Ingress Version 1.28.1 Released

I haven't been following +Ingress  as much lately for a variety of reasons, so this release caught me by surprise. But this was a very welcome surprise.

I woke up this morning, and my scanner showed it had automatically updated Ingress. (By the way if you haven't set your phone/scanner to auto upgrade this is an app I definitely recommend allowing the auto upgrade). Initially I didn't think much about it, but when I launched Ingress on my way to work I was really impressed.

The first and most noticeable upgrade is Portal Vectoring. This is an awesome tool. If you have no portals in view on your scanner you will get pop ups with direction and distance to nearby portals. You can also immediately see the portal level and which faction controls that portal.

This solves one of my major complaints about Ingress. If you were in an area with you are not familiar with, it could be hard to find portals. I am really excited about this portion of the upgrade.

Other important features include the release of 5 new portal mods.

• Multi-Hack - Now there are "blackhat" methods of multi-hacking a portal. Now it appears that you now have the opportunity to "legally" multi-hack. But the number of multi-hacks will be limited before the mod burns out.
• Turret - This is another long awaited mod. But I am not quite certain of just how powerful they are going to make this mod. What we do know is that it will increase the number of defensive attacks on an enemy hacking a portal. But will it increase their strength? Will it automatically attack enemy faction players who get within range even if they do not attempt to hack? These are  some of the rumors out there.
• Link Amp - As the name implies this will amplify the distance between points of possible links
• Force Amp - This mod boosts the force of an attack on a portal
• Heat Sink - When hacking a portal you must wait 5 minutes between hacks. If you try to hack again too soon you get a message telling you the portal is in a cool down period and you must wait. This mod greatly reduces this time. The question remains: will this prevent portal burnout?

Happy Hacking

New Ingress Item - Power Cubes

In the 1.23.1 release of Ingress we were treated to a new item among other things; Power Cubes.

So what is a Power Cube and What will it do for me?
It appears they are XM storage units. and there are 8 levels of power cubes. The higher the level the greater the storage.

What I do not know yet, but am assuming, is that they work like XMP Bursters and you can not use Power Cubes greater than your player level.

How do I find Power Cubes?
They are an item you get when you hack a portal, much like XMP Bursters, Portal Shields, etc...

Get out there and find some Power Cubes!

Your Phone

Your +Ingress  Scanner is your only direct communication with the game. An outdated

I currently have the Motorola Droid 3 through Verizon. This is an okay phone. When it was new it was excellent. But times have changed, new phones have greater memory, storage, speed, 4G and other features. It was never designed with running apps which are so resource intensive like Ingress.

Using a marginally capable phones is frustrating. I cant begin to tell you the number of times I've had it freeze up and need to reboot the phone. Or it will just automatically reboot itself.

Other times it will screw me up when there is a Portal when I'm stopped at a red light hit the portal and select Target. By the time it opens to the portal main page and I get to push Hack, the light is green and I do not get to hack the portal. It is frustrating.

Luckily I am fast approaching my upgrade time. I was looking at the Samsung Galaxy S III, but this weekend I saw reports that the Galaxy S IV will be released in April. So I've decided I'm going to hold out and at least see what the pricing is on the S IV. As of right now no pricing information is available.

If you are frustrated like me in issues playing Ingress, chances are it is not the game it may be your phone. Look into getting an upgrade for a much better playing experience.

Happy Hacking!

New Version 1.21.3

March 14th a new version was released. 

Version 1.21.3
* Portal Discovery - players can take photos of cool new Portal locations and submit them via the Ingress app to be reviewed and added to the game.
* Portal Editing - players can submit a new photo for an existing Portal, and/or submit suggested improvements to the Portal name, description, or location data.
* Embedded Video Player for story media.
* Improved player GPS location acquisition - more stable, less jumpy.
* Bug fixes and performance improvements.