Ever since I bought my motorcycle I have been looking for a good shop where I could buy my gear and have my bike serviced. I started out by looking at Parkway Cycle which is located in Everett, MA. The service was great there but the location was a bit difficult to get to. You always have to deal with a ton of traffic and VERY limited parking to go to this shop. I had been talking with the staff there and they seemed really knowledgeable and helpful. However when it came time to make the purchase I did not want to have to deal with the traffic to go buy my gear. I had also found Greater Boston Motorsports (also known as GBM) located in Arlington, MA which seemed to have ample parking and a lot less traffic to deal with. I talked with the staff there on my first visit and they seemed just as helpful and nice as at Parkway Cycle.
I am writing this post from my new N900 which was provided to me by my employer. I have been using the phone for the last few days. At first i was a it concerned that i was not going to like the device, i will explain why next. When i powered the device on the first thing i wanted to check out was the ovi store. When it opened in the browser the first thing i saw was a nice message about having to update to Maemo 5 before i could use the store. I tried a few times to run the update while at work but it was dead slow and the update process hung up on me a few times before it was successful.
On Monday I was browsing through the App Store on my lunch break and was a bit surprised when I stumbled across a game called Harbor Master. The surprising part hit me when I was looking at the details page in the store. The game play seemed very familiar and very much like that of Flight Control HD. The concept is the same as with Flight Control, you have to direct the boats to the proper docks based on the color of the cargo the boat is carrying. I must admit that both games are very addictive, I mean to the point where I find myself playing them whenever I get a chance because you know “I just have to beat my high score!”.
Though the game play is very similar at first (and I was surprised they are made by different companies) you will quickly see that Harbor Master while following the same concept takes it’s own direction with the game play. When you first start a game you will see an empty harbor which will quickly fill with boats (if you play on high speed like myself). Some of the boats are small speedboats carrying a small amount of cargo and some are rather large cargo ships. You will notice that the larger the ship and the more cargo it has aboard the slower it will go. When you have a large ship with a lot of cargo headed into port you will notice that it moves at a slower rate than after it unloads. The attention to small details like this is what makes Harbor Master a truly great game.
Another twist is that you will see tornado’s (I think that’s what they are) appear from time to time. Any ships that are set on course for a harbor that hits the tornado get spun around and loses all sense of direction. You will have to direct this ship back to a port trying to avoid the path of the tornado. This tends to make the game a bit more challenging especially when you have a lot of boats on the screen and more than one or two are hit by the tornado. Another great twist is that a ship can be carrying several different types of cargo. You will notice in the screen shots below that there are some ships carrying multiple types of cargo. First you have to dock the ship at one dock to unload that type of cargo and then head over to the other dock to finish the unloading process.
Early last week a co-worker noticed I had the iPad and had asked if I had tried out the Flight Control game. At first I thought it was some flight simulator and was not that interested however he told me that it is nothing like a simulator so I just had to try it out. I came back to my desk and bought the application which is priced at $4.99. Seeing a price like that for a game I did not think twice on whether or not I should buy it. It seemed cheap enough and it was a highly recommended game. Once it was downloaded I played one game and was instantly hooked on it. I have been playing it as much as possible in my down time and just love the game. The game play is very smooth and very engaging for the user, once you try it I am sure you will be hooked as well.
The game play seems very basic and at first look you wonder why people are raving over a game that seems so easy. After playing a few rounds I quickly noticed that it is not that easy of a game to play. Once you have several aircraft on the screen with some directed towards a runway and others not it becomes seemingly difficult to keep your attention on all of the planes to make sure there are no collisions at the runways or in transit. I did not notice until today that the game actually takes advantage of the multi-touch feature that the iPad offers. You can use multiple fingers to tap different planes and hold them all in the holding pattern while using other fingers to direct planes where you wish for them to go. This is a very nice feature but after trying it for the first time I have come to the conclusion that it will take some getting used to before you can master that trick.
I have heard people gripe about the price difference between the iPad and iPhone versions of this game when the only difference is a larger screen and higher resolution images. Personally I cannot complain at all because I do not have an iPhone and did not have to pay twice for the application. I also do not think that $4.99 is that much to pay for a game anyway. What are your thoughts on the pricing of this game?
If you have not seen lately I have been posting reviews if iPad applications on my site. So far I have reviewed Early Edition and Hangman RSS HD but I have many more on my list. If you are a developer and would like me to review your application get in touch with me. I will gladly add it to my list of applications to review.
The other day I was reading TUAW and they had made a post about Hangman RSS HD for the iPad. Generally I would not be too intrigued by a hangman game as it is an old game that I played as a child with friends and we generally would play on paper. Hangman RSS HD however is currently a single player game so I hope you will not want to compete with others on-line or via Bluetooth.
