Datel Wildfire, PS3 Dual Shock
Datel Wildfire, PS3 Dual Shock
Lightning Review: Datel Wildfire, PS3 Dual Shock Alternative
By Mark Wilson,
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The Gadget: Datel Wildfire, the first third-party PlayStation 3 controller to support a combination of Bluetooth, rumble and tilt sensitivity.
The Price: $40
The Verdict: Even at $10 less than Sony’s Dual Shock 3, the Datel Wildfire is a pass. The controller actually feels decent in your hand, with an interesting pistol-like contour and a useful rubber texture. And its build quality is decent—it doesn’t feel cheaper than a Dual Shock or SIXAXIS.
But the rumble isn’t fantastic, the buttons are all a bit stiff and the altered, trigger-like position of L2/R2 buttons makes it a leap for your fingers to reach L1/L2 (similar to the Xbox 360, but exaggerated for the worse). I didn’t notice any inherent lag or inaccuracies in either the analog sticks or the tilt sensitivity, but I found it hard to pull off any maneuver with laser speed. And additional turbo functions can do little to combat buttons that are hard to press quickly.
Plus, even though it plugs in via mini USB like official PS3 controllers, the Wildfire runs on AA batteries. Sony’s integrated rechargeable lithium ion alone probably makes the $10 premium worth it.
The Verizon Hub is unstuck in time. It’s a 2006 device that’s just getting here, now, in 2009, begging the question, “Is it better to be late than never?”
The Hub is a landline slayer launched in a wireless world, where the landline is almost dead. It’s a fertile garden behind a red-painted wall—red ’cause it’s Verizon, har har—found when most people are trying to break down those walls. It’s a Verizon Wireless VoIP phone coming about at a time when AT&T is killing their VoIP service entirely. It’s the phone we imagined before the iPhone, tethered to our home broadband connection for instant-pizza-ordering awesomeness. In other words, it’s a lot of interesting things, appearing in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
That’s not to say it’s bad. It’s just unfortunate. The Hub makes sense in a very specific context: If you’re a lock, stock and barrel Verizon customer, from wireless to TV to internet to, obviously, landline phone service. That’s where the “Hub” name comes in—it brings a bunch of different Verizon services together in one spot: You can monitor cellphone locations using Verizon’s Chaperone, send maps and directions from the Hub to phones running VZ Navigator, and manage a central calendar that your entire family’s phones sync to. Eventually, you’ll be able to do more, like manage your Verizon FiOS TV DVR. While a minor point, in a sense it’s a very sore point with the Hub, since you can already do that from many Verizon cellphones this very second. Why do I need a Hub again?
The garden walls reach their greatest heights when you try to text or picture message to a non-Verizon phone—you can’t. The calendar isn’t open, using a standard like CalDAV for easy export—it’s squarely in Verizonland. A surprising amount of managing the Hub actually takes place on Verizon’s website, like uploading contacts (via CSV files) and photos. Thankfully, the Hub’s pages are better designed than the rest of Verizon’s website—there’s legit eye candy in the photo gallery, for instance. And nearly anything you can do on the Hub itself, you can do from the website remotely, like manage voicemail or check your call history. But it’s odd you can’t do something very simple like upload photos via the Hub’s USB port.
It doesn’t really matter if there are walls around the garden if you’re never tempted to leave. Unfortunately, the Hub isn’t enough of an attraction. Pretty much anything you can do on it—buy movie tickets, send text messages, check traffic or watch videos, you can do faster or better on your computer or cellphone. The virtually useless selection of VCAST videos make the average YouTube video feel like HD in comparison, and the “traffic report” isn’t a map with live traffic info, but a canned audio briefing from Traffic.com that you have to sit through an ad to hear.
