Posts Tagged ‘review’
Good evening!
So earlier this week I had a revelation of sorts. I had one of those “on top of my student loan, this month I’ve gotten 3 paychecks at once”-moments (somehow most of my jobs suck at giving me money at the appropriate time). So after saving a good chunk of it (I save money now!), i decided that there is no way I am spending all of this on food and beer. So I bought myself an early Christmas-present. Behold, my brand spanking new used Nintendo 3DS!
Well, it's not a picture I took but it looks just like this! Even with the super-awesome Super Mario-cover!
So. After a few days of playing Super Mario 3D-land on my new toy, I have this to say about the 3DS.
The 3D-technology is a turd. I never use it, because frankly it is no good. I don’t use it, sure there are some puzzles where it is helpful but mostly it just gives you a headache/is an annoyance. Still, having a handheld gaming device is frigging awesome. Despite it being designed for hands I suspect are smaller than my giant monkey viking-hands. It feels a bit unnatural to use because the buttons are so damn close!
Alright. So, for the review.
The game I bought was Super Mario 3D-land.
This one!
I haven’t finished it yet, but here is a short review anyways. Because I want to share my opinions about things with the internet!
It’s fun. Well, It’s Super Mario. How can that red-hatted little bastard not be entertaining? Despite Nintendo beating the same dead horse over and over again because the twitching of the rotting corpse still provides sufficient entertainment to be worth money, they are doing it brilliantly. This game takes shit back to the classics.
The first video-game I ever played was Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo. I was quite young, but that damn red-hatted plumber chasing some Burgeois chick for reasons my young mind could not understand nor analyze with Marxist theories captured my little heart. With 3DS, they are doing it 2D-style, but in 3D! What? Well, all the levels are set up just like it was back when the game was 2D. Except there is a little room to walk up and down in, not just forward or backward. And you select levels old-school running on a track-style. And Princess Peach is not in this castle. Woo!
So it is a success. Now back to reading about administrational computers and law.
Toodles
I know I promised to review my new phone and netbook to ya’ll, but actually this is my first oportunity to sit down, relax with ice cold, nasty coffee, a bad radio show, and the smell of new car, to review at least one of them! (Yes, I’m at work, and there is absolutely nothing to do… And if you didn’t read the title, this entry will be about the HTC Desire Z!) It wont be to long or complicated, so dont worry!
So, what do I have to tell you about this phone? Well, to be honest I’m not very impressed, yet! But again, I love the phone, it’s android that’s bothering me the most… Frankly, I don’t know which version I’ve got, but it sure as hell is buggy and slow! A lot of the programs and apps for the Z is awesome, but yet again even more buggy than the OS itself. Sure I were to expect this, but not to this scale. Lately the whole thing has just been turning itself off once a problem occours, or locking everything up, so that I can’t do shieet. Also Android has a bad file system and using the menues are somewhat rocket science. While I play scientist, not to many programs are running, and the only program allways enabled is the 3G data transfer service, still Ive got to charge this beast every 10th hour. Sure I should expect. This from technology as new as this, and even so I’m happy with my new baby!
So i told you things are badly organized, yes? Exactly! Every single freaking program is just put into the main menu, and there aren’t possibilities for sub menues, as far as I’ve figured out. The good thing about it is that 20 seconds of insane scrolling gives you a good overview over what’s installed. Menues brings me to contacts, don’t ask me why, but for me this seemed logic… Contacts, well… WTF? Why the hell would they mess up this critical and important part of a phone? Every single contact gets doubled, tripled, fripled or worse, based on your SIM contacts, phone contacts, facebook contacts, twitter contacts, etc…
so every single freaking time I want to find a contact, i got to scroll through all the dupliicates. Fortunatly, you can link duplicates, sadly this demands more memory from the phone, and every time you use the “phone feature” it wants to know which of the one billion numbers you want to call. This is the only thing bugging me enough to want to chrush my phone against a telephone pole! Still, that would be a waste of the 4100NOK I’ve spent on this thing. Lets just pray this will get better in close future.
Now, maybe you’ll want to know why I still love my phone? Hah! Thats what I thought! You’re dying to read further in this crapppy entry… So, the main thing I love about this baby is the QWERTY flip out keyboard, oh my god how I love it. If It haden’t been there, I would’ve never written this from my phone. Touch keyboards are just annoying, and my chubby fingers don’t work well with’em. Second is the variety of awesome apps, and the bright an nice screen it’s got makes the apps and everything I do even better. Right now, I’m using the Word Press app to write and post this. Gebious little app. The possibility to make my own WIFI and connct my laptop to is great, also using WIFI in general, but that is old news on most cellphones nowadays. Headphone jack is nice, and an USB-charger is genious, saves me at work, since I’ve got an USB plug in the taxi.
All in all, this is a great mobile device with clear sound, good camera and speakers, bright screen with a good resolution, many posibilities, QWERTY and lots of other stuff. Downsides with the battery usage, contact organizing and menues. Still, in 2-3 months this will most likely be improved in the upcoming android updates. If the contacts doesn’t get properly organized by then, I will kick some developers arse. I would not reccomend it to novice users, but rather to those with more than a basic understanding of technology, and with interest or knowledge to program and fix some bugs themselves. Be prepared Bjørn! Don’t get your hopes up, but you’re about to get into a new and exciting era of smartphones, though I suspect you’ve got a feeling on android from your old tattoo.
Finally I got a customer! So this will be the end.
Upcoming: Samsung Galaxy Netpad review.
As you were!
Steinar
Your beloved admin just came home from a concert with the Norwegian band Kråkesølv, which is the norwegian word for mica.
This is mica, which is not the band Kråkesølv.
Kråkesølv is a band from my home-town, Bodø, which lies in the northern part of Norway. I went to a concert they had up north some time ago, and was quite disappointed. I’d been told they were incredible, yet the concert was as boring as it was noisy. I do not know whether I was drugged, or they where, but this time the experience couldn’t be more different.
As some of the more perceptive among you might be able to tell, I was most impressed with Kråkesølvs performance. They started out with a promising tune, and their first song earned plenty of applause from the audience. Now there were two performances going on at the same time, of which this was the minor one, which I had only patriotically chosen to attend, so the audience must have fallen short of 60 people, but the atmosphere was great, and the warm-up band had really gotten us excited. After the first song ended, one of the band-members told us that he would like to dedicate the concert to his, and another band-member’s, late grandmother, whose funeral they had to pass up in order to play for us. That really gave the concert a personal feel, but without making it a dreary process.
As the concert went on I became more and more convinced that this was some other band than the one I had listened to before. They were all so into the music, and after one song one of them commented that they had not sounded that good in a long time. The music really did come alive on that small stage from which it blasted.
Amazing live artists, you can really tell they love what they do.
The concert ended with the best song I believe I’ve heard in 2010. I think they said it was brand new, it certainly had a different style than the other music they played. While the main focus had definitely been on the vocals up to this point, this one really let the instruments come into their own. It’s not like the vocals were neglected though, it was just that there was less of an obvious divide between the song and the rest of the music than there had been before. Their last song was also more upbeat and rocky than the rest of the concert, while remaining melodic, and it was still recognizably their type of music.
To summarize, if you ever have the chance to attend a Kråkesølv concert, take my advice and do so. Pass up anything you have to pass up, because when these guys are having a good day, they’re pretty much the best, and who doesn’t love awesome music? I know I am looking forward to the next time I can hear them live, and I’ll be checking out their recorded music too, first chance I get.