First Impressions – Samsung Galaxy S II on AT&T

November 13th, 2011

Welcome to my annual blog post!  This time I hope to be a little bit more timely and talk about the latest and greatest Android smartphone from our friends at Samsung.  I won’t bore you with a full review since you can find plenty of other reviews out there.  Instead, I’ll tell you why I chose the Galaxy S II over other phones and how I feel about my purchase 48 hours later.

First of all, I came from a Samsung Captivate.  This was AT&T’s flagship Android phone when it launched in July of 2010, but it was fraught with issues – from random shutdowns, to poor GPS performance.  It also initially shipped with Android 2.1 (Eclair), which had already been supplanted by version 2.2 (Froyo) earlier in the year and later that year by 2.3 (Gingerbread).  It was a flawed release, but GPS issues aside, it was a pretty solid piece of hardware.  I spent a lot of time hacking on it — installing custom ROMs, kernels, modems, and UI skins.  I played around with CyanogenMod for 3 months.  These home-grown efforts went a long way to take a mediocre phone and turn it into a good phone.  That said, it still suffered from annoyances like poor to mediocre battery life and very uneven UI response.  I’ll be frank here, it really made me appreciate the iPhone user experience (yes, I know you can mess this up by running a too-new version of iOS on a too-old phone, but I’m talking about the out-the-box experience).  I grew weary of wondering if the next ROM or kernel would completely fix my issues.

Then I completed my upgrade penance with AT&T…and then I discovered that you can trade in old phones at Radio Shack or Target for serious cash.  My old Captivate brought in $95!  The next question was WHICH PHONE?  I’m stuck on AT&T with no LTE coverage, which means my only viable alternative was the Motorola Atrix 2.  The Atrix 2 looked like a great phone with a sharp 4.3″ qHD screen, quick dual-core processor and insane docking options,  but ultimately its locked bootloader and limited storage capacity (8GB!) disqualified it.

Oh, and did I mention that Target Mobile had the phone on sale for $99 with a 2-year contract2  So after the trade-in, fees and taxes, I paid $11.99 out of pocket for the upgrade!  Yeah, in reality this was a no-brainer upgrade.

So then, on to the “review” portion of our show…

The Build Quality and Form-Factor

Although the phone is entirely plastic, it still feels solid and sturdy.  For the most part, it doesn’t feel cheap.  However, don’t open the back panel or you’ll be both disappointed and a little concerned.  The back panel that provides access to the battery, SIM card and MicroSD slot is a thin and flimsy piece of plastic with tiny tabs that clip it to the phone.  I pray that I don’t have one-too-many battery pulls because tiny tabs will always break.  Thankfully, the panel does clip in snugly and secure.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to like going to a bigger phone.  The 4″ Captivate felt ideal in all respects and the SGS2 is slightly larger at 4.3″.  Thankfully, it doesn’t feel any bulkier than the Captivate thanks to its thinness (9.49mm).  It’s slightly more cumbersome to handle one-handed, though.  Overall, it’s not bad, though I know I won’t ever go to a bigger phone like the 4.7″ HTC Edge or the 4.65″ Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Display

This was the most difficult factor to decide on.  I’m a screen freak, especially after having owned an iPhone 4.  Retina displays are amazing, despite being trapped in a tiny 3.5″ screen.  My Captivate’s screen never quite compared to the iPhone.  Going from 4″ to 4.3″ while retaining the same resolution felt like a loss.  I did the math, even created a spreadsheet comparing various screen sizes and resolutions.  I even have a column with a rough guesstimate on optimal viewing distance (the closer the better).  It’s just something I’m very particular about because it’s the single most important element in how you interface with the device.  The qHD screens were all tempting, but they used somewhat inferior display technologies (S-LCD and regular Super AMOLED, not Super AMOLED Plus).  This sounds so pedantic, I know, but it bothers me.  So did Super AMOLED Plus really make a difference?  In short, almost.  The colors are extremely vibrant and punchy almost to a fault.  The contrast is fantastic and the blacks are the deepest blacks I’ve seen on an LCD yet.  When you turn the screen on, you can’t help but to go “wow!”, especially if you’ve got one of the more colorful wallpapers.  Unfortunately, color isn’t the entire story.  This phone is the same resolution as my Captivate at 480×800.  As a result, everything looks bigger, but not more detailed or even much clearer.  Supposedly Super AMOLED Plus is supposed to make it sharper and clearer, but I honestly can’t tell the difference.  On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’ve lost detail, either.  The bottom line is that it is a better display overall, just don’t expect “HD” clarity.  I’m really looking forward to the next generation or two of phones when 720p on a 4″ to 4.5″ screen will be standard.  I can’t wait to see what Samsung cooks up then!

