I came across DC Universe on my PS3 while looking around for some new stuff and it took forever to download and install (and update etc). You can also download and play this for free on Windows, not 100% sure if they are the same servers. The game is a 3rd person viewpoint and you get to choose Male or Female, Good or bad and various skill types to start the game with.

 The initial starting block

Once you have created a character, you go through a level that eases you into the game and you have to fight you way off a ship using your various powers. As you achieve various tasks, you get points to spend on your skill tree and this gives you some extra powers. Along the way you also get stuff in your inventory which pays to put on as it helps you kill the enemies quicker.

Quests 

You get tasked with various jobs and this in turn allows you to fight enemies of your own level, start to level up and get other items along the way. It felt different from say World of Warcraft type MMO as you can level up just by killing monsters, this seems to be quest based on getting to the next level.

Free to play

While the game is free, it does have the shop and you can buy extra stuff. One is a monthly fee and this can cost £8.99 (if you pay monthly) or £71.88 for a full year membership. This gives you DLC packs, more slots, bigger inventory and so forth. Another option is to buy as required, such as the lightning pack for $9.99. The last method is to add cash to your in-game account to buy thing from the shop in the game, such as better helmets and so forth.

Work supplied me with HTC Trophy which runs Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) as it’s core operating system. I have been using this phone for a few weeks now as my main mobile and I would like to go through my thoughts on how it pans out as an all-in-one smartphone. The phone has no form of memory card slot and comes supplied with 8GIG Storage, you cannot increase this in any form (rather like the iPhone) but it does come with Microsoft Skydrive which allows an extra 25GIG worth of stuff ‘in the cloud’.

Setting up the phone

The first thing you need to do is install Microsoft Zune software and I am not sure what you would do if you only had an Apple computer of for that matter a Linux PC? Once the software is installed, it detected the phone and Windows went through its normal steps of finding hardware many times. It found an update, I left it installing and this went on for hours on end, by the time I was finished my phone was now running Mango (7.5) and all my data was intact.

Choosing what the Sync 

  The first thing I noticed was how unresponsive the software was, I am clicking Phone but nothing happens, it is doing something in the background you see (finding my music for example).

As you can see from the screen shot above, you can control how to sync the various items.  This works best for me as it gives me more control over what is on there. Talking of finding music and so forth, it operates on ‘Watched folders’ and in my case the music is stored on a NAS box, once I had added the folders (which took a bit of stabbing around on how to do this), off it went and added all my music collection. As I stated it was a watched folder, so anything new in there is added without any further effort from me, I just wish iTunes would do the same thing.

The phone itself

The Snapdragon 1GHz CPU is plenty fast for anything I have chucked at it so far which includes games. Mango operates on Two screen, the first been the tiles and the second screen is the complete list of apps installed on the phone.

Tiles provide a very quick way to display information, I can see at a glance on mine if I have any emails from my Google or Work email account, what is coming up in my calender and so forth. The three buttons on the bottom of the phone provide me with back, Windows Key (home) and Search. A long press of the back button shows a list of running applications and easy to get back to them.

Market Place

A Smartphone lives and dies by the number of applications a person can get there hands on and I was surprised by the large number of choices I did have. I can either use the zune software to find and install software or the phone itself. The way I rate any phone + Applications is how many free one’s you can get, it’s all very well been able to buy stuff.

There is no Skype for the phone, they claim they are making one and that will be great. Flash to my knowledge is not supported but there is a trick you can do and this involves telling the settings to do desktop mode on the browser and this allows some sites to show flash. I tested this with Justin.TV but there was no way to get it to run. Twitter is another example, it would have been ideal to have a live tile showing latest tweets but again this is not supported as of yet and Twitter is not buried deep enough so I can share things via it and so forth.

Battery life

At a guess I would say with phone calls and using the phone for various tasks gives you about 2 days worth of charge. The way I use the phone anyhow is having it plugged into my computer via USB (which charges it – yet iPhone does not) or I plug it into the wall at night when I sleep due to the fact I use it as an alarm clock. Like any Smartphone, battery life will be an issue due to how much it is doing, so nothing that bothered me in that sense.

