Gadgets
Monday 30 July 2007 at 1:35 pm. Used tags: 770, harmony, wii OK - heres my first Pivot entry about some recent Gadget acquisitions -* Nintendo Wii
One of those silly impulse buys.
I'm not a big gamer - I have wasted many many many hours in the past on Homeworld & Dawn of War but not since Silent Hill & Medievil on the PlayStation have I spent much time on a console.
Having said that - something about the Nintendo Wii was strangely appealing - it didn't have all the bells and whistles of the PS3 or XBOX2 but it did seem to focus on the actual enjoyment factor of a computer game rather than the technology showcased in the box itself. Certainly the Wii is worth buying for the free included Sports package - particularly the Tennis (bowling is rubbish but the boxing & golf are amusing).
Two people jumping around on a creaky, slippery, matai floor in a confined space is hard to beat for entertainment value.
In addition it will happily play MP3's, images and simple videos (without fancy encoding) from memory card as well as allow browsing the interweb via built in wireless (it does 54Mb 'G' class with WPA encryption) and Opera. Annoyingly it won't play DVD's - if Nintendo offered some firmware updates to improve the multimedia capabilities (eg support for USB drives/memory sticks and video codecs) they'd be onto a real winner.
The other thing about it is its wonderfully unassuming form-factor - like the Mac Mini you can tuck it away beside the TV and it ticks away almost silently.
On the games front - we did buy the Legend of Zelda game - pretty good graphics, game play and audio but some of the puzzles are repetitive. I hear Paper Mario is worth checking out too.
* Logitech Harmony 550
Again another evil impulse purchase - these were going for $80 at an online video game store in NZ. We have four remotes (Cable TV, TV, DVD & Stereo) and it seemed like we were forever running out of batteries or having to tweak settings on the one remote you just couldn't find. So I figured I'd give a universal remote a crack (and you can't go wrong for the price).
Essentially you hook it up to your PC via USB, select the devices you want to control and then download the appropriate configurations from Logitechs enormous remote control database. Then instead of having to switch between remotes or remote configurations you switch to activity based remote control. Select 'Watch TV' and it switches the TV, cable, stereo on, sets the appropriate channels and then when you raise or lower the volume it does so on the stereo and when you change channels it changes the cable channel etc. Its not perfect (finding obscure remote controls can be a matter of picking the closest match) but you can program individual buttons by beaming the old remote at the Harmony and it learns the appropriate command sequence - personally my patience doesn't extend to that level of perfection so replicating 85% of the functionality of four different devices is sufficient payback to not bother about the rest (the last 15% tends to a little mis-mapped DVD functionality).
* Nokia 770
My most recent purchase (again on a whim) was the Nokia 770, an ARM/Linux (debian) powered internet Tablet. Expansys UK are selling these for 73ukp - a price you just can't beat (esp with the killer Kiwi $$) !
The device is pretty awesome - there are some niggles - its a little slow (just a 220MHz ARM processor) and the Opera browser crashes often (the tiny 64Mb RAM probably doesn't help) but it still lets you browse the web for about 4 hours straight without a laptop or PC. Using any Bluetooth or Wireless connection (doesn't support PEAP unfortunately if you have a locked down corporate network) you can browse at a decent speed on a crystal clear screen.
The PDA functionality isn't great but it will play MP3's and some video (as long as its been down sampled). Other than web browsing I've found it most useful for streaming radio through my stereo and acting as a UPNP player to stream music and images from my Mac. Surprisingly there isn't a decent free UPNP server for the Mac - I ended up using the 2004 Beta of Philips Streamium Media Manager. I suspect if I got serious about this kind of thing I'd setup a Windows or Linux PC or appliance to act as a UPNP server
