Ebscer games starting applying for ESRB ratings a month ago, and all games have now been rated.
Games rated E for Everyone include:
Games rated T for Teen include:
Liar’s Dice received this stricter rating for including “Simulated Gambling”.
A look at the January downloads for the free Stuff I Need app shows that the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom together make up 53.8% of users.
In total, downloads came from 138 different countries, with Germany making a surprising showing at 5.4% of the market. India also does better than expected with the 7th largest number of users despite not being a traditional BlackBerry market.
Just one year into the launch of BlackBerry 10, and users have shown themselves to be rather quick to upgrade to new versions of the OS. While the wireless carriers have interfered with BlackBerry’s ability to get out the newest versions of the operating system to everyone, even the United States seems to have gotten on-board with OS 10.2.1 so expectations are high for next month.
While the day following the launch of 10.2.1 showed 66.61% of users on the newest OS, this came too late in the month to have much of an impact on the overall numbers for January. Growth of newer OS versions was overall steady, but slow. February is expected to be much better as there are now no carriers pretending that OS 10.1 is the newest release.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of February 2013 through the end of January 2014.
Twinkle has been updated to version 5.3 in BlackBerry World for all BlackBerry 10 phones. In addition to a few optimizations, this new version also allows Twinkle to act as a share target for calendar events from other applications including the built-in calendar app.
Twinkle is an app that allows you to set and keep track of upcoming and past events. Twinkle will tell you how far away an event is, and share it with a friends through social networks. The app includes an number of options for sorting or filtering your views in order to allow you to easily be able to manage and share a large number of different events.
In order to send an event to Twinkle from the native calendar app, just open the event and then select the ‘Share’ option from the menu. This will give you a list of applications (including Twinkle) that you can share the event to. Twinkle will then pre-populate the fields as if you were to manually create a new event.
The BlackBerry game 10,000 Farkle has been updated to version 2.3 in BlackBerry World. This new version offers a number of optimizations that makes the app faster, and also reduces the overall install size of the app by over 26 percent. Additionally, this update to the game also includes a swipe-down menu in order to give you another way to access some of the game’s advanced features.
Farkle gives you six dice to roll and awards points for a straight, three pairs or three or more of the same number. Fewer points ares also awarded for each individual 1 and 5. Any dice that do not score can be re-rolled for additional points. If all 6 dice can be scored, then all of the dice can be re-rolled on the same turn.
The skill in this game comes from knowing how far to push your luck, and which scoring combinations to take, and when to re-roll.
The default game mode gives you 10 turns to score as many points as you can. The 10,000 point mode gives you unlimited turns to reach 10,000 points. The two competitive game modes both use the traditional format of racing to 10,000 points.
While BlackBerry 10 users have been quick to upgrade, the demographics of the older BBOS are mostly unchanged over the past month. OS 5.0 was first released in 2009, and still claims a decent percentage of the market share. With the release of OS 7.0 coming in 2011, even this version has been around for awhile, but has yet to even capture 50% of the market.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of January 2013 through the end of January 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
BlackBerry officially released OS 10.2.1 this past Tuesday, and despite a few wireless carriers blocking the update for their users, the majority of users who downloaded my apps on Wednesday were already running the newest version of the OS. Taking the average from users of Pixelated and the Stuff I Need apps shows 66.61% of users on the newest OS just a day after it officially launched.
Statistics were collected by BlackBerry World for downloads on January 29th of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Because this is a snapshot of just a single day, the overall sample size is significantly smaller than for most of the statistics that are posted on this site.
An update to Xploding Boxes has increased the total number of levels to 420. This update also brings some tweaks to the swipe down menu on BlackBerry 10 devices, and a smaller install size for the Windows 8, Nook, and PlayBook versions of the app.
Additionally, Xploding Boxes has received its official ESRB rating, and is rated E for everyone.
Xploding Boxes is a strategy game for BlackBerry, Android, Nook, Windows 8, and BlackBerry 10 where the goal of the game is to start a chain reaction that will explode all of the boxes on the screen. Each level gives you a different number of touches, and requires a different strategy to solve.
The game itself, and the first 25 levels are available for free, while a one time in-app purchase can be used to access the rest of the levels for just $2.99 while maintaining your progress from the free levels.
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Much has been written about Prem Watsa’s failed acquisition of BlackBerry, and most of it strikes me as being wrong. Especially the part about it having failed.
In September 2013 Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial announced its intention to take BlackBerry private for $4.7 billion. While Fairfax already owned around 10% of BlackBerry they wanted to take the company private without investing any additional money of their own. This arrangement would have allowed Fairfax to have control over how BlackBerry was run.
