Two really nice interviews with seniors in the Mobile Games industry:

Smartphone.biz-news published an interview with Xavier Carrillo, CEO and founder of Digital Legends Entertaiment (DLE). Xavier talked with David Montgomery about how the iPhone changed the mobile games space, and about their game Kroll.

Interestingly, smartphones have become such attractive platforms for gaming almost as a by-product of the drive to create multi-media handsets.

The demand for more megapixels on cameras led to more RAM, the popularity of mobiles as music players required more storage capacity and the addition of TV functionality led to improved hardware accelerators.

For gamers, Carrillo said it means someone playing a game on a smartphone on the train to work can now expect a quality similar to that on their PS3 at home.

Another interesting interview is the one MocoNews’ Tricia Duryee held with Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s SVP of Worldwide Publishing.

During Glu’s Q3 conference call, the company mentioned that the adoption of smartphones is actually negatively impacting mobile game sales because they aren’t typically tied to a carrier’s deck, where games are sold. Are you seeing that, too?: “Yes, it depends on the carriers. With both AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile, you can download Blackberry games, but they [the carriers] were taken by surprise by the strong take-off of the smartphone content business—first the smartphone sales and then the content business. They are all taking care of that now, and will all be live by the end of the year. There are lost opportunities now, but all of this will be taken care of by the end of the year.”

Another exposure of the nasty business practices running around the mobile industry. Arjan from MobileGamesBlog published an email from an executive in Glu to one of the game reviewers on an undisclosed site. In the email, the Glu representative demands to see the reviews before they go online and clearly state they will not allow reviews with ranks lower than 8/10 to be posted: Read more »

David Wood, Executive Vice President and Co Founder of Symbian, gave the opening keynote at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco and made some notes about it on his blog. He talks about how will smartphones be in 2013, why does he think OS is so important, how to tackle different problems we have in the industry and the role of open source.

Of course, being such a high figure in Symbian, he also gives his perspective on where the company should go in these areas.

It’s a bit long, but it’s quite interesting. Check it out.

After Arjan broke the news on Vivendi Mobile closing it’s US operations, comes the European office shut down. According to sources, the team already been informed and will be disbanded.

This was expected since Activision aquired Vivendi to form a gaming giant Activion-Blizzard. The official statment released at the buy-out announced Activion “…also is evaluating options regarding two non-strategic business units Vivendi Games Mobile and Sierra Online, which provides casual games for the PC and Xbox Live Marketplace, including the possibility of divesting these business units.”

Activision practical philosophy so far was to build successful PC/Console franchise and then licensing the IP to 3rd parties (such as Glu) to do the mobile games.

Lauri Aalto published a post on his blog about converting Redland RDF libraries to Symbian OS, and the issues he had to tackle:

…There’s already a rather well established OOM testing technique on Symbian OS called OOM loop. The basic idea is to inject allocation failures using __UHEAP_SETFAIL() heap failure macro, which in turn uses User::__DbgSetAllocFail(), and then see how the code deals with allocation failures. John Pagonis writes extensively about the OOM loop construct in his Symbian Developer Network technical paper…