Simple Gamer

Pocket Boom Impressions

I was given the chance to try out the “Pocket Boom”, a little device that allows you to turn any hollow object into a set of speakers.

To me, the device seemed quite gimmicky at first. There are plenty of portable speakers out there for cheap. You can even find them at newsagents now days at cheap as £5! However, it does depend on the quality you want and what you want to use it for.

First off, the sound quality you’ll get from the Pocket Boom is nothing special. It’s pretty standard, however the way it projects its sound is pretty interesting. The Pocket Boom has a little vibration part that can be stuck to a hollow object. By turning sound to vibration, it projects the sound through the hollow object. To me, this only gives an appearance of giving louder volume, however in reality it’s only because the sound is coming from a surface area bigger than normal speakers on devices like laptops and mobile phones.

The device comes with the Pocket Boom unit, a USB cable to power it with (it can also be powered using 2 AAA batteries), and an audio extension cable. It also comes with replacement sticker pads to stick on to other objects. It doesn’t use normal adhesive, but rather similar adhesive to that of screen protectors which can be removed and re-attached to objects.

On the whole, it’s definitely an interesting device. However, usually retailing at £20, it may not be the purchase to go for as you’re main portable speakers. There are plenty of other proven alternatives out there. As a gimmicky type device, that’s certainly small, it’s pretty cool to try out.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, you can find iPad accessories and Galaxy Note cases over at GearZap. I’ve been told they have new stock, so definitely worth checking out.

Sociable App for iOS Impressions

I always like using lightweight utility applications on my iPhone. One of them that I used to use was called Duo+, a 69p app which allows you to update both your Facebook and Twitter statuses together. It also allows the use of location, but besides that not much. While it’s a nice lightweight app, it had a fair few bugs. Quite often it wouldn’t connect to Facebook, and when it did, it rarely allowed an update. The developer has tried fixing it, but it seems the latest fix now never allows me to update Facebook statuses, making it pretty useful. It was fairly unreliable before anyway.

The Sociable app effectively does the same thing, allowing you to update both your Facebook and Twitter statuses together. However, it has a great polish about it. The wooden effect given certainly gives a nice feel when using the app and makes it feel a lot more professional than Duo+, which quite frankly appears like a hastily put together knock-off in comparison.

The added advantage with Sociable is that on top of location, it allows you to add photos to status updates. This is great for keeping both Facebook and Twitter up to date with the same status and also photo that you may have taken. So far, I’ve found it pretty reliable, so I’m pretty happy with it and it’s worth the 69p over Duo+. If only I could get refunds for apps!

P.S. It also allows you to update LinkedIn and Tumblr statuses, but I don’t really use them.

Saitek Cyborg V1 Keyboard Impressions

It’s been a little while since I last updated, mainly because I’ve been bogged down with work and then been on the phone to Alienware/Dell Support regarding my Alienware M11x fan. However, more on that another time, for now I want to talk about a keyboard I’ve had the chance to try out.

I’m not really into keyboards too much – as in I don’t kick up a fuss if the keyboard isn’t a gaming keyboard or has special fancy customisable features with backlit buttons. Since I’m a regular laptop user, the laptop keyboards suffice for me. I’ve been using laptops before even using a proper PC, so it’s almost natural for me to use a laptop keyboard over a desktop keyboard, which may sound crazy but it’s the truth!

I have used a range of normal keyboards by different manufacturers, such as Microsoft and Logitech, and on the whole they’ve always felt pretty much the same. There’s one thing that used to bug me, and that would be huge gaps between the keys. For some reason, and I think because of my affinity towards laptop keyboards, I hate having huge gaps between keys. It feels like it can slow your typing speed down and only causes your fingers to sometimes get stuck in a gap when trying to type fast. Therefore, even at work, I’ve tended to make sure I have a keyboard with slightly narrower gaps between the keys. Besides that though, I’m not that fussy. Honest!

I’ve been recently using the Saitek Cyborg V1 keyboard. Now, while it’s marketing as a gaming keyboard, I have to say there isn’t much there to really make it stand out as a gaming keyboard. The one feature, and literally one feature, that would make it appear to be a gaming laptop, is a key which disables the Windows key. Even though it’s just one feature, it’s actually a really useful one. Most gamers have experienced pressing the Windows key by accident mid-game, and cursing as a result as it’s ruined a key moment in their game! Therefore, Saitek decided it’s best to be able to just disable that nuisance button altogether, so added another button to disable it. It’s easy to tell when you’ve activated it too, as the button lights up green and is at the top right of the keyboard, next to where the light indicators are for Caps, Scroll and Num locks.

