Now, up until a couple of months ago, I was still living in the mobile stone age with a Nokia N70. Built and used solely for messaging and phone calls, this dusty relic left me dominated by everyone else who had shiny new touch-phones such as the Samsung Tocco Lite, the Tocco Ultra, Nash’s HTC Hero and, begrudgingly, the Apple iPhone. So, saddened by this I sent off my brick (quite literally as it survived many-a drop down my staircase) to Mazuma to be sent to the great recycling centre in the sky and started hunting around for an alternative. Of course I had to go touch, and this meant starting up my first monthly contract, with the phone itself being based off what the World Wide Web said would be selling like hotcakes over the Christmas period. Eventually I decided upon a HTC seeing as Nash’s all-singing and dancing Hero seemed to sing and dance more Broadway, like the kind of phone I was looking for, as opposed to the iPhone which every man and his dog had, that appeared to perform, in all honesty, like High School Musical. The HTC website foretold of a mystical device, no wider than a pencil but with an enormous 4.3” screen known as the HD2 and being the elitist dick that I am, naturally I had to have it.

            Many moons passed waiting on Vodafone to cough it up when I almost gave up hope that it would ever be back in stock before anything slightly better came along, perhaps Sony’s Xperia X10 which boasts a slightly faster processor, more RAM and a better camera. Then one day whilst in town a glowing beacon (or more a shop sign) of the Virgin variety drew me in upon where I discovered they had had the damned thing in stock all along, and with a cheaper contract. Immediately I made my purchase and rushed home to delve into all the HD2’s features. So with all that out of the way, let’s get down to business.

            The phone itself looks and feels great, the screen is a 4.3” capacitive-touch screen which can be set to alter its brightness depending on the amount of glare reflecting off of the screen. The backing is comprised of an aluminium battery cover and a weird rubbery-feeling cover around the speaker, the 5.0MP camera (with a flash that could blind a lighthouse!) and I/O ports. Connectivity is piss-easy thanks to mini-USB cable being a data cable and charger cable all-in-one, and it uses MicroSD2.0 cards for storage, recommended as the onboard memory is only a respectable 512MB. The HD2 weighs about 150g and despite its massive face supporting razor-sharp WVGA at a resolution of 480x800; it’s impossibly thin and will happily sit in one’s pocket without causing a tumor-esque bulge. Although I’d recommend not a trouser pocket as even though I’ve been told the HD2’s screen is reinforced, I’m always sceptical that it may crack the screen if I were to sit down or something. Any extra specifics can be found on HTC’s website here: [http://www.htc.com/europe/product/hd2/specification.htm], but that’s enough for all the nerdy numbers.

            Using the phone is pretty easy, currently only Windows Mobile 6.5 is supported with no official availability for the presumably outstanding version 7; although it won’t be long before a stable crack comes out and the HD2 can shuffle ever closer to current-age perfection. Annoyingly, after checking stocks, browsing the relatively small Windows app market, surfing the web on 3G or even HSPDA, composing a few SMSs and perhaps even an e-mail, performance in the HD2 shudders to a halt. As great as multi-tasking is, some things cannot be exited via a normal “X” button and so my advice to keep the 1GHz Snapdragon fully breathing fire during, say, a full 3D game, affix the task manager from the Windows menu to the home screen as a tab to switch off all the unused programs. It works exactly the same way as it would on a Windows PC OS, as does the file explorer and you can even download a registry editor and cleaner to make it your own little PC from home and treat as more of a baby tablet than just a phone. Like all good smart phones is has GPS and an accelerometer, a few of the small list of worthy apps include Mobile Office 2010 (which is free, surprisingly), gimmicky bits such as binary clocks, magic ‘8 balls’ and speedometers from 69p up, or clever apps like one that lets you find your car or even the mobile equivalent of Brain Training.

            There’s not really much else I can say about the HD2 other than it’s amazingly simple to use and eye-watering to behold. Typing takes a while to get used to, but it’s no harder than when you first learnt to type on a normal phone’s keypad, to get a feel for it just ask for a demo in any mobile shop. I’d recommend buying this over the iPhone any day for the same reason that I’d tell you to buy a PC instead of a Mac; you get more bang for your buck and there’s so much more you can do with it, even small things like having a 3.5mm headphone jack instead of a specialised one such as you find with other phones like the Sony Ericssons make all the difference in the ease of use.

            Although the exclusion from Windows Mobile 7 and the unavoidable cleaning of the screen due to greasy finger marks is annoying, and due to its almighty speed the battery does take quite a beating, pretty much one of the top five phones you can buy this year.

Perfect tablet.

- Tegra 2

- Capacitative Multitouch

-Digitizer pen

-Atleast 1ghz A9 with 512mb RAM

-Android 2.1/2.2, no custom interface, access to Market

Now do it.

So today I demo’ed a new Indie game, Flotilla.

I’m a sucker for fleet-combat-based indie games, so when this popped up I gave it a go. The demo loaded extremely quickly. I’m notorious for my slow internet speed, but it only took me 10 minutes, so it’s a tiny game.

So starting up the game, the first thing I noticed was the interesting visuals. It looks kind of like Darwinia/Multiwinia, with objects being polygons of various colours. This retro, cell shadey sort of look always appeals to me in games, and it is especially effective with the arcade play style.

I was expecting a funky looking, 3D centric version of other indie space games. Real time, 4X combat, more ships than I can realistically control properly. I was surprised; the game is turn based. I’m not using a fan of turn based games, but it sounded interesting, so I continued.

