As an update to my previous posts on PS3 media software i’ve since upgraded (term used loosely) to Vista. I’m not sure if it’s Vista as a whole, or just Media Player 10 but it acts as a pretty decent media server that takes very little configuring. The only think i haven’t fully sorted out is the codecs i need to play all my files and whether they work with Media player. What it does do well is serve up photos and music without a hitch, which is nice enough on it’s own….

My trusty (well, not so trusty really) K750i began frustrating the hell out of me recently and so i did what every self respecting geek would do – i kept it as a ’spare’ and bought a new one. My new phone of choice was the eye-catching w880i. Ownership has been a happy experience so far, the keys are no where near the big deal people have made out. Sony obviously thought things through pretty well, and by spacing them so far apart the sliver-buttons are actually pretty accurate. You’ve just got to back yourself a bit and go for the key you want.

The only problems so far have been:

Vodafone’s (NZ) 3g service is really not up to it. Over half of my calls from home fail when the phone is set to automatically choose the network type. Best bet is to forgo the gimmicky video calling and set it to GSM by default. You can always set it to 3g again if you want faster internet service.

The other issue has been the the phone tends to corrupt 2/3’s of the photos i take with it. It does seem to be more likely that it’s something to do with the card as it seems to be fine when saving to the phone’s internal memory. Still very annoying and i’m hoping to find a firmware patch the sorts me out.

Things i miss after upgrading are probably the autofocus camera and accompanying flash/LED torch. It’s funny how handy the torch was – finding my way into our room after a late gaming session mostly

Overall the phone has been great – great shape and size, very sturdy (no hint of it breaking despite it’s thin size), always responsive and as a fan of the Sony interface i’ve not been disappointed.

Like a complete idiot I let one of my favorite gadgets tumble. Turns out big flat screens aren’t all that stable when placed on a bed and the panels themselves are a touch sensitive to bed-posts. I think the picture explains most of what happened…

The latest firmware for my D2 has added some great time consumers to the player – namely flash games. We’re (D2 users that is) pretty lucky that the iRiver clix has such a similar navigation system and has had loads of flash games developed for it. These are generally compatible with the D2 using either the touch screen directional or mouse-like interface, for which you get a choice before running each flash game. Typically the Clix developed games use the 4 way buttons at the sides of the touchscreen, this matches up nicely with the 4-way click screen available on the clix.  I found a nice collection of games available in 1 download at this site. Most work fine, others have a few quirks to do with navigation etc.

All in all, very impressed. Makes me proud to be  a Cowon customer. Can’t wait for some D2 specific games that fully utilise the touch-screen.

My friend Chris went to great lengths to get an unlocked, slightly cheaper Nokia N95. After a few weeks apprehension the Mafia-run phone shop he got in touch with shipped him a phone that, to the naked eye at least, appears to be exactly what he was after. He was good enough to share his findings so far, so in a vain attempt at living vicariously through his experiences i’m posting his review on the other side of the following more-link….

In his own words….

I’ve had the phone for a couple of days now so it’s time to give you an
update.

Major features (if you didn’t already know)

•   WiFi
•   HSDPA (makes no difference in NZ)
•   5mp camera with Carl Ziess lens
•   Accepts microSD cards (2GB is the max size right now)
•   GPS
•   Two way slide with automatic portrait/landscape rotation (and everything just works)

Major differences to my 7610
- It’s way way WAY faster. It’s a computer so it does still take about 30
seconds to boot up but once running it’s very fast. There are still a few
times where it has a little micro pause when it moves from portrait to
landscape mode and loading the media player but it’s very usable
- New version of Symbian offers more shortcuts to immediate app access, auto
keyguard, reliable phone turning on for an alarm, flight mode
- memory card is hot swappable
- camera is good quality, ditto for video and it has a flash but you all
know my policy on taking photos – just use a camera, not a phone! The phone
looks and feels like a camera. It has a dedicated camera button and zoom
where zoom should be and you turn it to the landscape mode to take photos
(photos autorotate)
- quad band and every single protocol you can think of is supported. If the
phone doesn’t work in a certain country, it’s not worth visiting the
country! The WiFi supports all major protocols WEP, WPA(2), PSK/TKIP etc.
I’ve easily connected to my home LAN and workplace-network which both have strong
security. My home lan doesn’t even publish it’s SSID.
- Uses a microUSB connector – no more pop port plus comes with a standard
3.5mm jack for audio (and video) output and comes with a handsfree
remote/mike