Speaking of light indicators, I have to say that these light indicators are subtly powerful! They must be the most powerful light indicators I’ve seen on a keyboard. Seriously, I can hold my hand a good 10-15cm above the keyboard and still see the red light on my palm! Nothing bad about that, just something I noticed! Good quality I guess!

Now, the actual keyboard is nothing spectacular as I’ve mentioned, but it’s still a solid piece of kit. The keyboard itself feels solid and rugged, no actual moving parts besides the clips at the back to add a bit of height to it and tilt it forward. The buttons are distinct, and has a good amount of spacing between each key. It is a full keyboard, with a numpad and the usual Insert, Home, Delete, etc. buttons and arrow keys of course.

I don’t have much else to say about the keyboard. It’s priced below £20, which is why it’s quite basic and probably a good buy for an average gamer who wants a normal-ish keyboard for everyday use as well. Quite often, normal keyboards will cost about £10+ anyway, so if you have a little bit of spare cash, I probably would recommend going out and getting this. The one thing I really would have loved to see in this keyboard, but which would also raise the price considerably, would be backlit keys. That would have made my day!

The Saitek Cyborg V1 and a whole range of other PC Gaming Keyboards are available now from GamingZap, as well as the Nyko Zoom for Kinect, making them the first with stock in the UK.

iPad Advanced Case Stand Impressions

Gear Zap have been kind enough to send me an iPad Advanced Case Stand to check out and write my thoughts on. I’ve had my iPad for close to six months now and haven’t really gone through many cases. I had one padded leather case that I purchased from eBay for fairly cheap. It did a great job of protecting my iPad, especially when I went on holiday and had it in my backpack. I was at complete ease knowing that my iPad was well protected. It also folded so I could use it on a desk to watch stuff, or position on my lap to type with or use.

(Edit: I finally found the case that I was referring to, it’s made by ‘Micko’. I couldn’t find an official website, however doing a Google search for Micko iPad cases brings up a lot of results from sellers.)

My next and also current case, and also a little personal favourite of mine, is the Macally BookStand case. When going to work, quite often I end up with my work laptop, which is a heavy beast of a machine unfortunately. This coupled with a semi-thick iPad case didn’t help and things started getting squashed in my bag. I decided to try see if I could find a thinner iPad case and saw the BookStand case at a PC World on a demo unit. It fitted my criteria perfectly, as it turns into a stand, provides adequate protection and has a very nice finishing to it.

Now, first off about the iPad Advanced Case Stand – it’s clearly meant for iPad 2 rather than the first generation iPad. I couldn’t get it to comfortably fit my iPad and decided not to use it for prolonged periods of time – otherwise it would have either deformed the case or I was afraid of causing some damage to my iPad. Having got this out of the way though, let me actually talk about the case itself.

Update: So after checking with Gear Zap, it seems that this case is indeed meant for the iPad. I decided to take the plunge of trying my iPad in there for a few days continuously and see how it went. First off, it’s still a tight fit even though it does adjust after a little while. The edges around the screen block part of it and seems too tight a fit. Despite that, it does give a solid feel to your iPad/

The case is actually pretty good. I personally wouldn’t see it as a high end purchase, but definitely better than the cheap eBay options, which are usually about £10-15 anyway. Forking up a bit more money for this case is probably worth it if you want the case to last longer and protect your iPad 2 better. The first thing about this case is that it is quite a hard case, so it’ll certainly give adequate protection to your iPad 2. I’m not brave enough to try dropping mine, so I can’t give results however for average use, it’ll definitely give enough cover.

The case can be used as a landscape stand for your iPad 2. It has a little pull out part on the back, which then slots into a groove (of which there are many to choose from) to secure it into a position. While it’s nice to have this in a case, and pretty much every iPad case tries to mimick this functionality, I don’t think it’s implemented in the best way here. It can be shaky, and worse off, the button used to close the case dangles at the top middle part of the screen, obscuring a bit of it – particularly where the time would be. This is a bit of a design flaw.

The iPad 2 slots into the case snugly, and has a little latch with a button to secure it in, so it doesn’t slide out. I don’t think this is the best design choice, as I prefer smooth cases with pretruding bits, however it’s not massive and doesn’t really get in the way of use.

On the way, I’d recommend this case as an alternative to other cheaper options – it’ll provide better protection and has the option of using it as a stand for your iPad 2. A lot of cases cost more just for doing the same thing. It doesn’t look the prettiest, but isn’t too bad functionality wise.

You can find some more iPad cases over at Gear Zap, along with iPad 2 cases and iPad 2 accessories.

Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB Impressions

Having been impressed with the performance increase in my work laptop, I decided to give my MacBook a much needed upgrade. I browsed around a fair bit and finally found the Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB drive at YoYo Tech. I did a fair bit of research to find something for a decent price which also had good specifications. There were a few 80GB drives that I considered, however the read and write speeds weren’t too fast on those. I didn’t really need 128GB, however more hard disk space never hurts and the specifications on this drive definitely justifies the purchase!

