Write a short story with all the team members names used in the story.
Here’s my poor example… England’s Cricket Team
Whilst trying not to Harm i’ son the Broad Cook listened to the Bop Ara by Strauss. Prior to hearing the Bell, his Onions were already done. He shouted, “Anders, son I need help in here, but he knew all his Coling wood not be heard as his Swann ing about earlier had caused his son to get burnt.<br>Clarification added August 9, 2009 4:28 AM: You can pick any team, at t …, more 

Tags: viral, marketing

You know, sometimes you’ve just gotta call 911. But all that talking; it’s such a damned pain. Sure, there’s a guy beating another guy to a pulp in the movie theater. But come on, people are trying to watch a movie! They don’t want to hear you blabbering away on your phone!

Fortunately for the folks of Black Hawk County, Iowa, their local 911 center is now taking reports via SMS. On first thought, it’s a great idea. With even a moment of consideration, however, the idea falls apart. Sorry, Black Hawk, folk: this is a bad, bad idea. While there are a handful of great reasons for 911 centers to accept text messages (alerting 911 without alerting criminals, for example. It might also help deaf/mute callers, though 911 has accepted TTD andTTY calls for quite a while now), there are so many glaring flaws with this plan that it’s absurd.

Here’s just a few:

• Time matters: As any emergency responder (or anyone with half a brain, really) could tell you, every second counts in an emergency. Texts are fantastic for casual chat, but they’re horrendous for time crucial conversation. Between typing, connecting, transfer across the network, and transmission to the other device, a single line of dialogue can easily take 30 seconds.
• It’s one county: Unless you just so happen to spot the little sign on the freeway letting you know you’ve entered a new county, there’s no way of knowing which county you’re in. Exit the county unknowingly, and you’re texting a non-SMS friendly 911 line. Even if the line auto-responds telling you the current county emergency line can’t handle texts, that’s at least one minute wasted. How many people in Iowa will read about this and skip right over the “Black Hawk County” part, and waste crucial time trying to text their emergencies?
• Text messages aren’t dependable: If the network gobbles up your tweet, it’s no big deal. If the network gobbles up your attempt at telling 911 that your friends head is on fire, it’s kind of a big deal. When you’ve established a voice connection, you know that the person on the other end got your alert unless they’re shouting “Hello?” repeatedly. With texts, there is no immediate way to know if your message has been received
• Location verification: Verifying location and other details is already a pain when dealing with cell phones. Slow down communication and add a bunch of points for failure, and it becomes a big, hot mess.

For this plan to work, it needs to be rolled out nation-wide (or state-wide, at least). Additionally, the SMS protocol needs to be modified to prioritize 911 texts, and to automatically confirm the receipt of the alert. In other words, it’s no small task.

If this were for non-emergency calls, that’s fine. Mr. Mittens can stay up in the tree for a few more minutes while its reported via SMS. But this is 911, land of gunshot wounds and 8 car pileups. If it’s worth contacting 911, it’s worth a phone call.

[Via PhoneArena]

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The first few times I picked up Resident Evil 4: Mobile Edition (iTunes link), I wanted to throw my iPhone out the window and watch it slowly sail 8 stories below into the Potomac river. Now, after five days of playing through the game’s 12 levels, I am ready to take my iPhone into bed with me and make sweet love to it. The controls take a lifetime to get used to, but once you’ve got them down, the game is extremely addictive. It took me a full three levels to get used to the game mechanic, but it was well worth it. The much-anticipated iPhone port of the console classic, Resident Evil 4, is only for those who are willing to put in the time I did. So be warned, short attention-span iPhone gamers: RE4 is not for you. For those who have come to appreciate the iPhone as a full-fledged portable gaming device, proceed, but please be patient.