It’s a simple, fun game. You move to a planet, a random event happens. In the case of battles, you’re put onto a battle field strewn with objects and an enemy fleet. Selecting your ships one by one, you move them in the horizontal plane, then the vertical, then decide their orientation. The orientation is extremely important, because the damage mechanic is very simple. Top and front, no damage, bottom and back, damage.The movement types are split into 3. The first, attack, combines movement and attack speed, with your ships flying whilst shooting. Focus fire gives your ship barely any movement, but their fire rate is greatly increased. Flank gives very wide range of movement, but no attack.

Once you’ve set your moves, the ships carry out the orders, with both teams ships carrying them out at the same time. It’s an awesome experience, and incredibly tactical. Trying to lure enemy ships into exposing weak spots whilst orientating ships to defend their own, coupled with the slow motion and classical music that comes on when the ships actually move, makes it a very surreal and relaxing game.

The ships come in various types, the basic being destroyer with it’s one missle cannon. But there are bigger ships, with different weapons and different weak spots. Ships can also be upgraded, each ship having two upgrade slots that can be filled with loot picked up on missions.

The campaign involves jumping from planet to planet, being faced with decisions, such as whether to help “runaway cats escape the authorities”, or salvaging a “Abandoned smuggler ship haunted by the ghosts of smuggled pandas”. Some planets hold these choices, which can obviously yield good or bad consequences, some hold battles. Interestingly, your decisions affect the other planets too. I chose to salvage a ship, and 4 planets on got attacked for salvaging a ship without a warrent.

There is an online scoreboard, as well as multiplayer and a variety of modes. I’ll post more when I have tried the multiplayer.

Overall, a fantastic and interesting game, that for it’s £6.80 price tag, I highly recommend.

~Nash

This whole spectacle surrounding the iPhone 4 is what can only be described as utterly hilarious. Here we have a company, Apple, so obsessed with secrecy that employees at it’s suppliers factories have been known to kill themselves under the immense pressure piled on to them, and one of their software engineers leaves a prototype phone in a San Jose bar.

The poor engineer. Not only did he lose the secret frontline product of a company that prizes it’s secrecy, but he lost it on his birthday. And not only that, but it was found and sold to Gizmodo, one of the bigger gadget coverage websites.

Happy birthday, Gray Powell.

5 of us set out to GV in the hopes of ressurrecting a Wilds village, only 3 of us made it to the wilds. Those 3, Myself (Nash), Borken and Helluva eventually made it to the BlackLight after several deaths. We are now part of a village kindly taking host to us whilst we build the new Blackvine.

Brief synopsis, but yeah, things are going well.

More detail at some point in the future.

I’m not usually one for jumping on the Call of Duty bandwagon, but when steam announced a free weekend on Modern Warfare 2 - Multiplayer, I felt I had to do my bit and test out the new release. I have to say I went into the game with a fairly open mind. I had heard a few rumours that the PC version was pretty awful and even that someone (who shall remain nameless) had deemed the latest COD a PC failure. Even so, I felt the game must have something to it that would keep a large proportion of gamers so addicted to it.

After the pitifully slow download over my entire Saturday I was ready to play. What I found once I was in there was such an amazingly hooking game play aspect that I promptly lost my Sunday under a wave of what can only be described as Gun. Here’s the point where I admit I am a sucker for FPS gaming and with RPGs as my second love, I became immersed in the level of customisable fast paced action. The ability to completely alter several loadouts perfectly for the right situation and then to upgrade and fine tune your class even more was brilliant.

It was safe to say that after a few hours I had by no means mastered it, but it is possible to survive in that game to the point where it’s a nice challenge to have some skilled competition.

I will admit that if I wasn’t the poor self made tramp that I am I would have probably bought the game by now. My experience with COD was a thoroughly enjoyable one and I would recommend it.

Unless you live under a rock, it’s impossible to ignore the release of the iPad. Now whilst I have a distinct dislike for Apple, their fascist policies and their closed source antics, I can see potential in the device. More importantly though, I can see the potential for the future of tablet.

I’ve been an Asus T91 user for a good while now, and I love it. Touchscreens enable me not only to view media and the web faster, but to note take and handwrite. Yet for all the brilliance of the device, the software is lacking. The original software was awful, and whilst Win7 improved the experience, it still has a way to go.

The iPad however, has made manufacturers realise the importance of software. I personally can’t wait for more open company to jump onboard.

Hey all, James here.

 Finally able to post on here now. I suppose this is just a quick Hi and test to see if this works. If it does, and Nash approves of my antics then I might be able to post more, who knows…

Joe here.

Apologies for the incredibly long time since last update. With the January A levels and the feeling afterwards that we all suck, haven’t had a lot of time to do anything else really.

Other than Wurm.

Blackvine are now playing Wurm online again, all 5 of us. We had originally intended to chill on the GV server, before moving on to the Wilds and starting a town, but some hiccups occured in this plan. Still, when we do eventually go to the Wilds, I’ll start posting a diary of our exploits.

Currently setting up Centos on an old build to get some server practice in before the rebirth of the Blackvine servers this September.

And I think that’s about it for this post. At some point in the future I may actually try to push Blackvine in a direction…

Also, hello to Blackvine Media (the other group of a similar name that has spent almost as long as we have not having a functional website, must be a curse of the name), hope we’re not cramping your style.

Windows Phone 7, 3 years late, has just blown away the mobile world, and Technoholik have an exclusive early feature of the Notion Ink Adam, something I was already excited about. I’m now hyperventilating with it’s brilliance.

Get over to Gizmodo for more details, notion ink, Win Phone 7.