Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. Impressions
If you grew up in the nineties, like I did, you might remember the whole “virtual pet” fad that swept the nation, sparked by the “Tamagotchi”, a Japanese brand of virtual pet that was arguably the best and likely the most popular of them all. Everyone wanted one. I got a red and black one for Christmas back in the fifth grade and got it taken away by my teachers a couple times when I forgot to silence it and it beeped at me in the middle of class. Then, one fateful day, it beeped at me in art class and my Art teacher, a guy named Mr. Peterson who was like 6’5″, had a beard like Santa Claus and a handshake that could crush bones, demanded I hand it over. I never saw it again.
But by that time, I’d had my fill of the virtual pet thing and decided to let it go rather than replacing my bygone Tamagotchi.
But when I saw that an app called Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. (an acronym for Love Is Fun Everywhere) was released on the Google Play store, I couldn’t help but be overcome with nostalgia. I thought back to the day I got my Tamagotchi and how much I enjoyed playing with the little bouncing thing existing in its own egg shaped world. Seeing as the app was free with ad support and (thankfully) non-compulsory microtransactions, I couldn’t help but download it, if only for the nostalgia trip.
So, read on for my impressions of the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. app from Namco-Bandai.
Mismanagement of the Pebble Smartwatch May Have Killed its Chances to Succeed
Looking over the Pebble launch, I’m astonished to that it’s practically a textbook example of how to bungle the launch of a highly anticipated product. Just about everything that could go wrong, did. Production hadn’t even begun before Christmas (remember, it was supposed to ship to backers in September), the SDK has not yet been sent to developers (supposed to delivered in August) and through all of this, a general lack of communication, which may well be the worst misstep of them all.
Pebble Smartwatch First Impressions
After many months of waiting, fraught with missed shipment dates and a relative lack of communication, the Pebble smartwatch I pledged for back in April is finally in my hands, or, rather, upon my wrist. This has been a long time coming, but the dream has finally been realized, at least in the sense that backers are finally seeing the Pebble come to fruition.
Nexus 7 Review
Introduction
The fact that I like Android has certainly not been a closely kept secret. As an operating system, it’s functional, highly customizable and an all-around great smartphone and tablet OS. I’ve owned a couple of Android tablets over the years, namely the HP Touchpad, Viewsonic G-Tablet and Amazon Kindle Fire but my latest one (all the others have been sold off) is undoubtedly the best.
After the Amazon Kindle Fire showed me the virtues of an inexpensive 7” tablet, I decided to get the 16GB version of the Google Nexus 7 to replace the HP Touchpad, which I liked and was certainly a fine tablet in its own right (once Android was installed on it) but it wasn’t officially supported, what with WebOS being…you know, dead and HP’s having stepped out of the tablet game. What support it did have was from the hacking community on forums like XDA and while wishing absolutely no disrespect to those guys, as they were plenty awesome with the support, it’s just not the same as having the backing from a large manufacturer to keep the tablet updated and smooth out the kinks (of which there were many).
And who better to support an Android tablet than Google itself?
A Lamentation on the Death of Windows Live Mesh
Yes I was one of the apparently few people still using Windows Live Mesh near the end of its life cycle. Now that it’s gone for good, I miss it. It was one of the few peer-to-peer file and folder syncing services available at the time and best of all, it was free. It was convenient, automatic and easy to set up to keep my files synced across numerous computers. I used it to keep my documents, music, photo and videos synced across multiple computers, without having to worry about working around cloud storage limits or migrating my files to the designated syncing folders employed by just about every cloud storage service ever. But, alas, that’s gone now. Windows Live Mesh has been discontinued as of February 13th and I’m really disappointed that it’s gone.
As an alternative, Microsoft has encouraged users to move to SkyDrive, their new and improved cloud storage platform. The problem? It’s not as good and quite frankly, I hate the idea of migrating to a functionally inferior alternative when a perfectly good service had been up and running for years. Great.
