Cellphone Sidekick

The iPhone is really quite awesome, and with all these amazing apps out there for it, it is even more attractive. So today we’re going to introduce you a very interesting game – the iHurt! The Loony Tunes smack’em up game for iPhone is really quite exciting, you should try it!

If you’re into goofy action cartoons and watching animated characters getting bashed up, this is the iPhone game for you.

iHurt takes inspiration from Loony Tunes and cartoon violence to create a game where the more you hurt yourself, the more you win. The gameplay? “Steer your character down Mt. Spinebreaker while hitting as many objects as possible in your quest to rack up the largest hospital bill in the history of the iHurt Championships!”

The main idea of this little game is: You’re falling down a hill, the idea is to bash your character into as many trees, rocks and mulitpliers as possible to maximise the hospital bill at the bottom of the hill.

Here’re some great features about this game:
1. The visuals are great, it’s genuinely quite exciting for an iPhone game with the ground rushing below your feet and trees flying past to either side
2. Accelerometer control by tilt is intuitive and easy to do
3. Integration with top scorers from twitter/facebook is a nice

And here’re some weaknesses:
1. Screen reaction is a bit slow to taps
2. Limited choice of character and scene
3. You look like a bit of a twat moving your iPhone around like it’s a steering wheel.

And it’s also important to note that iHurt is only a virtual simulation, a game, and should not be recreated at home in any way. The actions in the game are just what cartoon characters do for a living, they fall down and go boom. They are professionals in the world of slapstick, and also you wouldn’t like the hospital anyway.

It’s not at the level of top games like PocketGod – where the endless variation makes the play really addictive. But this is well visualised and the gameplay flows smoothly. Cartoon link-ins are fun.

All in all, this is a really nice game to kill time with, but you should always bare in mind that it is MERELY a game!

Lots of things you can do with your new iPhone, for there’re lots of different apps which do many different things for the iPhone, and that’s the one of the biggest advantages of modern smartphones. And today here’s a cute app for you: If you like to do self-measures, the TrakIt app for iPhone will  help you keep tabs on your life.

If there’s one thing people like finding out about, it’s themselves. So iPhone app TrakIt is probably onto a winner with their tracking yourself app. It doesn’t really do very much apart from provide a format for you to track things in: helping you help yourself, you know.

Describing itself as a “unique Goal Setting and Daily Tracking app”, TrakIt says that they ”enable users to track anything on a daily basis: Sales calls, blood sugar, pill taking, their weight, stock prices, billable hours, miles run, whether they worked out or not, or anything else they would like to track. Users can also take notes, set goals, and quickly see how they’re performing in relation to those goals.”

Obviously that is most useful if you have some particular area you want to improve on and certain goals you want to achieve. Like with a lot of stuff it’s down to how much effort you put in. Do you remember to record stuff?

Features of the app that make it useful include the ability to track anything. Other apps tend to focus on particular things like weight loss. There are three ways to input data – you can either input numbers (calls made a day); yes/no data (did you go for a run?); or an average (what was your weight?). Your progress and goals can displayed visually in a graph, and the app also generates an automatic To-Do list which can buzz you with reminders – “eat a carrot!”, stop looking at it, you can’t have cheese burger!

It’s part of a broader trend of tracking ourselves, taken to a sort of extreme by the people in this New York Times article on self-measurement. Something that has increased a lot with smartphones because of the convenience of updating something that is always available.

Available for $3.99, it’s actually quite pricey for an app, but totally worth it for some people.

Blackberry smartphones are the best selling business phones in US. Many people use the Blackberry phones because they’re really good at what they’re doing, and we’re quite used to their trackball design and shape too. However lately Blackberry comes out with quite a lot new ideas, like the optical trackpad, the touchscreen thing, and now even a slide-out keyboard…

Want to see how these are working out? Well, that’s a “WOW”, the news are that this new slider touchscreen Blackberry – The Torch 9800 will launches in US soon.

It has a slider keyboard and a full touchscreen and it is the latest gadget in Blackberry’s redoubtable range of business phones. The Torch was unveiled yesterday and will go on sale in the US on AT&T from 12th August. Features of the new flagship phone include the Blackberry OS 6.0. The new operating system will be rolled out to other handsets but the Torch will be the first phone to carry it.

The Torch features a 3.2″ touch screen with 480×360 pixel color display. The unusual feature is the slide-out QWERTY keyboard and optical trackpad.