System Performance

Holy crap this thing screams!  Like I mentioned earlier, the performance of my Captivate was spotty at best.  The worst part was how inconsistent it was.  One moment you could be flinging between home screens, the next frustrated because a touch isn’t registered or registered twice as a result of input lag.  I didn’t get a great first impression of the Android OS.  It felt merely “okay,” and not as smooth as iOS.  Well, apparently those issues disappear entirely when you throw enough horses at them.  I’ve got roughly twice as many horses on the SGS2 than on the Captivate and the OS just flies.  It’s such a refreshing experience!  Android finally feels like a polished, professional operating system!

My last run of the Quadrant benchmark on the Captivate running a leaked Gingerbread 2.3.5 and a tweaked kernel with “lagfix” (i.e. optimizations, but no overclocking) produced a score of about 2300.  Stock the phone scored 1400.  Out of the box, the SGS 2 scored 3200, with a slightly tweaked kernel, 3400.

Phone and Network Performance

It’s too early to tell, to be honest.  Call quality isn’t bad and reception seems on par with the Captivate, which was mediocre.  As far as 3G goes, I’ve gotten between 1.5 and 6 Mbits/sec.  That’s not shabby and I could never have dreamed of 6 Mbits on the Captivate.  I can’t wait to take it to work where my office gets fantastic reception (4 bars consistently with good stretches at 5 bars).  GPS is also dramatically improved.  I pull down 9 satellites at home within 10 seconds where the Captivate, on its best behavior, with every fix and workaround applied, could only pull 7.

Battery Performance

Again, still too early to tell, but I can say that it’s at least comparable to the best performance the old Captivate gave me.  I can easily last a day.  According to my last run, it would have gone 30 hours off charger, even after over 3 hours of Display time (i.e. time I was actively doing something on the phone).  I don’t think the Captivate could have done that.  I know that if Display time was over 2 hours, I was looking at a 12 hours max.  With the SGS2, it was at 40% battery with over 3 hours of Display time.  Wow!  So…early indications are very, very good.  My days of fretting over battery usage may finally be over!  Good bye Juice Defender, good bye battery monitoring widgets!

Final Thoughts

So far, the SGS2 is proving to be the phone that the Captivate should have been.  I constantly debated on whether I would buy another Samsung phone because of the Captivate.  I took a risk and bought based on the numbers and I have not been disappointed.  Sure, I could have better screen resolution, but I’ll just have to wait on that upgrade until my next cycle in late 2013.  Until then, I’m quite content with what I have.  It’s got processing legs to go the distance with whatever games or other demanding applications that developers want to throw at me.  It might not be a true 4G phone, but let’s be honest here, it’s going to be at least another year before that technology is going to be mature enough to be stable, at least on AT&T.  Does anyone remember when 3G was new?  Do you remember the first crop of phones that would drop calls when the phone had to negotiate down to EDGE?  It was a failure common to the first batch of 3G phones.  It’s going to be like that for LTE for a little while – unstable and finicky.

I don’t think you can go wrong buying the AT&T SGS2.  The only other phone that could remotely compete was the Atrix 2.  I failed to mention that the new Motorola phones are all compatible with their docking solutions.  If you’ve got the dough to spend on accessories, that could be a really fun way to go.  That wasn’t really a factor for me.  Also, the upgrade price was unbeatable.  If you’ve got a semi-recent smartphone, are eligible for upgrade, and can find a sale like this – then you’d be a moron not to go for it.

