These picks are based mainly on my own personal choice but I have tried to pick out what I think are the best in all categories based on presentation, enjoyment and longevity. In general I am recommending games that look good, play well and suit the mobile phone format, in particular I like to point out games that make use of tilt controls or make good use of touch screen. Also note the lack of 3D games, there may be some good 3D games out there but personally I’m not impressed with a lot of the 3D games as if I wanted 3D gaming I would use my PSP, I think android is best suited to 2D, for now. So read on for my top Android picks.

Labyrinth
The first purchase I ever made on the Android market and still one of my favourite games, the massive selection of levels and casual gameplay are great for those times when you’ve got a few minutes to spare here or there. You’re probably already familiar with Labyrinth but just in case you aren’t you have a wooden maze in front of you with lots of holes, your job is to avoid the holes and get to the finish. Use of the accelerometer in your phone makes this feel great, like tilting the maze in real life. As I mentioned before there are hundreds of user generated levels to pick from, some easy and some insanely hard but all very addictive.

Diner Dash
Already a hit on just about every other platform Diner Dash 2 is a great little time waster. You play the waitress in a diner who has to serve all of the customers. Enjoyment is derived from managing where all the customers go, getting their meals and cleaning up all as quickly and efficiently as possible. There are plenty of different diners to work in with different customers and quirks with each, not only does this add more challenge as you play through but it also gives you some variety. Graphics, whilst not mind blowing are neat and kind of retro. Controls are obviously touch based and work out pretty well. Another good point about Diner Dash is that you can pick it up and play a level whenever you have a few spare minutes then pick up where you left off another time.

Tiki Towers
I wasn’t too impressed when I saw screenshots of this game but it’s wormed it’s way into my favourites. If you have played world of goo on the PC this is basically the same game… With monkeys. You have to build a bamboo structure for the monkeys to pass across and pick up bananas on the way, easy to start with but gets more tricky as you play on. Tiki towers is well presented with some swish menus and well drawn sprites, sound is ok but nothing to write home about. I just love building those moneys a bamboo suspension bridge.

What the doodle?
What a great game, it’s just like playing Pictionary online right in the palm of your hand. 5 players are rounded up and you each take it in turns to draw. It’s a great little game to play when you have the time and you’ll probably end up playing it for some time after you pick it up. Not only is it fun to guess other people’s drawings but it’s also even more fun to laugh at how bad some people and maybe you are at drawing. Anything else you need to know about What the doodle you can find out here, I wrote a whole post on it.

Radiant
If you like scrolling shooters then chances are you’ll love radiant. You take the role of a little white ship who has set out to destroy this big red space invader… Or something along those lines. Basically you’re stuck to the bottom of the screen space invaders style and you can move left to right to shoot and avoid enemies, touch controls work really well here. The graphics and sounds are simple, retro and impressive. Lots of stuff on screen at once, lots of colours and lots of action make Radiant a really fun game to play. Different weapons and upgrades and bosses keep this game interesting throughout.

Doodle Jump
I’ve recently become quite addicted to this great little game, the simple premise is to get your little doodle character as high as possible jumping on platforms and dodging all the bad guys. The phone is played with tilt controls, tilting left or right moves the character and pressing the screen fires some kind of bogie bullet to kill enemies. The game is also improving over time with the developers adding more features and making it a little ore challenging. All in all the graphics have a lovely hand drawn style to them and the game is simple and addictive.

Sky Force
Another shooter this time, Sky Force has been out for some time now for a few different platforms, I played it first on my Nokia 6630 on Symbian and this is basically the same game. Controls are touch based and work ok but not ideal, plenty of times fingers will get in the way of enemies and ruin your day. That aside I still had a lot of fun getting through this game and got a lot further than I ever did on my Nokia. The graphics are pretty good but as this is an old game they have been up-scaled and do not look particularly good. The music for me makes the game, some brilliant thumping retro tunes accompany you through the levels.

Jewellust
Another old favourite of mine and my family, everyone knows the premise and everyone enjoys the game. This is basically Bejewelled but I think a much nicer, polished and complete experience. Swapping gems has never been so fun. Graphics are sharp and high resolution, control is spot on and sound is great too. Another minor advantage over Bejewelled is that you don’t have to wait for gems to finish dropping before you start your next move, a very minor but nice feature nonetheless. Anything else you need to know about Jewellust you can see in my old review here, note that back then, for whatever reason it was called Jewerlust.

Drop
There is not much to say about this game, but I think it just sneaks in to my top list due to it’s simple nature and it’s well put together gameplay. Drop is simple, you have to guide your red ball down through the gaps in endless platforms with the aid of your accelerometer, tilting your phone from side to side and making your balls bounce has never been such fun. Graphics and sound are nothing spectacular but are perfect for the job I think.

