CES: Palm Pre is what I want

Sony's bendy TV, Nyko's own Wiimote, Samsung's sleek P2, touch-screen Walkman, I can go on for days. CES is the convention that holds the Microsoft conference, which merely reiterated the stuff found in a previous developer's convention (Windows 7 beta is available for download though), but it's also the convention where all the other brands converge and show their wares.

One in particular looks like my ticket to touchsville- the Palm Pre. While I predict that it seriously won't kill the iPhone, people who know their tech will probably say that it's better. Of course, the iPhone will be guaranteed to have a new iteration by June or so and complete specs for the product aren't readily available (I'm curious about a few other features that it may or may not lack), but for now, the Palm Pre looks real nice and desirable.

It's not sleek like the iPhone, and the QWERTY keypad looks awful to press, but the software is the ticket. If Palm's new WebOS- the upgrade Palm fans have been waiting for- performs as admirably as the iPhone's, I may just jump ship and save for one. It also supports multi-touch gestures like the iPhone, but it will also give you a way to switch between open applications in a manner similar to the way you switch through 'tabs' in iPhone Safari.

OK, so perhaps I'm associating this one way too much with the iPhone. I apologize, but the iPhone is simply the de-facto standard for touch-screen phones for now. I'll try not to associate in the succeeding paragraphs.

Anyway, you may ask: It has a keypad, but where's the directional pad?! Well, you can actually use the area just below the screen to navigate your phone. 

Additionally, charging isn't a mess either- You can charge the Pre wirelessly in the literal sense through a hockey puck.

No AC adaptors.

What do you do with the hockey puck? Well you place the device on top of it, and voila! Charging.

While it's not clear whether you have to charge the hockey puck on the wall, but if you could, it would be awesome and you could charge on the road if you ran out of juice.

If you want to see it in action, watch the video below.

I'm crossing my fingers that this will be the phone for me. Seriously.

Why the iPhone 3G is STILL innovative

On paper you'd see that the features you get on the iPhone 3G are sparse compared to even the most basic of cellphones. Come on, who doesn't think that omitting MMS and video recording are embarrassing for a company well-known to be the cutting-edge? Why does the iPhone lack so many features yet receive so much acclaim and praise?

Well, think about this: how often do you use your cellphone's E-Mail features? Did you know your cellphone probably had one (if it was made after 2003 or so)? How about your music player? Compare how much you used to listen to it when you first got it to the frequency of your music listening now. Do you even bother to surf the internet with your phone despite having 3G? Statistically, only 10% of users are able to actually use all of their cellphone's features to their advantages (especially multimedia ones) while the rest ignore them altogether or use them rarely and just stick to texting and calling. However, the iPhone changed all this.

Let a newbie take an iPhone for a spin, and chances are that most of the features it has actually get put to use. That's because most of these features aren't secluded into some stupid folder; they're just staring at the user. You want E-Mail? Press E-Mail and set up your Yahoo! mail account credentials! Music? Ha! It's right there unmistakably in the iPod! It's all driven by one-click (or in this case, one-touch) access, because people become tired of having to slog through various menus and stuff like that just to access this one little feature (-cough- Nokia! -cough-). It's convenient and an extremely quick way to access features, and it's surprising that no other touch-screen phones before it have done stuff this way. This kind of reminds me of the old Nokia phones of lore, or even current Sony Ericsson models. You only had to push Menu and there the features were. Now, you have to go through hell to find where the Address Book is (-cough- Nokia! -cough-).

That's primarily the driving force behind my dad's batchmate (the same batchmate I mentioned in my CEL '08 post) preference of the iPhone to the significantly more feature-packed E61i- the menus weren't convoluted and the features were staring at you in the face.

Oh, and here's another game-changer that Apple put: an accelerometer. Some phones have already been using the accelerometer for other gimmicks even before the original iPhone came out, but the accelerometer in the iPhone wasn't a gimmick- it was a legitimate function. Gone were the days when you had to click a button and search a menu to make a video adopt a landscape orientation in the screen. All you had to do was flip the phone sidewards, and voila! Same goes for the music navigation. If you find having to flick your finger tiresome just to find a specific song, why don't you flip the iPhone sidewards to access Cover Flow? And how about surfing the web? If you feel that the web is more justified with a widescreen view of things, why not flip the iPhone sidewards as well? See? Legitimate feature and less gimmicks.

Speaking of which, multimedia also plays a big part in the iPhone. Once you've loaded up your iPhone's music library, you can immediately plug any ordinary headphones (in the 3G iPhone, that is) to replace those crappy Apple ones and enjoy. Or if you're on a plane, get your iPhone on Airplane mode and watch your favorite movie. This thing could replace a dedicated music player if not for the lackluster battery (my dad's iPhone 3G's battery has even become defective!) and for the refusal of Apple to let users put music manually in it.

