Tech Gadgets Reviews

Get your game on with the HORI Real Arcade Pro.EX for the Xbox 360 console. After all, there is nothing quite like a dedicated joystick when it comes to fighting games. Complete with eight oversized buttons to ensure you don’t miss a beat while punching your opponent into a bleeding pulp (on screen anyways), the rounded knob of a joystick works much better than your standard Xbox 360 controller. Hopefully when you are on the ropes, you won’t lose your temper and smash the HORI Real Arcade Pro.EX - after all, you paid good money for it, didn’t you? All the pre-ordered allocation is already out of stock at the moment, so do check back with Play-Asia from time to time if you’re desperately in need of one.

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So you’re taking in all of this coverage of the iPhone 3G and suddenly start saying to yourself: "Man, does this mean that I have to follow the pack completely to the Apple store in order to get a good multimedia cell phone experience? Or can I find something else that is just different but can come close to the so-called Jesus Phone? That thing’s not Jesus, alright?!"

We hear you. And we salute the mutinous thinkers, the ones who choose to go their own way…all the way to the clutches of another multimedia/telecom/manufacturing conglomerate who will gladly take your money as well.

Here are some of the other phones available now that try to compete with the iPhone, some of which offer some features that are better, and others that fall way off but we still wouldn’t mind rocking in our pocket.  (And remember to click on the link after each phone description to go to the full review, and to find out the scores.)

Samsung Instinct

WIRED: The all-touchscreen, monolithic-looking Samsung Instinct has quality specs: 3G, GPS, a 2-megapixel camera (with video recording – the iPhone can’t do that), and full e-mail and web browsing features.

It also adds other features its arch rival skips: Haptic feedback buzzes below your fingertip when you work the touchscreen, and voice control lets you do certain tasks sans typing. Music playback is considerably higher fidelity. Painless e-mail setup works well with numerous hosts

TIRED: The real reason for the iPhone’s success is its operating system, and the Instinct is still catching up with this one – the Web browser needs a serious reworking, and a crude zoom button stands in for the iPhone’s sophisticated "pinch" system. The screen size is also smaller and typing on the Instinct can be rocky.

Typing isn’t easy — we made many mistakes in notes and web URLs. Also, there’s no WiFi, and no internal storage (2-GB microSD card included, upgradeable to 8 GB). Can’t edit attachments.

Price: $130 (with 2-year contract)

• Review: Samsung Instinct Gives iphone a Run for Its Money

Nokia N82

WIRED: The N82 has solid communication specs with top-shelf image-capturing tech. Editing options are unparalleled — spruce up a shot with poor lighting and horrid composition in a few minutes. And sharing photos is easy. Bluetooth, multimedia and e-mail options are simple to activate. Posting to the web is the same: One-touch access to Flickr and Vox accounts virtually ensures that you’ll never max out the 4 GB of memory. Integrated WiFi connects without a hiccup. Accelerometer switches screen from landscape to portrait mode with a flick of the wrist.

TIRED Xenon flash often washes the color out of pics. Battery gets sucked dry in just an hour using WiFi. Accelerometer can randomly switch from landscape to portrait mode without a wrist flick.

Price: $700, Nokia

• Full Review: Nokia N82 Calls Your Shot

Nokia E66

WIRED The E66 is thin enough to disappear in your pocket but large enough for a 2.5-inch screen. Upgraded processor runs the phone fast. Automatic screen orientation. Finger-friendly textured keys. Hard buttons for silent mode and Bluetooth on/off. What’s best is that it has a switch mode button (which we lovingly call the “mullet button”) and allows your mobile to toggle between two separate screen modes.

Keep the first one full of all your spreadsheets, work e-mail, and then, switch to the personal mode to use all your personal multimedia applications, and you’ll easily use the 3G, Wi-Fi, media player, FM radio and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

TIRED Metal backplate gets hand-scaldingly hot. Road warriors will scoff at the battery life: around three hours of talk time (con Bluetooth). You have to paying extra for business applications. Side-mounted volume buttons offer scant tactile feedback. Camera is not good in anything but perfect light.