Customisation 

 You can set the Wallpaper for the Lock Screen, you cannot set any wallpaper for the Tiles screen but you can change the colours in the settings menu. Rings tones are easy enough to set and you can set a ring tone per person if you really wanted to. I have for example set up one ring tone for work people, another for family and finally a different one for the wife, this way I can tell who is calling just by the ring tone alone.

Some odd things

I do like the compass application and how it overlays a map of where you are underneath, this is a nice touch and most other phones just show you a compass. Scanning Bar codes seemed to be a lot slower than any other phone I have tried, it took a long time to finally work out what it was and in some cases got the product wrong. I scanned some Champagne and it told me it was a box of coloured ribbons while the iPhone not only got the bar code in seconds but also got the right product.

Camera and video recording

You can check the quality of the camera at this site and I have attached a video as well showing it is capable of 720p.

The specs are 5MP 2560×1920 and it has a flash built in which was the major issue I used to have with my HTC Hero (as in it had no flash). It has a dedicated camera button and I personally prefer this over having to press the screen (as you do with the iPhone). Of course it is not as good as the latest iPhone 4S but it’s good enough I guess. It has no front facing camera and this alone would make it hard for Skype should it come along to video chat.

Overall

To round this review up then, I do like what Microsoft have done with the operating system, it suits a mobile phone well indeed. There is many applications I would want missing from the market place such as Skype and Justin.TV type of thing. It is no iPhone killer and it cannot compete with the sheer might that is Google (Android) but I am happy with it and saves me having to buy an iPhone for now.

The three main smartphone’s out there at the moment are Android, Apple and Windows Phone 7, of course there is a lot of makers of these phones (apart from the iPhone, only Apple make them). It just so happens that I have to hand three phones to compare, this been the HTC Hero (Running Android 2.1), a slow and small phone by today’s standards but it does give me a chance to compare. The wife has the iPhone 4S and I got a new work phone, the HTC Trophy, A Windows 7.5 phone. Is there a clear winner here? Will the iPhone wipe the floor with the rest? Onward to battle.

HTC Hero

Before we continue, this phone is well below the specs of the other two. The screen size of 320×480 and the fact it is only running from a 528 MHz ARM 11 means it is slow. One of the great beauty in my eyes of the Android OS is the fact you can find pretty much any type of program you need and normally for free. You can side load any program just by putting in a memory card and installing it that way.

While not relevant on this phone, you can get Skype and many streaming type applications to broadcast anywhere. The other fact is you do not need to sync this phone (you can if you want) to a computer, just put what you need on a memory card and you are good to go. It can do all the major function such as Sat Nav, Mapping, act as a camera, a music player and a whole lot more besides. My main gripe though was how fragmented Android got and for this I see this platform as a failure for now.

iPhone 4S

There must be very little I can write that people do not already know but my first and foremost thought on this phone is the fact that while many applications are free, most cost money. You have to Sync the phone initially with a computer running iTunes and if you own a Mac and a Windows Box, you cannot just plug into any, you have to sync with the computer you choose at the start.

While not important to me, the things that mattered on this phone was the ability to be easy to use (it is – it has one main button to press), notifications (just added with ios5) and be easy to type on. Siri to me (and my wife) seems to be a fun gadget to use but once the 5 minute of playing has been done, it is back to the keyboard.

HTC Trophy 

Recently I swapped my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone (HTC mini) for this model and it came running version 7. It seems you need Zune software to do anything with the phone and updating to latest (7.5) took many hours indeed. It reminded me of Windows actually, doing one update, rebooting then finding another update.

The speed of the phone is very fast indeed, the Metro OS is easy to use and has live updating tiles. There is no dedicated phone button so calling someone means you have to press one of the tiles, I made sure this was placed right at the top. I like the fact I can see if I have any emails, messages and upcoming appointments. The App Store (Market place) has quite a lot of programs, I was surprised as to how many there was.

What was missing though was the programs I might need such as Skype, any sort of Streaming type application and others. It has voice input (rather like Siri) and on my testing it worked better than I expected and I guess it has to do with accents. Siri for example got some things wrong as did this phone but at least when I search for Pizza, this phone actually brings the goods (Not working on Apple in the UK as of yet).

