Jul 02

Review: Go, Diego, Go! Safari Rescue (Wii)

Game, Princess, Wii No Comments »

My 2.5 year old daughter found this game while we were at Sam’s Club. She loves Diego, but hasn’t shown much interest in video games, but given the low price tag ($19.99), I picked it up thinking we’d have fun with it for a little while before she got bored with it.

After dinner, she saw the game on the kitchen table and wanted to play, so we popped it in and started it up. And played for 2 hours. There are two game modes, one is simply racing with animals, cars, and other items from Diego’s rescue pack. The game mode says racing, but it’s really just controlling your character trying to avoid obstacles. You hold the controller sideways and just go left and right, she picked up real fast how to do it. The only negative was that the view is from far up top, so she couldn’t actually see Diego and asked several times where Diego was.

Go Diego Go, Safari Rescue

Go Diego Go, Safari Rescue

The other game mode is a side-scroller (Think Mario) where you control a character and go left and right with some jumping involved. That one was a little bit more challenging for her, so we used the same controller and she did the jumping (by pressing the “2″ button). The cut scenes are a little long for an inpatient 2.5 year old, but you can skip them if you manage to wrestle the controller out of their hands.

We had a great time with it and we’re looking forward to playing some more this weekend.  Great way to get your child introduced to video games and interact, talking about the different items in the game.

Jun 22

Review: BeejiveIM 3.0 for iPhone with push notification

Review, Technical, iPhone No Comments »

What it is:
An IM client that supports AIM/Google Talk/ICQ/Jabber/MSN/mySpace IM/Yahoo & Facebook IM on your iPhone. The version that got published live today to the iPhone App store includes Push Notification. I.e. when you get a new IM, you’ll get an SMS/Text-like notification on your iPhone screen telling you who sent the message and the content of the message. You have the option to either close the message box or view, which automatically opens the application and opens a chat box in which you can chat with your buddies.

The good:
-Nice UI.
-Easier to chat on the iPhone than I thought it would be.
-Error correction works great and once you get used to typing, you’ll be chatting away fast on it.
-Supports landscape view.
-Push notification is very nicely implemented, although logging off before you go to sleep is recommended.

The bad:
-Yahoo IM doesn’t work. Every time I attempt to log in, I get the error message “Connection failed on all fallback ports”. Not sure if this is temporary or not, looks like it’s not specific to this version of Beejive based on a quick Google search.
-Frequent crashes. I’ve had it for less than a day and it has crashed 3 times on me back to the home screen.
-The cost. $9.99 for an IM app? If it had been $4.99 I wouldn’t have complained, but $9.99 is more than this app is worth right now given the issues above.

Recommend that you wait and see what Meebo is up to or for Beejive to drop the price.

Update: Now getting “error: received invalid data” when trying to log in to Yahoo

Update: June 24th – looks like Yahoo is working now, at least somewhat. I could log in to one Yahoo account, but not two at the same time. Log out of all accounts and log back in.

Apr 16

iPhone App Review: Blacklist

Review, iPhone No Comments »

I am in the unfortunate situation of having bought a new car. Unfortunate, you ask? Yes, because I’m getting 2-3 auto-calls per day from companies trying to sell me a worthless extended warranty. This is a known scam and not even being on the Do-not-call list stops them from calling.

Fortunately, there’s a solution for those of us with iPhones. The Blacklist application for $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Blacklist creates a contact named “Blacklisted Number” full of thousands of numbers (over 30,000 and growing) belonging to US telemarketers, scammers, and prank callers on your iPhone so that when one of these numbers calls, you know not to answer because it displays the caller as “Blacklisted Number”. 

Blacklist connects to callerdb.com’s extensive database of problem callers every time you sync. Since I installed it two days ago, I’ve avoided 4 calls. Installation and sync is painless if you’re on a high speed wifi connection.

With the minutes it saves you, Blacklist will pay for itself. If you’re getting telemarketing calls to your iPhone, you need this application. Why isn’t Vonage doing this?