the tweney review

File under funny / sadistic: PeopleFallingOver.com brings you the news, photos, videos, and, yes, the dance remixes of pratfalls, spills, tumbles, accidents, drops, and sudden unexpected descents.

Jeremy Horowitz at iPodlounge has a pointed critique of Sony’s PlayStation Portable demos earlier this month at E3. The bottom line: the PSP is far from being ready to launch, and Sony’s strategy surrounding it and the Vaio Pocket media player (a supposed “iPod killer”) is confused and contradictory.

I got to fondle a PSP prototype at E3, but Jeremy’s right: Access was carefully controlled, I couldn’t actually hold the PSP or play any games on it, and it’s not clear how fully baked these prototypes were. By contrast, Nintendo’s DS is much further along, with games you can actually play.

Beautiful photos of a Gunkajima, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan.

(via BoingBoing)

If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right? That’s what Rumsfeld must be thinking: He’s banned camera phones in U.S. Army installations in Iraq. A total ban on camera phones in the military is coming up next, the news reports say.

You can slash at the waves but you can’t hold back the tide….

UPDATE 5/25/04: There’s some speculation that this news report is fake, since every outlet is running the same Agence France Presse item and there’s no independent corroboration. Xeni Jardin asked the DoD directly, and found that the ban is not new (it dates to April 14), but it is being newly enforced.

You probably don’t get many telemarketing calls on your mobile, do you? That’s partly because it’s illegal–but more importantly, there’s no directory of mobile phone numbers that unscrupulous marketers can use to target their campaigns. Well, you can kiss that precious bit of anonymity goodbye: the CTIA is assembling a directory of cell phone numbers.

Impressions from E3: The coming year will be pretty interesting for mobile gaming. The Nintendo DS (dual screen) is a somewhat goofy concept, but there are a lot of games in development and some of them look pretty cool. I got a chance to play with a few of the new games and was fairly impressed. Developers can use the two screens for different views: e.g. first-person view on the top, map view on the bottom. Or you can use the touch-sensitive bottom screen to draw notes, and see other peoples’ notes on the top screen. My vote for the most fun new game: a Pac-Man variant, where little ghosts run around a piece of “note paper.” You have to draw Pac-Man, and as soon as you finish, your drawing animates and goes off munching the ghosts. Fun! But do you really need two screens for this game? Not really.

The Sony PSP is very slick-looking, with an absolutely gorgeous industrial design. I got to fondle it but not actually play with it at all. Hard to tell how far off this product really is, since Sony was playing pretty close to the chest with it — listing lots of developers who had signed on to the platform, but not actually showing any games. Sony has created a new data cartridge format for the PSP — a kind of minidisc in a case.

The Nokia N-Gage QD is a big improvement over the original N-Gage. It’s smaller and sleeker, so it will actually fit in your pocket. Battery life is better and the screen seems brighter. Much to my surprise, Nokia claims that “tens of thousands” of people sign on to the N-Gage multiplayer environment, the Arena, every week. Eighteen games already on the market (not too many); Nokia claims there will be 40-50 by year’s end.

Finally, I got my hands on some prototypes of the upcoming Gizmondo. It looks vaguely N-Gage like but with a bigger, brighter screen; it has GPS built-in as well as GPRS data capabilities — so it can exchange data over the cell phone network — but it’s not a phone. Also plays audio and video files. It looks very slick, but a lot depends on how well this company does marketing and distribution. It’s up against some real heavyweights.

Video games are now a $20 billion industry, making them bigger than Hollywood (as measured by box-office revenues, anyhow; the film industry actually makes more money from videos and DVDs than they do from movie theaters). No surprise, then, that the average age of video gamers is going up–it’s now 29–although half of gamers are still under 18.

I’ll be in LA the rest of this week to check out the video gaming industry’s main convention, E3.

And, I’ll be appearing on Dennis Miller’s show on CNBC, this Friday night at 9, to talk about some cool new gadgets for games and entertainment.

Good advice from Jim Henley: “Start by slavishly imitating poets you admire.”

And if you’re writing science fiction, be sure to avoid these overused plots. (both links via BoingBoing)

Intel’s Dothan CPUs (Intel Pentium M processors 735, 745, and 755) use Intel’s new numeric nomenclature and have dropped the clock speed designations from their names.

When asked about the new names, Intel vp Anand Chandrasekher said they’re designed to reflect qualities of “goodness” that Intel chips have, beyond mere gigahertz.

However, the only difference between these three chips is their clock speeds: the 735 is a 1.7GHz chip, the 745 is 1.8GHz, and the 755 is 2GHz. Exactly how much extra goodness is that, now?

“Working at Google, an engineer told me recently, is the nearest you can get to having an unlimited amount of computing power at your disposal.” Simson Garfinkle explains the hidden power of Google’s server farm, which reportedly tops 100,000 machines. (free registration required)