Thoughts?

The iPhone and the Windows Phone both have fixed storage which means I have to micro manage what I put on there. They also both need a program to sync things which means I have to use the one fixed computer. I much prefer the flexibility of have a SD Card to shove on what I want, increase the storage and so forth. I actually find the Windows 7.5 phone very functional indeed and much better than I thought it would be, it sort of does multitasking but only in the fact it suspends applications. It has no Front facing Camera on the HTC Trophy and the quality is not as good as the iPhone.

If I had to choose one phone out of them all from this list then? The answer of course would be the Apple iPhone but the windows phone comes a very close runner up for now.

Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

If you are on Windows and are looking for a freeware photo editor, then look no further than Photoscape. Photoscape is a fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

Key Features

• Viewer: View photos in your folder, create a slideshow
• Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming, clone stamp
• Batch editor: Batch edit multiple photos
• Page: Merge multiple photos on the page frame to create one final photo
• Combine: Attach multiple photos vertically or horizontally to create one final photo
• Animated GIF: Use multiple photos to create a final animated photo
• Print: Print portrait shots, carte de visites(CDV), passport photos
• Splitter: Slice a photo into several pieces
• Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it
• Color Picker: Zoom in on images, search and pick a color
• Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
• Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG
• Paper Print: Print lined, graph, music and calendar paper
• Face Search: Find similar faces on the Internet

At work we have 6 Cisco AP541N wireless access points, these are aimed at the small business and is a dual band access point. The problem we had though was that although the clients could see the wireless, they would never get an IP from the Server and thus not connect. I did some googling around and I struggled to find any reason for this behaviour and when I did find something that pointed back to the Cisco Site – I had to jump through many hoops to even get the that post or information. I did finally get this sorted and this post shall explain what I did and why it was broke.

The Background infomation

We have two floors in the building and on the ground on each corner we have an access point and upstairs we have 2 more, this was to try and give as much spread around the building as possible. Initially the person who had set these up had placed them all on channel 10. The issued that arose were all related to DHCP in that it would not give you an IP at all but I worked out that if you rebooted the access point, you got an IP and as long as you were connected, all was fine but as soon as you dropped, you were back to square one with no connection due to lack of an IP given out.

Information that I found

I read all sorts of things to try and as I am not a Cisco type person (understand what each of the boxes do – such as clustering) I was unsure what to try. My First task was to place them on all different channels, this made no difference as such but it meant it at least stopped the client suddenly searching for another point. I did find another post about DHCP running from Windows 2003 Server (which we are) not working with these boxes due to the way they both work. There was a suggested registry hack but I was not about to start experimenting on a live server. The most annoying part was how many hoops and how much information I had to provide just to create an account on the Cisco website and then look for the relevant information.

Fixing the Issue

Eventually after scouring the Cisco Forums, I found a simple fix that I should have tried – Updating the firmware! I downloaded the latest version (v2.0.0) and overwrote the Current Version (V1.8.0) and tested it over the space of a couple of days and sure enough – all clients got an IP without me having to apply registry fixes to the server or un-plug the access points. My Next task then is to find out any black spots in the wireless range and order more if needed. I did do walk about with my Laptop and work out that two more would be needed anyhow, at £239 each its a good job I am not spending my own money.

Head to the EA Site to grab the PC Crysis 2 Multiplayer Demo.

Today I shall do a review of a Playstation 3 title called Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – I bought this for a very cheap price of £9 at Game and this was the Limited Edition title which includes extra on-line maps and items. By Sheer chance I saw the PC version also on sale for £5 but I left this as I really only need it on one format. It is billed as a Shooter but it steers away from the normal FPS type games in that going in all guns blazing will not get you very far. I would like to describe this as a “Hide and shoot” type game as you fight from cover to cover to complete each part of the game.

Plot

The game begins with the originals criminal anti-hero, Kane, arriving in Shanghai to do one last job with his psychotic ex-colleague, Lynch. Both men are deeply dislikeable in their own way, but each has some shred of humanity to keep your interest. Strangely, the game makes the curious choice of having you play as the crazy Lynch instead of the more sympathetic Kane, though our protagonist has calmed down considerably for the sequel). The tale that follows isn’t a whole lot more than an excuse for a long series of shoot-outs, but it’s a reasonably well-written excuse with a couple of genuinely shocking moments.