The key features of the new Blackberry operating system are: a new “PC-like” web browser. It renders pages “beautifully” apparently, with tabbed browsing for access to multiple web pages at the same time and pinch-to-zoom capability and – secondly – a Universal Search tool.

The new device is geared to take advantage of your media resources elsewhere, so it syncs to iTunes, Windows Media Player DRM-Free music, photos and videos on the go from your computer to your BlackBerry. Sync from your home computer music library to your BlackBerry can be done wirelessly over Wi-Fi.

And based on the picture above, the Torch 9800 looks nice too, a very beautiful design. Although I do adore the traditional Blackberry look, this phones looks really cool and nice, so maybe it is time to make a change. The phone’s launching in the US first on the 12th August, for more information you can check out the AT&T pages.

Eco-friendly is a quite important issue in life, while everyone’s talking about low-carbon life now, we’ve really realized that we should do something to save the earth, and so does the cellphone industry. Environment-friendly phones are no breaking new today, but most of them are merely concept for now. And this one, Samsung Intensity II might not be absolute eco-friendly, but do has a nice job done. Now arrives on Verizon, check it out.

Want a mobile phone that will not make you feel guilty about damaging the environment knowing the fact that mobile phone manufacturing and using a mobile phone actually hurts the environment? You have to check out the new Samsung Intensity II mobile phone which will be available from Verizon Wireless in the coming weeks.

Partly made of recycled plastic, the Samsung Intensity II boasts of a horizontal slide-out QWERTY keyboard, one-touch access to social networking sites, a 1.3MP infrared camera with night vision and a music player. Adding to the phone’s environment-friendly feature is the fact that its design includes an exteriror battery cover which is made from 35% post-consumer materials and recycled plastic which were actually extracted from water bottles and other polycarbonate materials. The phone also comes with an integrated eco-calculator that you can use to calculate your carbon footprints that tracks your car fuel mileage, efficiency and amount of carbon dioxide emitted to the air.

Additionally, the Samsung Intensity II’s packaging is also made from recycled paper and all the markings on the package printed with soy ink. The package size was also made unintentionally smaller. And its charger alerts you when the battery is full during charging.

Key specs and technical features of the Samsung Intensity II include – a 2.2-inch QVGA screen, 1.3MP infrared camera with night vision, series and divided shot modes, voice commands, advanced speech recognition, bluetooth, microSD card slot. The phone also comes with a built-in music player, one-touch contact list access, full suite of messaging options, social beat apps and VZ Navigator.

For your mutimedia needs, the Samsung Intensity II gives you easy access to downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, location-based services, as well as personal organizer and tools with calendar, calculator with currency converter, stop watch and more.

Functionally this new Samsung Intensity has no breaking bright spots, but quite nice nonetheless, and it’s quite eco-friendly, so this is a nice deal anyways if you’re in the looking of a nice smartphone. The Samsung Intensity II will be available from Verizon Wireless for $49.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.

Summer is here, and everyone love cream in this sweet summer, so how about get some strawberry and cream cellphone for the fun of summer? Well, check out the Vertu Strawberry and Cream Cellphone from Nokia.

Ahh, the sweet smell of summer, and the sweet stylings by Nokia’s luxury division, Vertu, complement each other so well. Launching a special edition strawberry and cream models for the girl whose phone must match her new summer handbag, the pierced leather that decorates the Ascent mobile comes in two- you guessed it- colour ways, one berry, one cream. Though the phone cannot be faulted for it’s high tech specs- hands free loudspeakers, polyphonic Yamaha hardware and a sapphire coated LCD screen, I feel kinda gypped at the fact that they’re touting themselves as strawberries and cream, when it’s strawberries or cream. And not a Chupa Chups or scented phone charm in sight. I may have to invest in some penny sweets to cheer me up now.

So, how do you feel about these phones, girls? Do you love them, or you just want some real strawberries and cream for the summer?

I usually love Sony Ericsson phones just because they’re good in design, and alway has friendly user interface. However for this Sony Ericsson Vivaz I do expect more for they’ve promised much more! And the result? Yes, I’ll tell you.

This week, I got my paws on Sony Ericsson’s Vivaz. With HD capability – and a nice new curvy design – I wanted to know whether it pulls off the multimedia magic we’ve all been promised.