I bought the game last night and I have found that it can be very addictive. From the time I bought the game last night until now I have played for 37 minutes and won 62 out of 83 played games. The unique twist that Hangman RSS HD implements is the fact that every hangman level is created from current news which is pulled from RSS feeds on-line. You might be asking yourself right now since it pulls the questions from the internet does this game require you to always be connected to wifi? The answer is no. The game pulls down the stories and stores them locally so if you want to make sure you are always playing with current news you should connect it to wifi from time to time so that it can update it’s internal list of articles.
One of the first things I did when I got my new iPad was to look for a good RSS reader, i stumbled across Early Edition. When I first opened the application and started playing around with it I just loved it. I was able to start it up and add a few of my feeds that I read on a daily basis. I had originally added only 14 feeds thinking this was going to be a good set of feeds for my daily news. However today when I opened up the application I was confronted with only 4 articles to read, no matter how many times I told Early Edition to refresh the feeds nothing seemed to happen. My first thought was this is a bug and I added a review to the apple store flaming the application for not working. I jumped the gun because I saw reviews from a lot of other people about the same issue and though how could Apple let an application that does not work like this get into the application catalog. After looking at it for a few minutes I determined that I just did not have enough source feeds added to Early Edition because there were only 4 new articles for today at that point. I quickly edited my review to give it a 5 star rating after adding more feeds and seeing this issue go away.
Yesterday while at work my fiancé called me and told me that she was buying me an iPad for my birthday. I must say that I am quite impressed how fast the device is. I must also state that i love how fast you can actually type on the device without any lag or delay in the typing speed. As i am writing this i am trying to type as fast as i can and to my amazement it is almost as fast as on a regular keyboard and there have been very minimal mistakes.
My only real disappointments with the device Is the lack of a front facing camera for use with video conferencing. The other slight drawback is the fact that iBook does not support PDF documents. For that I have found GoodReader which fills the gap. It would be very nice however if iBook actually supported PDF since there are really no converters that I have found which actually work. I am not Trying to convert the typical book with only text. I am trying to convert books like “Head First Php& MySQL” which contains a lot of images. When i convert a pdf book which has 300 pages it is converted into a malformed ePub as file with about 3000 pages.
If you have ready anything on my site regarding the Palm Pre you will find that every review is good in nature. However I feel those reviews have more to do with the functionality of the phone and not the actual hardware. While this post will not go into details about the hardware specifications it will deal with hardware quality. So without wasting any time let’s get started.
I have had 2 Palm Pre‘s on my Sprint account for the last 10 months. My fiance and I both have the phones and have been happy with them for the most part. However what really makes me angry is the quality of the phone. Now you see I can understand having to replace a defective phone from time to time but this is getting ridiculous. I have replaced my phone 3 or 4 times and my fiances phone is being replaced for a 3rd time now. Surely 2 phones should not have to be replaced 7-8 times over the course of a year. Shouldn’t phones that are “this expensive” actually be quality devices? I have no qualms with the way the phone operates. I rather like the WebOS operating system but without a phone that will function the OS is rendered useless as well.
I have contacted Sprint to see about getting different phones but I feel they are going to tell me that I am out of luck. This is the point where I will just end the contract with Sprint and find service elsewhere. I will update this post once I hear back from Sprint with their response.
Do you have a Pre? How many times have you had to have yours repaired/replaced? Please leave a comment and let me know.
I am not going to outline all of the details of what took place in this post. Rather I am going to be posting the entire letter that I am sending to the Board of Trustees or CEO of Sovereign Bank. The activity outlined in the document that is being sent unprofessional to the point that I never want to even hear the name Sovereign again. Please read the letter to read about a very detailed incident that took place this morning at one of my local branches. To read the document click the following link: Sovereign Bank Experience
** UPDATE **
About an hour after I sent that letter to corporate I was again called back by the gentleman named Craig. When asked he informed me that Jonathan is *not* a member of the management team and that he was going to take care of this issue to his fullest extent. He told me that he could not tell me what actions would be taken due to corporate policies. I explained that I was not trying to tell him how to do his job and was not saying fire the guy. All I want done is whatever your corporate guidelines mandate. If that means he will get written up then that’s what it means. If it means he gets fired then so be it. However I wanted something done. He apologized deeply and stated that he knows I am not a customer of the bank but if I go into that branch (or any other) and do not receive amazing service he wants to hear about it. I am going to let things be as they should after a situation like this but I can sleep now knowing that something will be done because at-least now Craig’s bosses know about this situation so he will have to do something.