Price: $500, Nokia

• Review: Nokia E66 Is Business up Front, Party in the Back

Nokia n95

WIRED: The N95 has a 5-megapixel camera and takes very good photos and videos, probably better than any phone out there. It packs Wi-Fi and 3.6Mbit/s HSDPA wireless broadband so you can watch the videos on its gorgeous 2.5-inch screen. It has built-in stereo speakers and a slick dual-direction slider that exposes the standard keypad on one side and four dedicated media keys on the other. The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack (that supports Bluetooth) allow you to use whatever headphones you want with it.

The Symbian smart phone also features integrated GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, and an innovative two-way slider design. Finally, the N95 is unlocked, so you can use it on whatever GSM service you like.

TIRED: It’s crazy expensive, and many people have reported that the performance (loading apps, the browser) is not as great as the iPhone. Also, the battery life, like most other phones, is not good.

Price: $500-800, Nokia

• Nokia N95 8-GB Cellphone Live Video Review Today 

RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8120

WIRED: RIM’s updated Pearl smartphone omits 3G and GPS. This one has Wi-Fi, and RIM got the kinks worked out of its 802.11g implementation. With mature email features, its good for the type of person who can handle the bi-character key setup.

Software is somewhat better at word detection and correction; sensitive mic offered exceptional call quality in our tests. Very fast battery charging, and nearly nine solid hours of talk time in our benchmarking.

TIRED Pearl keyboard still not for everyone. Lack of 3G is absurd. No GPS (get with it, RIM).

Price: $199 (with 2-year contract), RIM

• Review: Newest blackberry Pearl is a Peach

Samsung G800

WIRED Its roomy interior (110 MB of memory) features a microSD slot up to 4 GB, and includes a nice 5-megapixel camera, with Bluetooth, FM radio and HSDPA capabilities. Snapshot tweaks like auto-shake and panoramas up to six images wide were useful. 3x optical zoom. Video editing includes time code. Built-in effects work with video (including negative). Smooth-operating keypad. Supports Java for Google Maps.

TIRED The frontside lens slider adds one-eighth of an inch to the footprint, which means it can’t lay flush unless it’s face down on its pristine 2.4-inch LCD – who needs scratches? Also, it has a laggy shutter, no GPS, and a useless red-eye remover. Multishot and Mosaic functions only snap measly 60KB images.

Price: $500, Samsung

• Review: Samsung G800 Nixes Call for Pix

LG KE990 Viewty

WIRED The frontside scroll wheel handles menu navigation and volume control, and is used as a nice manual focus for the 5-megapixel camera. Another one of the best image-capturing devices on a cell  — the image stabilizer is compensates for the slightest of hand jitters. Also has the option to shoot video up to 120fps (with DivX capability), and has a nice Xenon flash is great for low-light shoots. Plus, it has useful (and easy to find) menu shortcuts.

TIRED The KE990’s the 3-inch WQVGA touchscreen is not the best and is still far in quality from the iPhone’s. After several recalibrations, the feedback was not haptic – instead it was noticeably craptic. Includes only 2 GB of external memory, it has no 3G and no WiFi, either. Touch icons have super small sweet spot. Finally, the lame stylus resembles a tiny mini-mascara stick.

Price: $400, LG

• Square Shooters: Four 5-Megapixel Camera Phones Judged and Rated

Gadget Lab 2.0: Jose Fermoso’s Twitter feed; Gadget Lab on Facebook.

News coverage on great iPhone apps is sure to ramp up in your readers from here on, and I’m particularly excited to learn more about some stunning apps and report back along the way. Before I dive into the new Apple App store, I’d like to encourage you to take a closer look at a newly released jail-broken app, Instinctiv Shuffle™.

I’m addicted to my music and music gadgetry, but the single feature that I’ve never been fond of and almost never use is the “random shuffle.” True to its name “random” there’s no rhyme or reason to how my ipod chooses the lineup, and mostly it leaves me flipping around or onto the next song, rendering the feature an epic fail. Instinctiv Shuffle is the first app that truly seems to understand how I listen.

The application smartly shuffles my music in a few seemingly simple steps (note there’s a bunch of crazy stuff behind the scenes bringing together the brilliant outcome):

Step 1. Instinctiv Shuffle gathers the names of your songs and their associated playback.

Step 2. Via a secure and anonymous connection, this data is uploaded to Instinctiv Shuffle servers.

Step 3. That data is analyzed and new information is returned to your iphone, enabling your formerly random shuffle feature to now determine the perfect songs and mix for you.