First, let’s talk about the looks. Much has been made of the ‘human curvature’ design, and it’s not exactly been a universal hit. But I like it, actually, and certainly don’t think you’d be ashamed to take it home and introduce it to your mates. However, while I like the fact that it’s lightweight, the casing does feel a bit flimsy – taking the back off to get to the battery and SIM is a bit fiddly, and I was worried that it might snap with a teeny bit of pressure. The 3.2 inch touchscreen looks great though, and buttons are kept to a minimum (I was particularly pleased to see the camera shutter button, along with a video button, along the edge – much nicer to use than on the touchscreen itself, as in the iPhone).

However, I was disappointed upon opening the box to be presented with: a stylus. I’d vainly hoped there wouldn’t be the need. And I wasn’t particularly convinced with the thing when texting – the handwriting feature wasn’t quite as responsive as I’d hoped (I got lots of ‘hollo’s, even with my neatest handwriting), while the mini and full-sized QWERTY keyboards had me wishing for something in between. I did also struggle to see the screen properly when outdoors (just occasionally) as there seemed to be a bit of glare even on days that weren’t particularly bright.

Web browsing was nice and easy though, and the 360×640 pixels make sure your picture is sharp and bright. I must confess, despite regularly trying to ditch the stylus I kept having to pick it up again whenever I didn’t get the response I wanted.

But, I hear you cry, what about the camera? Well, this is where the Vivaz starts to show off a little. With 8.1 megapixels, face and smile detection helps to make sure you get the snap you’re after. And having the hard button on the side means it’s easy to grab a picture even in those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments. We thought that video quality was great – it’s certainly a good idea for anyone who wants to be able to grab some footage or pictures whenever they like, and upload them straightaway to YouTube or Picasa. YouTube (along with Facebook and Twitter) is preinstalled, too, alongside iPlayer and other video services, meaning your favourite videos are close to hand.

Ultimately, I had mixed feelings about the handset – it’s stylish, perhaps a bit specialist, but could be so much more user-friendly in terms of the interface. For the average user, the Vivaz might just be a bit fiddly for everyday use. But for multimedia fans who take pictures and movies regularly, it’s not bad at all.

Overall, this is a nice looking phone with pretty nice functions, but I have to say that I’m indeed a little disappointed, for they’ve promised so much more. But still the phone is really pretty!

Microsoft is the name we can rely on (to some extent of course), and as we have this feeling for Microsoft, it is quite obvious that we have to take a look at the Microsoft smartphone: the Microsoft Kin One.

If you’ve seen the commercials, you know the Kin line of phones is all about social networking. The Kin One allows users to view Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networking accounts in one screen, with updates from you and your friends visible in a list format. Great!

There’s also a screen for favorites and a screen that holds all the traditional information on a phone, such as messages, pictures, contacts, music, email and Internet.

The Kin One has a unique shape, just about as wide as it is long, and has an interesting color scheme — black, white and silver with lime green detailing on the QWERTY keypad.

It’s not for everyone, including people that want a big screen for watching movies and clips, or people that want to keep their phone services basic and limited to chatting and texting. But it does hold appeal for the social butterfly on the go that’s looking for something smaller than a Blackberry or easier to type with than a touch screen keypad. And also, it is really cute in size and design.

As a social networking smartphone, the Microsoft has almost everything you’ll ever want, not shockingly powerful, but totally enough for communication use on the go. And I have to say the most impressive part of this phone is its almost square shape, weird but cute!

Smartphones are no news today, and we all have seen lots of interesting, beautiful smartphones, and neither is touchscreen anything new, but still a touchscreen smartphone is really worth a second look, and when it comes from the label LG, girls might really want to check it out, so here today we’re going to go through this LG Viewty GT generally.

Phone makers are falling over themselves to create great social-networking phones: Microsoft’s Kin; Nokia’s C3 – and mid-market phone veterans LG are jumping on the bandwagon releasing their LG Viewty GT exclusively on 3, which is on sale now.

We like the look of this touchscreen phone, not breathtakingly gorgeous but ordinarily beautiful indeed, though the biggest asset might just be the £15 a month deal.

Twitter and Facebook are built into the home screen, both available from one touch on the home screen. Skype is onboard and free as well.

Featuring 3.0″ resistive touch screen, a 5.0 Mega Pixel Auto Focus Camera and fast browsing with HSDPA 3.6. There is 60mb internal memory onboard and it comes with a stylus for more precise touch screen input. As for software, it features Muvee studio and photo editor and two customisable home screens.

The £14 a month contract on three includes 300 minutes of free talking, a mix of 300 minutes & texts to use how you like (anytime, any network) and unlimited internet. A good deal considering Skype is also free… but a 24 month contract. Also available on pay as you go.

