Mobile Phone Accessories Review

Yes, we easily could have spent days on Fun For Mobile, and even if we had packed a lunch and camped-out, we still just barely would have covered the tip of the iceberg, because they keep adding new stuff and updating all the time.  But we grew curious about what else was out there.  Our search took us next to Mobile Rated (www.mobilerated.com), where other explorers promised we would find “a nice collection of free goodies, including Java games, puzzles, trivia, and other apps.”  Mobile Rated perfectly complemented Fun For Mobile, because it specializes in games and apps like “FFM” specializes in tones and images. 

Mobile Rated especially reassured us all their downloads are perfectly legal.  Truth told, we hadn’t even considered that copyright thing, so the reminder and reassurance helped a lot.  Mobile Rated made searching easy, letting us survey the most popular games or allowing us to search for the stuff especially matched with our phones’ makes and models. 

Sometimes, sites have forums where no one posts or the posts are so techie-nerdie-cryptic you must show your “squint squad” membership card to make sense of them.  On Mobile Rated, however, we found lots of posts in each of seven useful categories: free games, free applications, installation over the air, installation via PC, mobile devices, data plans, and suggestions for the site itself.  The game reviews were pretty good, but games are so much a matter of personal taste it’s hard to know which recommendations really have any value.  We especially appreciated the installation assistance, because it broke down the how-to-fix-its into instructions we actually could understand and follow.

Because I’m not exactly your state-of-the-art computer gamer, I happily downloaded my old favorite Solitaire game.  The download was quick, easy, and painless, and I was turning and sorting my little cards in practically no time.

Because we kind blew the budget on the phone, we didn’t have a whole lotta cash, credit, or PayPal left-over for “fun” stuff; but the peer pressure is overwhelming.  All the cool kids have custom ringtones, wallpaper, videos, games, and apps.  We cannot let the mobile-phone bullies make fun of us in the lunch area.  So, we went in search of the best sites for free stuff.  After all, what can be better than free—especially if it’s free and cool.

Our first destination: Fun for Mobile (www.funformobile.com).  What a great site!  A mobile-phone apps almost-paradise and everything free for the clicking.  We especially liked how the site did most of the search-work for us: enter your phone’s make and model, click on your feature-of-choice, and—poof!—a host of choices.  Actually “wide array” probably more accurately and discreetly describes it, because Fun For Mobile offers something for every taste from cute and innocent through rico suave and all the way to full-on raunchy. 

Without exaggerating, we confidently can say that we found thousands of ringtones, images, videos, wallpapers, and all the rest..  Because Fun For Mobile served-up such an embarrassment of riches, we let the site do still more of the search-work.  For example, we could choose among “popular,” “most popular,” and “Top Ten” ringtones, and we could select today’s greatest hits, the week’s favorites, or the month’s download leaders.  How often do we get to decide just how trendy we want to be?

Once we found the stuff we liked best and probably would not gross-out or mothers and English teachers, of course, we went ahead and tested the downloads.  They went quickly, easily.  Our cool stuff was up and running, ready for use and display just in time for lunch.

We finally caught-up with the calendar and most of the North American population: We finally wrapped our minds around the fact that our mobile phones really are not so much for making phone calls as for doing all the cool stuff your laptop can do when your laptop is not there.  Oh yeah, there’s still plenty of communication goin’ on, but it’s way more sophisticated than actually talking into the mouthpiece and waiting to hear a voice through your ear: it’s all about texting and leaving comments on MySpace and Facebook.  We celebrated the ritual debate about “predictive text vs. no predictive text,” discovering that, just like you cannot convert a PC user to a Mac fan, the predictors and anti-predictors can agree to disagree, but they never win converts.  We finally get it.

Most of all, we have figured out that our mobile phones exist more for our entertainment than for communication or transmission of vital data.  And we grudgingly accept that, until we really and truly can watch episodes of “Gossip Girl” on our phones—you know, like really seeing and hearing them—games come-in as first runner-up.  So, we asked ourselves, what are all the cool kids playing?  We went to our favorite site, clicked on “favorites,” and—wow!—we discovered Yahtzee at number one!

