Mostly This:

If you like it then you should put a ring on it. Campaigns that will never happen.

Starbucks Design your own tumbler. Genius. £6.95 of your UK pounds sterling.

Eco Power Chargers. Heres my idea for a power adaptor that auto turns off. I thought it up a couple of years ago, but never bothered to sketch it out.

It’s such a simple idea, and would only add pence to the cost of making chargers. Basically its adding a spring loaded light touch ‘switch’ which activates when the charger is inserted, turning the charger on. when removed the switch disengages turning it off.

Also for a contactless (like palm pre/powermat) charging pad, simply spring mount the pad, so the weight of the device switches it on.

(c) me like forever ;)

Any manufacturers out there wanna help me out.

January 28

It had to happen, apple release something, well, a bit crap. ok it’s anything but crap, but its just not the unicorn encrusted rainbow project running on fairy tears we were all hyped up to expect. It’s. well. A big iPod touch. Thats it. It’s a niche product, apple do them well, but this is filling a small niche. I’m sure I will buy one, as a second screen for use while watching telly for web (as long as it doesn’t need flash - forget lots of e-commerse and entertainment sites) mail and twitter. But I’m not a typical mass market consumer, I’m an idiot.

It’s too big to carry around all the time, and not able enough to replace a laptop. It’s between a rock and a magic place.

Yes it is magical, but so is the iPhone/iPod and we’ve all had them for 2/3 years.

However, it may be saved by iPhone OS4.0 which hopefully adds some active home page widgets, flash and backgrounding apps. Otherwise that chrome os may not look so silly now.

I can’t help feeling its missing a few tricks, how about a front facing camera / iChat? I would buy one in an instant for my mum, so she can iChat to the grandkids, play scrabble/words with friends, surf a bit, read ebooks. then leave it as a eFrame linked to a family friendly flickr account. Makes perfect sence. There is a potential market for ‘toaster’ devices, Windows tablets and linux netbooks haven’t quite made it yet. And why is anyone releasing a 4:3 screen in 2010, madness.

It feels like apple’s ‘virtual boy’ remember that? no nintendo would rather you didn’t either. Though i suspect it will sell well among the faithful (myself included) it’s probably going to be an apple TV in terms of reach for the meantime.

January 27

Mobile Gaming comparison. I wrote this post last year but somehow never got round to publishing it. Slightly out of date now, as n-gage has been scrapped, in favour of just selling games though ovi store.

Mobile gaming.

Being an alpha adopter geek I have numerous mobile devices, all which have varying gaming ability’s from 100% to 5% of the overall intended use. So I decided to test them all, using a single game format available on all platforms, casual golf. I choose casual golf because there’s a title on each platform, it’s not overly demanding graphically and it should be possible to compare overall platform suitability rather than judging the games themselves.

Do here’s the contenders

Sony PSP 1000 & Everybody’s Golf 2
Nintendo DS lite & Touch Golf
Nokia E71/N95 & Everybody’s Golf Mobile
Apple iPod Touch and Let’s Golf

Sony PSP 1000

I played everybody’s golf 2, a slick and enjoyable true 3D golf game using the old school ‘three click’ method. Controls were simple and fairly intuitive, though the zoom is a bit messy. Graphics are outstanding, battery life on the psp is great. There is very little to fault. The ‘relativly’ massive screen is incredibly clear and the graphics really shine, the club selection estimated distances matched well, and the game is rich and full of content and extras like online gaming.

The downside is that the PSP is a large device and the games come on large UMDs, certainly too big to ‘pocket’ so its only really taken with me when I’m carrying a bag. One bonus is the recently improved playstation store which lets you buy and store games on memory cards - ending the need to schlep around loads of UMDs. The new overpriced PSP Go! removes UMDs and if you pack an 8gig memory stick you can load up games via the Playstation Store directly now.

Nintendo DS lite

I was initially surprised by the lack of golf games on the DS, just tiger woods and touch golf, while touch golf is the more casual title it’s not quite the super deformed cutesy ride of the other titles. Touch based controls worked well and the 3D graphics were adequate, but felt way behind the PSP and iPod. Overall the DS just feels a little bit second rate in delivery and requiring a stylus - its all a bit clunky. on the plus side the DS does seem innovative and able to launch niche titles, more so with the DSi and its ability to download titles and store on memory cards. The DS clearly comes into its own on numerous wonderful nintendo titles and other DS only games such as brain training, Doctor Layton etc.

Nokia E71 / N95

Now slightly unfair to compare the E71 to gaming devices, but lots of java games are available and titles like this don’t require amazing graphics to be enjoyable. This is a good case in point, while graphically Everybody’s Golf mobile is poor - it still entertains. The biggest problem is the speed, so I fired it up on a nokia N95 - with its 3D hardware acceleration, only to discover it ran at an identical sluggish response. Still all is not bad, the game still offers fun on the move, and is probably the poorest of all the titles but I still found myself playing it when I had no other devices available. The N95 supports n-gage, nokia’s gaming platform, which has some impressive titles like bounce boing voyage, one and star wars force unleashed. The only n-gage golf game is pro series golf, which is more in the ‘tiger woods’ simulation category, I gave the trial verison a go. Its quite nice - but workmanlike and nothing too exciting.

