Having to go into a certain location to talk to somebody by voice across the planet was a bit of a hassle but still very welcoming in the department of technology that let us communicate almost anywhere on Earth almost instantaneously. The first cellphone was called a Field telephone used by the military in 1910 and was used during the two World Wars. The first official cellphone that was released to the public was invented by Martin Cooper, a Motorola company engineer in 1973. From then, people jumped on the cellular phone bandwagon. In 1994, the first official smartphone with applications like a PDA, Simon, was released to the public. It was the size of a brick, had a digital touchscreen with email, a calendar, calculator, and a settings menu! With the price tag over just over a grand, this bad boy was a must. The second smartphone that came to the glory of the consumer was The Nokia Comminicator series in which had a clamshell form. The smartphone was released in 1996. Later on that year in March, HP released the mother of smartphones: The HP OmniGo 700LX Communicator Plus. Such a long name for a device, but with good reason. This device had a PDA-like functionality. It had a flip form factor with a keyboard on the bottom form and a screen on the top. It had MIDI-formatted music on it, folder browsing, a photo viewer, email, calculator, and even games! Although was still in black and white, the smartphone was a revolution in the mobile voice technology department. As more companies jumped in, years went by and more and more smart mobile devices were being released. In the mid-to late 2000’s Symbian, Blackberry, Nokia, HP, and many other companies released smartphones with complex operating systems that became extremely popular and became more focused on entertainment. With browsing, video playing, and more things that you could only do on a regular computer were being implementing on smartphones. Apple, in 2007, revolutionized the smartphone with their iPhone. The iPhone had a whole dedicated app marketplace, a gorgeous LCD touchscreen and many features that other smartphones didn’t. A year later, Google came out with the first Android smartphone. As years past after that, the iOS and Android devices became the dominant smartphones in the marketplace and became bigger, more powerful, and more smart. Each year they came out with more and more features. Today, the best smartphones have become almost as powerful as a standard desktop and even have just about all the capabilities of a laptop PC!
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When I grew up with my Dad in Louisiana when I was around 5 or 6, he ran an online video gaming business. In his room, there boxes filled with tons of PC and console games. I had a few gaming consoles and a Mac PC. I grew up liking video games because of his love in his business and I am happy for that. I genuinely enjoyed the thrill of playing them. It was a totally interactive experience and I was in charge of the outcome of the character being played as in the video games that I played. I enjoyed a wide range of many different kinds of video games. Anywhere from shooting and action to racing and family-friendly. Since I was a kid living in my Dad’s home, during the years of his online business, I have enjoyed video games so much in fact, it has become my favorite hobby. The reason I enjoy games and have become my favorite hobby, is due to the fun factor. Movies can contain an enjoyable story with engaging characters and great atmosphere. Video games can contain the same factors as movies do but with an interactive experience rather than a passive viewer’s experience. Game play usually takes longer to completely view all of the content involved. Playing and achieving certain goals within the game world can unlock rewards that help benefit me or my character in the virtual experience. Gaming to me has changed the way I look at the world. Many sources of entertainment are an outcome to many people’s hard work. If a certain group of people really enjoy doing something enough and put their mind into the outcome of what they like, success can be achieved. It is pretty awesome in my eyes to see dedicated communities that work hard to achieve what they want. This is why video gaming is my favorite hobby. The music I listen to contains a wide range of different genres. Genres including soundtrack, pop, country, rock, and techno all fall into the kind of music that I listen to. When I was a kid around the ages of 5 or 6, my Dad or my Grandmother would drive me to elementary school and on my way to school, they would have the radio on. On the radio, country music played. I began to be into songs from country artists such as Faith Hill, Lee Ann Womack, Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, Kenny Chesney, and others. The first of my favorite songs were that of what adults would listen to in the South: country music. As I grew into my older years, around 8 or 9, I moved to Houston, Texas with my Mom and Stepdad. With the people I grew up with, pop, hip-hop, and other more popular urban-genres were amongst the genres of music I had started to listen to. On the radio and on Television, stations would play music from artists like Madonna, Usher, Inrique Iglesias, Destiny’s Child, and others which I really enjoyed. As I grew into the mid 2000’s, my hobby of playing video games lead me to the enjoyment of hip-hop music. The start of my scent going elsewhere in music was my time with a video game called, “Midnight Club 3". Rock, techno, and other genres of music started to dive into my taste in music. My exposure to different media, friends, environment, and school had helped me explore the different kinds of music around the world and have left a satisfying taste in my mouth. As I have grown up, my library of music has grown with many different tastes in mind. A lot of which comes from the games I have played and the movies I have seen. Music is very important to me because it fills in the gaps of boredom, aids in my concentration in doing homework, and provides enlightened mood. The Drunken Peasants is a podcast that is uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and iTunes. On the show, three to four people on webcams play videos from sources such as the news and YouTube to make fun of them by providing commentary and/or responding to them. They upload anywhere between 10 minutes of clips to 4 hour long episodes. The clips they play contain content such as news stories from Fox or CNN, people’s rantings about various topics like feminism, educational material, and other videos that talk about current events. The hosts in the show – Ben, TJ, Scotty, and Paul - also read articles from news sources and break them down by arguing points against them and mocking them. Sometimes they will bring on guests who support their Patreon page (a public funding) or other popular YouTubers/little-known celebrities. Perks are achieved such as exclusive videos, discounts towards items from their shop, and being on their show from certain levels of money donated to them through their Patreon website.
