Atari Arcade for iPad Review

By now you may have seen ThinkGeek’s iCade, the cabinet that transforms your iPad into a legitimate arcade. Well, Discovery Bay Games has just produced a new take on the “iPad Arcade”. The Atari Arcade for iPad 1 and iPad 2 is not an entire cabinet, but rather a more practical and affordable arcade board for iPad to pop into. It features a joystick, four arcade buttons, and a clean retro design. Download Atari’s Greatest Hits app and you can enjoy all of the classics like Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command.

The Atari Arcade for iPad is passive and doesn’t require it’s own power source; it’s powered by iPad. The only downside to this is that it uses a little extra iPad battery and there’s no way to charge iPad while it’s attached. Just like the classic arcades, there’s a nice sized joy stick and four big buttons with good spring back action. There’s a regular 30-pin connector for iPad to dock into. On both sides is a slide lock to secure iPad into place. While the Atari Arcade would be best played on a flat surface, it’s portable and light enough to play it on your lap, or even your stomach if you’re laying down. There are rubber grips on the bottom so it won’t slide around a surface during intense game play.

The Atari Arcade relies on the Atari Greatest Hits app. Outside of this app, the joystick and buttons don’t do anything. The Greatest Hits apps brings you 100 classic Atari games, with Mission Command for free. All 100 games costs $14.99, or you can buy any of the 25 game packs for $1.00.

The arcade games include: Asteroids, Battlezone, Black Widow, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Gravitar, Liberator, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, Red Baron, Space Duel, Super Breakout, Tempest, Warlords. Then there is also all sorts of Atari 2600 games like Backgammon, BlackJack, Bowling, Casino, Codebreaker, Golf, Gravitar, Hangman, Home Run, Math Gran Prix, Chess, Pinball, and more.

Nokia Lumia 710

The Nokia Lumia 800 might be the flagship Windows Phone handset for Nokia when it rolls out, but if you are on a tight budget and want to give Windows Phone a chance and yet do not know where to start, who do you turn to? Some say that you need not look elsewhere, as Nokia also has a more affordable model for those curious about Windows Phone, where Nokia World 2011 saw the announcement of the Nokia Lumia 710.

The Nokia Lumia 710 takes on a more youthful appearance, where it has the ability to exchange back covers in different colors to suit your mood and fashion sense for that particular day – bringing back memories of those Xpress On covers in the past. Well, enough about history – the Nokia Lumia 710 is clearly future forward in terms of software, which we will cover in greater detail after the jump.

 

Too bad it comes only in black and white colors, but at least the back covers have a far wider range to choose from – black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow. In front lies a 3.7″ display at 800 x 480 pixel resolution with a ClearBlack TFT which is touted to deliver great looking colors as well as readability in bright sunlight. When you flip the Lumia 710 over like a burger patty, you will find a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with an LED flash that also does HD video recording at 30 frames-per-second.

Since nearly everyone and their dog has a social network these days, you will find the Nokia Lumia 710 accommodating in this aspect, boasting full integration of Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, letting you share your freshly snapped photos with but a couple of taps on the screen. Internet Explorer 9 will be the mobile browser of choice, where it will also play nice with a gamut of modern HTML5 web apps.

Opening up the Lumia 710′s chassis will reveal the same 1.4GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor that is found on the Nokia Lumia 800, accompanied by 8GB of internal memory and 512MB RAM. Connectivity options include quadband radio reception, 3G up to HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Expect the Nokia Lumia 710 to hit Europe first for around $270, followed by other parts of the world later in the year and early 2012.

Press Release

Angry Birds gets new bird

Angry Birds fans have a reason to get super excited. Andrew Stalbow of Rovio has confirmed that a new bird is coming in the October update of Angry Bird Seasons. A mysterious new bird stirs a lot of anticipation amongst all. We wonder what it will look like, what will it to. The game has been providing hints to users in recent updates and ancillary products and he built on this a little. He showed a small, duckling-like yellow bird in the corner, which may be the new bird. Are you ready to include a new bird in the family? I’m eagerly waiting!