We know what you’re thinkin, because we thought it, too: Yahtzee, the ol’ granny game we used to play on rainy days when we were so bored we thought we would explode—that Yahtzee? 

Yup, that Yahtzee, except that on your mobile phone, somehow, it feels more like playing a slot machine, and you don’t have to wait for your bonehead cousin to figure out whether it’s a straight or one 1.  As a matter of fact, that same old Yahtzee has millions, count ‘em millions, of avid fans all around the world.  It earned its popularity.  Oh, and it also has its high-powered students, too: A guy at Cornell University actually wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about Yahtzee.  Can you imagine?  The guy is Doctor of Yahtzee.  Squint Squaders, rethink your positions, because it requires more thought and strategic calculation than you imagined: exactly how often will you roll a full house in the course of one game?  You will roll more than one, you know.

Of course, the free download went lickety-split, and our little fingers were flyin’ in no time.  Within the first free minute, we understood why it drove up the charts “with a bullet.”  It’s fun.  Simple as that.  It’s fun.

Okay, we admit we’re just guessing here, but we have a really strong feeling that “Fighter” and “VirtuaFighter” and all the other incarnations and reincarnations of the Fighter franchise muscled their way into the Top 5 favorites because boys like them.  Except when they finally download the game and start to play it, even boys realize it’s not that great.  More hits on the download site, but fewer players in the real world.

Like Pong, PacMan, and all those other games evolved from eighties and nineties arcade favorites, Fighter for mobile attempts to recreate a cool arcade game on a tiny screen with a keypad.  The keypad part makes the game incredibly difficult—as in frustrating, infuriating, obnoxious, stupid, boring, and “what were we thinking when we downloaded this?” 

In truth, we could give the graphics a pretty good score: the Brazilian coders who developed the game made the figures move and bend and jump and duck and roll almost like real human bodies do.  And we genuinely appreciate the tutorial that patiently, clearly introduced us to the game.  Although the concept is just as simple as it seems—I try to get my guy to bash the snot out of the other guy—the bashing doesn’t exactly come easily.  The tutorials showed us possibilities for dazzling spin moves and aerials that would have transformed us into virtual Bruce Lees and Jackie Chans.  No, we don’t think the tutorials lied, but with the keystrokes mapped all around the d-pad and the number keys, you gotta have some mighty nimble—like Gumby-nimble—fingers to make those moves appear on your very own screen.  The frustration starts there.

Promising to perfect those nimble finger moves another time, we resorted to what all boys do when they fight on the playground—we just kicked and punched randomly with the simplest keystrokes.  But we quickly discovered that our random and genuinely lame kicks and punches usually hit nothing but air.  That little revelation drove the frustration to the redline.

Yeah, after whetting our appetites for violence and butt-kicking, Virtua Fighter really left us unsatisfied.  We respectfully suggest that Brazilian exporters probably should stick to acai berries.

For those of us initiated into the cell-phone world back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and our phones were approximately the size of small boulders, the fact that the new ones actually complete calls seems pretty overwhelming. Some of just learned how to turn-off the predictive-text keys so that we could send text messages in the words we really intended to use.

Imagine our surprise; therefore, when it finally dawned on us that our “mobiles” have a lot more in common with our laptops than our telephones. A whole new universe opened-up—especially when we discovered the amazing downloadable games we could put on those little handheld powerhouses. Wow! Who knew?

Although we quickly discovered we decided we could download “Final Fantasy” and the other high-powered role-playing games, we decided to start small and work our way up. Arcade games still lead the league, outranking their nearest competitors by tens of thousands of downloads.

And “Pocketman” stands-out as by far the most popular arcade game. PocketMan reprises our childhood favorite, the PacMan arcade game from the 1980’s, updating and adapting it for pocket pc’s. Although it still has all the features we always have loved, the designers have updated the look and added adjustable gameplay. Although I typically advance no further than the saddest, lowest, most pathetic levels, the designers have added lots and lots of higher levels. They also have improved the graphics, upgraded the music, and added a new character, who assists as we struggle through our missions.

Of course, downloadable PocketMan is at least as addictive as the original arcade game. Thank goodness we don’t have to keep pumping-in quarters to keep playing.