We’ve seen game controller and plenty of other great mods before for the loved but unfortunately canceled VAIO UX-series UMPC, but it looks like one person has taken the game to a whole new level by mounting a PS3 controller directly to the device.

It’s not clear exactly how the Ps3 controller is mounted to the UMPC, but it seems to be very firmly attached, and is connected to the UX via Bluetooth. The grips of the controller have been shaved off, presumably to make the rig more compact or perhaps easier to hold.

The Vaio UX is powerful for a UMPC, but definitely can’t handle intense modern games. When it comes to older emulated gaming, or less 3D intense arcade style gaming, this mod seems to work perfectly, even for an FPS (as you’ll see below).

YouTube user pochowandpoch (the creator of the mod) has a number of videos showing the rig in use playing Halo, Mario Kart, and Metal Slug, among others:

There’s also a video that gives a better look at the removed grips  and how the controller attaches to the UX:

Thanks to its desktop OS running nature, and the ability to run emulators, this certainly represents one of the most versatile hand-held gaming machines in the world. Now if only Sony would quit canceling all of its innovative handheld devices….

So Google tell us that the Chromebooks will be fast. It all hinges on the apps (again!)

I took the newly released Angry Birds for Chrome and tested it on a desktop, a tablet and a netbook. I also took a beta version of Chrome and tested it on that. Then I took a native version downloaded via AppUp (Yes, Angry Birds is already available for your Windows desktop!)

The results – I’m not impressed with the Chrome version at all. Windowed and running slowly on Chrome. The Native version runs flawlessly.

This, of course, isn’t a Chromebook test but remember, Chromebooks will run in Intel Atom N570 (at least the first devices) so the CPU and GPU power is limited. The Chrome OS is likely to be faster and WebGL will get better and as we go forward, the platforms will obviously get better but based on what I’ve seen this evening, I’m a little wary of performance. It’s not going to stop me from buying an Acer Chromebook for testing but this test gave me a good reality kick.

Update: Feeback from others in my circle that have tested isn’t that positive either.

Note: We’re not sponsored by AppUp or Intel. The ads you see are agency sales.

There’s one thing that was clear from last nights live testing of the Aspire One 522 – I’m the worst person in the world to demonstrate 3D games. Interestingly though, that’s because I never have devices that can play games. In the last 5 years we’ve seen just a handful of mobile devices that can play games and the fact that I was thrown into Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournament demos shows that the Acer Aspire One 522 is quite unique – and an indicator of where netbooks are going next. We tried hard to find showstoppers and major issues, design problems, heat and noise or anything that would confirm that this is a cheap device but no, after 3 hours, it was clear that the Aspire One 522 is a real bargain and a true upgrade option for those with first or even second generation netbooks.

Highlights and Lowlights

• 1080p playback via local or YouTube works flawlessly on-screen (1280×720) or via HDMI
• In normal use, this is a 6 hour working device with a 3-hour gaming capability, 5 hours or more video playback and up to 10 hours with radios-off in low-power use as a text-entry device.
• No heat or noise to speak of although the fan is constantly spinning and can sometimes be heard or felt through the chassis.
• The Hard Disk seems to be a bottleneck in some situations
• Mono speaker just about does its job
• The glossy screen appears to be a little washed out compared to high-end displays
• Wifi reception is better than average
• No USB 3.0 or charging USB port
• Plastics very thin
• Access to memory and HDD is easy. Upgrade to 4GB is possible (Only 2GB available in Windows 7 Starter)
• Gaming needs more testing but viewers on the live session seemed very excited!
• Battery life / weight ratio is very good

A word of warning though, in terms of CPU processing power, there’s not a lot of difference here between the Intel Pinetrail platform in single or dual-core variants. in a pure-CPU video rendering test we saw the Aspire One coming in at 15% faster than a Intel N450 CPU which puts it between the N450 and N550 in terms of processing power. Compared to first-gen netbooks, that’s a great improvement but its far from mainstream.

It’s the ‘balance’ of CPU, HD Video and 3D that works so well with the Acer Aspire One 522 (and, we suspect, other Fusion C-50 APU -based devices) and if Intel don’t one-up the C-50 with Cedar Trail in a significant way, they will lose a good percentage of netbook sales. At €299, there’s very little room for beating AMD on price.

So here are the three videos we made during the 2.5hrs online last night. As usual they are captures of the low-quality stream but I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of them. Thanks again to everyone that joined and helped-out in the live session. Spread the word – this is how reviews should be done!