The Linux OS itself isn’t particularly a joy. God knows, Verizon’s committed some horrible user interface atrocities over the last few years, but at least the Hub’s is alright—usable, not mind-blowing. I wish it moved faster. The keyboard is annoying to type on, but it’ll get better in the next software update, which adjusts the spacing and adds pop-up letters. A persistent set of buttons on the left gives you constant, instant access to the two main menus: The phone and the uh, menu, where you get to your apps. In the top right corner is the home button, which takes you to the desktop, where your widgets, like for weather, time, voicemail, etc. hang out. Applications tend to have a two-pane layout that’s framed by buttons on three sides, which doesn’t sound like a problem, but it becomes one since the touchscreen is not so responsive around the edges. I’ve accidentally called two people at 3 in the morning while trying to press the menu button. Not cool.
Actually, that’s one of my more concrete frustrations with this phone: The hardware feels cheap and shitty. The handset, which costs $80 a pop, is a plastic piece of garbage with a shoddy build quality and terrible screen. (It doesn’t help that you can’t do much from the handset either, like send text messages.) The touchscreen isn’t as responsive as it should be, and it distorts with even the slightest bit of pressure, adding to the whole crappy feeling. A screen designed to be touched shouldn’t freak out when you touch it. The speakers really harsh, crappy and tinny too. I couldn’t stand using it for loudspeaker calls.
There are a few bright points. While the directory isn’t as precise as say, MenuPages, it is fairly painless to find a nearby pizza place and call them in a single stroke. The synergistic—I know, that word provokes a gag reflex—stuff works well. Directions quickly went to the Samsung Sway test phone I got with it, which promptly fired up VZ Navigator and pointed to wherever I pointed it. (Too bad VZ Navigator is slow and sucky, but that’s somewhat besides the point.) And the call quality itself is pretty good—or at least I sounded “loud and clear” to the people I called.
The brightest light may end up being the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—the promise that developers will be able to create their own apps for this thing in the future. The included ones, for the most part, just aren’t that hot, and some of the newer ones in the pipeline are definitely more head-turning. But it’s hard to see how this product can sustain itself long enough to engender a solid third-party developer community. More likely, it’ll get slightly better, then go extinct.
It’s pretty ballsy to charge $200 for a landline phone with $35/month VoIP service right now, one that does the same thing you can do on an iPhone or G1, but is tied to your desk. Which is a lot of the reason I like it. But it’s just as ridiculous to ask that much for a phone that’s built with subpar hardware and doesn’t live up to its full potential in a world where it’s already horribly outmoded. Time was up two years ago.
There’s nothing majorly wrong with Apple’s MobileMe service. All of its subsidiary pieces and parts—the email, the syncable calendar and contacts, the photo gallery, the online storage—do fine. So why doesn’t it make sense?
Apple has every right to be proud of the fact that it got its act together, and everything that was all herky jerky back in July 2008, when the $99-per-year MobileMe launched, is now working as billed. The push email shows up immediately, if you use your me.com account. Ditto for the push contacts and the push calendar, though you can’t use web cals like Google’s or Yahoo’s if you want to be super synced. The gallery works great; as a dad I upload tons of pictures and videos to the MobileMe gallery right from iPhoto, but with iPhoto ‘09, I can upload them to my free accounts at Facebook and Flickr too. There’s even iDisk, a smoothly integrated 20GB cloud storage service, which now has a public drop box for file sharing, just like YouSendIt. And if you have a time capsule NAS/wireless access point, you can remotely access your disk using mobile me, as well as use back to my mac remote desktop control. (The service tracks the dynamic IPs of all your machines, so each machine can always keep track of the others.)
Maybe you’re catching on to the real problem here. It’s not just that you “free” junkies who read Gizmodo wouldn’t be caught dead paying $100 for anything but a 50″ flat-panel TV. It’s that the service itself is made up of many pieces you already have. This presents a complicated economic argument: If you already have an online photo gallery and a free or company-given email account that you like and use, why would you pay to have those things twice, just to get contact syncing for your phone and a decent online storage system. Wouldn’t you go find a less elegant online storage system for a lot less money, and content yourself with syncing your phone to your computer’s address book every couple of days?
I said that the service worked as billed, and it does. My favorite component is the contact syncing, because anytime I add anything on my phone or my computer, the two are instantly in sync. But I’d achieve the same result, with less magic, if I remembered to sync my iPhone every so often.
