can unlock, for example.

The game can be a little frustrating in certain parts. In some instances your characters end up stacked on top of each other during battle, which often leads to selecting the wrong character--an infuriating problem, especially if you're trying to keep a wounded character alive. Fortunately this problem doesn't occur too often, and you'll mostly have time to move characters out of the way as long as they are not near death.

Overall, Battleheart does a great job of challenging you to work out your strategy for party-based combat. With several unique character classes, tons of skills to unlock, and items you can upgrade for more power, Battleheart has plenty of replay value for the strategy-loving gamer.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Do you think I'm being too hard on Volcano Escape? How do you like having control over an entire party of classic RPG characters? Let me know in the comments!

How many times have you found yourself frustrated by an iPad game's touch-screen controls? My personal answer: lots.

Take the awesome sci-fi/horror shooter Dead Space. As I noted in my review, "If there's a problem with Dead Space, it's the controls. They're about as good as they can be, but I usually end up fighting the controls at the same time I'm fighting the monsters. Oh, to have an actual game pad I could plug in!"

Ten One Design's Fling is not a game pad, but it's quite possibly the next best thing. It adds a small analog joystick to any iPad, thus giving you a physical controller for games that would benefit from one (and there are many).

The genius lies in the design. Held in place by a pair of small suction cups, the Fling employs a coiled plastic ring with a screen-conductive black thumbstick in the center. It looks totally bizarre, and your first reaction upon taking it out of the box is, "This can't possibly work!"

But it does, and quite well for the most part. I tried the Fling with N.O.V.A., Dead Space, Lego Harry Potter, Reckless Racing, and NBA Jam, to name a few, and almost without exception, it made games easier to control--and more fun to play. (NBA Jam in particular, which uses an onscreen D-pad exactly like what the Fling replicates, went from frustrating to fantastic--and it's not even iPad-native!)

What's awesome about the Fring is that it requires no special software, no batteries, and no connection to the docking port. Just slap it on the screen and start playing. When you're done, pop it off and stick it in the included soft carrying case.

What's not awesome about the Fring? For starters, it does slide around a bit, the inevitable result of robust thumb movement. What's more, in some games (like Reckless Racing) it's not easy to position the controller so it perfectly matches the onscreen controls. In other words, it may not work with every game you own. Plus, the stick often gets in the way of menus, and sometimes activates them accidentally.

I also need to gripe about the price. Ten One originally planned to charge $29.95, which was just plain ridiculous, but wisely lowered it to $19.95. Even so, that seems high for what is essentially a small piece of plastic. The good news is you can buy two (for dual-stick shooters) for $29.94, making your price-per-Fling a bit more reasonable.

It may not be perfect, but the Fling is an awesome way to add tactile controls to some of the iPad's best games. I'm joyfully rediscovering gems I'd abandoned just because the onscreen joystick(s) drove me nuts.

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

Google has made good on a promise to release technology it hopes will curtail Android's fragmentation problem, a complication for programmers who want their software to run on diverse devices.

Yesterday, the company released a "Fragment" library for older versions of Android. The library is built into the Honeycomb version of Android, offering new tools to sidestep issues like different screen sizes more easily for those using the brand-new Android 3.0. That version of the OS appears on Motorola's new Android-based Xoom tablet and will arriving on other tablets.

Now, though, the Fragment interface will be useful for older Android devices that currently dominate the market. The library can be built into applications so that programmers can use the Fragment application programming interface (API) even if it's not in the operating system directly.

"Today we've released a static library that exposes the same Fragments API (as well as the new LoaderManager and a few other classes) so that applications compatible with Android 1.6 or later can use fragments to create tablet-compatible user interfaces," said Xavier Ducrohet, technical leader for the Android software developer kit, in a blog post yesterday.

Google announced the Fragment API in February.

"For developers starting work on tablet-oriented applications designed for Android 3.0, the new Fragment API is useful for many design situations that arise from the larger screen. Reasonable use of fragments should also make it easier to adjust the resulting application's UI to new devices in the future as needed--for phones, TVs, or wherever Android appears," Dianne Hackborn, a Google Android programmer, said in a blog post about the interface.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

The corporate wrangling over Web video standards, already a technically and legally complex matter, is getting a lot more complicated with the arrival of a Justice Department antitrust investigation.

Specifically, the DOJ is looking into whether the actions of patent licensing group MPEG LA are stifling a Google video encoding technology called VP8, The Wall Street Journal reported last night. The the California State Attorney General's office also is looking into the matter, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources.

MPEG LA licenses patents for Web video encoding technology, including today's widely used H.264, on behalf of a sizable group of companies with hundreds of patents it deems to bear on the technology. As an alternative to H.264, Google last May began offering VP8, the technology at the heart of its $123 million acquisition of On2 Technologies in 2010.

At stake in the matter are the financial and legal requirements to digital video, which is getting ever more important as the Internet and the Web rise to prominence as a medium for content. H.264 may be used freely for video that's available freely; by contrast, royalties must be paid to MPEG LA if the content isn't free or if the codec is used in hardware or software products.

MPEG LA, which is based in Denver but has offices around the globe, wouldn't confirm or deny an investigation, but it defended its practices.

"Time and again MPEG LA's model has been tested not just in the marketplace, but in the courts by those seeking any possible way to avoid their intellectual property obligations or other axes to grind, and each time, MPEG LA has prevailed," the organization said in a statement. "It is a successful model that the market has widely accepted and which has been approved by competition authorities around the world, including in the U.S."