For those of you experiencing your first few days in civilization, Resident Evil is a first/third-person zombie shooter franchise from Capcom that has infiltrated every form of media on the planet. It started as a kick-ass video game, back in 1996. Since then, Resident Evil has appeared in 20 games on 12 platforms (including “PC” and “Mobile Phone”). It has also spawned a variety of movies, comic books, and, yes, someone took the time to write novels about Resident Evil. The story has varied and evolved over time, but there is one running theme: humans killing zombies. OK, history class over. Now onto the review:

The mobile version’s storyline is fairly simple: you are Leon S. Kennedy, a new hire Secret Service agent, and your job is to save Ashley Graham, the President’s daughter, from evil monsters. You save her, and then she gets caught again. Then you save her. She gets caught. That repeats a few more times. Then, finally, you save her for good. There are 12 levels in all, and they are each extremely challenging (more on why later, but it took me upwards of four times to beat each level – sometimes as many as 15). As you go through the game you amass currency, and use that currency to buy weapons, ammunition, healing herbs, grenades and other upgrades. Each level involves killing a shit ton of enemy creatures, each of which is ferociously attempting to bite your head off. In essence, it’s a simple RPG-style shooting game.

The first thing you’ll notice are the controls. As is becoming popular, on-screen buttons for the iPhone appear and disappear as needed. A joystick appears on the left-hand side and allows you to move around (there is no strafing). When you draw your weapon, you freeze and cannot move, and a red laser appears. You aim the laser with the joystick and shoot at will. Here’s the problem: aiming perfectly is damn near impossible; you simply don’t have the precision on the touch-screen to move the laser exactly where you want. When the enemy is more than 2 feet away (so, always), it is maddeningly difficult to aim. I eventually got used to it, but it took a really long time – and I have yet to perfect it. Given that head shots are far more valuable than body blows, you will surely miss the precision of better controls.

Conversely, the graphics are rock-solid. They are on par with those of Doom: Resurrection; the enemies are well-detailed, the lighting is perfect, and the characters’ movements are surprisingly smooth. Furthermore, the bad guys vary quite nicely: I never got sick of blowing the heads off the same baddies time after time. They also had different weaknesses and “personalities.” For example, one type of enemy is blind and simply identifies your location based on sounds you make (so, you can shoot a giant bell across the room and the enemy will charge at the bell instead of you). Others attack in such a manner that you have to dodge their blows; this is all about timing: you hit the “dodge” button as soon as it pops up on the screen and you’re scot free.

Again, it takes forever to get used to the controls, and this is the game’s Achilles’ heel. It is the reason why the levels can be so frustrating. Time and time again, especially early on, I would complete 50-75% of a level and then be unable to aim my laser at an enemy before he tore me to shreds. To top it off, there’s no auto-save, so I would have to start from scratch all over again. That said, the diversity and depth of the levels made me smile. Each is different, and has a unique setting. Your tasks change from level to level; sometimes you have to just walk towards the exit and stick a bullet in everyone on the way. Other times, you act as a sniper and try to take out the enemies as they attempt to grab your dear Ashley and take her into their lair. You’ll barely get through each level, even if you’ve got plenty of health and ammo. The strategy for each level also changes depending on the variety of guns you’ve got to choose from. You can only carry/buy so many, and your choices are integral to your success.

I’m honestly torn on whether I’d recommend Resident Evil 4: Mobile Edition. I played through the first few levels largely because I had to and not because I wanted to. After pulling teeth with the controls for a bit, it was smooth sailing: I immersed myself in the game’s diverse levels and jaw-dropping graphics. If you were as excited to see this title pop into the App Store as we were, I’d say its a no-brainer: forgo the lunch money and spend the $7.99. However, if you haven’t any allegiance to or experience with the Resident Evil franchise, you should probably pass on this one.

What we like:

• Awesome levels. Deep, challenging levels. Valiant enemies and rigorous fight scenes. This game was difficult enough to frustrate you, but just enough to keep you from growing any gray hairs.
• Variety. Resident Evil 4 is chalk-full of weapons and zombies: what else could you want?
• Engaging gameplay. Fight scenes are uniquely entertaining, and you’ll be hooked in no time.

What we don’t like:

• Control stick. This game has one critical flaw, and it is massive. Like a bloody pimple on a beautiful face, the poor controls stick out and make it difficult for even a Resident Evil lover like myself to whole-heartedly endorse the iPhone version.
• Auto-save. The joystick problem was magnified by the lack of checkpoint saving in this game. Personally, any game with longer levels ought to have auto-save built in.
• Menus. This is a bit nit-picky, but the menus take forever to go through. It took too many taps to get from one level to the next, or to select a new weapon, or to sell existing weapons, or… you get the point.