I did have one problem with contact syncing, but I bring it up mainly to tell how easy it was to fix: I had imported a bunch of contacts from email accounts online, and some contacts got corrupted along the way. I had 18 contacts, out of 250 or so, that wouldn’t sync from Mac to iPhone or MobileMe web portal. The fix was easy: Go in and change something about the entry, like adding the person’s company name or a fax line, even their kid’s name. As soon as you tweak the entry, boom, it gets uploaded.
Most other exchanges in MobileMe have been without incident, even exporting my Google Cals in a big bunch, then manually importing them into iCal from time to time. But the very fact that I use MobileMe for some services and free web apps for others, and the fact that I am in many cases the one making sure everything talks to everything else, underscores the point I’m making, that MobileMe is a confederacy of programs that have nothing to do with each other.
In the end, even after it’s working well, it’s difficult to recommend for two reasons: The money, which I’ve sufficiently covered above—a hefty sum when contrasted to free web-based simulacra—and the compatibility, not with your device “ecosystem” but with everybody else. Who uses iCal or Me.com mail? Google wins those battles for sure. Even though I swear by MobileMe Gallery, most people I know prefer Flickr, or just Facebook.
There’s a solution. Apple could offer some things for free, and some things cheap. Just bought iLife ‘09 or a new Mac? Guess what, you get to upload your photos to a MobileMe Gallery. Buying an iPhone? Syncing your contacts and calendar is a $2/month add-on. I think iDisk could easily be a success at $25/year, all by itself, as long capacity goes up each year automatically based on capability. It’s not like these component parts have anything to do with one another anyway.
My mother-in-law recently switched to a Mac after eons on a PC. I looked over her shoulder as she was placing the order, and when we came to the part where she could get MobileMe at the low introductory price of $70, she asked me if she should. I thought for a second, and realized the answer was no. I may keep her grandkid’s pics on MobileMe Gallery, but she’s perfectly happy with Picasa, and there’s a beta version of that for the Mac out now. For free.
The price: $599 (configured with 4.8″ WSVGA display, 60gb HD, Intel Atom 1.33GHz CPU, free spare battery, car kit and pouch)
The verdict: The S5 is a good value, but you may not like it anyway.
At .92lbs, the Viliv is a bit hefty in your hands even though it’s 1.5lbs lighter than most netbooks (it’s sitting on an Asus Eee 1000HE here). Still, the Viliv kept surprising me with its speed. Loaded with the same processor as the Vaio P, the system doesn’t actually run XP faster than any Atom-based, but to see installation bars and downloads move so quickly on such a tiny device is always a bit of a mindfrak.
The resistive touchscreen has passable color, brightness and contrast—luckily, it’s also ridiculously accurate. Yeah, the buttons and icons are as minuscule as you’d expect, but I never had a hard time, say, hitting the “X” to close a window (with my precision “nail” tool, of course)…unless my browser was full screen. Then my finger just never fit in the corner properly. For when you need extreme precision, the four-way thumbstick doubles as a mouse, or you can use the bundled “Cube” interface for larger icons (which is fine for a skin, but you’ll need to tinker in the real XP sooner or later).
When I hooked Digeo’s Moxi HD DVR up, I told my wife it’s like TiVo, and she said, “Then why don’t we just use TiVo?” After several weeks testing it, I have no good answer.
If you’ve never heard of Moxi or Digeo, you are forgiven. Although the company has been making set-top boxes for almost a decade in one form or another, this is the first time Digeo is selling a Moxi box to consumers directly. There are rollouts of similar-looking Moxi cable boxes in smaller markets across the US—the chance is slim that you have one, but if you do, you’re damn lucky, because they are a hell of a lot nicer than any of the crap Motorola or Scientific Atlanta DVRs that cable companies usually foist on their highest-paying customers.
But the question here is unfortunately not, “Is Moxi better than a cable box?” even though the answer to that question is, “You know it.” The question is, why should I buy one of these instead of a TiVo? And the answer is, at the moment, you probably shouldn’t.