Game-play

At no pont in the game did I feel i was really part of a story, it consisted of getting to an area and then shooting out various gangs be in the police or the other gangsters. I tried standing up and running forward but soon got gunned down. To aim you have to press the left shoulder button and the right shoulder button shoots. Due to the fact you are using a Game controller, this is not as fast and accurate as say using a Keyboard and mouse.

Multi-player

I tired this for a while and my apparent lack of controlling a FPS using the PS3 game-pad become apparent very fast indeed and I never last very long at all. Maybe if I played long enough, it would become easier but for now, I have not loaded up the multi-player part very often.

Conclusion

If you are looking for the normal type of first person type shooter, then this game is not the one for you, at times you will get frustrated at the puzzles parts were shoot one bullet too many at the wrong time can lead to running out of rounds before the mission ends and thus failing. You are going to be looking for new weapons all the time as the number of rounds is not a lot but there is enough about if you look. Other times in the game you will not be 100% sure were to go and there is the option to pick up gas bottles, throw them and blow them up. My Suggestion is to try the demo if you can or buy it only if the game is very cheap (as I did).

In an effort to present the ideal Tablet / small computer for mobile staff at work, one of the computers we tried was the Viliv X70. While it is not obious form the picture above, this runs Windows XP, has a built in webcam (as you can see on the right) and is touch screen. Around the back is insteresting as it has some sort of a bracket which I imagine you can get a car kit for and maybe use it as a rather large GPS?

Specifications

It features an Intel Atom Silverthorne 1.33Ghz CPU. The Screen is a 7” touchscreen which runs at 1024×768.  Storage is a choice of SSD (8/16GIG) or HDD (30/60GIG). It has WiFI (b/g) and WiMAx plus Bluetooth along with GPS. Battery life is quoted as 6 Hours continuous movie playback and 200 Hours standby time. As for dimension – 210(W) x 117(H) x 22.5 (T) mm. The thing weighs 600G

In Use

I tested the time it took from switching it on till the OS was ready and this was in fact only 60 seconds max, this is of course windows not loaded with various programs or any AntiVirus to slow it down. The problem came when you try and use it – the fact the screen is so small means you will struggle to press boxes to close programs or windows and that joystick which you *think* is a mouse does nothing of the sort. The A Button is left Mouse while the B Button is Right mouse.

I have always stated that Windows is not designed to be tablet friendly and this is where the likes of Android or iOS comes into play. As this is a standard computer of sorts, you can load any version of Linux you wanted bia memory stick which might work out better for you.

How much is this costing me?

If you look at this device and think, this is a Netbook in fact with a touch screen and the keyboard ripped out – you would be expecting to pay in the order of £250 to £300 right? What if I told you it would come in at the wallet busting £647 ( Well over $1000).

While a company can withstand that cost if the product fills the need, I am not 100% sure that consumers will be too happy parting cash for this one. Looking at how heavy this is I was surprised that in fact it is slightly lighter (and only just) than the iPad (which weighs 680g) but then again the iPad is 9.7” while this is only 7”.

I would have done a much more in-depth review of the device but given the fact most are not going to be buying this anytime soon when there is just so much better (and cheaper) devices out there, I have chosen to list only the basic’s. What else can you do with this device? You can load some form of routing software and as it has a GPS – you can mount it in your car and job done but most mobile phones do this anyhow plus a TomTom is just so much neater and cheaper.

At work I got a replacement phone, the current model they hand out now is the HTC HD Mini which runs on Windows Mobile 6.5 and has a sense UI bolted on front to give it a Android type look. What HTC did was take the HTC HD2 and shrink it down to a more manageable size – of course going down in size means they had to cut back on some items such as screen size and processor speed.

Phone specifications

The CPU is a 600Mhz Model, this falls well under the 1ghz seen on newer and better phones and probably means games and such will be slow. It has 512MB ROM and 384MB RAM along with a Micro SD slot that takes up to 32GB cards. It runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional with HTC Sense bolted on the front. The camera is 5 megapixels with auto focus but no flash and has built in G-Sensor, Proximity sensor and finally Ambient Light sensor. Battery life (Quoted) is 400 Minutes Talk time and 500 Hours Standby time along with 12 hours of Audio Playback time.