I rate the Samsung Galaxy S II 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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Windows Vista, One Month Later

October 11th, 2010

Edit:  This was written over two years ago, but never left my drafts queue.  School kicked in and I kept the blog on the back burner.   I’m back in now, starting with a cleanup of old drafts and miscellaneous junk.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I thought I’d share my experiences with Windows Vista, roughly a month after I initially installed it.  First off, just so you know my bias up front — I’ve had a copy of Vista Ultimate sitting on my bookshelf unopened for well over a year and a half.  I refused to install it.  Since Vista’s release, a number of my friends have tried it out and gave consistently good feedback.  Nevertheless, I continued to dig my heels in and hung on to Windows XP, vowing that I would run XP until the day security updates would no longer be made available.  I recently bought a new laptop (see previous post) and made a point to order it with XP, not Vista.  In fact, I made a point to rush my order before the June deadline after which vendors were no longer allowed to sell XP on new machines.

However, there comes a time in any XP installation when the system becomes slow and buggy.  I did my best to keep the system clean, but I knew that it was too little, too late.  I allowed too many software installs and uninstalls.  I held off on the re-install simply because I simply did not have the time nor the patience to reload my entire working environment.  Then we got hit with the Great A/C Crisis of 2008.  My wife and I were exiled for a week to the master bedroom where we had a window A/C unit offering relief from the 85 degree plus (up to 88 degrees in my office!) temperatures in the rest of the house.   During that week, I moved all of my production work to my laptop.  When the crisis was over, I realized that I finally had an opportunity to re-install my desktop since I had shifted my work off of it.  I had nothing to lose and figured at this point to dust off the Vista packaging and give it a run.  Moreover, I chose to take the 64-bit path seeing as how I had the hardware to support it.

The initial installation was done on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 7800 GTX video card.  According to Microsoft, this was enough to run the OS with all of the bells and whistles, like Aero, turned on.   My initial impression was one of severe annoyance.  User Account Control was intrusive to the extreme, especially during the initial software installations requiered for my environment.  I immediately turned it off.  I then noticed that the interface didn’t seem all that responsive, so I did what I normally do under XP — toggle the desktop theme back to “Windows Classic.”  Unfortunately under Vista, many of the new interface widgets look absolutely butt-ugly under the Classic theme.  I turned Aero back on and left it there.  The remainder of this initial experience was all downhill…  Let me bullet-point them to be brief:

  1. My Cisco VPN client isn’t supported at all under Vista 64-bit.  As a result, I was relegated to running my work environment from a VMware virtual machine.  More on this later.
  2. Despite running in 64-bit goodness, 64-bit applications are still scarce.
  3. Incredibly enough, there is no 64-bit Firefox and under the 64-bit Internet Explorer, there is very little plug-in support.  In other words, if you want Flash, you’re either running 32-bit Firefox or 32-bit IE.  I took the 32-bit Firefox route (there’s a 64-bit third-party build available, but again, no plug-in support).
  4. Firefox ran like molasses uphill on a frozen winter day.  It would often become unresponsive and eventually crash.
  5. Between the Indexing service and System Restore, my hard drive light was constantly on and would make the entire system unresponsive.  I think I may also have had heavy swapping because switching between my desktop and my VM would often take several minutes.  I would walk away with the drive light flickering only to come back half an hour later to see it still flickering.
  6. Working with the network configuration is needlessly click-intensive.  Much of Vista feels like they’ve added extra clicks for no apparent reason.
  7. The 3D window scroller is pretty, but useless.  I never use it.
  8. Memory usage is ridiculous.  Out the gate, Vista kills 39% of my 2GB of memory.

Some mixed bags…

  1. Per-application volume control.  I understand how this is supposed to be better and gives the user more control over their system (a significant departure from what seems to be Microsoft’s overriding philosophy in Vista).  In practice, however, it’s annoying.  Legacy applications don’t want to behave.  If a game starts while the system is muted, it remains muted until I tab out to the desktop to toggle the mute.
  2. Aero effects.  They’re pretty, but I’m tempted to disable them because they add to my impression that the OS is slow.  Windows gradually fade in and out on the desktop.  Neat effect, but I’m still used to XP’s windows snapping open and shut in the blink of an eye.
  3. Service Pack 1.  Refused to deliver via Windows Update and I had to download the 750MB file manually from microsoft.com.  My irritation is assuaged by its ease of installation.  You double-click on the patch .exe file and it takes over, doing all of the multiple reboots for you.  I recommend you install it overnight.  You’ll come back in the morning and find a happy login screen ready for you to work.
  4. Sleep.  It works better on my desktop than XP ever did, but it’s still not perfect.  About once out of every 3 sleep sessions never wake up properly and require a restart.  Oddly enough, it seems to remember that it was sleeping and triggers the “restoring Windows” prompt on the reboot.

