On one of our many “I need some toys” visits to the local Toys R Us store, I noticed this little beauty, and felt I neeeeeeeded it. I’d originally gone over there to pick up a remote control helicopter, and ended up leaving with both.
The box read “Fly the Millennium Falcon”, “Easy to Fly”, and had the Hasbro logo in the corner which ticked the boxes for me.
I have to admit, it’s not bad looking, granted there is is a big hole in the middle of it, however the rest is highly detailed, and they’ve made some effort on the controller.
As this chargers from the remote, I have to admit, hiding the charge cable under they “cockpit type flap” was a nice touch.
So how does it fly ?…pretty bad in my opinion. I have various “change and fly” polystyrene helicopters and can successfully control them, and keep them in the air for the time it takes the battery to run down, this however was a mare !
I found I had to get within about a foot of it to initially respond, and the it would take off. Upon attempting to adjust the trim to it stopped spinning, it would just flip over and head for the ground ?….I then adjusted the trim while on the floor….great it flew straight….for a second or two….then would just flip over and head for the floor again ?
Maybe it will just take a little getting used to, but the other helicopter I bought, I was able to fly out of the box.
I’ve checked YouTube and they are flyable, I guess I’ll just have to master it….will post a video if/when this happens.
As always, unboxing pics below, and a YouTube video of one of these in action.
edit 31/12/2010
Please find below, my attempt at flying, this was unfortunately also the death of the Falcon
Wow ! What a busy, and expensive week, only 2 days ago the Halo Reach XBOX 360S turned up (and I’m blogging instead of completing that fantastic game).
So what do I think of the Playstation Move, will it replace my Wii ? Well let me tell you.
First of all, the controller feels pretty solid. I’ve always found the Wii controller and Nunchuk to feel like toys in my hands instead of controllers. Now don’t get me wrong, I still use the Wii , probably a lot to do with the face that it runs a lot of the games from the external hard drive (You can find that post here)
The buttons on the Playstation Move Controller seem to be well placed, on the main controller you have all the 4 usual buttons, a select and start, a playstation button and a trigger on the back. There is also a “move” button in the middle, this seems to get used as the “Select” button
The Navigation Controller is simplified, and reminds me a lot of the Nunchuk. It has a D-Pad, Anagolue stick, the X and O buttons and the playstation button. There are 2 trigger buttons on the rear, very similar to the Nunchuk. Both devices feel solid in the hand, and benefit from the curved shape (instead of the squared off WiiMote).
I did notice one slight annoyance, there were no USB cables in either of the boxes, it’s a good job I bought the charger, otherwise I’d have been unplugged other USB devices to charge these.
So how do they work ?….Well, very well to be honest, the tracking is spot on ! I realised today, that the Playstation Move didn’t come with any demo games, so had to buy something on next day delivery just to try it out. I then decided to check out Playstation Store, only to find there’s a handful of demos on there.
So far I’ve only played the demo of Sports Champions, and it’s really good. it works very much like the Wii with the motion plus attached, however a lot better graphics. It did however want me to calibrate the controller every time I started a new game, however this could just be because it’s a demo. I played table tennis, and Frisbee, both of which were ultra realistic, (each of my frisbee’s would end up in the trees )
You can also control the XMB with the Playstation Move, simply hold down the trigger on the back, and move up, down, left and right.
All in all, a good purchase, and look forward to more games to come out, and think that this could be the end of my Wii usage.
As you may remember from my post on iOS 4, I was looking forward to somebody developing a Google Latitude application.
Google Latitude is a way of keeping your friends updated on your location in real time. If you have a latitude application running on your mobile device, this will poll the Google servers and update your location. This is especially handy if you are meeting with friends, or want to see if somebody is home before popping in.
Google Latitude has been working as a layer on Google Map on the Nokia, Blackberry and Android based phones for some time now, however only worked as a HTML5 version on the iPhone (which doesn’t work as a background application)
Now thanks to the Background location feature on iOS 4, and Google making the Latitude API’s available, developers are able to start work on Location based applications.
The first one that seems to have emerged is an app called Latitudie.
Latitudie is still in it’s infancy stage, (Current version is 1.1) however seems to do the job. Once signed in, it will pinpoint your location on the map and start to poll the Google Latitude server. You then have to option to view your history, and thanks to iOS 4 it will happily run in the background.
In version 1.0, the application tended to not update at all if your didn’t move locations, which would lead others to think you had the application switch off, also the accuracy would drop, making it look like you were in the middle of a field, and not at home.
In version 1.1 the developer has addressed these issues by allowing you to switch on/off “Low accuracy in background” and an additional feature of “Periodic updates” (when low accuracy in background is switched off).
As I’ve said, it’s still in it’s infancy stages, doesn’t allow you to view your friends on the map, or do much else apart from update your location. I find myself using the HTML5 Google Maps version to find my friends.
If your a data junkie and like to know where you’ve been and when, and have other friends using latitude, this app is a must. I hope as this app grows, it will add all the feature that the HTML5 version of google maps has to offer.
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