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Remember that big reveal we did of Nokia’s next internet tablet? Well, these FCC documents appear to show the very device… or at least its outline. The picture is only for the FCC to show where its little “OK by us” label is, and there’s no revelation other than the basic shape (lozenge) and many buttons or knobs around the edges (indeterminate).

If you click the image, you’ll get a nice big version that you can scour for clues. Engadget notes that its 3G specs are in the Goldilocks zone for T-Mobile — that is to say, juuust right.

Not exactly “man on the moon” level of news here but we thought you should know.

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It shouldn’t really come as a surprise considering the fact that we’ve known for some time that Samsung is hard at work on multiple Android devices, but the NYT is reporting that Samsung will have multiple touch-screen Android devices in the market next year for under $100.

Casey Ryan, the product manager for the Reclaim at Samsung, said that by next year, touch-screen phones, with full Web browsers running the Android operating system will be available for well under $100.

via Bits

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Apparently this phone is getting ready for a big Muay Thai match. It’s a Vertu—“vertu” is “virture” in French!—designed by one Norihiko Inoue. No, you cannot buy it, I just thought it looked neat.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the phone is mostly air, like a building. Says the designer:

Thanks to the advances in technology mobile phones are getting smaller and thinner each year, however phones have to be a certain size for us to hold them and look at the screen properly. In my concept most of the electronic components are incorporated into the phone’s outer shell, but the size of the vertu phone remains the same size as it is now with empty space inside.

I think it’s safe to say that I’d much rather use this than a now-boring iPhone.

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Tags: viral, twitter

Can’t get enough of the Motorola Morrison? We can’t say we blame you. While we’re not the biggest fans of the black and blue hue scheme it keeps popping up in, we’re still pretty excited to see Motorola’s massive Android move finally coming to a hardware head.

While the Morrison has had its fair share of camera time, everything we’ve seen has been rather unflattering angles with even more unflattering levels of blur. Luckily for us, it seems Motorola is pretty proud of this design; Czech mobile site Mobil.cz just unearthed a handful of Morrison industrial sketches tucked away in the European Bureau for Industrial Design, showing the handset from just about every angle. It looks a bit meaty around the edges, but — at least from what we can tell right now — we can honestly say that this is looking like the first Moto handset in a long while that we’d carry without a fuss.

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Didja hear that RadioShack is rebranding? The hoopla will of course include some sales to drive traffic. Apparently the Pre will be part of this upcoming sale and will be only $150 for new customers. Nice.

We’ve seen it lower thanks to a Best Buy snafu and one website offering a one day rebate, but this might be the first legitimate price cut on the Pre. Now just to be clear, this is for new Sprint customers. Current subscibers eligable for equipment upgrades will still have to pay $219 for the handset, which is $20 more than what you’ll pay at a Sprint store, natch.

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Let’s say you drop your phone in the sink or pool for whatever reason. You are, in fact, S.O.L., but there’s a couple things you can do to minimize the damage. The first, obviously, is to remove the battery from the device… unless you have an iPhone, at which point you can thank Apple for choosing form over function.

Step two—and sit down for this because it’s a doozy—is to submerge your battery-less phone into a bowl of dry rice indicates that water was there, sorry!

Oh! And if you own an iPhone (or iPod Touch), you can slip it inside the Sanwa Waterproof Bag. That way, you can take awesome iPhone photos and video of your poolside shenanigans and zip ‘em off to Facebook post-haste.

via Dvice

Flickr

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Motorola appears to be investing in Android pretty heavily, but we haven’t seen anything definitive yet. But BGR has been tipped off that Moto is hard at work on skinning Android like HTC has done with Sense on the Hero. The question, however, is whether or not “Blur” is merely a skin on top of Android or if Blur is as deeply integrated as Sense. The rest is a bit jumbled since I haven’t had enough coffee this morning so I’ll leave it up to you to decipher.

The skin/OS is named “Blur” by Motorola and will be heavily web-connected. All Android devices will be able to upgrade different sections of the OS and interface all over the air. There’s been something mentioned about a device key that’s attached to your email and passwords for your social networking accounts. What this presumably does is let all the content be pushed right to the device from the web which includes updates and actual upgrades.

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