Part 1 – Overview and first impressions.

Part 2 – Heat, battery life, video performance, browsing tests

Part 3 – Video testing, webcam, high and lowlights, Crystalmark test

Although I didn’t know this at the time, it turns out that Antix is quite the multi-OS gaming platform. It’s a solution that allows purchase, play, sharing and trial of games between people and different devices running different OS’ (More here.) At the MeeGo conference last week I caught up with Costas Stylianou of Intel’s AppUp team who was demonstrating a multiplayer game.
While the game demo might be interesting, I think it’s more interesting to see Intel demonstrating a gaming platform thats is being ported to AppUp.

The demo is being done on a MeeGo TV platform and a MeeGo Tablet – the WeTab.

I’m looking forward to a multiplayer game of Raging Thunder with another netbook owner soon but watch out, it seems like I was able to play while holding a camera and interviewing Costas!

I know its been a while, but I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a full tablet PC so that I could do better demos than simply using my Sony Vaio UX180 and showing you what’s happening using a monitor as I have done in the past. Hopefully you will agree that the format of this video demo is better than those that I did previously!

But beside all of that, have a look at the Crayon Physics Deluxe video demo.

The game works great with touchscreens and there is even a demo that you can try before purchasing:

• Official Crayon Physics website
• Download the Crayon Physics Deluxe Demo

The idea of the game is that you are drawing with a crayon, and your drawings become physical objects that interact with the rest of the crayon based levels . The goal is to get the red ball to touch the star, then you get to move on to the next level. There is more than 70 levels to complete in the full game. The game was also the grand prize winner of the Independent Games Festival in 2008!

An interesting story over at Kotaku talks about a new service called OnLive. The vision of OnLive is to bring processing intensive gaming to low end hardware, a sort of on-demand gaming service.

The way it works is essentially opening a video stream from the OnLive server to an OnLive client application on your computer. Your inputs would be sent to the server, and all of the game’s processing would happen on the server and the results would be streamed to your computer. The idea is actually not new, we told you about StreamMyGame back in June of 2008 which uses the same basic idea except you can use your own personal computer to act as the server. The idea was targeted toward those who already had expensive gaming computers, and could use StreamMyGame to play games on lower end hardware over their own network.

OnLive aims to bring high quality gaming to those with low-end hardware, without the need to own expensive equipment. By staging all of the processing on their own servers, the real bottleneck is not hardware performance, but instead, internet connection speed. OnLive says that full quality SD gaming can be achieved on a 1.5mbps connection, and 720p with a 5mbps connection. OnLive says that they are using patented technology to do the video compression, and say that games will play through their service at up to 60 frames per second. If there is any artifacting or lag in the streamed game video, OnLive will have a hard time convincing any hardcore gamers to use their service.

Interestingly, the Kotaku article mentions that OnLive claims that their game video streams will have a ping of less than one millisecond. They also said that their patented video compression will take about one millisecond to complete as well. If true (and there aren’t any other lag points on the way) these times should mean that you will get nearly lag free gaming on any hardware that can play back the video stream, and has a fast enough internet connection. That category could include netbooks and lower end hardware like the MIDs and UMPCs that we cover here on UMPC Portal.

So what would it really mean for people who like to play games but own netbooks? Obviously you would be able to play graphically complex games that your netbook would never be able to handle rendering on its own, but there are more benefits. This style of server-side gaming would mean not only no downloads, but no instillations of games either. Theoretically, this could mean being able to play a game like World of Warcraft, which currently consumes about 15GB of your HDD, on a device that has even less storage than the game itself requires for normal instillation. Not only would you be able to skip the 15GB download, but you wouldn’t need to wait for a long instillation session. Another advantage this has for netbook and other mobile hardware users is that on-demand gaming doesn’t require a CD/DVD drive. The majority of netbooks out there do not come with CD/DVD drives, and unless you want to play around with .ISO files, you are usually out of luck when it comes to installing games to your system. OnLive’s service would make an easy entry point for someone who doesn’t know how to mount an .ISO, but would still like to try some of the latest and greatest gaming.

All of this sounds a little bit too good to be true right? Hopefully that isn’t the case. Kotaku says that they had a chance to test the service (albeit, in a controlled environment) and were able to play Crysis (a game known for bringing some gaming rigs to their knees) on a low spec machine. The OnLive service is still in internal beta, with an external beta test planned for this summer. We’ll keep an eye on OnLive and see how it all turns out.

