tech support

Hi, thanks for dropping by. If you are interested in a lively community around mobile casual games why not register to play, score and make friends. Please go to http://www.playyoo.com/common/registration.html

Playyoo is all about playing on mobile phones. You can only rate a game when you play it on your phone. You can also add comments directly from the phone, although comments can also be made through the web site. We’re aware that at the moment how to do this may not be entirely obvious, so this short video shows you how it’s done (note: it’s not exactly Hollywood quality!).

By the way, we assign a default rating of “3″ to new games. So a game rated 3 is average, 1 is poor, and 5 is excellent. You can change you rating of a game at any time: we only retain your latest rating.

We recently introduced a new feature, the “short ID”, which is accessible through the Your Account link.

The point of this feature is to make it easier to login to Playyoo on your mobile phone. Now, rather than having to painfully enter your email address, you can choose a user ID of minimum 4 characters. Note that this has nothing to do with your nickname, and remains private.
The best way to use the short ID is to choose a sequence of letters which can be entered with single taps on your phone keyboard. For example, ADGJ, which is entered by typing 2-3-4-5 (somebody has already grabbed this one, unfortunately. I wanted it!).

Other strategies might be to choose a pattern, or to map to a number. For example, my birthday is 28 Feb (so, still time to buy presents), so I could try AT02.Other easy to remember numbers could be the first 4 of your spouse’s phone number, or your ZIP code.
Let us know how this works out for you, and if you have any suggestions.

Of course, you can also use this short ID to login on the web. And by the way, we’ve also added a third way to identify yourself: just use the mobile phone number you registered with.

Bill Perry recently updated the Flash Lite device spreadsheet. There are now 60 commercially available Nokia mobile devices, 36 Sony-Ericsson, and 13 BREW devices that have some version of Flash Lite installed (as of November 5). You can access the updated spreadsheet (in PDF) here

If you’re unlucky enough to get the message “sorry, your phone is not compatible with Playyoo” when you try out our preview site, we really are sorry. Playyoo requires a phone which supports the new Flash Lite technology from Adobe, and although this supported by more and more mobile phones, so far the majority of phones, especially older ones, are not compatible.

So, if we know this, why did we choose to bet on Flash Lite? Well, Flash Lite allows us to do some very cool things. More to the point, is allows us to let YOU do some very cool things, as you will discover when we launch in December. The only real alternative technology, Java, is simply not in the same league. Sure, people create great games in Java, but they take a huge investment in time and education.

Flash Lite is building a momentum. Adobe is fully behind it – Adobe was a principal sponsor of this year’s major mobile phone tradeshow, 3GSM, and this alone is a clear indication of how seriously they take the market. Back in March, when we decided to go with Flash Lite, maybe 1 in 20 phones in use in Europe and USA were compatible. Now it is closer to 1 in 10. In the Far East the situation is considerably better.

So if your phone doesn’t work, what can you do about it? Well, to be honest, not so much. Phones are not PCs. You cannot, in general add a Flash player to your phone. Note that while you might find a Flash Lite player you can install, doing it this way in almost all cases will not help, because the phone’s operating software will not be aware of it. The only way in which you can upgrade your phone to support Flash Lite is through a firmware upgrade, and let’s be honest, few phone manufacturers bother much with these, except in extreme circumstances, and even fewer customers apply them. And why should they? It’s a phone, not a PC, and only too often they’ve see what “upgrades” do to their PCs.

So what is the solution? Well, the best thing is to check with your operator and see if you qualify for a free upgrade. At the moment, the safest bet is to choose a Nokia phone, but you can also check various resources (see our FAQ) for a list of supported devices. We’ll be adding a lot more resources on this topic soon.

Actually, if your phone doesn’t work, you’re in good company – my personal phone, a very nice Sony Ericsson K810i, doesn’t either! By the time we go live in December I’ll be making sure have a Flash Lite enabled phone – I hope you can to!