Feeling frustrated? Well, let it all out with a nice, long scream at the top of your lungs, and you don’t even need to travel to the Grand Canyon to do so as long as you have the Shouting Vase. This plastic jug apparently was specially designed in such a manner that it fits over the contours of your mouth, absorbing whatever screams that come out from there. Works much better than a pillow, and you won’t be accused of sleeping on the job should you decide to bring this to the office either. It will cost you $79, however, but that’s a small price to pay considering you can now scream wherever, whenever, as loud as you like.

There’s a new Gmail feature that Google just rolled out that apparently has taken years of testing. It’s the ability to track and sign out other Gmail sessions that you have open in other browsers/computers.

All you need to do is head down to the bottom of your Gmail screen and click the Details link near your “last account activity”. It will show you other Gmail sessions, including their IP addresses and a button to sign out of those sessions.

I tried this today and signed myself out of my session that I left running on my home computer. I love it. It means I can be a little less afraid of using Gmail on strange computers. Not completely though!

Posted in Miscellaneous

FROM APPLETELL - Although the new iphone 3G doesn’t bring much hardware updates on the inside, the outside brings a relatively new look.
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There is a lot to say about this newly-discovered embedded video from WiiFolder. Supposedly, it is an ad for a new Nintendo title titled Captain Rainbow. From the name, you may have gathered that the titular character is a superhero who wears A LOT of rainbows. According to 1UP (who somehow is the only site with any info on this game), the story is pretty crazy.

The Captain Rainbow of the title is the alter ego of Nick, a typical geeky guy with a penchant for loud, flower-themed clothing. As the eponymous captain, he’s a super-studly hero with a bunch of crazy fighting moves and a magic yo-yo to finish the bad guys off with, but his popularity with the kids just isn’t there — in fact, the ratings for his TV show are just about in the dumps. So Nick takes a trip to Mimin Island, a fabled land where it’s said your wishes can come true — but thanks to an unexpected turn of events, it’s actually Captain Rainbow who has to help out all the island’s inhabitants with their own wishes.

Well, all right. This island of Mimin is inhabited by Nintendo characters like Birdo, so expect more than a few familiar faces to pop up. The gameplay actually looks pretty cool. It’s being called a 2.5d fighter, with some side-scrolling action mixed in. Really, I should just stop trying to describe this video. You’ll be much happier simply watching it.

Read more at Joystiq

Leadtek recently introduced its WinFast PxDTV1300 T TV tuner card which is capable of working with DVB-T TV and HDTV H.264 reception. This card is pretty tiny, and it comes accompanied by WinFast PVR2 software to get you started. Some of the features offered by the WinFast PVR2 software include Live Broadcasting, Time Shifting, and TwinView. Using this will be a snap even for beginners as functions are all included in a 2-layer menu with a user friendly interface.

AOC has introduced a new lcd monitor in the form of the 2230Fh. Features of this unit include :-

• HD3 technology
• Proprietary menu and remote
• 4-in-1 memory card reader
• 1,680 x 1,050 native resolution
• 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio
• USB 2.0 connectivity
• DVI/HDMI inputs
• Integrated speakers
• 2ms response time

Can you believe the aOC 2230Fh LCD monitor retails for a mere $399.99, considering all the functions thrown in? I can’t either, what more this is a 22″ LCD monitor that allows you to play back movies without the need for a PC.

If you want to legally capture any Internet video then you’ll want to check out a solution being offered by Applian Technologies and All Alex Inc.

WM Capture is a piece of software that’s designed for the Windows operating system which will create unprotected video files. It works by allowing a user to capture video from any region of the screen in real time.

The region to be recorded is easily selected by moving a mouse over it thanks to the software’s “get window” feature. Regions can also be setup manually to increase or shrink the recording area. Sound playing through the PC’s speakers is also incorporated into the video. If you’re looking to create Windows Media format video files the software can support that as well.

The software retails for US$39.95 and can be purchased through the WM Recorder website.

This is a pretty sweet little solution for those Internet videos you haven’t been really sure how to capture. Add the fact that the software is only US$39.95 and you realize it’s a small price to pay to increase your video catalog. Now you’ll finally be able to carry your favorite Internet-based videos with you whether you have access to an Internet connection or not.

Read more at the joint press release.