Slingbox iPhone Application Coming Soon
From Gotta Be Mobile: Slingbox showed us its iPhone application at CES 2009, but it hasn’t been released on iTunes quite yet. They hoped it would be live by the end of Q1, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when Apple will approve it. Things seem to be progressing in the right direction though, with Slingbox publishing a new page on its site showing a sneak peak of the Slingbox iPhone app.
From Zatsnotfunny: What we’ve got here is a technology demo and a stake in the ground: SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone. As it is, the current application is an amazing technological achievement (given Slingbox’s Windows Media Video broadcast) and the team has done a great job with the initial UI. Going forward, Sling’s got an interesting decision to make (which may not entirely be up to them): Continue down the jailbreak path or get legit with the SDK and iTunes App Store (including hefty Apple kickbacks). But Jobs has said no to “bandwidth hogs,” so Sling may have to limit connectivity options (to WiFi - a non-issue with the current EDGE model) for a store blessing.
No word on timing, but if I were driving I’d put a time bomb on this alpha software and release it as part of a Sling Labs initiative (along with Blackberry, SlingPlayer 2.0, etc) to fire up the community and sell Slingboxes.
And Macdailynews.com says: “Unfortunately, while the new app fills the iPhone’s screen with a nice, smooth picture, it doesn’t take full advantage of the increased screen resolution. The app scales up the same 320 x 240 pixel image from the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry versions to fit the iPhone’s 320 x 480 pixel screen. Having said that, it still looked sharp when blown up to full screen, with reasonable smoothness over a weak 3G signal and near 30 fps animation over Wi-Fi,” Lendino reports.
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