And now the good…

  1. It’s pretty.  Okay, I admit it.  It looks good.  The UI appearance is much improved over the original Windows XP “Playskool Playbloks” look.
  2. umm…

I honestly can’t think of anything truly outstanding about the OS.  It is NOT better than Windows XP.  I simply do not see any functional improvements.  On the contrary, it seems less stable, performs worse and the UI more obtuse.  After switching my work environment to VMware, I decided it was time to upgrade to a more modern hardware platform.  My VM was sluggish, compounded by all of the other Vista performance problems.  I bit the bullet and upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 and 4GB of RAM.  Under this platform, I reinstalled Vista and tried again.  My experience this time around was much smoother, especially in the VM and World of Warcraft.  Firefox, however, remains a dog.  It doesn’t crash outright as it did, but some websites that employ Flash cause it to freeze up for anywhere between a few seconds to a full minute before it becomes responsive again.

So after a month and a core system upgrade, I’m left rather unimpressed with Vista.  If I had paid for my copy, I’d feel gypped.  The only reason that it remains on my system now is because it’s the only 64-bit OS I have a license for that works with games.  Not to mention that I don’t feel like going through another two days of software installation.  It’s not so bad that I feel like chucking it, assuming that the Firefox issues are eventually resolved.  I am, however, left scratching my head about what the fuss is.  Maybe it’s more secure?  Maybe it’s easier to manage in an IT environment?  I am severely irritated that Vista requires as much resources as it does.  For what?  What more is it doing for me over XP?  I don’t know.  In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have bothered.

My advice for you is this — If you are comfortable with XP and are savvy enough to browse safely and avoid the malware pitfalls, then by all means stay put.  If you’re getting a new system with plenty of go-juice — a speedy processor and 3GB of RAM — Vista 32-bit is not a terrible option.

Maybe we should all just wait on Windows 7.

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Truly, Truly Old School…

July 25th, 2008

So I was rummaging through the old junk still at my parents’ house and found my old Atari 2600 games. Amongst gems such as “Sssnake,” “Fishing Derby,” and “Airlock,” I found this rarety:

Bride of Anodyne

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Dell Vostro 1400 – First Impressions

June 25th, 2008

The Toshiba Tecra from my last post worked out so well that I eventually overextended its capabilities. Writing in MS Word led to Java coding in NetBeans and the next thing you know I’m hitting the laptop’s memory and CPU limitations. So after some research and consideration, I decided to replace it with a new Dell Vostro 1400. The Tecra lives on as a replacement for my sister-in-law’s desktop.

I don’t consider myself the typical laptop user. I’m somewhere in between the business user that needs a high degree of connectivity and portability and the home user that needs full desktop functionality. Before I went shopping, I set forth the following requirements:

  1. 2GB of RAM to potentially accomodate Vista, Java development, and light gaming.
  2. Dedicated 3D video card capable of playing World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and City of Heroes at reasonable framerates (~25-30fps) at the display’s native resolution.
  3. Small enough to fit on an airplane seat back tray, large enough to have a comfortable keyboard.
  4. Built-in 802.11g
  5. CD burner. DVD burning optional

Secondary requirements were purely aesthetic. I’ve noticed a trend in the newer vendors attempting…art…with their laptop designs. By “art,” I mean pointlessly rounded, shiny, bulbous and chromed designs that looked like they came out of a 70s art deco catalog. We’re talking ugly. I’ve always been a big fan of simple, straight lines that make no attempt at making me look cool, hip, or otherwise fashionable. Also, I’d prefer that my laptop be sturdy and somewhat rugged — not necessarily armored like a Panasonic Toughbook, but well-built and capable of traveling without falling apart. These requirements came out of the experience of owning one of those fancy art-deco boxes laden with features but short on build quality.