The main thing to note when looking at SSD’s are the read and write speeds. For this Kingston drive, they’re 250MB/s and 230MB/s respectively, a lot faster than drives of smaller capacities. That’s something worth bearing in mind when purchasing an SSD – if you want something cheap, then it may not actually be worth the purchase since the read and write speeds aren’t going to be that great. You might as well go for a slightly more expensive drive since you’ll be a lot more bang for your buck.

I first started looking at 80GB drives or similar, and most of these were in the price range of £120-130. The read and write speeds varied greatly – almost always the write speed was below 100MB/s. The Kingston drive that I purchased only cost £150ish, so you’re paying £20-30 for about 60GB more and much faster read and write speeds. Definitely worth putting that extra money in!

The process of switching drives is pretty pain free on Macs. I popped off the battery, screwed off the L-shaped panel which also hides the RAM, and slid out the SATA drive. I think removed the small enclosure and fitted the SSD drive in, slid it back in and closed up the MacBook. I had backed up my laptop on to an external drive using Time Machine before, so when I started up with the new SSD, I put the Mac OS X disc in where it gives a prompt to recover from a Time Machine backup. I selected that and had to wait an hour for everything to be recovered on to the new SSD.

There was about 60GB worth of stuff to recover, and once it was done, it rebooted my laptop with exactly the same configuration as I had before switching the drives. I didn’t have to change a single thing once it was finished, it felt like I hadn’t even changed drives at all since that’s how easy the transition was!

Now on to performance. Boot time on the old SATA drive was probably a couple of minutes. It would go past the Apple logo and load my wallpaper, only to take a bit of time loading the icons in the bar at the top. Now, everything is rapid, and it boots up in about 30 seconds. Applications respond much quicker, opening up and being ready to use in a matter of seconds (such as Chrome, Thunderbird, Adium, Twitter, iTunes, etc.) The performance increase is a huge jump from the old SATA drive!

If I had the cash, I’d definitely consider upgrading my Alienware M11x to SSD too, but I had too many games on there and would need a 250GB or thereabouts drive, which are not exactly cheap at the moment! However, for the MacBook it’s been an extremely worthwhile upgrade and much cheaper than purchasing a MacBook with SSD preinstalled, as the price goes through the roof for those.

Chrome breathes new life into my MacBook!

Safari has been my default browser on my MacBook for ages now. I’ve just never felt the need to change, however my MacBook is 4 years old this summer and with the constant updates to Safari, it’s far from being a lightweight browser. It was getting pretty slow so I decided to go for a change. I don’t consider Firefox to be lightweight, even though I use it as my primary browser on my Alienware M11x and my work laptop, so I decided to give Chrome an extended go.

I’ve used Chrome quite a bit before, and have always been pleased with its performance. I know it does a lot of caching, which is good and bad. Good for faster browsing on websites you visit regularly, bad for web developers who need to see changes on their website – they’re forced to constantly do hard refreshes as I’ve experienced tons of times.

One thing that gets on my nerves in both Firefox and Safari is how slow it is to move tabs around and rearrange them! Chrome seems to do this extremely smoothly with no problems at all. I don’t know why Firefox and Safari aren’t capable of doing it as smoothly as Chrome does. Another nice feature of Chrome is the main page with the Most Visited and Recently Closed pages on, I find this to be a great landing page and like the way it looks – clean.

Next step for my laptop, SSD drive and possibly a new battery! Stay tuned!

XCode 4 (£2.99 on Mac App Store)

I’ve been so used to programming in XCode 3, that XCode 4 seems like a huge jump. The installation is pretty lengthy, since rather than doing a normal upgrade, it does a fresh install. But once I had downloaded and installed it through the Mac App Store, I was in for a little surprise.

XCode 4 makes everything integrated within the IDE. Now, rather than opening up Interface Builder separately, it opens it all up within the XCode IDE. I much rather prefer this, and don’t know why they didn’t try to do this earlier. It makes working on iPhone applications a lot easier in my opinion. I didn’t enjoy having loads of windows open all over the place every time I had to make an interface change or link something from the interface to the code, it got messy very quickly. It’s good to see that Apple took note of it and just made the whole experience easier by integrating it all.

For those who haven’t used XCode but are planning to, there’s something to be aware of. Firstly, it costs £2.99, which is extremely cheap for a development software. However, if you are planning on definitely creating an app to release, then you can subscribe for $99 (per annum) for a proper Developer account with Apple, where you can download XCode 4 for free. The choice is yours – if you’re not planning on releasing an app soon and can’t justify the $99, £2.99 really isn’t too bad to fork out for a comprehensive development environment.