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Monthly Archives: October 2011

Review: Ghost Radar Classic (Android)

The Android game Ghost Radar Classic is free most places these days. It pretends to be a ghost-hunting app that will record paranormal activity everywhere, as well as pick up on EVPs.

Unfortunately, this entertainment software doesn’t even try hard to be convincing; it shows activity everywhere and spits out computer-generated-voice words every few seconds.

Rather predictable and disappointing, don’t celebrate Halloween with this stinker of a game. An Arizona pool fence is far more interesting and convincing as a ghost detector.

Even at the price of free, Ghost Radar Classic is too expensive for what it’s worth… which is nothing.

Review: Virtual Horse Racing 3D for Android

I recently downloaded Virtual Horse Racing 3D, an Android-platform videogame, and while at first glance it appears to be the product of a lot of Help Desk Specialist Jobs veterans, the game actually is better than it seems at first.

The look of the game will call to mind the PSone and PS2 classic series, Gallop Racer, and the racing is roughly on par with that series. However, whereas Gallop Racer was interactive for the gamer, in this game all you can do is bet on outcomes and watch.

It’s actually not too hard to keep from losing your shirt on this game, because it enforces a strict limit on betting of $10 per horse, per line. So at most, you lose $30 per race.

The racing is fun, but with such a shocking lack of interactivity, gets told fast and doesn’t age well. Too bad.

Google Navigation has been valuable lately

Ever since moving to Portland, where I have never lived before, the most useful app on my Android has been Google Navigation. It operates like any other gps online navigation system I’ve tried in the past, like TeleNav, but the main difference is that it’s free.

Many times, as we’ve been learning the area, Google Navigation has been the key to us arriving on-time, in the right place, without getting lost among a load of rabbit trails. Back when I briefly worked for a Spring reseller a few years ago, TeleNav was a spendy little app. It added something like a $10/month charge to your bill, in addition to requiring that you had a data plan as well.

Now it’s on most Android phones and all you pay for is the data plan.

Guess which one I like better?

Finally, an OTA update from T-Mobile

When I bought my T-Mobile G2 by HTC last January or February, I bought it with Android version 2.2, known as Froyo, with the understanding that an OTA upgrade to Gingerbread would be coming “within weeks.” Weeks went by, then months. Still nothing. So finally I found a place to download the pre-release official T-Mobile 2.3 Gingerbread update and get it installed.

I suppose someone would bet their equestrian helmets collection that if I’d waited a few more days, I’d have received the OTA update. And maybe they’re right. But once I was on Gingerbread, I was happy, so how I got there didn’t matter as much.

Well, just as I sat down to write this entry, my phone buzzed to tell me a bug-fix update had been released and asking if I wanted to install it. Sure thing! So I did.

And now I have my first OTA from T-Mobile. Which is great.

Sure, it’s not Ice Cream Sandwich, but that probably won’t be sent to my phone anyway, much as I wish it would. But at least it shows there’s an effort made on T-Mobile’s part.

The Kindle Fire looks pretty nice

It’s not often I get excited about new product announcements anymore, but the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s first color Kindle, is pretty nice. In fact, the only complaint I have about it is that it features a traditional backlit screen; something I’m not interested in because I already own an Android phone.

I understand that even the latest eInk color screens might not be up to Jeff Bezos’ standards, but I can wait until they do and start appearing on the second generation of Kindle Fire devices.

That being said, if I wanted a backlit tablet, the Kindle Fire is pretty sweet. It can perform full Web browsing and even stream video in addition to reading books. (Not sure if it utilizes a YouTube video downloader, but its speeds are primarily determined by your WiFi network, so it’s probably pretty good.)

And with 8 GB of memory, it’s the beefiest Kindle device yet. And all for a price of $199? That’s an impressive debut, considering Barnes and Noble dropped the Nook Color to $229 the day before the announcement, hoping to undercut the widely-anticipated price-matching price of $250 that was expected out of Amazon.

The world is hurting right now from the loss of Steve Jobs. But with the innovation he’s displaying, I’d argue Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is a candidate to eventually become the next great tech innovator.