Saturday, June 18, 2011

Amazon's Free App of the Day - Nano Panda [PSA: WARNING!!!]

written by: Nick Kosmides

I've not had to make a PSA yet, but don't download today's free app from Amazon!  Nano Panda, though looks extremely cute and fun, and has achievement support through Open Feint, has some serious problems.

I downloaded it only after reading everyone else's experiences on Amazon and basically ran into the same initial problems.  Extremely long load times getting to the main menu for starters.  Its not Feint's fault as many seem to think.  If you load Feint from the Main Menu, it operates perfectly fine on its own, but returning to the game and progressing anywhere within is where the problem lies.

The first level was really beautiful, I thought I might be one of the lucky few (literally) who made it to gameplay.  Upon completing the first level I had no idea how to play still.  Onward to the second level.


I fired off the two pandas and CRASH!!!  My phone's auto-brightness level seemed to increase which may have caused the crash, meaning the game could not handle certain phone features.  Not good.  So my phone is hard crashed, locked up, can't be recovered without removing the battery now.  Sweet.  But my screen starts to do something funny.  All these horizontal lines begin to slow cover the frozen image of gameplay.  A couple minutes later my phone's screen is covered in lines.

So I say once more, until a proper fix is released, DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS APP!  If you do so, you will be putting your phone at risk of these same issues or worse.  Not every device will fully recover from this.  Heed my warning people.  I'm not even going to link the app below, its that bad.  If there appears to be a link below, its because the issue is reportedly fixed and I will update this post.

Nano Panda - $0.99 FREE