I read a ton of reviews, considered Dell and Lenovo and finally ordered up a Dell Vostro 1400:
- Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.8GHz
- 2GB of RAM
- nVidia 8400M GS 128MB
- 250GB HD
Price as configured: $650 (including taxes)

The machine arrived in a plain brown box, snuggled in a styrofoam case. It shipped with an AC adapter, getting started guide, a bound book of warranties and legal disclaimers and the various restore and utility disks. I lifted the laptop out of its packing and was immediately impressed by its heft. For a 14.1 inch screen, it’s pretty heavy ( 5.4 lbs), but at the same time also felt sturdy. The case featured a matte black finish that oddly still managed to highlight fingerprints. So far I was getting a very sparse and utilitarian vibe and I was thoroughly loving it.

Booting up the machine for the first time took me through some basic setup wizards before finally landing on the Windows XP Home desktop (no Vista for me, thanks!). True to the Vostro promise, there’s very little by way of pre-loaded software, save for the Dell utilities and Google desktop. I eventually uninstalled Google Desktop and disabled the Dell Support thingie, which left me with a barebones Windows XP system. After running loading up my favorite applications and utilities from my own Restore Disc, I had a fully operational, personalized laptop.

Typing and using the touchpad was a pleasure. The keys give good, solid tactile feedback. The keyboard itself is firm with no bending at all. I noticed that the touchpad is off-center, but it doesn’t seem to affect actual use. Heat and noise during use also isn’t much of an issue. My palms remain cool and my lap doesn’t get burned, so it’s passed the comfort tests.

All of my apps run silky smooth, even the Java bloatware. Best of all, World of Warcraft runs, in the native 1280×800 resolution, at 60 fps with the default detail and quality settings! That right there beat all expectations. I expected to be able to do some light gaming, with the online games chiming in at ~20fps. I never expected to be maxing out the LCD’s refresh rate pegging 60 like that. Even after I dialed up the settings a bit, I’m still hitting 48-60fps. That is simply far, far more than I need for this type of game. I also installed Freedom Force, a superhero strategy game from 2002, and it runs like a scalded dog. Basically, this machine should be able to eat up any of the older games with ease. I’m not sure about the latest and greatest like Crysis.

The built-in Dell 802.11g card is surprisingly responsive. Admittedly, my only experience with 802.11 are from the Powerbook and Tecra laptops, both of which are well over 5 years old and could only run 802.11b (11Mbits). The Powerbook delivered a reasonable experience, although occasionally it wold drop the connection and it had to be wrangled back onto the network. The Tecra used an ancient Linksys card and it had issues acquiring the network after coming back from sleep. I would often have to “repair” the network connection in Windows XP to get it to connect. Even on a good day, it still took 30 seconds to connect. None of this is an issue with the Vostro. The machine comes out of sleep and is instantly online, I never knew it had disconnected. It connects to my home network at a full 802.11g, 54Mbits. Although I never see that on the Internet (home connection is only 5MBit), it seems like I have far less latency than my other laptops. Online games over wireless are smooth and lag-free.

So far, the laptop has met or exceeded most of my expectations. There are, however, a few items on which this laptop is lacking. For starters, the LCD screen is not the best…in fact, I’d say it’s just a tad sub-standard. Vertical viewing angle is extremely limited. This should not be a problem for most business use, but it does prove to be an annoyance in gaming and makes the laptop almost unusable for photoediting. I very much miss the display on my Apple Powerbook G4 — so much so, that I’m seriously considering investing on a new battery to get it portable again. Compared to the Powerbook’s display, the Vostro’s is extremely poor. Nevertheless, the LCD is useful and nowhere near as bad as the old Tecra’s. There has been much progress in laptop screens in 7 years.

Secondly, the Vostro 1400 lacks a DVI output. You’d think that with the domination of LCD displays on the market today that any laptop designed and built afte 2006 would have a DVI out. Nevertheless, it still comes with the standard VGA and S-Video outs, so it can still be connected to an external display, even if you need an adapter.

