A Happy New Year to all!

Sadly my immune system decided to take two days off resulting in most of new year’s eve consisting of watching films in bed and getting up at midnight to watch the fireworks from the terrace. Which I might add were rather spectacular and I am left warm and fuzzy knowing that Birmingham City Council are spending my council tax well.

Anyway, this gave me time to play Assassins Creed 2, which to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic considering the first one was pretty, unique and fun to play.  Sadly it was killed by the repetitive side missions and mundane tasks which did not fit in to the assassin theme. I was however impressed, the storyline in the game continues right where you left off in the first game, so at least there is a little consistency. The game is far more pretty than the first one, running through Italian streets gazing at the architecture and finding new and amusing ways to kill the guards on the roofs.

The side missions keep you entertained and are completely different to the first, you gain a gun and play in Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine. The game however has developed a Legend of Zelda theme with puzzle levels involving you scratching your head on where to go and running against the clock. Overall it is a very good game, however being ill and housebound means that it was completed in 48 hours, still well worth it. I did however completely ignore all the side missions bar the view points, which were a necessary evil.

At work, I was given a shiny HTC HD 2 to play with and to modify software for the Windows Mobile platform, so I took the opportunity to take it for a test drive over Christmas and see if this would be my next gadget purchase.

The phone itself is bigger and slightly chunkier than my E71, but most of this is just purely screen space and the modifications HTC have put on this platform (HTC Sense) are quite nifty, most of the features like e-mail, browsing, sms and weather are all available from the home screen, so you rarely have to dive in to the start menu.

The touch screen is very sensitive and the phone was very responsive to commands. I did sadly have a few gripes with the phone and the software. Firstly it is running Windows Mobile 6.5 which is a revision of version 6 that includes gestures and better support for touch screens. Sadly like it’s big brother Windows Vista/7 a lot of the configuration interfaces have been left untouched from the earlier incarnations of the OS and are far far too small to use with a touch screen and really require a stylus to use them properly without a lot of furious tapping to correct the mistakes.

The worst problems were web browsing and text messaging, well really anything that involved the keyboard. First the keyboard is over zealous on correcting itself when typing and a lot of mistakes are made rather quickly, which leads to a lot of profane language being said and parents not appreciating the language in their presence. Second, the phone comes bundled with Opera and Internet Explorer and I was surprised to see that an alternative was available. Internet Explorer was utterly rubbish, it zooms out to a ridiculous level and does not seem to support gestures, which resulted in me avoiding it like swine flu. Opera was decent, however it’s ‘render as you move’ was infuriating when trying to read text. Also, when the phone is used landscape with Opera, you are left with the silly bar at the top which has the start button, combined with the keyboard being present and taking up two thirds of the screen and then trying to move around forms on a page resulted in more profane language. Writing text messages was just as fun lying portrait and when the phone finally started to type by itself I decided to throw in the towel.

Overall, it’s a swish phone and Windows Mobile 6.5 seems like a stable OS but still has too many rough edges for me. Sadly it is lacking in apps, lacking in apps which work with the phone being horizontal (or like the camera, lacks in support for the phone being held portrait) and was a complete pain to use with sms and importing SIM contacts. I will just stick with my E71 for now and perhaps go for a Palm Pre or the Nexus 1.

On a brighter note, it has been snowing quite a lot in the West Midlands making everything look rather pretty and has even allowed me to work from home, which is just awesome. Sadly however I seem to become a complete child when it starts snowing, I get excited, I find an excuse to go out in the snow and then draw comedy cocks on my colleagues cars….

Aside from dancing in the snow, I visited Shrewsbury on the 2nd and 3rd of January to see some close friends and to make up for my absence on New Year’s Eve. It was a last minute sporadic visit which ended up being a great laugh catching up with people and making an arse of ourselves on guitar hero (or rock band … the one with the drum kit).

On the 3rd I was going to make my way back to Birmingham via bus to Shrewsbury town centre, but sadly slept in and missed it and later on I heard that a suspected gas explosion had taken place right in the centre and a building had been demolished. When I finally arrived in the town centre I saw rubble all over the road near the Welsh bridge and smoke still rising from the buildings remains, was not a pretty sight and I didn’t want to take photographs as I felt it would be in bad taste. Anyway 12 people were injured and 2 seriously injured, I wish them all a speedy recovery. You can show your support on the couple of Facebook groups that have sprouted up.

Support for Sam, Sarah and Scott

Bridge Street Fund

Support for Annie

I am hoping that this is not the beginning of a horrible trend where something blows up in a town that I visit, so far the flat in Birmingham hasn’t exploded. Anyway time to resume working at home! I wish the sodding electric heaters actually heated up the flat… Take care!

Tags: Assassins Creed 2, Childish Behaviour, Fireworks, Gas Explosion, Guitar Hero, HTC HD 2, New Year, Profanity, Shrewsbury, Silly Browsers, Snow, Windows Mobile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 15:09 and is filed under General Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.