The N95 and n-gage is fun, but the phones just aren’t very ergonomic for gaming, and i fine myself often hitting the menu key (next to the joypad) which throws you out of n-gage and into the home screen.

iPod Touch / iPhone

One billion apps cant be wrong, but iFart is along way from a gaming experience. But getting on for a year after launch the app store is starting to throw up some gems. Let’s golf from gameloft is an out and out rip off of everybody’s golf (update - now also available for PSP via the online store). But it has enough subtle differences to let it live seperatly - but only just. It works because its so well done, and offers a touch based swing as well as a traditional 3-click method. The graphics are lush and almost upto the PSP standard - but not quite. Theres a similar set of game mode and 3 full 18 hole courses + one 9 hole one. All for £3.49. Price wise it’s a winner. The only fault is the club estimates tend to be a bit wrong and you often over or under hit, despite hitting the marks. But if you have an iPhone - its a game you’ll always have with you. The iPod touch is a fantastic form for portability. The only downside is things like fighting games and platform games dont translate well, though recent launch ‘assisins creed’ has show responsive joy pad style gaming can work in the iPod.

So summing up, the PSP is clearly the daddy, but isn’t portable enough to be with you all the time.
The DS is similar but clearly an underperformer, and the novelty has defiantly worn off, The DSi hasn’t added any graphics power to a tired looking console.
The nokias have some impressive titles, esp on N-gage, and are in your pocket - so why not, the downside is the controls are bad and n-gage has some restrictive DRM if you change phones it hard to move your game library over with you. The iPod touch/iPhone is the dark horse - there’s some amazing addictive titles. and its early days for the touch only platform, expect more from cupertino. (Update several months on and the App store is chock-a-block with top notch gaming titles across almost every genre, it’s still missing a good fighting game)

Of the games tested Everybody’s golf 2 and Let’s golf, are clear winners. As to every day gaming - for me while I love the PSP - its just not ‘always with me’ where asI don’t even notice carrying the iPod touch, and if you have an iPhone its the clear winner.

January 16

Halo ~~Lego~~ erm Mega Blocs: These halo wars sets are so-so. mega blocs never seem to work as well as lego. But check out the mini-figs!

December 15

maemober:

Tinned Luxury, Oh my WOMWORLD sent me a pair of these nokia BH-905 blue tooth (with wired option) noise canceling headphones to trial, and BOY they are good. I had a pair of sony noise canceling headphones about 10 years ago, and the were a bit rubbish. These are amazing, even without music playing a couple of seconds after you turn on the canceling - suddenly you get drawn into a silent place. apparently there’s 12 microphones built in to sample the surrounding sounds.

Music sounds great on them, I’m no audiophile but they sound really good to me, there are lots of specs that mean very little to me. Every bit of the product oozes luxury, the metal bit seem gold in some light and silver in others. Theres leather, fabric, metal, and a twist in every direction to get the right fit. This is solid engineering, yet they are smaller than you expect, lightweight and comfortable.

There’s a range of adapters for using in ‘wired’ mode, but the freedom of bluetooth make me never want to grab them. The carry case is quite large, and only really suitable for traveling. I would of liked to have seen an additional soft pouch for slinging in any old bag.

I had some drop out and that weird bluetooth catch up on the N900 when first connected, but no issues on the more mature firmware of the 5800. It worked a dream with my macbook pro, to give me spotify around the house.

My wife tried them out and I didn’t get them back for over an hour. Likewise in the office they got nabbed as soon as i put them down. Though we did have a tinny sound issue with a desktop mac pro, not sure why it was sounding very muffled, no problem with other connections so seems some sort of bluetooth compatibility issue with that mac hardware.

I made a couple of phone calls with excellent call quality. In fact it made a teleconference far less painful as i didn’t have to hold my phone for 20 minutes.

I’ve always avoided over the ear headsets before, but having tried these out i now want a pair, as they are so much better than the admittedly more convenient in-ear options.

They cost an eye popping £250, but you can get them a lot cheaper online, google shows £149 being best current price.

Click the main pic or HERE for lots of photos of the headsets.

December 10

Information is Bullshitable. Visualising data is all the rage these days, everyone is at it, invading the web and print with colourful ways to make numbers mean something.

But some people are clearly faking it. Engadget have these nice colourful graphs down the side of the page, but take a closer look and the size/shape/overlapping elements bare no relation to the data - it’s just BULL. A list with boxes whos size is determined by the amount of copy. There is no accurate appliance of scale, so its pointless and misleading.

26 != 4,

(179 -122) != (112-108)

They have since introduced a timeline based graph that does this in an actual real data way that sometimes (when the fairy’s decide it appropriate) appears in the main body, but its not that much more informative - other than what the most commented on. But still it shows some scale and meaning.

December 7

More neat stuff from Product (RED), ok so I’m a sucker for all the (RED) stuff. And this is probably the most obscure, I presume that nike will push these at POS in nike town etc. But otherwise it’s more of a PR thing than a legitimate fund raiser. Maybe some higher ticket price nike items will follow.

+

AA text messages, a good idea to keep you informed of how long you have to wait.