The fellas at the Nokia Blog went down to the flagship store in New York looking for the 5800 and were told that the phone was no longer for sale.

As you dost recall, the 5800 is having lots of trouble due to issues with the speaker as well as 3G failure. We’ll ask what the matter was next week but for now, no 5800s for you.

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Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also a very good idea. Remote controls are among the worst-designed pieces of technology we have to deal with these days. They’re being replaced, somehow, but even more complicated controllers, but one of these days we’ll get it right.

Anyway, considering how hard it is for someone who grew up around these things to get anything done (that’s yours truly), I don’t hold it against my Grandma when she can’t figure out how to get back to the TV from the DVD player interface. There’s probably a way of doing this “mod” that’s a little more tasteful, but the idea is totally sound.

It’s nabbed from Designing Interactions, a new book from IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge. You can bet he’s got a few more pieces of good advice in there as well — I’m sure he’d take it ill if you just thought he came up with remote mods.

I’ve totally had both those clickers, too. That’s kind of weird.

[via Divine Caroline and Reddit]

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Filed under: Cool tools, Internet Tools, iPhone, App Store

Among the crowded field of cloud sharing and file synchronization services, there are plenty of interesting options (we've been partial to Dropbox around here, but check around for more), but when you add 'must work well with iPhone' to the requirements list, the choices narrow a bit. I've been testing out two business-focused options in Readdle Docs and box.net, and two other iPhone-friendly options (ZumoDrive and Drop.io) have just poked above the horizon.

Readdle Docs may be on the pricey side for the App Store at $9.99US, but there's a lot of functionality bundled into that ten bucks. In addition to turning your iPhone or iPod touch into a WebDAV file server -- accessible easily and securely in the Finder, Windows Explorer, or via clients like Transmit -- Readdle lets you access hosted storage on your MobileMe account or other WebDAV services.

Once you get the files onto your device, it's easy to view all iPhone-friendly formats, or forward documents and images by email. I'm particularly fond of the full-screen PDF and PPT viewers in the app. Of course, it's no Documents to Go, but it's a good start (and for those waiting eagerly for D2G to arrive on the iPhone, word from DataViz is that the app is on track for a Q2 release).

Update: DistortedLoop points to veteran Palm developer QuickOffice and the $9.99 Mobile Files Pro product, which offers iDisk connectivity and also allows editing of Excel files. I hadn't heard of it before and we'll definitely be checking it out for a future review.

While you can use Readdle with iDisk or any WebDAV-enabled storage service, you also get a bonus account on the Readdle servers with 512 MB of storage (yes, not much, but it's handy). Upgrades to the Readdle storage start at $5/month for 2 GB. On the other hand, if you need the cloud access but not the onboard server, you can save $2 and get Readdle's OneDisk product for $7.99. Per Michael's question in the comments, the Readdle team does have OneDisk working with JungleDisk and Amazon S3, and it should work in the same fashion with Docs.

Though box.net is focused on enterprise users, it's plenty functional for personal use; with a free 1GB storage account that permits 5 collaboration folders and files up to 25 MB in size, you've got some room to maneuver (paid plans start at $7.95/mo). The companion iPhone app, also free, lets you upload images from your photo library or camera, view a list of recently modified files, and open up any of your files for viewing (unfortunately the new box.net webdoc format reads in as raw HTML, which is a drag). You can also forward sharing links to your colleagues directly from the iPhone app, which can be extremely helpful in the midst of a collaborative project.

The box.net app is more streamlined than Readdle Docs, but offers a lot less of the bidirectional functionality, and the viewer isn't fullscreen or landscape enabled; it also doesn't appear to cache large documents locally as Readdle does, and it's crashed on me once or twice while downloading large PDFs. Still, if you're already using box.net or you don't have a WebDAV-enabled storage option for use with Readdle, it's a fine app to try.

Details of the two new kids on the block, in the 2nd half of the post.

Continue reading Cloud file sharing on the iPhone, four ways

TUAWCloud file sharing on the iPhone, four ways originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flickr member Redbeard Math Pirate came across this collection of extremely hard to find Atari 2600 games. See if you can recognize any of them:

For some reason I can’t any find these in my closet between my copies of Pitfall and Adventure. I swear I nearly wore out my paddle controllers playing Zardoz. There’s nothing quite like Sean Connery in a tiny pixelated red Speedo - an image now burned into my memory forever.

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Anyone over the age of 30 may fondly remember Earl Weaver Baseball for Amiga, DOS, and the Apple II. I myself had an Apple IIc and split most of my time between Earl Weaver Baseball and Hardball! during my formative elementary school years. Now we’re hearing that one of Earl Weaver Baseball’s original designers, Eddie Dombrower, is porting the game to the iPhone.

According to an interview with Dombrower on Game Stooge, the game will be called “EWB Baseball” — pronounced “yewb” since Earl Weaver still retains naming rights — and will contain the original game engine, which is owned by Dombrower.