The purpose of their show is to entertain and have a pretty large audience, over 140,000 subscribers on YouTube. They also have their own dedicated website, drunkenpeasants.wiki which is updated by not the hosts of The Drunken Peasants, but by some of their fans. Hangouts to various bars and other places of entertainment with their fans are organized by Ben from the show and posted ahead of time on their Facebook page. Often times at least 100 fans show up to these meetups and videos of them are recorded then posted on YouTube and Facebook. Due to their dark comedic nature of the show, there’s no surprise that controversy is a big factor of the show. Since the hosts have no fear in mocking the common stupidity in human nature, they receive much hate from the people’s videos they cover and fans of those mocked. In my other post, I reviewed the PSP (PlayStation Portable) which was released in 2005 (2004 in Japan) by Sony. As the successor of the PSP, Sony announced the PS Vita at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) 2011 in California. The PS Vita had dual analog thumb sticks, as well as improved hardware including a higher resolution OLED touch screen, touch pad on the back of the device, gyroscope, more RAM, more powerful GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), and more powerful CPU (Central Processing Unit). The system had added features that the PSP didn’t have such as full PlayStation 4 Remote Play support, more social interaction, faster navigation, and other features that made many gamers hyped for its release. The PS Vita was finally released later that year in December 17, 2011. Sony sold over 300,000 in its first week’s release in Japan and Over a million globally. Games’ graphics on the console were on par with the graphics of games on 7th gen. consoles such as the PS3. Games such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and wipEout 2048 were graphicly impressive to many as well as myself, but were not as impactful as the PSP’s launch titles. As of this day the PS Vita is still an enjoyable on-the-go handheld gaming device in my opinion but popularity and support has declined steeply since its first few weeks of release due to expensive propitiatory memory cards, mobile gaming market shift, issues with PS4 Remote Play, small game library, and other factors. The handheld gaming console has great potential. With what we saw with the PSP and its absolutely huge game library that made it sell so well, the PS Vita could have followed its predecessor’s tracks. At the time of the PSP’s release, playing video and listening to music, and looking at photos-all on one portable device that you could put in your pocket was a revolutionary concept that was put into action with great success, because cell phones like the original iPhone that could do all that wasn’t released until 2007. In 2012, we already had smartphones with gaming, video, web browsing, and everything else, so with the PS Vita just out in market, it failed to compete mainly with other handheld devices. In the wake of all this, hopefully Sony will announce a totally new and competitive portable gaming console that can be a hybrid of a smartphone and a dedicated gaming handheld within the next year or so. Hence their next device has a greater chance at success like the PSP did. The PSP (PlayStation Portable) was a portable game console that was revealed at E3 2004 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in L.A. The console’s reveal left people shocked at how powerful a portable device could become. Playing on par PlayStation 2 games in your hand at the time was an unbelievable! It was revealed to have so many features that many could only dream of: watching video, listening to music, playing 3d games, and web browsing all on one device! There were devices that had features like the PSP but were expensive. The device has a directional pad, thumb stick nub, 4 action buttons, two trigger buttons, a button to change the screen brightness and many others. It uses the original fat USB, unlike the micro-USB we all use, and uses a standard A/C port to charge but the USB can be used to charge it as well. The console has a 4.3” screen with a resolution of 480x272, 32 MB of RAM (64 MB for later models), Graphics card with a clock speed of 133 Mhz and 2 MB of VRam. This all may seem like really weak specifications but at the time was really powerful. Also, the games that run on it were optimized ONLY for the system, so the games could take advantage of the console to its fullest extent. When it comes to games, the PSP released with games like Need for Speed: Underground Rivals, Wipeout Pure, and Dynasty Warriors. Not only did it launch with popular games, popular games all throughout the PSP’s lifecycle were released and was supported by many big third-party developers all throughout its life. After more than 10 years, the PSP is still a popular device to play games that all of us remember. To many people like me, so far there is no portable gaming device that surpasses that PSP’s gameplay. |
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