Frankly, not a innovative smartphone, and quite ordinary look, but it is really quite convenient and thsi really is a social-networking smartphone which can basically make your social life more convenient and somehow easier to be connected, and that’s good. And the £14 a month contract is quite reasonable too.

Google is always a nice choice, and we kinda all have a pretty good impression about this label, so now let’s check out how well Google has done on their first smartphone, Google Nexus One.

With all these smartphones out there in the market, the Google Nexus One is still worth a second look.

It’s been weeks since Google released its Nexus One Android phone and you might have already read several if not hundreds of reviews. And those reviews may have given you various opinions and comments about the Nexus One, that you might find it pretty confusing. So, to add to your confusion as to whether you would get the Nexus One or not, here’s our take on the Google Nexus One.

First of all, Google Nexus One Design and Form Factor

Knowing fully well that I’m probably among the first owners of the Nexus One in the country where I am located, you can just imagine how proud I am when showing the Nexus One to my friends and co-workers. I’ve got mixed reactions. But those who are tech savvy enough usually comment on how beautiful the Nexus One’s form factor and design is as compared to the iPhone. And I couldn’t help but agree with them. Don’t get me wrong here. I loved the iPhone’s design and form factor when I first got hold of it. But after two years of using the iPhone, I felt the same thing when I got hold of the Nexus One. The Nexus One emits a sense of geekiness while the iPhone now gives me a sense of fun and entertainment.

The Google Nexus One is lighter than the iPhone but thicker by a small bit. I’ve seen several HTC manufactured phones before but none of them appealed to me than when I saw the Google Nexus One. The Nexus One’s body is composed of two different materials – a metallic bezel surrounding the front and side of the phone and a rubbery material that serve as battery cover and the bottom part of the phone. Gripping the phone with your hand is a pleasant experience thanks to its thin form factor and its curvy shape.

On the face of the Nexus One are five basic buttons, unlike the iPhone’s one-button interface. The five buttons include a trackball which is actually pretty useless except when it blinks when something is happening on your phone while on standby-mode. It’s not really useful as a scrolling device since you can practically use the Nexus One’s touch screen feature to scroll. The other four buttons are – for navigating to the Homescreen, back, menu and search. All buttons have haptic feedback when you tap on them. But don’t get your hopes so high for this button as most of the time they don’t respond well. iPhone’s touch control between the Nexus One in this department.

At the back of the Nexus One you can find the camera and the LED Flash, the Google trademark and the HTC brand. On the left side of the phone is the volume control while on the bottom side is the USB port.

Overall, Google (or HTC) has managed to come up with a well designed smartphone worthy of competing against the iPhone. Make no mistake both smartphones are great looking in their own rights. Putting the Nexus One beside my iPhone 3GS makes it look more the male while the iPhone as the female.

Secondly, Google Nexus One Software – the Android Experience

With the latest Android OS 2.1 running as its OS, Google managed to come up with a robust mobile phone platform that may not be more revolutionary than the iPhone but is definitely at par with it. One thing you’ll quickly noticed when using the Nexus One is its speed, especially if you are on Wi-Fi. Downloading apps from the Android Market is a breeze through Wi-Fi, faster than when downloading apps from the iTunes Apps Store on the iPhone.

Android OS 2.1 may not have offered something different than what the iPhone is currently offering but it is certainly a great mobile phone OS in its own right.

Now, when friends ask me what’s the difference between the iPhone and the Google Nexus One aside from their looks, I always cite one answer – the Nexus One’s Voice command capability. Whether it’s the voice-to-text function or voice-enabled searching. Don’t get me wrong here, these features are far from perfect and I have personally experienced inconsistency when transcribing what I’ve spoken but it’s still fun and exciting how the Nexus One recognizes and transcribes what I want to say when composing SMS. It’s the coolest feature that I know of the Nexus One so far.

Another notable feature of the Google Nexus One is the live wallpaper. It’s pretty cool but useless and just eat up your phone’s precious battery life. Those who prefer usability over eye-candy will definitely find this as a negative feature of the phone but for those who don’t mind this feature definitely rocks.

When viewing applications you can either view it similar to how the iPhone apps look or via a more organized grid-like manner that displays in 4×4 arrangement on your phone’s screen.

Of course, you all know that the Nexus One also features a virtual keyboard like the iPhone. And if you’re fond of texting, this is very important. To be straight about it, I have more luck with typing the correct words on the iPhone than on the Nexus One. The keys on Nexus One’s virtual keyboard are placed so close to each other so much so that those with bigger fingers would often find it a pain to type messages. It’s a good thing that I don’t send SMS messages often, so I won’t have to deal with this problem most of the time. A quick fix would have to be downloading another virtual keyboard at the Android market.