The screen is Capacitive and runs at 320×480 HVGA – the phone weighs 3.88 ounces (110 Grams). Size wise – its 103.8mm in height, 57.7mm width and 11.7mm thick.

The Initial Setup

The Boot up time seem to take a long time indeed compared to many other phones I have seen such as my HTC Hero and the iPhone. It takes you through setting up any email accounts you may have and then moves onto the likes of Facebook and Youtube. Now while I managed to sign into facebook, no matter how much I tried, it did not seem to want to log into Youtube via the setup wizard.

The Various Screens

The first screen is the Home Screen and you can see that it displays the time and the weather (animated), if you now swipe up on the part that says Call History – it takes you to your Quick launch applications (which you can customise).

The next Screen is along is contacts – here you can add people so you can quick dial them, if they have no picture, it lets you select one or use any part of a large image for example. Finally we have the SMS Screen which you can swipe to read and reply to if needed.

The internet part is a choice of Opera Mobile 8 or Internet explorer (not sure what version). You get to add two main sites on the front screen and unlike the Android – it does not show a preview of the site. I have opened up my site as you can see and for most part it displays this just fine. I tired the various flash sites and this is were it fell over straight away. I tried to get Skyfire for this but no such luck installing the software. You can see the Calendar and as this is a business phone – this gets it from my Outlook at work. I am not sure how this ties in with say Google Calendar which my ANdroid Phone does very well indeed.

The email screen allows you to swipe you way through the emails as well as manage them from this screen, if you double tap on one email, it opens up in full screen. If you have many accounts, it displays various envelopes to show un-read messages in each.

The Music player looks quite good, you can quickly get to your library stored on the phone or the memory card. What I could not find though was a way to link to my NAS Box and play the music across the network. The Pictures slide shows both pictures and video’s and you can swipe through them, play them and so forth.

How did I get the screenshots?

Finally the Settings Screen, this is the button that looks like the Windows Flag – this allows you to get to installed programs and various settings of the phone.

I went to the market and installed a program (which was free) called Wifi Remote Access and this sets up either by wireless or USB a connection and a password. You then go over to your computer, bring up a web browser and insert the IP Address the phone has got, the phone will prompt you if you want to allow this computer to connect. You can now browse the phone contents, FTP into the phone (using any FTP client) and as you can see, look at the phone screen in almost real time (minus animations) and even control the phone from that web page.

Wi-Fi Router

As you can see on that screen above – you can use the phone as a 3G router, this is as simple as setting up a WEP key and such and away you go. You would of course need to make sure your data plan could withstand such a thing as the computer will be pulling a lot more data then using the phone. This could be very handy, say in a hotel to access your work and check the internet type thing.

My thoughts on the phone itself

I was never really a fan of Windows Mobile 6.5 and even plastering on Sense UI does not hide that this is not in fact an android. The market place for example has hardly any applications listed compared to Android and Apple. I could not find Skype, seems that Skype has pulled the only version they had and now concentrating on Windows Phone 7. I could not find a VNC Application, animated wallpapers and so forth.

What is more worrying is that the phone has no method for updating itself it seems, surely Microsoft has been updating windows for some time now yet struggled with 6.5? In the end I had to go off to HTC Main site, spent ages trying to enter my serial number and finally getting an updated ROM. The ROM Update actually failed twice before I finally managed to get it installed and my phone was back to Day 1, I had to set it up all over again.

The screen may well be Capacitive and I can pinch and zoom with the best of them but no matter how much I stabbed at that screen, more often then not it either picked a different row on the keyboard or never responded to my stabbing action. Every time I place the phone down, the dialler seems to come up – am I pressing a button by accident or is the phone sensing that by placing the phone on my desk I might want to ring somebody?

If I had a choice between an Android phone and a Windows Mobile 6.5 – i would choose Android every single time. It feels snappier than my HTC Hero on some parts but harder to understand on some other parts. Its nice and small, its provided by work and it’s free – so I should not grumble.