Other cool features
- Radio and mp3 player (supports playlists, album art etc)
- stereo speakers – do a good job
- Searching of files by name (before you could only browse by date)
- The browse function shows all files in all directories (you can view by
directory if you want). It’s pretty cool to see videos and pictures
interleaved – gives a chronological timeline
- The web browser is wicked. It creates a little mouse and you just click
away. It can render some pretty complex sites and viewing them is easy when
you move to landscape mode and reduce the font size. i.e. you can fit most
pages without horizontal scrolling
- Voice recognition. Not the standard voice recognition when you record
your voice against a name/feature. Instead the phone reads all peoples
names (and nicknames) in your phonebook and tries to figure out what the
names would sound like, therefore working for any user of the phone. But
wait, there’s more. You know how I won’t buy a phone without french? Well
when the phone is in french mode, it expects names to be spoken like a
frenchie would. It’s great! If it finds a few names that could be possible
matches, instead of saying “unrecognised” like my old phone, it lists the
possible matches and speaks them when you scroll through them (in a french
accent) so you can really choose without looking at the phone – great for
driving. It’s pretty accurate too (though I haven’t tried in a noisy
environment)
- If you take a photo with the phone, you can use GPS to also record the
exact position where the photo was taken too
- Can sort texts by person, date, type etc

Bad things
- Web browsing hung but then I read a forum post and they said to turn power
saving off and it works sweet now. I imagine that will be fixed in the next
firmware update
- Battery life is poor but then again I’ve been using the GPS, mp3 player
and WiFi (with power saving off) quite a bit. You definitely need a charger
in every location that you stay at. I doubt the phone would last a weekend
even if I didn’t bugger around with the GPS and WiFi.
- 3G coverage is still average in NZ and when we run low on 3G service I get
quite a bit of echo on calls before it decides to flag and move to GSM only
when the sound quality improves to a normal call. Since I’ve only used a
video call and that was just as a gimmick, I might change the phone to GSM
only mode.
- NZ maps (5mb in total) are not detailed at all but that’s because the
phone isn’t officially supported here. I also downloaded the East
Australian (60mb) and the France map (400mb) and they are very good. (Hint
- you want to download the maps via the net otherwise you can download via
your phone provider but at $30/mb when roaming internationally, it’s pretty
expensive!) The memory cards are hotswappable if you really need to map the
world.
- I have my phone contacts listed under given name family name but text
messages appear family name, given name just like the old phone. Why is
that?

Conclusion
If you are a power user then this is the phone for you. I’ve probably
forgotten to mention something important because the phone does so much (oh
yeah, there’s a bar code reader that I haven’t used yet). I doubt the apple
iPhone will come anywhere close. They will have to rely on ease of use,
looks and marketing to win market share but we all know that they’re good at
that. The apple users will end up with an overpriced phone that does jack
all – pretty much like an iPod but look at how many people use iPods (I’m
one of them)

Tried out my second lot of media software for the PS3 last night. Running from my laptop I installed TwonkyVision v4.4 and happily had around half of my video files streaming over to the PS3. Files that worked included some web-sourced .mpg’s and unprotected .mov files from my sony digital camera. Not supported includes .wmv and .mpg from the web. I didn’t do too much digging into how each of these were encoded though i suspect they are either protected or simply some odd combination of codecs. I had read that so long as you have the appropriate codec installed on the source machine then TwonkyVision should be able to transcode and pipe it to the PS3. No real matter yet though – i’ll be installing and trialling some larger full length movies tonight, mostly in xvid and divx format. Then i’ll start caring.

Overall i have to say that TwonkyVision seems a little better. Though both suffer from the same issue – mainly to do with the PS3 i suspect. In the XMB under each of the media categories you still get all of the media types. It just adds another layer of clicks to get through before getting to the media itself.

The big downside that i’m sure everyone will agree with is that Twonky costs a few pennies, actually, it costs quite a few pennies. I will take them up on the offer of 30days free though before settling. That should give TVersity enough time to update specifically for the PS3 just as Twonky did.

Updated my PS3 last night – very interested to check out PS2 and DVD upscaling. Predictably I was a little underwhelmed, can’t really tell much difference on the DVD’s that I tried out. The most notable difference is probably in PS2 games. You have the option of specifying no upscaling, normal upscaling or full screen upscaling. Normal upscaling allows you to have the PS2 rendered in the normal aspect ration (4:3, black lines down each side of a widescreen tv like mine). While this does waste real-estate it looks a whole lot better. The confusing bit comes when you attempt to set the game to widescreen format. This doesn’t appear to actually change the resolution of the image i.e. from 4:3 to 16:9 resolutions, but changes the shape of the items on screen – characters are rendered much taller etc.

