Posts with tag android

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Why are they here? Nobody knows.

On second thought, maybe they're grummles.

@Skeptikk asked:

Read any news from Blizzard on the new spam in the calendar that players are seeing?

Blizzard has updated the Android version of its World of Warcraft mobile remote app to include the mobile guild chat feature. Also, all North American realms are now eligible to use the guild chat feature. For a limited time, the mobile guild chat feature is free to use, but it will eventually be part of the subscription service that also includes the mobile auction house as part of the app.

The World of Warcraft remote app features character sheets, talent calculators, calendar access, item database information, and much more. For a monthly subscription, players can access the in-game auction house, buy and sell wares from their inventories, and collect money from sold auctions. The mobile guild chat feature, currently free, allows players to log in to guild chat and converse with guild members and friends, a great resource for staying in touch with your guild on the go.

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WoW Patch 4.1 is on the PTR, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from previews of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.

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The World of Warcraft mobile app for iOS devices was updated today with the oft-requested mobile guild chat feature. Best of all, this new feature is free to everyone for a limited time! Check out the full release after the break.

The newest version of the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory has been released on iTunes, featuring a 3-D model viewer for all characters, activity feeds similar to the ones on the web version of the armory, and optimizations for Apple's iOS 4.0.

Included in the update is a cool feature called screenshot mode, allowing you to take cool pictures of your characters in front of lots of backdrops, including the racial capital cities. The screenshot mode will even remove all of the interface elements from the phone, giving you a clean shot.

This update could be laying the groundwork for the newly revealed mobile guild chat service available through the armory app, potentially unlocked in the near future for subscribers to Blizzard's Remote Auction House service. Hopefully, more light will be shed on this functionality in the near future. Until then, get updating, because these new features are pretty neat. Previously, I would have had to bookmark the armory's RSS feed for my characters and open them in Safari on the iPhone, but with the new activity feeds built right into the armory app, things have gotten a lot less clunky.

Wrocas (European community manager) announced on the WoW forums moments ago that a guild chat feature will be added to the Mobile Armory that's available on both the iPhone and Android. Players have been asking for this type of feature ever since the armory was introduced. This feature piggybacks off the same service that the remote auction house uses, which requires an additional monthly fee on top of your normal World of Warcraft subscription. One fee to rule them all (and by "all," I mean both the mobile auction house and the guild chat feature).

This allows access to guild chat, officer chat (presuming you had access to start with) and whispers. It appears the whispers will only be allowed to and from guild members, at the moment. There is also no news about being able to chat with your Real ID friends. If you don't have a device that the Mobile Armory runs on, Blizzard will soon be adding this feature to the normal armory as well.

The full announcement is behind the break.

Blizzard appears to be trying to make it easier for everyone to have an Authenticator and to that end, there is now a Mobile Authenticator for Android. The Android version works just like the iPhone/iTouch app and is available at the Android App store (you can view it via a third party site). Once you get it on your phone, you then link it to your account at the official World of Warcraft Account Management page. We have reports of the app working for people.

Though we were unable to find this app from Blizzard directly, we believe it to be legitimate. However, we have contacted Blizzard for confirmation. We'll let you know what they have to say when we hear back from them. Update: Here is the link to the official Blizzard support page for the Android app. Looks like it's legit. Update 2: Here is the official announcement.

If you don't have an Authenticator yet, we can't recommend it enough. The added protection an authenticator provides to your account is much greater than the slight inconvenience of needing access to your phone whenever you login. This is particularly the case if you game at internet cafes.

Blizzplanet continues to track down hints at what Blizzard might be planning in the mobile space, i.e. on the iPhone or another mobile computing platform (that Android Dream demo looked pretty sweet, too). Recently, Blizzard posted a job opening for a web software engineer, and while of course that could be for improvements to the Armory, or for the upcoming changes to Battle.net, but considering that many mobile apps are web apps nowadays, that position could definitely be put to work developing a web interface specifically for mobile platforms.

And the second hint is a little more concrete: our sister site Massively has mentioned Vollee before -- they're a company that claims to be able to stream a PC game experience to a mobile platform like the iPhone. They've already created a Second Life client, and Blizzplanet notes that in one of their recent press releases, they mention that they've been working with Activision Blizzard on a partnership. There are a lot of games under the Activision Blizzard banner nowadays, of course, but WoW is the biggest one of them, and it's definitely the MMO Vollee would want to be working on.

Blizzard hasn't officially announced any version or WoW application for any mobile platforms, of course, and even if one was in the planning stages, there's no guarantee we'd ever see it in an releaseable form. But there's definitely a call to bring facets of World of Warcraft to mobile computing, and if they can work it out in a form they find acceptable, it would undoubtedly be popular.