Quick Look: Stacking the Deck With Poker Stacks

I am a huge fan of poker.  And I love color matching games.  This strikes me as an opportunity which is ripe for a chocolate in my peanut butter moment.  Fortunately, I don’t have to speculate about what the outcome of that moment might be.  My good friends at Birdsoft have already done that work for me.  Yes, this is the same Birdsoft which gave us the much acclaimed Extreme Agenda for Windows Mobile.  Hit the jump and we can take a closer look at what happens when poker meets Bejeweled.

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Cy-fi Brings Your Tunes Straight To You At 25 or 30 Miles Per Hour

I used to be pretty heavily into bike riding.  I’d routinely head out on all day bicycle treks.  just me and my Schwinn.  The problem was my tunes.  Specifically, wires.  My bike riding days were well before the onset of Bluetooth and wireless devices.  This meant that I was routinely tugging my Walkman (yes, this also predated mp3 players and ipods) out of my pocket.  It is a wonder it survived at all.  The second problem was that bike riding on busy streets with headphones is…well…dangerous.  You need to be able to hear the sounds of oncoming traffic if you hope to stand a chance out there.

Well, along comes a new product, Cy-fi, which solves both of these problems.  Cy-fi is a wireless speaker, designed for use while bike riding, but is also great for camping, boating, hiking, or just sitting around.  Pretty much anywhere you might need a lightweight, portable (and oh yeah, wireless) speaker, take a look at this.  It comes in two flavors, Bluetooth for use with any A2DP enabled cell phone or device.  More intriguingly, however, is the Kleer flavor which connects with any iPod.  I have been following the new wireless technology, Kleer, and am excited to finally see it being used in market-ready products.

Check it out at www.mycyfi.com.  It will run you $199 for the iPod Kleer version or $179 for the Bluetooth version.

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A Handful from Handmark for your Handheld (er…iPhone)

Anytime Handmark, or their newly acquired affiliate, Astraware, comes out with a new program, I get an email from my good friend, Alison.  Looking at my inbox today, you would think Alison was one of my closest friends.  My inbox runneth over with news from heir illustrious company.  From clay spacefighters in Platypus, to the simple dictionary (and color matching fun in between), Astraware announced three new games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Listen To This: Menus

As I discussed last time, the controls and menus are complimentary pieces of the interface to any media player.  So, having brought you the controls in the last installment, we’ll pick up right where we left off and discuss the menus on each of these players.

I found it interesting, once I starting comparing the various approaches to the menus, that they all fit within three general categories.  For all of their advanced features, the iPod Nano and Microsoft Zune both utilized a text based menu system.  It was most interesting that these two bitter rivals utilized such a similar interface.  The Creative Zen X-fi and Sandisk Sansa both offered a graphical menu system, in which only a portion of the menu was displayed at any time.  The Sony used a single screen menu system, with nine icons appearing on the screen for each of the nine basic features.  The Samsung was unique in that it fit all of these modes.  The menu on the Samsung was customizable, so that it could scroll vertically, horizontally, or appear all at once on a single screen.

Let’s jump in and take a closer look at each, and see how these menus interact with the various controls.

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Holiday Shopping: Take A Peek At The Peek

Not long ago, Time Magazine named the Peek mobile email device its Gadget of the Year.  Now, that is a pretty strong endorsement, and one which was met with a bit of controversy.  Our own Peter Murphy disputed this endorsement, stating:

I find this quite alarming, the Peek itself made an appearance, when it was released and conveniently disappeared.  A device like this is more Zune than the Zune, and less Oprah than the Kindle. I suppose you would have to say it’s a great idea if this was 1988. The fact that the iPod touch came third in this list, makes me wonder why striking two stones together to create a spark to light a fire, isn’t on the list.

After reading Peter’s thoughts, I decided that we owed it to our readers to take a much more in depth PEEK at this device.  I am never one to rely on other people’s thoughts or words, and I wanted to test out whether it really deserved Time Magazine’s mantle of Gadget of the Year.  Fortunately, the folks at Peek were kind enough to loan me a unit to test.  So, read on to find out whether this really is the must have gadget of 2008, or whether 2009 will have us peeking in another direction.

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Listen To This: Controls

So far, in this series, we have not really had much of a chance to get into specifics about the individual players.  We’ve done a quick overview, looked in the boxes, even checked out the hardware and accessories.  But none of what we have looked at so far has had much to do with the actual use of the players.  All of that is going to change now.  The next two articles will focus on the user interface.  Today, we will be talking about the controls on each of the six players.  In the next article, we’ll be looking at a related item, the menu systems in each player.  The two really go together, and if it helps, we can think of this as part 1 and the next one as part 2.

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