Quickly I want to also mention that OnLive plans on rolling out a small piece of hardware that one could use to have the OnLive gaming experience on their TV. The little box, probably not much larger than a 2.5” external HDD, could be hooked up to your HDTV via HDMI, and given a fast enough connection, play high end games in 720p on your TV. The unit is targeted to have a competitive price, possibly lower than that of the Wii.

Well done Amazon. At last an easy to-use selection of ‘no-CD’ games that you can download, test and buy from your mobile PC.

Amazon launched their Game Downloads section on Tuesday. It’s a new section of Amazon.com that allows you to choose and trial any of the games and then purchase it if you like it. Game downloads are nothing new but this simple service with this trusted brand could be just what the casual gamers on netbooks want.

There are currently just under 600 titles available from various software houses and download and trial is a simple process of logging in, downloading a download application and then downloading and installing the app.

I tried Airport Mania on the Medion Akoya Mini netbook and the download process worked very smoothly. The game worked smoothly too as I seemed to have killed 30 minutes of my day. (The maximum trial time of a game is 30 minutes)

The selection of games is definitely ‘casual’ but this download model, combined with the Amazon brand and the millions of netbooks out there without optical drives could tempt many software houses into adapting their older titles giving them a fresh new market to step into.

If anyone tests this out, be sure to drop some comments below for other readers. What netbook and what game did you try? How did it go for you? Have you used game download services for the your netbook before? If so, which service did you try?

Via Buzz Out Loud podcast 903

Chrysler are introducing a ‘web-edition’ mobile Internet device package for their cars which comprises a Wifi/3G router with one year of 3G data contract, a Sony PSP, a Dell Mini 9, an Apple iPod Touch and Eye-Fi wifi/sd card. The option price is $1999. Mobile Internet Mobility!

It got me thinking, given $2000 and assuming you had no mobile devices, what devices would you choose? You’d need to cover the following mobile scenarios.

• PC Computing (screen, keyboard, storage, desktop OS)
• Handheld web browser and e-book reader
• Media (video and audio) playback
• Photography / Video
• Gaming
• PIM
• Navigation (with turn-by-turn)
• Connectivity (voice, data, wifi, 3G, BT)

[continued...]

Read the full story

StreamMyGame is a fairly new service enables high end gaming on low end hardware by using a host computer to run the game then playing it remotely from another computer. The service, which offers a free and paid version, has been demonstrated as working well on the Eee PC among other netbooks and UMPCs. Today a news post on the StreamMyGame website says that a new version of their software has been released that targets UMPCs and netbooks, and claims compatibility with over 100 devices. Additionally they mention that similar performance should be seen on upcoming MID devices. The software is compatible with Windows Vista, XP, and even Linux.

“The Linux player has been requested by our Eee PC members and has been optimised to run on both the original and new ranges of the Eee PC. The Window’s player has also been optimised.” — Richard Faria, StreamMyGame’s CEO.

The video below shows Crysis and Quake 4 being played on an Eee 701. Crysis is an extremely graphically and CPU intensive game which requires a beefy gaming rig to run at a good framerate. Crysis runs at a respectable framerate on the 701 to say the least. Of course performance is mostly reliant on the host computer, but this demonstrates the ability of the software quite nicely.

The video is rather impressive, but I can’t seem to think of a situation where this would really be practical. I don’t know many people who have a $2k+ custom gaming rig who would prefer to play the game remotely on an 800×480 Eee 701 screen.

I suppose true remote play (over the internet, not through your home network) would make it possible to do some mobile gaming while you are on the road, but I don’t think it is a real replacement for fast paced FPS (first person shooter) games. You could make the argument that it would be convenient to be able to play World of Warcraft while away from home, or maybe a slower paced RTS (real time strategy game) like Starcraft would work well. Surely a touch type-able keyboard and USB mouse would be required for a good gaming experience with most games.

What might be useful for some (though I’m not sure if it is cross platform) would be the ability to play Windows games on your Linux based netbook or UMPC. Whatever the situation you may need to remotely play your high end games, StreamMyGame seems to have a solid platform set up to help you do just that.

I gave this a try about a week ago using my Dell desktop as a host (not a gaming machine by any stretch of the imagination), and my Sony UX180 UMPC as the client. Setup was pretty confusing, and in the end I couldn’t get Day of Defeat: Source to play on my UX180, but I’ll give it another shot, maybe with a non-Steam game, and try to get some usage experience to share. Give this a shot on your own device and let us know how well it works.