What i’m not sure about is whether this has to do with the difference between the old analogue tv connnectors/signals vs the modern ‘intelligent’ connectors. For instance what we see on our computer screens changes automatically to fit the resolution change when flipping from something like 1024×768 to 1280X768. What this looks like to me is that the PS2 game knows how to make game assets not look stretched when a signal carrying a 4:3 aspect ratio resolution is stretched over a widescreen CRT TV, thus the in-game setting change doesn’t actually make the signal widescreen, just stops it looking horrible when stretched.

Either way the game looks a lot better now that i have the option of setting it to display in normal 4:3, even if i loose out on a bit of screen real-estate.

Other updates are less important to me, though i did have a go at setting up a media server using TVersity. The application itself works reasonably well, although how to set up your shared media isn’t immediately obvious. Once i had it figured out things ran smoothly enough, i could get pictures to display and the PS3 could see all my music. But that is where the media sharing bliss ended. For some reason the PS3 reports all my MP3’s as an unrecognised format. Googling for a while last night i couldn’t figure out exactly why, let alone actually resolving the issue. The closest i came was a discussion about streaming media rather than loading down a whole file before playing it i.e. the PS3 expects a streamed file, while TVersity is attempting to provide the whole file. Not convinced but it’s the best i could do. I’m hoping it will just come down to a settings issue.

Will try out my PSP tonight, already had it playing remote content locally. I can’t figure out why i would need to use it over the net but i’m willing to play guinea pig anyway.

Picked up a bargain-basement copy of the original God Of War ($NZ35) late last week and I’ve been mightily impressed. I did so on the back of renewed press coverage of the new version, and while it’s not as shiny as some of the PS3 content it is actually as much if not more fun than anything else I’ve been playing recently. A lot of people would probably not be surprised by any of this, I am admittedly a late arrival at the God of War party but I’m impressed none-the-less. For what appears to be a simple game it really is very complex and engaging. For instance it has all the appeal of a straight-laced fighting game, mixed with the false sense of being free-roaming (a clever trick if done well), and the satisfaction of great and varied visuals, not to mention the cleverly implemented level design and puzzle solving (i seem to run through the same areas several time but never get bored with it). From what i understand part 2 is more of the same, but when you’ve got such a good thing there is no need to re-invent.

I think the nicest aspects of the game are the varied abilities Kratos can draw on. For instance a group of 3 enemies can be dispatched in very different ways. Taking them on with basic moves is fine, and quite challenging. Throwing in some magic can help blunt the attack and allow you to implement some unit-unique finishing moves to extract some extra magic or health. If you really want to you could even utilise some of the lighter units by attaching them to the end of your blades and swinging them into the larger enemies. Great stuff.

I think another aspect of the game that really draws me in is the adult-attitude the game has. I’m no fan of adding in bare-chested girls for the hell of it – like some of the recent fighting and driving games – but the level of violence, and touches of womanising make you feel like your playing a game that was designed for your age-group. I don’t kid myself in thinking that i’m not in some way holding onto my youth by having 2 consoles and a gaming PC, but it’s nice when you come across something that had you in mind when it was designed.

Just noticed that GPStore has put up a link for the new PS3 version of Singstar - including all previously released tracks – the total is noted as “300+” though so not sure if there are also a bunch of new tracks. So anyone out there in my position – with an otherwise redundant PS2 sitting in the living room just waiting for the semi-regular stampede of girls ready to wake the neighbours – can confidently look to reduce the clutter a bit by dropping the ever-reliable PS2 without fear of reprisals. Which as i mention above should keep both people in the relationship happy.

After the demise of my long-lived iAudio X5L i was looking forward to diving into a new realm and direction of MP3 player. Does that sound a little too much like i was just waiting for my old one to break? Maybe. The D2 is a great little player, not quite revolutionary but it’s got plenty of charm. The touch-screen interface, which I wouldn’t go so far as to call revolutionary, has some obvious benefits such as being able to adjust buttons to suit the context. However it also has it’s flaws, such as the inability to do everything you might want to while the player is still in your pocket, the amount of finger-sludge that is left on the screen along with a few implementation type issues (multiple clicks for simple operations).

The thing i am liking the most though is the steady ongoing development of the players firmware. So far i’ve owned the player for about 6 weeks and i’ve installed 2 new versions, each with a reasonable list of new or improved features. This last one added a handy drawing/note taking interface – operated by touch of course. I probably wouldn’t have ever really wanted for the feature, but now that i have it i can think of a few occasions when that would have been handy.

The biggest selling points for me? The expandable memory and battery life. The D2 can take advantage of SDHC cards (and SD of course), i notice a new card on the market today at 16gb (for the princely sum of $US3500 mind you). With battery life rated and often tested at around 50hours i think that puts it well into best in class.