April 25, 2009, 9:54 AM — The weekend is here, you've got your soda and chips, and it's finally time to log into World of Warcraft for some leveling. And then it happens: spouse aggro. The inlaws are throwing a barbeque, and your presence is required. What to do?
No problem, just grab your iPhone and you'll be all set. If the video below is to be believed, you can take advantage of most of what Warcraft has to offer via a mobile client. As the folks at Touch Arcade say, this is either a pretty slick implementation of WoW on the iPhone, or a very elaborate hoax. I don't think I'd try raiding with it, but for puttering around grinding rep or checking the broker, it seems very serviceable.
The developers, Vollee, have already produced a Second Life client. Unfortunately the Vollee site (http://www.vollee.com/home) is down at the moment, but from reading the Second Life article it seems like the client works similar to the OnLive technology that we discussed a few weeks back: the heavy lifting is being done via remote servers while the iPhone just works as a thin client. While I remain sceptical of OnLine replacing your XBox 360 anytime soon, for a low FPS application like this World of Warcraft client, the idea seems to work well enough.
No one thus far has gotten confirmation from Activision Blizzard on whether or not this client is in any way official. It might just be a prototype or a proof of concept. Perhaps we'll learn more at E3 in early June.
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