While the full amount of money was never raised it is seems safe to say that Fairfax has managed to take control of BlackBerry without investing any additional money of their own. In a November 2013 announcement Fairfax effectively used their 10% ownership in order to take control of the company, by placing it under their own hand-picked CEO and putting forth their own vision for the future of BlackBerry. Granted, Fairfax did give BlackBerry a loan, but it is hard to give Prem Watsa too much credit for that given the very health 6% interest rate that Fairfax is getting in return.
At the end of the day it is hard to say that Prem Watsa didn’t get exactly what he wanted out of the deal insofar as that he was able to leverage his 10% ownership into complete control of the company. While this looks to be in the best long term interest of Fairfax financial, I have to question whether or not it is best for the users and developers of BlackBerry phones.
Last week was CES and very many new products and product categorizes were shown off, yet all of these products are completely useless. Except for the robots. Robots are always awesome.
Yet the highlights of CES are things like smart watches which (in my opinion) are a complete waste of time. I wrote about this before, but having a smart watch is not practical when you already have a phone in your pocket that does everything you need to do. There is really no demand for a secondary screen, when all other pressure is about condensing everything down to a single device.
The other trend at CES was towards devices like Fitbit that measure your physical activity. Personally I consider myself to be an athlete, and run 5-6 times a week, but I have no interest in these technologies. Sure, it is possible to measure my distance, heart rate, speed, step-count, and a thousand other factors, but I just don’t care. I am happy to continue running in a low tech environment, and see no advantage to tracking every single detail of my workout. Just because something can be measured, doesn’t mean that it matters.
And I certainly don’t need a bluetooth fork…
Version 1.5 of Starbeams expands the game to a total of 150 different levels. The game can be download from both BlackBerry World and the Windows 8 Store.
This update to the game adds levels 141-150, while also adding support for the ‘T’ and ‘B’ keyboard shortcuts to the Windows 8 version of the game.
The object of the game is to assign colors to each star in order to ensure that none of the stars are connected to another star of the same color. The game starts off easy, but quickly gets more complex, adding more colors and seven pointed stars that can not be changed.
The BlackBerry 10 version of the Stuff I Need app has been updated to version 2.3 and is available for download now. This update gives the app a quicker start up time, and also improves the overall efficiency of the app.
Originally conceived as a grocery list app, this minimalistic checklist app can be used to keep track of the stuff you need to get, or the stuff that you need to do. Items on the list can be edited (or deleted) by giving them a long press. Lists can be switched by pulling down on the tab at the top of the screen. This will expose a spinner that shows all of your current lists. New lists can be added by using the “+” button on the right side of the expanded tab. Making use of three or more lists requires the use on a one time in-app purchase.
Liar’s Dice has been updated to version 2.2 in BlackBerry World. This new version has a smaller instal size, and also adds support for a swipe-down menu.
This is a classic dice game of strategy and deception in which seeing only your own dice you must bet on the combined dice in play without getting caught in a lie.
The object of the game is to catch your opponent (the computer) betting too high. Bets are placed on both your own dice which you can see, and your opponent’s dice which are hidden from you. You begin each round by making a bet. The computer then has an opportunity to either call your bet a lie, or to bet higher then you. Then it is once again your turn to call your opponent’s bet or to bet even higher. This continues until eventually a bet is called. Then if the bet is too high the caller wins, or if the bet is not a lie, the bettor wins the round.
The game has two main game modes. The “High Score” mode is the default mode, points are awarded for each round, and the first to gain a given number of points wins. The number of points required to win a game can be configured on the options page in order to allow for shorter or longer games.
The other option is for an “Elimination” mode in which the loser of each round loses one dice for the following rounds, and the last player with any dice left is the winner. This game is more dynamic as there are a different number of dice in play each round. Additionally games in this mode typically play faster than high score games.
While I stopped actively working on apps for OS 4.x two years ago, it wasn’t until this past month that use of the now ancient OS finally fell below 1%. In my very first post on BlackBerry OS statistics from back in 2009, I expressed my surprise that 49% of users will still on the 4.6 operating system. After a few years of charting these statistics I am no longer surprised my the slow upgrade cycle on BBOS, but it is nice to see this older OS disappear for good.
However, the rest of the chart is mainly unchanged from the previous month.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of December 2012 through the end of December 2013, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
While BlackBerry 10 had previously been seeing very aggressive upgrade rates, December saw only a modest uptick in those using the latest OS version. This is most likely due to some wireless carriers (like Verizon) continuing to block this update from their users.
With 76.9% of Stuff I Need users running OS 10.2, users of the checklist app have once again been a bit quicker to adopt the newer OS than the users of Pixelated have been. For Pixelated use of the newest OS was up to 61.2% which is less than a two percent increase from November.
For December statistics on the distribution of BlackBerry 10 devices, see yesterday’s post on BerryReview. The short version is that the BlackBerry Z10 currently accounts for 62.2% of the market.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of February 2013 through the end of December 2013.