Price Breakdown
When the news came out, some people bitched about the price, but the truth is, Moxi HD does sit somewhere between the two comparable CableCard-compatible high-def TiVo models. It’s got a 500GB hard drive, bigger than the 160GB on the $300 baseline TiVo and smaller than the 1TB found in the $600 TiVo HD XL. Once you factor in service, it’s pretty much exactly on par:
• Moxi HD is $800 up front, or four $200 payments, or 20 monthly payments of $40.
• TiVo HD is $300 plus $300 for three years of service up front (more if you pay a la carte)
• TiVo HD XL costs $600 plus the same service pricing, so if you pay for three years of service up front, it costs $100 more than Moxi
In the rear, they are very much the same. Both Moxi and TiVo deliver HD video over HDMI, take a CableCard tuner from any cable company, and can have expanded storage by way of a drive attached to the eSATA port. The difference lies in the interface, and in the internet-based services that each box offers at the moment, always subject to change.
CableCard-compatible Windows Media Center PCs. As a fan of the Media Center platform, I didn’t do this by accident. It’s just that we have yet to see a cool-running quiet set-top PC marketed widely to average users for a reasonable price that can compete with TiVo or Moxi. When that product comes along, you better believe it will be in the running.
Interface
The company that builds the Moxi has been talking about their interface since the beginning of time, and even brags about an Emmy it won for it. I can see why. It’s a fun interface, a refreshing change from candy-colored ca-plop ca-plop ca-plop TiVo menu that you might well be sick of by now.
The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed, The Wazabee 3DeeShell
By Mark Wilson,
10:00 AM on Thu May 7 2009, 115,253 views (Edit post, Set to draft, Slurp)
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The gadget: Wazabee 3DeeShell, a screen filter that turns your iPhone screen into a 3D photo viewer.
The price: $50
The price, again: $50 (seriously?)
The verdict: My eyes are now all screwed up. Seriously.
The Wazabee 3DeeShell is essentially an iPhone case built around one key feature: a 3D screen filter. Obviously it can’t turn the OS into a 3D experience, but the Shell promises to offer glasses-less 3D in the form of stereoscopic images you can take on your iPhone (with the purchase of their $1 3DeeCamera software).
I don’t know where to start with the shortcomings of this product. It’s a train wreck of molded plastic, a product so horridly useless, even amongst novelty gadgets, that it should be banned from sale in the free market.
There’s the issue of the design. Once you slide the 3D filter onto your screen, you can no longer navigate the iPhone. Therefore, while using their software (that’s not free with my $50, otherwise completely useless purchase?) you need to continually move the filter up to hit a button, and then down again to see the results.
You can capture “3D” photos by taking two slightly different pictures of an object and combining them in that $1 software I mentioned above. I was unable to do so without crashing the program (though to be fair, this might be my firmware 3.0 getting in the way). However, I was able to 3D-ize an existing photo.
The result is not quite as good as any bad hologram I’ve ever seen, mostly creating the illusion that the photo was ever so slightly sunken in my display. It’s a tad better than 2D in terms of depth, but the results are quite blurry, and the extent to which it fucks with your eyesight is not worth the 2 minutes of near-entertainment.
(In case you believe my 3D-izing skills to be lacking, I also tried out their free space shooter title. I don’t know what to say about it other than the game’s fun level is on par with creating Excel spread sheets and it in no way appears 3D.)
45 minutes after testing, I still can’t focus properly with my left eye. I’m not sure what a few rusty nails go for these days, but it’s gotta be less than 50 bones.
There’s simply nothing worthwhile about the Wazabee 3DeeShell that can justify either its existence or its please-punch-me-in-the-face cutesy name. Given the laughable price and (temporary??) damage to my vision, I don’t believe that I can recommend the purchase, nor can I recommend any programmer create content for the “platform” when its SDK hits later this month.
Also of note, in some unnecessarily cruel twist of fate, I can’t get this shell off my phone. Thanks Wazabee. You guys are the best. [Wazabee]