If you have ever played Pictionary you’ll be familiar with the concept of What the Doodle. You are dropped in a room with four other people and you each get two turns drawing a phrase. Hilarity ensues when you have no idea what’s being drawn or no idea how to draw a phrase.

So how does it work on Android? Well obviously it’s online and connects straight away to the other people playing, most people are using the free (lite) version which only supports easy difficulty but more and more people seem to be playing every day. Needless to say I have never had a problem getting into a game on easy mode. Could do with some more people to buy the full version, currently only £1 meaning there’s a few more modes to play for everyone. Buying also lets you draw your own avatar which people will see in the game.

It’s a cherry!

Drawing with the touch screen on my G1 was great, my finger wasn’t the most precise of drawing implements but it did the job perfectly well and I was surprised how easily people guessed some of my worse doodles. There are a few problems of course, with people writing when they can’t be bothered but there’s a system in place to boot players who cheat or who do not play in the spirit of the game. There’s also great stat tracking with details on your games played and overall points.

The whole experience works smoothly and effortlessly even on my piddly G1, there are a few problems with other handsets and virtual keyboards as obviously it takes up some of the screen. I’ve never had a force close and can’t really fault the experience I’ve had. Connection wise it even seemed to work pretty well over 3G and never seemed to drop from a game at all.

All in all it’s a great app and one of the most fun I’ve ever played on Android. With the free version having enough fun for most people and the paid version being a meager £1 I can only see more people playing and buying in the future. Hopefully I’ll contribute to that and get some people to play some of the advanced game types. QR code for lite version in the comments below.

More is not always better
Blu-ray boasts a fantastic video experience with eye popping 1920×1080 resolution, up to 40Mbps throughput and uncompressed audio. How can anyone snub those specs? Well it would seem the average consumer is unimpressed, take for example the uncompressed audio, every time I get into a Blu-ray debate uncompressed audio is one of the main talking points, fantastic studio perfect sound can’t be bad can it? Well no but it also is not necessarily good, take for example MP3, a heavily compressed audio format that the majority of consumers have accepted as standard and easily acceptable for listening to all their music, even DVD audio is highly superior to MP3. So the question becomes: Can people tell the difference between MP3, DVD and uncompressed, and more importantly do they care?

I can safely say I for one do not. As someone with a competent audio setup with a dedicated amp and floor standing speakers MP3 is fine, DVD is fine and personally even though I’m a bit of an audiophile I’m pretty sure I would not be able to tell the difference between uncompressed and DVD. Scale that across the market and most people use only their TV’s built in speakers and I guarantee whilst I’m not a massive audiophile my auditory standards are quite far above the norm.

Next on the chopping board is the high res visuals and I’m going to fill you in on a little background first, I used to rent a room from someone and had my own 32″ HDTV wall mounted right above my computer which meant I was always sat no more than 2 feet away from it and usually less. This allowed me to experience some really stunning visuals from HD videos and I was hooked. Skip ahead a year or two and I move into a house of my own, the same 32″ TV is sat in the large living room and my viewing distance is increased to something like 6 feet. HD becomes less wow and I start thinking that maybe I need a bigger TV. At about 6 feet away from my 32″ HD still looks good but it doesn’t look “great”.

And now it comes down to justification, is the improved picture worth the extra I will have to put down for a Blu-ray player and the Blu-ray discs? For me again this is a no, sure if I had a bigger TV with 1080p suppport it might be a different story but there lies the issue with market acceptance. Although more and more people are buying HD sets there are still a great many people (I would wager a vast majority) who still have SD sets or 720p sets and have them set up in their living room sitting a good 6 or so feet away. Yet again I am a bit of an elitist when it comes to video, I loathe watching badly transferred DVDs and DIVX copies of my DVDs are just not the same! But still to me, the visual elitist I find it hard to justify shelling out for something that is marginally improving my viewing experience and will only cost me more in the long run for discs.

Versus DVD
DVD is still the biggest physical medium for video and it still has a lot to offer in the age of High Definition and Blu-ray, the biggest selling point for DVD is it’s price. Economies of scale mean that DVDs are cheaper and easier to buy than ever but Blu-ray is still more expensive making Blu-ray more of an indulgence. So what are the compelling reasons to indulge?

Well the video and audio has been discussed above and they apply equally to DVD. But there is another dimension to DVD which narrows the gap and that is up-scaling, DVDs have a lot of untapped bitrate squeezed in there and DVD is the perfect candidate for reprocessing to HD resolutions. Anyone who has an Xbox can tell you of the fantastic job it does of up-scaling DVDs, personally I can’t live without my 360, it makes DVDs look so crisp and clear and gives them quality approaching HD. This is another barrier in the adoption of Blu-ray, DVDs for me still look fantastic when up-scaled and narrow that important gap of how much better Blu-ray actually looks. Again for me on my 32″ that far away the difference between DVD and Blu-ray is getting even more minimal.