Finally, the battery rattles a little. This was fixed easily enough by padding it with a folded up piece of paper. Still, considering how well-build the rest of the machine is, it’s a little odd that it would have this minor annoyance. I haven’t had a chance to really run the battery down, so I don’t have much to say about that. I’ll find out more about that when I take it traveling with me later this Summer.

I don’t think you can do much better for $650, to be honest. Despite the LCD limitations and the minor annoyances, it’s a great little machine. It won’t outrun a gamer laptop and it won’t outsex an Apple Airbook, but it does everything that I need it to do in a package that doesn’t break my wallet or my back. If I had to give the machine a score, it lands a solid 8 out of 10. If it had a better display, I’d be willing to crank that score up. Again, there are some sacrifices made for the price.

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Dusting off the Cobwebs

February 12th, 2008

I haven’t written anything substantial in a while. Lately I’ve been wondering whether I really have this “writing” thing in me after all. I have tons of ideas, but even greater doubts about my ability to get those ideas out of my head and on paper where it really counts. So I sat down today with a text editor and began to write out a treatment, perhaps even an abstract, of this idea that has been brewing in my head for the past couple of weeks. It was the hardest two-hundred words I’ve ever written. I have this vague idea for a cool story, a novel if you will. I challenged myself to write out a concise abstract and I just about failed. I can’t begin to count how many times I backspaced over my own words…how many times I stopped and just stared dumbly at the screen looking for the next sentence. It’s not very easy and almost shook my confidence. However, I worked through it and pounded out a rough treatment for the story. It’s the first step in going from the abstract fuzzy stuff in my head to something tangible and coherent on paper. I might decide to share my work as I go…maybe I’ll even post the first chapter right here in these very web pages.

In any case, my first 200 words are out and written. I’m going to flesh out the world a little more, that’s something that’s always come easily to me. I can build worlds and fill them with all sorts of minute details. I’ll need a skeletal world to work with before I write anyhow. This story depends too much on a radical vision of the future of humanity and if I don’t build something that makes sense, the entire story concept will fall in on itself.

Enough yammering… I’m going to bed.

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Wii vs. X-Box 360

December 28th, 2007

I haven’t blogged in a while and I thought I’d take the tail end of the holiday festivities to comment on the two most interesting game consoles out there — The Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft X-Box 360.

We’ve had our Wii for a little while now, since August. It’s the only console I’ve ever seen to have broad appeal – everybody loves it. The thing is that you’re not just playin a video game where the action is abstracted onto a gamepad, but you’re really going through the motions that are directly analogous to the real life activity. This is New. It is the first step of freeing video games from the confines of a 2D screen and into more visceral, 3D interaction. This new depth of interfacing has allowed people who are otherwise uncomfortable with video games to participate in a manner more intuitive for them. My father-in-law, for example, was a softball player in college. He picked up Wii Sports Baseball like a natural. Within minutes, he was hitting balls out of the park…while I was lucky just to hit a foul ball. Unlike Dad, I was never good at baseball and it shows in the game. Likewise, my wife’s grandmother was able to pick up Bowling pretty quick as well because she used to play when she was younger. We had three generations in our living room that night, all of us having a blast playing video games together. Who would ever have seen this?

Since the Wii’s debut in late 2006, it was clear that Nintendo was not aiming at the “hardcore” gamer market. Nintendo always had a certain “kid-friendly” atmosphere about it, made most pronounced in the Gamecube console and controller design. Gamers complained that it felt like a toy and the controllers’ aesthetics were less than ideal for the more “mature” gamer. Even the first-tier Nintendo properties took a turn to the cartoonish in the gamecube Zelda games. Nintendo had completely lost any appeal to the older gamers, who started to prefer the X-Box due to its more “mature” (read: violent and explicit) content. It seemed to me that a new violent and decadent gamer subculture was arising out of the X-Box titles which glorified these excesses. When the X-Box 360 was released, I was less than enthusiastic. In my mind, I was done with “gamer culture” and longed for the days when games weren’t steeped in obscenities and graphic acts of brutality. In came Nintendo to the rescue! I would have been content with just the Wii, safe behind an enclave of family-friendly games.

