Take the art of folding paper, on your Pre! – Tilt Origami

The art of origami always fascinated me, especially when you spend a few minutes to make a paper crane so it can flap its wings when you pull its tail. Now we can double our frustrations and take the challenge directly to our Palm Pre or Pixi handsets, with Tilt Origami.

The application is $1.99 and is supposedly developed by Lexon Soft Inc. (http://www.lexansoft.com/RFID/). When visiting this site, it really doesn’t provide any information that this company develops for the palm pre, or games for that matter. In fact, they develop Windows Mobile PDA handsets for either inventory tracking or P.O.S. (point of sales) systems. All around, the website really lacking and support seems non-existent. I’ve sent them an email with an issue I had with one of the puzzles, and haven’t received a response back from them. Luckily, there were other owners of this application at PreCentral.net, and they were nice enough to assist me with my mistakes.

The application is very basic in appearance; with a plain star filled wallpaper, no sounds, basic API buttons and a basic UI, which is a good thing that it’s not more then $2. Not too many features are filled with this application, like changing the background, options to turn off the sleep, a toggle for hints. However the performance of the app is exceptional and quick, the puzzles are enjoyable and challenging.

There’s one particular puzzle called ‘The Dome” and I’ve managed to make an identical version of the original puzzle image, but it will fail to move forward to the next level. Obviously I did something wrong, but thanks to PreCentral users, they managed to pull me out of the hole and complete it. There are plenty of missions that will keep you busy and kill time while you wait for your number to be called at your local DMV, plus you can receive updates with new puzzles that were submitted by other owners of the application. You can also enter into Free Origami mode and create your own origami masterpiece and share it with the world to solve. I’m not sure what the turn around time is for your origami puzzle to show up in the game, but it looks like the developer releases ‘updates’ for the application that fills the list with new puzzles.

The features are very basic. The Help Menu takes you to a written tutorial how the game is played; the preferences only has a toggle between tap and drag & tilt controls. The controls are pretty simple with a minimal learning curve. First tap the paper to create a blue point where the paper will fold, a line to set how the paper will fold and an arrow for the fold direction. You can spin the folding line around and the arrow will follow, and once the folding is set properly, tap the yellow star icon to finally complete the fold. Enabling the tilt control will allow the player to spin the folding line by using the phone’s accelerometer. It sounds fun, but comes across as a gimmick when actually played with. It seems easier to control with the tap and drag method, and the screen needs to be tapped anyways to fold the paper. If a wrong fold was made, the undo button is displayed in the bottom right corner as a blue arrow pointing left. The undo history records all the folds made throughout the puzzle, this can be useful if there’s a mistake made and the paper is folded ten times already. Other controls include regular clockwise and counter clockwise rotations and a 180 flip to show the backside of the folded paper. This is identified with a darker shade of gray for the back, and a plain white side for the front

The application deserves a 7 out of 10, it could use an artists touch in my opinion, with a better looking background and perhaps a smoother UI experience when working the puzzle. I would also like to see the developer to update their website about this application. It’s a bit disconcerting that I’m purchasing this application and their website has no mention of it and providing below average support.

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