Can I have a quick rant? Second Life is a fairly popular virtual world, even if its active users are dwarfed by those of less swizzy 2D kidworlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz. But still, Second Life has secured enough column inches to make it an ideal way for any company to cop some zeitgeisty cool by announcing some kind of tie-in with it. Any kind. Even if they quietly abandon it a few months later.
Now, I’m not suggesting that’s the case with Samsung, but its decision to trumpet an application that lets users access Second Life from their phones is puzzling. Who would use such a thing? Surely squeezing Second Life down to the level that it’ll run on a phone negates the whole point of being there? And in any case, how many extra handsets is the company really going to sell due to having this application.
It’s not even like Samsung is the only company trying this. Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo is doing it too, as is Israeli technology firm Comverse.
Still, Samsung has announced some other apps too, at the CTIA show in Vegas. LifeDiary is basically Nokia’s Lifeblog by a different name - being an app that turns your photos, videos, calls, texts and appointments into a “personal diary”, which works in partnership with a PC application and a website. Yes, it can output all this as a blog too. Check it out.
Meanwhile, Softboard is the most interesting of the lot, being a user-generated content thingy that lets you make “stories, games and animations” on your PC, and then send them to mobile phones. The site is live now, so you can give it a try.
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