42Bytes

After standing in line over a week ago to get myself my iPhone, I do believe it is worth it. I figured I would give it one week to test it out and give it a rest run. It has revolutionised mobile phones forever providing smart phone capabilities with a plain nice feel to it.

The whole phone’s experience centres on the touch screen. You use your finger to control everything about this phone, excepting the few various buttons on the device, and combined with the Apple aesthetics it just provides an experience that leaves you content and smiling that you’ve used the device rather than frustrated or making you think like most smart phones.

The phone has many features to go with the appeal of the touch screen. The various features include a camera, 3G capabilities, a proper internet browser (Safari), an accelerometer, all of the iPod features such as music, video and audiobooks, built-in YouTube, a full GPS system and the ability to download applications and put them onto your phone.

The camera on the phone is alright quality. You won’t be taking photographic masterpieces with it but it’s good happy snaps on the go and the colour isn’t too bad. It is a little grainy but I wasn’t expecting anything more from the phone’s camera. It does have a built-in feature which allows you to email through the email account you’ve set up for the phone. Look to your left for an example of the camera.

The 3G on the phone allows for much quicker internet browsing and anything that uses the internet. At first I thought it to be rather average speed but when I ended up in a place with only GSM I soon started to miss the 3G access. According to Apple it loads 2.4x faster than EDGE which I am tempted to believe. Thankfully, Australia has 99% coverage of the population on the 3G network via Telstra.

One thing that adds to this phone is that it packs a proper internet browser not just a compact version. A fully fledged Safari is on the phone and this allows for proper viewing of websites. It renders very quickly and makes use of multi-gestures by using the pinch motion. This is where you use two fingers to zoom in and out making it very easy to any page on the net. The let down with the browser is that it has no Flash support. Meaning you come to a lot of your favourite sites and receive a little lego block with a question mark. This left me disappointed as I hoped to be playing flash games on my phone while at school. We can only hope this will be coming in the future.

The phone features an accelerometer which allows you to view various applications in landscape or even giving you different views when you flip it on your side. One cool thing is when you open up the Calculator application, it shows you a simple calculator. If you turn it sideways, the calculator becomes scientific, giving you all the tools you need to solve that complex arithmetic. This nifty feature comes in handy though it can be a little dodgy at times where it won’t notice you flipping the phone. So you have to flip it a few times to get it to work.

Naturally, the phone has a built-in iPod. The interface is very easy to navigate as you “flick” through your music and happily listen to your songs. It syncs the same way an iPod does via iTunes and gives you the familiar interface. This makes it easy to pick up and get music and video onto your phone quickly. It also makes good use of the accelerometer by changing to CoverFlow when the phone is flipped onto its side. This is nifty if you like to use the CoverFlow view.

Whoever came up with the idea to put a YouTube application onto the iPhone was a genius. I can now take Numa Numa guy, Star Wars Kid and Lolcats wherever I go. And it’s awesome. The application works well and suprisingly doesn’t use that much data.

The phone now features a GPS which can give you spot on locations…when you’re outside of course. I turned it on inside and it just told me I was sitting in the middle of the Tasman Sea. As soon as I made my way outside, it had me down to the metre. Unfortunately, that’s how GPS works and we can’t argue with it. The built-in maps application used Google Maps so the interface is lovely and the maps are always up to date. So all in all the GPS is pretty good.

The final and best feature of the phone is the App Store. This gives the iPhone extreme depth as now anything can be put onto it. It can do absolutely anything now and it isn’t restricted to what Apple are putting on there. I’ve got applications like Band which allows me to play piano anywhere, PhoneSaber which lets me whoosh my lightsaber and pretend the force is with me, Twitterific letting me post twits anywhere making the Twitter idea actually work. The only limits with applications is the developers imagination. It was the smartest move by Apple to hand out the SDK and they will see their market share expand simply because of this.

The actual physical phone is very nice to look at whether you get white or black. It is very modern looking and is just plain gorgeous. Everything fits in perfectly and the phone is very Apple. There are only five physical buttons on the phone and that’s all it really needs to keep it’s minimalist style. There is the Home button, the Lock button, the Volume Up and Down and the Silent button. They all look very nice with none of them extruding out from the device. The phone itself is quite sturdy even with the plastic backing and holds up very well. I still would buy a case for it just in case because you don’t want to be scratching it’s glass front or cracking it’s plastic back.

The original iPhone was said to be awesome, wonderful and great. The new iPhone is revolutionary, fantastic and mind bogglingly awesome. Apple have really outdone themselves with this phone and I can never use any other phone after this one. No other phone provides the nice appeal that you get from using the iPhone. The iPhone3G is just great. Excellent. There isn’t a word that can describe how great this phone is. If you can afford it, go out and get one now.

Well, I legged out the $80 last week for a copy of Mario Kart Wii and I can tell you now, it’s definitely worth the money.

Mario Kart is one Mario spin-off that has been around since the SNES. A classic party game, everyone loved huddling around their telly’s to play a good game of Mario Kart. Now, with Mario Kart Wii, we can experience all those memories and create new ones as the game has captured that Mario essence.

Taking advantage of the Wii’s motion sensing abilities, Nintendo have created a steering wheel that comes with the game for you to use. When I first heard the idea, I thought it might’ve been some sort of cheap, tacky hunk of plastic to appeal to five year olds. Alas, the game proved me wrong when I picked up the wheel and started zooming around corners with Toad. Turning with the wheel is pretty easy once you get your bearings on how much you have to spin the thing to turn corners and it doesn’t take long to pick up the controls of the wheel as most of the buttons are pretty intuitive. The game doesn’t stop there either, it also allows you to race with the Wiimote, Wiimote and Nunchuk, the Classic Controller and the Gamecube controller. It gives you lots of choice of how you want to race and I appreciate the selection it gives me.

The next new thing they added with it was motorcycles. Once again, when I first heard the idea, I fumed at how they might ruin the game by allowing to race with something that isn’t a kart. Nintendo trumped me on that as well as that now the motorcycles are more fun to race then the karts. You can do tricks for boosts, they turn nicer and you can wheelie to go faster. The karts are very traditional so you can’t get any of these lovely speed boosts other than if you go manual and drift you way through every corner.

The next lovely thing is that Nintendo have provided four cups made up of old tracks from SNES, N64, GBA and GCN as well as four cups with completely new tracks. This is great as it allows you to relive your old favourite tracks and experience some of the new features on the new tracks. Nearly all of the new tracks have places where you can jump up like half-pipe, have many places for you to perform tricks and are set in some pretty funky places.

The game also provides an online multiplayer feature being the first game on the Wii that allows you to find players around the world and challenge them on a track. To see online multiplayer Mario Kart is great but the problem with it is that you feel that you are just racing harder computers. There’s no feeling that the people racing you are actually alive other than they are harder to defeat. You get just as much fun out of racing expert computer players in single player than you do in the multiplayer. There’s no sense of competition at all and that disappoints me.

Mario Kart Wii has got a perfect balance of new and old allowing young and old gamers alike to enjoy and experience the Mario Kart series. Though the multiplayer may be a little disappointing it makes up for it in all other fields and I am happy to see it innovated and brought to the Wii.

I know I haven’t posted in a little while but hey…who runs this site. I think that’s me.

Nintendo have announced a date for Super Smash Bros. Brawl and I am rejoicing as I have now pre-ordered it for a reasonable price of $79. Due to hit stores on June 26th the game will be a smashing hit as it has been all around the world (if you count America and Japan as the world).

Just thought I would let you all know that I am still alive.