Then one day I saw the glories of gaming on a big-screen HDTV, running in full 1080p being generated by the X-Box 360. I’d go home, look at my old Standard Definition TV and sigh. I had been wanting HD for a while now, especially since the prices have been dropping, but didn’t have the $1500 required for a decent LCD. On Grey Thursday (that’s “Thanksgiving Day”), I took advantage of a big sale at a local big-box electronics store and finally plunked down the $1500 for HD sweetness. Although the Wii looks very nice in enhanced mode, it’s still only 480p and suddenly the console seemed very dated. Two of my best friends already had 360s and HDTV and, quite frankly, I couldn’t get over it. I had to have me some of that.

In December, my wife got me an early Christmas present of a 360 Elite. (I have the best wife EVAR!) Initially, I felt like I was cheating on my Wii. After all, it was my first Next-Gen console and that’s not something you easily forget. However, soon after powering on the system and downloading X-Box Live Arcade games, that feeling faded. We immediately bought Catan and a cute little platformer named Cloning Clyde. Between the X-Box Live Arcade trials and the game demos, we were kept pretty busy. In fact, wouldn’t you know it, we got “stuck” on the 360. I eventually got hooked on Every Extend Extra Extreme and Jen on Cloning Clyde and Catan. We’re playing on it constantly now simply because there is so much to do and see! Here’s the kicker, though – we’re not just stuck on the 360…we’re stuck on Arcade! Of all things! We’ve got the most powerful game console yet devised and we’re playing cheesy little platformers and board games on it! I even have Mass Effect now and I’ve spun it up exactly ONCE. What is most remarkable about the 360 is simply its connectivity. Unlike the Wii’s Virtual Console, X-Box Live is teeming with new and unique games. There are dozens of games available for as little as $5.00 (typically $10.00, though)!

So where does this put me in the console wars? Quite simply, each console serves a distinct and unique purpose. The Wii is the party and family entertainment center. When we have a game night, that’s the console of choice. Everyone can play, even if they’re not gamers. The 360 is the arcade machine and gamer box. When I crave cutting-edge graphics and gameplay, that’s where I’ll turn. Since the 360 has a larger library of downloadable content, that’s also where I’ll go for simple and fun play. In fact, X-Box Live Arcade has actually given my wife and I something that we can both do together, since we both enjoy those games (Jen more than myself, but I’ll gladly just sit and watch). Both console systems are remarkable in their own right and quite frankly, deserve to be on any gamer’s entertainment shelf.

Oh yes, and you may have noticed a certain lack of mention for the PS3. I’ll be straight with you — I’m severely biased against Sony for reasons I don’t have time or space to enumerate in one blog post. However, I will simply say that the failure of the PS3 to continue its predecessor’s dominance is a testament to the strengths of its two competitors, precisely for the reasons I just posted about. The PS3 doesn’t offer any of that — no built-in, seamless internet connectivity, and no innovative and revolutionary interface. The PS3 is nothing more than a PS2 with prettier graphics and that’s not enough to warrant spending $400.

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Resuscitation

May 24th, 2007

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since I wrote the now-infamous “Computer Lab Apocalypse” series of parody stories of life as a help desk tech back in college. Since then I’ve written short essays that were more like blogs back before we had such a thing. I’ve largely avoided the blog scene because I’m a contrarian — if it’s hip and cool, I’ll avoid it like the plague. mySpace has basically driven the idea of blogging into the ground, flooding teh intertubes (because we all know the internet is a series of tubes, right?) with whiny, “emo” drivel. So why me, why now?

Two old friends of mine from college, Brian and Scott, have started blogs. I respect these guys, so I suppose it lent the idea a certain respectability in my mind. It started the ball rolling in my head. Truthfully, it’s been too long since I’ve written anything substantive. The last attempt was a mocking mySpace page for my cat, Moxie. It’s surprisingly difficult to pose as a cat with a college degree online. The whole thing was supposed to be funny and pointedly ironic, but I could never quite get around the absurdity of it to make any sort of a substantive point with it. So after reading Brian’s personal blog and Scott’s technical blog, I decided that maybe I should just dump the pretenses and give this blogging thing an honest try.

At worst, I will have exercised my rusty writing skills for the sake of the writing and noone will neither have read or cared about the blog. That’s no tragedy in my book.

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