VP8 is a video codec, which is technology designed to encode and decode video so it can be stored and sent over networks in compact form. Combined with an audio codec called Vorbis, it forms Google's patent-free, open-source WebM technology, which the Internet giant hopes will unencumber streaming video on the Web. Google wants to lower the barriers to Web video use in the hopes that WebM will help people built video directly into Web pages with HTML5 rather than relying on a plug-in such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player.

The patent problem
Google announced WebM last year, saying people could use VP8 technology royalty-free. But video encoding is a patent-infringement minefield, and VP8 officially entered patent limbo in February when MPEG LA said it was asking for organizations to tell them if they had patents essentially used in VP8.

MPEG LA has said it believes VP8 violates others' patents, and formally assembling a list is an essential step toward offering a VP8 patent pool license similar to the one MPEG LA already offers for H.264 and several other video technologies.

"We do not believe VP8 is patent-free," MPEG LA told CNET. "There continues to be interest in the facilitation of a pool license to address the apparent marketplace desire for convenience in accessing essential VP8 patent rights owned by many different patent holders under a single license as an alternative to negotiating individual licenses."

The question that regulators apparently are interested in is whether MPEG LA is essentially quashing VP8. MPEG LA says it's neutral, offering patent pools for the convenience of those who want to implement the technology without the hassle of negotiating license agreements with multiple patent holders.

The antitrust situation is something of a reprise of the antitrust concerns that On2 raised in 2002 about MPEG-4 video encoding regarding a patent pool. H.264, also known as AVC and MPEG-4 Part 10, was then just getting started.

"MPEG-4 is trying to monopolize the substantially software-based interactive video compression industry, plain and simple," On2 wrote in a 2002 position paper to the Justice Department. "It is a move by a few very large companies to dominate a market and fix prices. Recent pricing policies by MPEG LA for MPEG-4, and the customer reaction to them are ample evidence of this."

More recently, German software company Nero filed an antitrust lawsuit against MPEG LA last May.

"Absolute power has corrupted MPEG LA absolutely," said Nero, which makes CD- and DVD-burning software, in its complaint. "Once MPEG LA obtained monopoly power in the relevant technology markets, it used that power to willfully maintain or extend its monopolies for years beyond their natural expiration...and administer its licenses in an unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory manner that stifles competition and innovation, and harms consumers."

Neither case went anywhere. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the Nero case in November.

Allies and agendas
Google has lined up several allies for WebM. Browser makers Mozilla and Opera Software have built support into Firefox and Opera, while Google is removing H.264 from Chrome. Another ally is Adobe, which has pledged to add VP8 support into its Flash Player plug-in alongside existing codecs such as H.264.

On the other side of the debate are Microsoft and Apple, which support H.264 for HTML5 video in their Safari and the soon-to-be released IE9 browsers. Those companies also have built H.264 directly into their operating systems. Though they have patents in the H.264 pool that MPEG LA licenses, Microsoft has said it pays MPEG LA twice as much in royalties to ship H.264-enabled products than it receives in royalty payments back. And Apple has only a single patent in the H.264 pool, so it appears its interests in H.264 and MPEG LA are not directly financial.

There are plenty of strategic issues involved, though. H.264 is widely used in everything from Blu-ray players to video cameras. It fits neatly into Apple's desire for seamless, high-quality technology that does its job and stays in the background, and using it in HTML5 video helps further Apple's agenda to build a future that doesn't rely on Flash Player.

In a 2010 letter to the Free Software Foundation Europe, Jobs cast doubts on freely available codecs, though he specifically named only a commercially unsuccessful progenitor to VP8 called Theora. The letter arrived shortly before Google announced its WebM plans for VP8.

"A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now," Jobs wrote in the e-mail. "Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others' patents."

Apple has a lot of allies in H.264. But it's virtually impossible that the World Wide Web Consortium, which is standardizing HTML5, would endorse H.264 as a the video codec of choice in HTML5 given its patent encumbrances and the W3C's royalty-free standards work.

Microsoft seems more neutral. It advocates H.264 and building H.264 add-ons for Chrome and Firefox on the one hand, but on the other it's helping Google build a WebM browser extension for Windows and says it has no objections if the intellectual property issues are resolved.

The Justice Department, Google and Microsoft declined to comment for this story. Apple didn't immediately comment.

Updated 3:44 a.m. PT and 8:36 a.m. PT with responses from DOJ, Google, Microsoft, and MPEG LA.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Contrary to last month when Microsoft plugged 22 holes on Patch Tuesday, only four holes will be fixed in the company's monthly security update roundup next week.

There will be three bulletins, one of them rated "critical" for Microsoft Windows and the other two rated "important" and affecting Windows and Office, according to the preview advisory released today.

While they are few in number, they are not to be ignored. They all involve remote code execution, which means an attacker could force code to run on a target's machine and could lead to a complete takeover of the computer.

"The upcoming Patch Tuesday includes a fix for a DLL (dynamic-link library) hijacking vulnerability in the Microsoft Groove application," said HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and chief architect at Metasploit. "This was one of the hundreds of flaws discovered last year by both Rapid7 and another security firm. I am glad to see that Microsoft is making progress on these vulnerabilities and continuing to fix affected applications."

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex