Life & Technology

Clip courtesy of the A Current Affair
A Current Affair ran a piece on games of 2009, and I put my two cents in. I think it has been a relatively good year for gaming, with a bevy of games for all consoles coming out – it’s almost been sensory overload with the number of games available…but I still manged to have a favoured few.

Sony has brought out the Eyepet, an interactive game that allows you to have a 3D virtual pet. It’s really cool, because it involves a camera that captures you, and a 3D model of the pet. You can play with the pet, interact with it, and it will intuitively do what you want it to do. You can even draw a picture and the game will turn it into a 3D version and allow the pet to play with it.

Then there’s Forza 3, an awesome racing game that takes you to most race tracks in the world, plus a huge array of cars to choose from. The more successful you are on the race track, the more cars you can access to race. It isn’t easy, but it is a lot of fun.

Scribblenauts is one of those games where the person interacting has to really think. Parents who worry about their kids playing “mindless” games don’t have to worry, because this game offers up a tonne of quizzes and puzzles, and with some of them there can be more than one answer.

Lips Number One Hits is Microsoft’s latest rendition of its franchise that allows you to belt out the tunes in timely fashion and includes hits from Black Eyed Peas, Lily Allen, Jason Mraz and Lady Gaga.

Finally, there is Assassin’s Creed II, the follow to the very successful Assassin’s Creed, which was released in 2007. This is a great game if you are into history, intrigue, a little bit of gore, and a tonne of secrets that need to be unlocked.

I am getting so many emails from you wanting to know how to give your kids the greatest Christmas gift of all – the gift of communication!

But, how do you choose the right phone for your kids? With so many models in the market, and these models being replaced almost fortnightly it is almost impossible. So, follow my never fail rules for buying a model phone and you will be on the right track.

There are hundreds of models and brands for you to look at and they are being replaced almost weekly! Start by looking at my little crib sheet here to move in the right direction:

– Make sure your phone is ‘unlocked’. This will mean it can run on any network simply by changing the sim card. Do not by a locked phone!!
– 3G or Not 3G? 3G, always 3G. Being given a 2.5G phone is on par with being given clothes. You want to love it, but you are wondering why the person who loved you that much to find this gift decided not to get you something that you REALLY wanted. 3G is the current network standard and 3G phones are far cheaper than they have been ever before. The networks are wanting new customers to sign up to 3G because each 3G tower can transmit more concurrent phone calls than 2.5G and this is more efficient for them.
– Expandable memory is a must. Make sure your phone has a ‘microsd’ slot. This will mean your kids can store pics, music and more on a microsd card and also take the card out of the phone and insert it into a card reader on the pc.
– Stay with a well know brand. Nokia and Samsung are number one and two in the market for a reason. Buying a well known brand comes with warrranty support and a wider range of service centers if you have a problem.
– Look to spend under $100. Today this investment will get you a basic phone, that does all the basic functions and in this pool of funky features I am including: Mp3 player, basic camera, calls, mms, sms and a few other necessities.
– Leave the frills for later. Your kids will have plenty of time to get the latest touch screen phone with all the bells and whistles. Give them a basic one now, that has fewer features so they can learn to manager their phone, before moving forward with more options. If you give them the best phone now, what do they have to look forward to later in life!!
– Slider or key pad, don’t dwell on it. The worst thing about a slider is if the slide function gets damaged, then it doesn’t work too well after that. Look out for the design you want and buy it.
Finally, a little known fact about mobile phones being sold in Australia is that they need to be compliant to Australian standards. ACMA are responsible for policing the practice of the ‘A’ tick. A phone with an ‘A’ tick is compliant, and the A tick is the part you can look for when making your purchase. Although Australia is a competitive market for phones, I am not sure whether the current strategy of dodgy importers being dobbed in by other importers for selling ‘untested’ phones is all that safe, but that is a whole new post for another time.

Ebay have said that they are experiencing so many people buying and selling this Christmas season that their site is having problems with the volume of traffic. Make no mistake, Ebay have asked for it and if you are having problems accessing the site, please blame Ebay.

The 2009 Christmas season was always going to be the biggest yet for internet sales. We’ve all been watching our pennies this year, so online shopping helps there. More of us than ever have tried the flexibility and convenience of internet shopping because we have been using the internet longer and someone, somewhere has said – ‘try this website, it is great for buying whatever’. Finally, there is more competition in the online shopfront market than ever, with online stores competing and managing the selling experience better than ever before.

So, online is big, but why is Ebay having issues serving pages to the millions of perusers looking for ‘stuff’?

Look deeper and you’ll find a well-timed promotion run to encourage sellers to post items has been too successful. Ebay is a brilliant online business, more successful than anyone else at providing a place where buyers and sellers meet to trade goods. Ebay has no stock, but simply take a commission on the sale price. They have other costs that the seller pays for meeting in the Ebay market, primarily the listing fee. This is the cost of listing your item on the site and Ebay provide a smorgasboard of options and value added elements all positioned to help you sell your item and help Ebay make more money.

This summer Ebay have run a promotion. ‘Free Listing For Auctions That List at .99 cents’. Free is a rare word with Ebay and the result is that we are now rushing to sell to take advantage of the $1.50 or so we will save at the time of listing our items. The influx of sellers taking advantage of the reduced listing fee’s has been met head on by the influx of buyers looking for a bargain from the growing pool of items for sale because internet shopping is bigger than ever, and there you have it, a choking, groaning server farm trying in vane to serve up the pages that we all are trying to view through our web browers.