Posts tagged review
Acer 4820TG: Performance + Gaming Laptop!!
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Hey people! My apologies I was away from the blog for a week!! The best excuse I could come up with is “Work” 
To the point, I decided, its time I get myself a laptop!
I wanted something portable but without sacrificing on the performance and after insane hours of research, I finally decided to settle down on the ACER 4820TG laptop, a 14.1 inch performance class laptop (as they quote), comes with core i5 and ATI card to boot! The price is about 51k INR in India, (i.e) 1099 USD $ uncluding shipping! It should be arriving at my doorstep tomorrow, So watch this space for a detailed review guys. Follow the link for a comparative list of similar laptops, which are good enough for gaming.
Day 1: The Exteriors
Got call from Ms.Radha (my dealer), informing me that the laptop has arrived at their logistics and is ready to be delivered! It arrived in a neat looking Box by 7pm in the evening. Upon opening, I was greeted with a rather small looking laptop. Reviews online had said the laptop to be of a weaker body, which kinda seems true, the reason being, its an ultra slim laptop, measuring about 1inch when closed. But that apart, the Body is aluminium, so I’m sure the laptop should be durable for normal use.
The first thing I checked was cross verified the specs are the Acer 4820 comes in various flavours, regionally and abroad. Here it is:
Intel core i5 430M running at 2.53Ghz [mid end]
(3mb L3 cache)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 [a mid end DX 11 card]
4GB DDR3 RAM [good]
500GB HD – 5000rpm drive [bottlenecks]
The lid is Black Brushed aluminum metal and looks sleek and sexy! I booted the little 14” inch pokemon, and was greeted by the usual Microsoft Windows initial setup screen and activation. So far so good. All went well. Takes about 5min for the laptop to configure itself for the first use…Its comes loaded with Acer Bloatware 
The little wide screen looks good, Though i did find some small variances in Contrast and Black points, but it shouldn’t be noticeable to the average user. As opposed to the online reviews, the quality of the laptop speakers were rather good, if not great…and yes, they are Dolby certified!
The keyboard is a chiclet form factor, feels little delicate but no issues, a good tactile feedback. The trackpad is neatly placed with option to disable it anytime, say you are gaming and want to avoid false entry.
Everything else is the same as other laptops, 4 USB ports, HDMI output, wifi, bluetooth and the like. Day 2, I plan to put it through some benchmarks. Watch this space.
Sneak Peak – Journey (PS3) Game
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From the team that brought you an award-winning Playstation game titles flOw and flower, ThatGameCompany [TGC] is all busy with a whole new concept in gaming called – The Journey.
While most games bestows you with addictive feel of power and domination over your puny enemies who scream for mercy when they catch your glimpse, Journey is all set to do the exact opposite! Yes, the developers want you to understand how small we all are really all.
Here’s what Jenova Chan, TGC’s creative director says
“in the modern world where man has so much power, we have lost an integral aspect of the human experience – awe towards the unknown”
Only if we cared to look beyond whats visible, we would understand that we dont even compare to a tiny speck of interstellar dust in this wide universe of ours. The game is a simple open ended multi-player that hopes to instill you this feel when you play it. You are put into a huge world where you shall wander alongside other live players, meet them, join the party or say a hi and part ways. This game intends to unravel the inner emotion buried deep inside one’s soul.
The game begins with you waking up in the middle of the dessert with only visions of distant tall mountains, urging you to set out and explore. Real world strangers who are wandering just like you, cross your path often from time to time. You choose to travel a lone rodeo or together with your live counterpart, unraveling a fresh new experience along the way.
Though one may guess, all multi-player games have live players, think again, they provide monotonic gameplay requiring you to complete missions. This is not one of those games, the Journey evokes a sense of awe and mystery that could be a whole new experience – refreshing and powerful.
The game is set to release somewhere around 2011.
Visit ThatGameCompany for follow ups.
An evening with Microsoft Tag reader
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Microsoft’s officially launched their “TAG” application on May 27th 2010. I had a free evening that day and thought I should try it out, you know, just to see how the stuff works. I kinda liked the appz. So here’s how it all began.
7:00pm – in front of my PC
I navigated to Microsoft Tag homepage and I was required to login with my live account before i could play around with the tag creator. Upon logging in, i was taken to a really neat layout that had three simple functions, create, track or edit Tags. Nice!
7:10pm – setting up my windows mobile
You need a reader + internet connection to be able to read the tag informations as all data is relayed from their servers. After going through a few “about tag” pages on their website, i bumped on to the reader…Atlast! I got the *.cab file and proceeded to install it. It was around 300kb, so it was all done in a jiffy.
7:12pm – Creating the tag
Creation of tag was pretty straightforward and simple, so i created this test tag to see if it works the way it claims. I clicked on create, and the wizard asked me a couple of questions like a title to the tag, a link or text, and the type of layout i wanted. After keying out the info, it took a couple of seconds and suggested me to print it out. I opted to save my tag as a Jpeg, as this is a test tag, just for sake of convenience and green environment!
7:15pm – Tag! You are mine!
I fired up Tag reader on my windows mobile 6.1 (yes its kinda outdated) and it asked me approve a set of EULA agreements. The appz initiated my camera mobile along with a onscreen cross mark that said requested me to point at any tag image. I pointed it at the jpeg that i created few minutes earlier. For a few seconds nothing seemed to happened as there was no status indicator. I thought it might have been buggy and as i was about to take away my phone from the tag image, suddenly a msg poped up quoting “Tag scanned successfully” and executed the function i embeded in it. I actually had it say “Success, your appz reads tag”
I had my pocket pc connected to wifi network at my place so the whole process was lot faster than our Indian GPRS networks
I am starting to like this tag application. I took a print out of couple of tag images and stuck them as notes all over my desk! lol it was fun.
Could have some true potential but I’m not sure how far would this go in terms of productivity. We gotta wait and see!
7:30pm – some wicked ideas creep into my mind
I googled for some tag images made by others and woah, loads showed up! I am gonna go on tag scanning spree to see what info they hold!!
Click here to see if you mobile reads microsoft Tag images. As a prerequisite, you should have the tag reader installed in your mobile. You can get it here. All major mobile OSes are supported.
And here’s the tag to madzindia blog. If you feel generous, just take a print out of this one and stick it as a note in your desks
Update: Consolidated tutorial on using Microsoft Tag
* Visit http://tag.microsoft.com and login to your live account.
* Click on create a tag on your dashboard
* Key in required details (sample below)
*create and render them in any format you see fit
*You are all set! Have fun and spread the word!
Review : Valve Organge Box’s THE PORTAL
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What we see is that a gem of a creation called “Narabacular Drop” mutating into (in a good way that is) Portal,Driven by a Source Engine.
In the first few levels are basically trained how to get in and out of pre-set portals,where u can have control of only one entry/exit point,then as the game gradually introduces you to portals you eventually end up with a gun that you can use to fire portals onto walls, ceilings, and floors. Your primary and alternate fire buttons will then enable you to create blue and orange portals, respectively, so basically moving through one portal sends you out of the other one. This becomes your travel mechanism through out the game. You can also pick up objects, such as large boxes, which often must be placed on specified areas to open doors that lets you proceed through a variety of test chambers.This Too is Made easy Using the portal Gun Effectively.
System requirements
Minimum:
1.7 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 8 compatible video card, Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Mac OS X
Recommended:
Pentium 4 processor (3.0 GHz or better), 1 GB RAM, DirectX 9 compatible video card, Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Input methods : Game pad, keyboard and mouse