Life Snippets #14: New Year, New Phone

I haven't even stamped my name on my exercise books yet. Haven't even taken the new school shoes out of the box yet. Haven't even sewed on my nametag and badge on, but that's okay - I'll need new ones, my current ones is sooo 2008.

This morning, I was flicking through The Star, and saw an advertisment for a newly released touchphone - I had been eyeing it for a week, but haven't voiced it out to my mom in case she will dismiss my appeal as a joke. So I showed the ad to her.. and got the phone the same night. Here goes - it's the LG KP500 or more known as 'LG Cookie'. It's a touchscreen phone - you use your fine digits to operate it. There's also a stylus, for the 'businessman' look, but styluses are sooo out of date now.



It's the Touchy-touch Revolution! Remember how once a phone with 0.3 megapixels camera costs RM1500? That used to be a point where everyone thought it was really unaffordable. Now, a 1.3 to 2.0 megapixel camera is standard in almost all cellphones now.. if you say that your phone doesn't have a camera, you are lying. Unless you ain't.

When you say touchscreen phones you almost always think of iPhone, a technology icon with a cult following. iPhones are expensive enough in our region, and we don't have official iPhones in Malaysia yet, although Maxis has said it will bring iPhone to Malaysia and you could own one if you signed a year or two contract with their services.

Then there was the Samsung Omnia, which had been released recently. It costs about RM 2,700 in Malaysia, and anything beyond RM 1,000 for a damn phone will not be considered.. why do people need a 3G phone in Malaysia? 3G phones suck ass because their cam quality is as great as a cow dung. Plus none of our phone services in Malaysia has good FPS streaming for the live 3G show - screen refresh rates can take 10-20 seconds, and your static, unmoving 'live video' is most likely comparable to a toad's wart.

So enough crapping. I bought the phone at The Hello Station in One Utama Old Wing. It costs RM999, although the original price is RM899, but that extra RM100 is for a 2GB MicroSD Memory Card. Holy smokes! That's friggin' cheap. A very well-endorsed touchphone for less than a grand! I have tried every feature that you could ever associate a touchphone with - and it comes with an accelerometer too, which is a motion sensor. It also has a 3.0 Megapixel camera.

The normal typing layout for the phone is the alpha-numeric layout, which is the ABC123 in a single button. Tilt the phone to the right and you get a QWERTY keyboard to text on.

Here's a picture, isn't it sexy? And here's a video of the LG Cookie. A video says a MILLION words.

Zelda Mobile

I have always wished there would be a sweet RPG for the mobile phone sector. A PSP owner would never go back to mobile gaming, they say, but I disagree. Sometimes mobile games have a little bit of that charm. Must be the crappy graphics.

Of course as a child I have played games like Snake and Space Impact on my parent's cellphones. But these games never appealed to me and they are meant to be dipped in the toilet bowl. That is, of course, where Java programmer Richard Meurling stepped in.

He created The Legend Of Zelda game for mobiles. In fact I have a copy of it in my Sony Ericsson. I spend the times outside of the home without my PSP playing Zelda on a cell.Yes, I created the mock Zelda Mobile box up there. I got a picture of the title screen, and added extra framing to produce a 3-D box. And you can see my name at the water at the bottom. You may ask, how is the gameplay for Zelda Mobile? Well, my dear friends, it is unrivalled by any other mobile game. Sure, it's not 3-D, but it works like magic.

That is a screenshot which I must credit IGN for. It shows Link at the early parts of the game. Convinced? Premium retrogaming just got portable. And I mean premium.

Full Interview by GameSetWatch