These concessions pay off in usability, however-the game has a good frame rate, and I was able to play for over an hour straight with only a slight change in the battery indicator when I was done. Try that same trick in X-Plane for the Mac (or in a real plane!), and you’d basically fold your wings in half, ending your flight very quickly and painfully. There are some concessions to lessen the load on the iPhone’s CPU-you can, for instance, enter a 90-degree banked turn from a maximum-speed dive without any damage to your aircraft. The Avanti in flightMost of the graphical goodness and flight model accuracy from the desktop version has made the move to the iPhone, so when you’re flying, the views are pretty amazing, and the plane responds (mostly) realistically. On the heads-up display, you’ll see everything you need to fly-airspeed and altitude indicators, an artificial horizon with flight path indicator, a compass (with a needle that points to the one airport), and throttle and flap position indicators. The four X-Plane aircraftYou can fly one of four aircraft (a Cessna 172, Columbia (now Cessna) 400, Cirrus Vision jet, and Piaggio Avanti), and all four share the same greatly-simplified instrument panel-it’s not really a panel at all, but a heads-up display that’s displayed on top of the moving scenery. I can usually clear this just by turning left or right, then returning to level flight. I have noticed that, occasionally, X-Plane seems to lose track of the iPhone’s position, requiring me to tip the phone further and further just to keep the same nose angle. It’s incredibly intuitive and very easy to master-the sensitivity of the interface is just about perfect. Once the aircraft is off the ground and climbing, raise the gear, zero the flaps, and then tip your iPhone left or right to initiate a turn. ![]() As the airplane accelerates, tip your iPhone towards you (X-Plane for iPhone runs only in landscape mode), and watch the nose come up. To take off, move the throttle slider to the top of the screen, move the flaps slider down a notch if you wish, and then release the brakes. So how do you actually fly X-Plane? Using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometers, of course. All of these interface elements are typically in a near-transparent state when you touch the screen, though, they turn opaque, making them easy to use without being visually distracting. Flying in X-Plane is very intuitive-there are sliders on each side of the screen to control the throttle and flaps, two buttons in the center for gear and brakes, and a row of buttons across the top to control the view and set up the simulator. While this all sounds quite limiting, it’s implemented very well, and the end result is a very usable simulation/game. There are also fewer aircraft, a reduced-accuracy flight model, and no navigation aids. Within the world, there’s but one airport, and no cities. So what do you give up in the move to the iPhone? First of all, the world is much smaller-the entire planet is a roughly 1,600 square mile area around Innsbruck, Austria. The iPhone install, on the other hand, weighs in at just 7MB. The iPhone version of X-Plane is a slimmed-down version of the desktop product-X-Plane for the Mac requires something like 60GB of disk space for a full install, so that’s not going to work well on an 8GB or 16GB iPhone. In short, X-Plane is the state of the art in flight simulation on the Mac. ![]() Each airplane has a fully functional panel, containing all the key instruments you’d find in the real version, and the mix of airplane types available is huge-everything from gliders up to a 747 jumbo jet. Reviewed version 8.0 back in 2005 version 9 is now current.) It has an advanced flight model, realistic and dynamic weather, the ability to fly hundreds of planes, and a worldwide database of airports and navigation aids (such as X-Plane, which is the most advanced flight simulator available for the Mac. ![]() This is the first flight simulator for the iPhone, and if nothing else, it’s an amazing testament to the power of the iPhone’s CPU and graphics capabilities. Instead, my iPhone can now literally fly, thanks to Laminar Research’s X-Plane for iPhone. While my iPhone has always felt relatively fast, now I can say it really flies-and no, that’s not due to theĢ.1 software update, though that helped.
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