Overall, software-wise, the Nexus One is also short of introducing something new and revolutionary into the market. Most if not all of its features are already with the iPhone and other touch-screen smartphones, except of course for the voice-enabled commands.

Thirdly, Other Important Information that You Should Know about the Nexus One

Very important – how’s the Nexus One’s battery performance? Quite surprisingly that Nexus One’s battery performance is pretty good. It could last you one whole day of normal use. This if of course pretty standard among smartphones with touchscreen features. If I have to compare it with the iPhone’s battery performance, the iPhone wins for a good couple of hours more.

Camera features – With a 5 megapixel camera, the Nexus One takes pretty decent shots. Nothing exemplary but good enough for what it is capable of given its extent. Of course it beats the iPhone’s camera in terms of resolution and output. But the one thing it failed to beat though is the iPhone’s camera speed and touch to focus feature. The Nexus One’s camera is slow. Perhaps an Android update would make it faster later on. But then, it’s the main reason while you would want to have this phone, anyway.

Photo Gallery – I believe the Nexus One’s photo gallery uses Cooliris. So there’s some coolness factor into it. Not as great as the iPhone’s photo gallery of course but is good enough to make it different from other mobile phones.

Lastly, Conclusion

When rumors leaked out about the Nexus One, expectations were high over the fact that it is a Google Phone. Now that it’s out in the open, did Google meet these expectations? It varies from every user. As for me, I am more than happy with my Google Nexus One. I wasn’t really expecting too many features that my iPhone 3GS could not do. In fact, I wasn’t expecting it to be an iPhone killer. But now that I’ve used it for a couple of days, I would have to say that it is NOT AN IPHONE KILLER, but more of an iPhone rival.

The question is, if you’re an iPhone owner, should you replace your phone with the Google Nexus One? Definitely not. Unless of course you’re tired of using your iPhone anymore. If you’re not an iPhone user and would like to use an Android phone, you might as well get the Nexus One instead of the other Android phones. Why? For the simple reason that it is a Google phone, and Android happens to be a Google platform.

If own an iPhone and you have the money to get another smartphone just for the heck of it, go and get your unit now. You certainly won’t regret it.

Well, this is how we think of this Google phone, what’s you opinion on this?

Smartphones are always nice, but never nice enough for us users. The truth is we really can’t find a perfect phone, simply because ‘perfect’ is really too much to ask for a smartphone, or for anything else, so let’s just see what choice do we have right now. Giving credit to Motorola, as they always come up with some real nice phones, this new push-to-talk phone is really worth worth your time to check out.

The CTIA 2010 kicked off weeks before in Las Vegas and this early Motorola is announcing its latest Android phone with a rather unusual look and features. The Motorola i1 is the first iDEN device that carries the features of most smartphones today thanks to the Android OS running on it. Some of these smartphone features include – a 3.1 inch touch screen, Wi-Fi, optimized browsing experience, Opera Mini 5 browser, access to thousands of Android apps from the Android Marketplace and of course push-to-talk feature. Motorola is releasing the i1 ruggedized phone to Sprint anytime this summer.

The Motorola i1 boasts of a solid body construction that passed military specs for protecting against dust, shock, vibration and blowing rain. It was designed for users who sport a rugged lifestyle and working environment. The phone automatically syncs and integrates with office and personal information including your emails, calendar appointments and contacts. It also syncs with Microsoft Document Viewer and corporate synch for Word or Powerpoint files.

The phone also features both Android standard virtual keyboard and Swype virtual keyboards offering you a easy time when composing messages. It’s high 5 megapixel camera has flash, geo-tagging and panoramic features – providing your with crips photos and clear displays perfectly suited for its vibrant 3.1-inch HVGA screen. The phone also comes with a microSD card and the latest Opera Mini 5 browser that provide quick internet browsing on Nextel Network and Wi-Fi. Plus, the phone is Flash 8-enabled as well, thanks to the Android browser.

The Motorola i1 is slated for release this summer under various Sprint data plans including the Sprint Everything Data 450 plan with Any Mobile, AnytimeSM for only $69.99 per month, and the Sprint Business Advantage Messaging and Data PlanSM starting at $59.99 per month.

Well, how do you think of this smartphone? Cute look, nice features, I think this is a smartphone I really want to get my hands on when this summer comes!