Brain Juice

Techmundo 2.0 has posted a great piece about Brain Juice which looks excellent. “I was looking for puzzle games to install on the E61 and I stumbled upon Brain Juice. For those with the Nintendo DS, this game is almost an exact copy of the cult hit Brain Age/Big Brain Academy. In a nutshell, players (and I use the term players very loosely) have to play the mini games daily to train their mental faculties; the more you train, the more mini-games are unlocked. With the E61 being touted as a business phone, I think that games such as these should be a big hit for Digital Chocolate.”

The theory goes that the more you use the old grey matter, the better shape it stays in, much like a muscle. So Brain Juice cues up a series of three short challenges that you must complete every day, just like taking your vitamins.

What ensues is a mix of number, shape and colour recognition problems, along with basic mental arithmetic and memory challenges. Your aptitude is then converted into what Brain Juice calls ‘brain wattage’, a value that’s plotted on a graph so that you can view your progress over the days, weeks and months.

To be honest, it’s all rather reminiscent of our school days, except we weren’t taught by a disembodied brain floating in a lightbulb.

As you complete your three-a-day, you collect medals. The more medals you collect, the greater the range of challenges you open up, ensuring that you don’t end up doing the same three exercises day after day.

The varying exercises do serve to stretch differing parts of your mind. The results are also interpreted and turned into a pie chart that shows where your mental strengths lie: visual comprehension, mathematics or memory.

Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2 PLUS Review

The Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2 PLUS review will be interesting reading for E61 owners- “As any power user of handhelds or smartphones (and in this case PSPs and iPods as well) will know, it’s been possible for ages to convert video clips to play properly on the mobile device. It’s not rocket science, but it is a right royal hassle. To go from (for example) a TV program to my Nokia N93, I’d have to record though composite leads into my MPEG-2 capture card, then use Quicktime Pro to convert the resulting video file into MP4 format. And that’s the easiest way I can think of to do it. Previous attempts usually involved a VHS video recorder as an intermediary. Even those with a TV card in their PC will almost certainly have to go through Quicktime Pro or similar in order to optimise the video files for use on the smartphone.

Enter the MPEG4 Video Recorder 2 PLUS (henceforth referred to as ‘Recorder 2′), a small black box that takes composite video in (that’s the yellow/red/white connectors to you and I) and encodes it to a variety of variants of MPEG-4 and 3GP, in whatever resolution and frame rate you select (chosen from a table of possible settings), to an expansion card loaded in its front. You then insert the card directly into your smartphone, start ‘Gallery’ and start watching. And, before getting too involved with its detailed operation, let me tell you that it works pretty well and that the Neuros kit has found a permanent place in my home audio/video rack. [Let’s hope they don’t ask for it back!”