The game will be released with a relatively simplistic design at first and, assuming it makes enough money, will be followed by a more advanced version later. Says Dombrower:

For the first release, I intend to leave them pretty much as you see them in the screen shots. If time allows for the initial release, I’ll begin to add texture mapping to fill in the stands, improve the look of the grass and dirt. The animations are, in my opinion, strong enough for the resolution of this device.

Now, assuming that the game gets some traction and proves to generate some “real” revenue, here’s the second phase of the plan:

• convert the hand-created flat polygon renderings of the field and stadiums to openGL technology (which I can use elsewhere too)
• spend some time re-engineering the “Director” to pick better shots
• provide users with additional options for visual playback using the camera (the engine supports user defined camera positioning, but this was turned off for igiBall)

The “background” behind the stadium uses photos to provide city scapes and mountain scapes, and so on, and I plan to allow users to put their own photos behind the stadiums (currently 2 photos per stadium). That should allow us to, as a community, create the feel of the actual cities these ballparks live in.

Some beefed up graphics would be nice, yes, but it’ll only cost $4.99 and it oughta provide enough nostalgia for anyone who like the original game.

Here’s a shot from the DOS version:

 

And, of course, the original box. Who could forget the box?

A Baseball Classic Hits iPhone [Game Stooge via Kotaku]

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Here I was thinking that was the only cheeseburger-shaped household appliance was the telephone from Juno. I guess I was wrong.

Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, dirty desktops do upset us! Now you can keep your workspace neat and tidy with this mini cheeseburger vacuum, perfect for picking up dust, dirt and crumbs from all those Fruit Loops you’ve been munching out of the box. And that silver stuff left over from scratching those lottery tickets.

Just don’t try to take a bite out of the burger-vac when you’re hungry. I know you want to, but don’t. I already tried, and it’ll only break your teeth.

Available from FredFlare for $20 (USD).

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If you’re moving to a two- or three-display setup, one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether you want two “equal” displays or a “primary-secondary” setup. A smaller monitor like this Westinghouse is a good option for a secondary, being cheaper and smaller yet still reasonably sharp and bright. Whether this particular Westinghouse is for you depends on a few things.

Specs
The L1916HW has a 19″ diagonal and a 1680×1050 resolution, which is good for that size; most at that size are 1440×900 or 1280×1024. I tend to game at 1680×1050, so it’d be a convenient size for me if I didn’t already have a large display I use for that. It’s so close to being able to show 1080p and yet — not quite. Oh well.

It advertises a 2ms response time, and I noticed nothing to contradict that, although I did have some serious trailing when dragging windows around on a black background. Sharpness was okay but nothing great, text was perfectly legible and details were just fine in high definition video. Color balance tended towards the warm side, but of course that’s adjustable. I found the viewing angle tolerance to be quite good, so you don’t have to worry about aligning this thing up perfectly with your head if it’s your second display. I have to do that with my little Dell, poor thing.

Touchy
The monitor’s controls are probably its most noteworthy feature. There is nothing on the front, if you’ll notice, and all the “buttons” are on the right hand side. In fact, they aren’t buttons but a long touch-sensitive panel. Good or bad? Well, a little of both. The different button areas aren’t well defined — there are little nubbins but if you go by those, you’ll hit every button while you search for the one you want. It’s a pain in the ass to use the menus, but you don’t do that very often once you set up a monitor.

What’s nice, though, is turning the thing on and off. At first I was groping along the side like a nervous virgin, but I shortly learned that nothing worked better than giving it a little slap on the side there on the lower right. It worked almost every time, and it was a quick, convenient, and satisfying way to shut down a secondary monitor.

Shi-shi
The styling I could do without: it looks a bit too much like a monitor you’d find at the concierge’s desk at a nice hotel or something. The clear plastic bits are a bit precious, and the logo glows at you all the time. You get used to it like anything else, but it’s bigger and brighter than other power indicators.

A minor gripe: in the box there was only a VGA connector. Come on!

All in all, it’s a solid little monitor. I personally needed something a little bigger, but if 19″ is your sweet spot, you could do a lot worse than this one. The high resolution is handy for a lot of things, obviously, and if you’re not doing any serious graphics work on it, you’re not going to notice the image quality shortcomings. If the styling and the idea of touch-sensitive buttons don’t offend you, give it a shot. Right now you can get it for $160 or possibly less.

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Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.

We knew all this stuff months ago, but it’s good to check in: last-minute tweaks to the UI or, say, built-in storage can have a serious effect on price and availability. It looks like nothing has been changed this time, but if you don’t believe us, feel free to compare this Russian review with the official spec sheet or the phone’s page.

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Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.

We knew all this stuff months ago, but it’s good to check in: last-minute tweaks to the UI or, say, built-in storage can have a serious effect on price and availability. It looks like nothing has been changed this time, but if you don’t believe us, feel free to compare this Russian review with the official spec sheet or the phone’s page.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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You can grab these DIY paper cut-out Mario, Piranha Plants, question mark blocks and a variety of tasty mushrooms over at CubeeCraft - where everyone has a square head.

[via Flickr]

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