My fascination with hand held game systems stems from my childhood, when the very first video game system I ever owned–in all its monochromatic glory–was the original Gameboy. I treasured the two hours a day that my parents allowed me to spend on it, and my adoration clouded my judgment of the mostly crappy games I played on it.
Fast forward eight years, and now I have enough disposable income to actually buy these things on my own.
Insightful commentary after the jump! (more…)
So the other day my girlfriend offered up an interesting proposal to me. She would use her birthday money to buy my iPod Nano (at a slight discount) and I would spend an extra 50-70 bucks to upgrade to an iPod touch. Brilliant! But here’s the catch.
My iPod has been exhibiting…interesting tendencies since a couple weeks after I bought it. At random times the scroll wheel won’t respond to my delicate stroking. It will still move, but it randomly jumps around instead of smoothly scrolling. For example, if I’m trying to adjust the volume (and it starts out at max volume) touching it will cause the volume to jump down to the halfway mark, and then ‘scrolling’ the wheel will make the volume skip back and forth between the halfway mark and about the 3/4 mark. If I continue trying to move the volume up, the volume will continue to skip up and down the bar, slowly moving farther and farther down the bar with every jump until it mutes the sound.
Weird huh? The same thing occurs if I’m trying to navigate through the menu system. If the top menu choice is highlighted (i.e. ‘Music’ on the main menu), trying to scroll down to ‘Podcasts’ is nearly impossible. I have to scroll to the option, keep my finger on the scroll wheel at the desired position, then with another finger push the center button to go into the sub-menu. If at any time during the process I let up on the scroll wheel, the selection jumps back up to the top of the menu column.
Confusing enough? Yeah, if I could just get it to perform when I had my computer handy I’d take a video. In fact, I might just make that my mission this week. Anyway, if any of you guys have had, heard of, or even understand the problem I just described, let me know in the comments. Aaron suggests (and I agree) that I should just take it back to the store and see if I can exchange it. Hopefully that will go as smoothly as it does in my head.
This is all pure speculation/wishful thinking on my part, so please don’t take it too seriously.
I personally love the way Installer.app works, I can install/uninstall applications where ever I go, that being said I’m not looking forward to installing apps via iTunes.
So my question is this, will Apple be able to offer the same on-the-go application management style as Installer.app with the release of the iPhone SDK? I genuinely hope so, however that functionality would likely require firmware 1.1.4 to be released alongside (or soon after) the SDK with a major overhaul to the mobile iTunes application.
Completely doable, but will Apple choose to follow the logical example set by Installer.app? If they plan on allowing developers to sell applications it makes great sense financially, after all I’ve purchased more than my fair share of stupid games for my cell phone at random times when I was utterly bored and had no form of entertainment readily accessible.
That being said, what do those of you who actually own an iPod touch or iPhone think?
I’m at the South Mill and the internet here has been down since yesterday. Basically, I figured out they lost their PPPoE Username and Password for their DSL modem, not a big deal, right? Just call tech support… or not. Apparently they went with a local company called Binary.net, which only offers tech support during normal business hours, so if you have a problem over the weekend you’re out of luck. Lame!
Long story short, I’m currently sharing my 230kbps connection through my cell phone with 25 other people. This is officially slower than dial-up. Now I could be mean and cut them all off, but their little faces lit up like it was freaking Christmas when I started serving up sweet bandwidth.
p.s. Much love to the people at Internet Nebraska, who don’t suck… It’s a pity The Mill isn’t even your client.
For no real reason other than the fact that I could, I took a picture of an Eee PC stacked on top of a MacBook, stacked on top of a MacBook Pro.