And how about a mention of Visual Voicemail? Voicemail may not be popular in the Philippines, but this killer feature has been tremendously helpful to the Caucasians out there. Normally, voicemail could be heard only through the order of which the mail was received. In the iPhone, you could access the voice message you want in a menu. It doesn't matter in the Philippines, but it still matters that the iPhone is actually the mobile that pioneered such a feature.

Lastly, the App Store. Yes, the Palm has apps, Windows Mobile has apps, Google Android has apps and your phone probably has apps too, but the rapidity of popularity the stuff in Apple's App Store has is astounding, thus the quantity of apps that get hosted there are also rapidly increasing moreso than the competition if claims are to be believed. Whatever the case, getting an app is easy after you make an iTunes Store account- and most of them extend what the capabilities of the iPhone and make up for most of the lacking features.

All of these elements combined with a stylish and extremely nice presentation make for an unmatched user experience, and they are what make the iPhone the innovator despite having some of the thinnest feature sets in any smartphone. 

Now it has sparked competition between other companies, and they're trying to match the experience on other platforms. And this competition attests to the power of Apple's innovation. But has the competition been beneficial? Well, it has also caused some brands to drop features they normally would have, and the physical keyboard is sometimes non-existent as well. Whether you like the touch keyboard is up to you, but I think the competition for touch-screen phones is beneficial to those looking for alternatives like the Omnia or the Xperia X1. But for those looking for beefy featured phones should look elsewhere. That is, unless the right one comes along.

So how much more proof can you get to see if the iPhone is truly a fad or something revolutionary? Bugs don't mean anything when you're actually talking about something like this, mind you, and security issues are significantly different affairs. So even if, on paper, the iPhone 3G is lackluster in features, it more than makes up for the experience.

Will Google pwn iPhone?

There has been plenty of news today about the much-touted iPhone OS killer Google Android being in T-Mobile's G1 phone. The phone was made by Taiwanese cellphone company HTC (and TBH, their phones are not so bad themselves) and is the only Google Android powered phone being launched to date. It was formerly supposed to be named the HTC Dream actually.
The phone is not much of a looker, but the OS sure is looking really swell- superior even. There's no telling if the software will be as user-friendly as various tech sites tout it to be, but one thing's for sure: this one's gonna be a huge beast of a competitor once developers start exploiting its open-source-ness. For the uninitiated, open-source means that the code written to empower some kind of program is open to anyone for modification so that updates will be regular and bugs are fixed faster. Heck, a few companies could even make enhancements and modifications to the program if they wanted to, and it would be a rather exciting prospect to gauge how creative companies are going to be with this new OS!

Like the iPhone, it has a touch screen, but it also has real, solid keys that reveal themselves if you slide the screen up like the popular Sidekick. And like the iPhone, it has a built-in music store that you can use to buy music anywhere, but it's the Amazon MP3 Store that's on the offering, and it's better because you won't have to worry about those pesky Digital Rights Management bull.

Plus, the third-party apps that are gonna be on this phone won't have to meet Google's approval if they want to post it unlike in Apple's App Store where updates roll out slowly because they have to go through Apple's inspection process. The Software Development Kit is also open-source, so many, many, many people will be able to make third-party apps for the OS- more than the App Store could ever potentially have.

Maybe this is more dependent from phone to phone, but the Android powered-G1 will have stuff the iPhone bafflingly doesn't like copy and paste, voice dialing, a removable battery, a Street View for Google Maps, a 3.2 megapixel camera and MMS. What it doesn't have however is a regular 3.5" headset jack and video recording, but the first (and for the latter's case, the current) iPhone didn't have that either.

Based on the many videos I've watched on this promising phone however, the OS will probably spark a series of chained events and Apple will be making a run for their touch screen money. This thing will rock the industry when the right phone comes along, but for now, the G1 won't be turning any heads anytime soon. The interface looks extremely easy to use, and sometimes even reminiscent to that of the iPhone and a desktop computer. I can't wait to try a Google Android phone out myself, but maybe I won't be betting on the G1nor Google Android to be the prophesied "iPhone killer"...

...for now.

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword (DS) Review

(First posted on my GameSpot blog.)

What do you get when you get a crappy overused plot, and some pretty good gameplay? Well, not Mario, but Ninja Gaiden. But this time, Ryu Hayabusa goes for a spin on the Nintendo DS.

So how does this start again?

You first play as Momiji, who I think is Ryu's sister. After training, she picks flowers for Sakura, but after picking flowers, she sees some freaky monsters trying to get you at every corner. She is not entirely defenseless, however, and that's because she has her shurikens and her sword. So you as the player will at least try to defend Momiji against the evils of the Black Spider Clan by controlling her, but that's just for a short period of time and serves as introduction to the new controls because she gets abducted anyway.