The competition
Here is the real clincher for me and probably the most important hurdle for Blu-ray to overcome, yes Blu-ray saw of HD-DVD as a competitor but though this might have seemed as the battle won it is only the beginning of the fight for Blu-ray. Since DVD was launched the market has been changing rapidly and adopting less conventional means of getting their media. Itunes alone has shifted over ten billion songs and are now offering HD content without the need for any hardware. The Xbox 360 is in 35 million homes and offers on demand 1080p streaming of the latest movies, not to mention the multitude of cable, satellite and terrestrial HD mediums.

Do people really want to go out and buy a brand new Blu-ray player for ~£100 and then buy physical media for £15 a pop when they can use their existing games console, PC or television provider to stream those movies for a third of the price. In today’s on demand culture I think people are questioning how often they actually watch the DVDs they buy and for some it may only be once or twice anyway and when you have the choice to be able to watch that movie at any time without having to pop out to the shops it becomes a much easier sell. Of course for those that watch films over and over again, or just love to watch them a lot Blu-ray may be a good choice for now.

Conclusion
I didn’t think I would need a whole conclusion section but I have rattled on for so long I think I need to wrap things up. Taking all of the above into account for me it is hard to justify investing in Blu-ray in the near future or maybe ever, HD streaming is only going to become more popular and the vendors are only going to multiply. This coupled with the negligible advantages Blu-ray offers leads me to think that Blu-ray will never reach the saturation of DVD or will ever gain true market acceptance as a mainstream product and maybe make in a niche for videophiles.

Let me know what you think.

As you can see it lists the wifi access points in range with the signal strength and handy things like the time it was last seen and most importantly the channel the network is operating on. The most useful parts for me though are the graphs at the bottom, the left one shows the signal strength over time, which is useful if you want to track what may be interfering with your signal. The right graphs just shows a visual representation of where the different channels are and where the networks around you are broadcasting, this is very useful in determining which channel you should be broadcasting on to get the least interference from other networks.

All in all it’s a small and useful package and you can download it here.

This is a compilation of the worst crimes against the facebook world. People should keep their profile pictures relevant on most of all the picture should be of you!

And was salivating at the prosepct of paying £18 for 16GB of PRO DUO storage instead of £55. That’s right, you can pop in 2 Micro SD cards up to 16GB and use them both as one drive in PRO DUO devices. It seems too good to be true, but it works and apparently there are no drawbacks. The only problem was that these £8 8GB Micro SD cards were only Class 2, meaning I may have to shell out more making it less of a bargain, there was lots of information available on the “minimum” write speeds of SD cards and the “maximum” write speeds of PRO DUO cards but I couldn’t find any concrete data on how fast cards should actually be.

So as usual I went crazy and I decided to benchmark a few cards to see if I would be losing out by using 2 Micro SD cards instead of a normal PRO DUO and to see if I was going to be sitting around checking my watch while this “Class 2″ SD card loaded stuff. Read on for graphs etc.

So first off I found myself a disk benchmarking program, this was quite easy, ATTO Disk Benchmark seemed to fit the bill, so I fired it up and did some quick benchmarks on the memory cards I had to hand which were:

• Sandisk 4GB Micro SD (Class 2)
• Sandisk 2GB Micro SD (Unknown Class)
• Sandisk 4GB Extreme III PRO-HG DUO (Pro HG features not used in this test)
• Sandisk 2GB PRO DUO MK1

Not the best spread, but I had what I needed, 2 memory cards of each type I wanted to check, good enough for me. If there were any massive differences then I would see them from this pool of test cards. I tested them with file sizes up to 8MB with separate read/write as combining read write was not relevant in this case.

Sandisk 2GB PRO DUO MK1	Sandisk 4GB Micro SD (Class 2)
Sandisk 4GB Extreme III PRO-HG DUO	Sandisk 2GB Micro SD (Unknown Class)

As you can see from the above charts it seems like the Micro SD read speed even though it is a Class 2 card is still much higher than the read speeds of the PRO DUOs. It’s nice to see that the Extreme III get such a nice write speed and actually surpassed it’s read speed, I assume this is because the Extreme III is HG card and had I been using a HG card reader the read speed would have been something like 20-30MB/s, but these devices aren’t exactly mainstream.

I think it’s safe to say that I shouldn’t have any problems with the speed rating of the cards when putting them in the PRO DUO adapter. Once I have it and 2 8GB cards delivered I’ll give that a test too and see how it does. If you want to take a look at the data yourself here’s the raw data. In the meantime here’s the read/write graphs for all the cards shown:

And here’s a little close up shot of those dreaded X-Clamps you’ve been hearing so much about:

Any way, here’s some more Xbox innards:

So until I see if I can grab one tomorrow from town it’s sat half naked on a table and I decided to take a few photos, prepare to get to know your xbox a lot more intimitley.