                   Ryu! Hurry up before the old lady rapes Momiji!

Stylus-slashing!

This will draw comparisons to Zelda, which I haven't played, and that's because Ninja Gaiden is almost fully controlled by the stylus. You hack and slash by slashing your screen and releasing projectiles by tapping at your target lightly. This also makes for some control issues and conflicts that arise from the fact that walking is also initiated by tapping at a part of the screen!

Then again, it's more of the hardware's problem if you think about it.

You can defend yourself from attacks as well by pushing any button. I'd advise pressing the R button since your one of your hands is gonna be resting there, and that's because you play Ninja Gaiden like you're playing Brain Age- you flip the DS sideways.

Graphics

At first glance, you'll see that Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword is a heavy-hitter in the graphics department because they're pretty good to look at. My gripe is that they're pretty much wasted by the monotonous look of most dungeons because most of the rooms look pretty much the same save for a few rooms, thus making it really easy to know which room is important, and which one is not.
     These graphics still shine regardless, and what Team Ninja has exhibited is nothing short of a  benchmark that other third-party developers should follow.

And again, stylus control, and the use of the microphone are some of the game's most advertised features. They're implemented quite well, save for the aforementioned projectile-walking issue.

This leads me to the microphone.

There are times when you have to use the microphone to advance the story, but you don't know exactly when you'll use it.

Like many others, I was stuck at Chapter 3 with the sleeping Muramasa thing which was so self-explanatory that you had to open your PC, connect to the Internet, wait for GameSpot to load, type in the search term, pick the correct title, click Cheats, select one of the many walkthroughs for the game, wait for the thing to load, press Control or Command-F, type Chapter 3, and read it from there.

I mean, yeah, the NPC's note that you should call a person when he's sleeping, but doesn't that mean that if you tap a person that's awake, you don't call them? Instead, they talk randomly? Because common sense usually states that when you want to talk to a person, you call them first. But no, in this game, the NPCs that are actually awake are probably released from the mental institution because they just talk to you without you even calling them. I mean, if you wanted to apply the logic of having to use the microphone to call someone, why don't you just use it to talk to someone awake as well?

Well?

And then...

And then there are those times when the game seriously wants you to waste your Ki and use your special Ninja arts to get rid of an obstacle. Now there's nothing wrong with using powers to clear obstacles, it's just that some of them don't even make sense!

Here's an example that makes me grind my teeth:
                           Gamespot rotated it again! Argh... I just wanted to put my own picture!

Now if Ryu can penetrate steel armor with his sword, why the hell would you have to use fire to get rid of a SPIDER WEB? I don't know about you, but that just doesn't make sense to me. What, is Ryu scared of cleaning his sword because the itty-bitty spidow web will make itty-bitty Wiyu's sword cwy? What about the blood that goes into your damn sword?

Speaking of blood...

There's none of that here, and that makes the game family-friendly, which I don't have much of a problem with.

However, the game's really, really easy, and really, really, really short. As in, each chapter amounts to like 30 minutes of gameplay, but the chapters are far too few to be deemed long.

Mind-numbing strategy...

So there are bosses, of course, and though they're pretty big, they only have like 2 to 3 attacks: 1) the throw and; 2-3) plain, semi-powerful attack.
                I rarely get caught by the bosses since they're so mind-numbingly easy.

So what strategy is there to be had with boss fights? Well, they're so strategic and epic, that you can just roll and use projectiles, roll, projectile, roll, projectile until they fall (except for the last boss who knows how to evade). In fact, the only times I succumb to a boss' throw attack is when I hit the invisible barrier which is annoying as heck because you're simply given an illusion of free 3D movement in every boss battle but not given just that! But at least the camera can catch up.

And if you want to accelerate these boss battles, you can always do this:
                                            Oh yeah, you're gonna die.

In fact, to be perfectly honest, I die more deaths from losing life to the "grunts" or the normal enemies in the game, who are far more irritating to kill, than the bosses. Yeah, I die from them. And when I do die from the bosses, it's because fighting these grunts have made me tired from slashing and Izuna-dropping and such. Yeah, there's not button mashing which affects the fingers, but your right (or left) hand will hurt instead. If there was a term used for describing the many slashes you do on the DS, I'd use it.

Oh yeah, it's called carpal tunnel syndrome.

Still...

There is still variation in the attacks nonetheless. You can slash down and then up twice to perform a pretty cool dive, or rub the screen so hard it could break to execute the Ultimate Technique. Frankly, I'm underwhelmed at the minimum of varied combos and attacks the game offers, but they're actually pretty cool to watch, and exciting to implement.

Overall

Granted, there's still a lot of fun to be had with Ninja Gaiden DS, and maybe you can pick it up unless you're expecting a challenge.

Rating: 8.0/10

                                  Oh look, lesbians! The score just went up a notch!