The Vita’s design turns out to be a good metaphor for the gaming handheld itself. It’s a device that makes some small concessions to the rise of phones and tablets as portable entertainment–things like the touch screen and motion controls, the bare-bones web browser and the obligatory Twitter, Flickr and Netflix apps–but then it ignores them in favor of playing kick-ass, modern video games. Not Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, or Sudoku, but Uncharted, Rayman, and Marvel vs. Capcom. Almost everything else seems like an afterthought.

The Playstation Vita owes much of its gaming prowess to its controls, or more specifically, to the pair of tiny thumb sticks that sit on either side of the 5-inch display. No other handheld has included dual analog sticks before, and although the Vita’s aren’t as easy to master as those of a full-size controller, they put to shame the sliding analog pad of Nintendo’s 3DS. At last, no more compromises for first- and third-person shooters.

To get these games running smoothly, the Vita’s CPU and GPU each have four processing cores. This processor combo is so powerful that some publishers have ported their full-size Playstation 3 games down to the Vita without much compromise. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is just as fluid on the Vita as it is on home gaming consoles. Wipeout 2048 had its framerate knocked down on the Vita, but you can actually race against players of Wipeout HD on the Playstation 3.

The rest of the hardware takes a backseat, with the battery lasting for maybe four hours on a charge, and the front and rear VGA cameras taking grainy photos. But it’s easy to forget about those drawbacks when you’re playing a game that feels like it was made for an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. That’s when the Vita is at its best.

At its worst, the Vita tries to shove touch and motion controls down players’ throats. Uncharted: Golden Abyss, for instance, breaks up its action sequences with tedious tasks, such as rotating an artifact around with the rear touch panel while brushing off virtual dirt with the touch screen. You can almost picture the touch control mandate coming down from a Sony board room, and although some games handle it gracefully–I liked how FIFA Soccer lets you aim on goal with touch controls–most touch and motion options are better off ignored.

I’m also troubled by the inflated prices of some Vita games that are already available on phones and tablets. Gameloft’s Asphalt: Injection costs $30 on the Vita, while Asphalt 6, a nearly identical game with slightly fewer courses and cars, costs $1 on the iPad. Plants vs. Zombies costs $7 on the iPad, but it’s a $15 download on the Vita. The markup, especially for boxed retail games, is a slap in the face to consumers, and I hope the market quickly discourages that kind of pricing.

Of course, using the Vita isn’t just a matter of popping in a cartridge and playing. Sony created a new operating system for the Vita, with bubble-shaped app icons and an iPhone-like home button on the hardware. Yes, it’s another nod to smartphones, but Sony does things its own way. Open apps, for example, are represented as sheets of virtual paper called “LiveAreas,” named for the information they contain. These LiveAreas show friend activity, software updates and news from the publisher, and users can multitask by swiping from one sheet to the next, and can close apps for good by peeling away at the page. As far as app management goes, the Vita is as capable as any smartphone or tablet.

Yet some of the frustration of traditional gaming remains. Sometimes, you’ll load up a game, only to find out that you can’t play online without going back to the LiveArea, downloading an update, then relaunching the game. For some apps, multitasking is out of bounds, so you can’t run a game and the Web browser at the same time, nor can you jump back and forth between two games. This wouldn’t be a major headache, except that the games themselves often suffer from long load times, so if you exit a game completely, you’ll have to wait a while to start playing again.

The Vita’s online system is also a bit of a mess. Instead of offering one social app for all friend interactions, Sony separates friend lists, messages, voice chats, and nearby players into four individual apps, which is silly considering you’ll often get bounced from one to the other. Even worse, some games, such as Uncharted, will sign you out of Sony’s online network for no apparent reason, so you can’t tell if someone’s trying to reach you without going to the home screen.

The main hub for online activity is an app called Near, which lets you find nearby players, look at what other people are playing, and send and receive gifts. It’s a neat idea, but it’d be better if games themselves could handle the gifting and player tracking directly. Also, I never quite understood why I was receiving a particular gift, or how to control who’s getting presents from me. With the Vita, all the right social features are in place, but the execution needs improvement.

When it comes to buying new content online, however, Sony nailed it. Although most of the games sent to me for review came in boxes, all of them can be downloaded from the Playstation Store as well. The online shop also includes old PSP games, PSP Minis, movies and TV shows, so users who splurge for Sony’s overpriced proprietary memory cards–starting at $20 for 4 GB–will have lots of content to choose from. That seems like the way to go unless you don’t mind carrying around a bunch of tiny game cartridges in your pocket.

The Playstation Vita launches on February 22, priced at $250 for a Wi-Fi model, or $300 for one with support for AT&T’s 3G network. (3G data costs $15 per month for 250 MB, or $30 per month for 3 GB.) The 3G is useful if you want to use the Near app or browse the web on the road, but it’s not a very fast connection, and some games won’t even let you play online unless you’re connected to Wi-Fi.

When I first saw the Playstation Vita last June, I said it was handheld gaming’s last stand, and I still think that’s the case. Like any gaming device, the success of the Vita depends how well it’s supported by game publishers and how affordable it gets with time. But phones and tablets are a growing threat. They’re getting more popular, and their games are getting better at a fraction of the cost of the Vita’s games. That’s probably why Sony is working on Android-based gaming as a backup plan.

For now, though, the Vita is what it should be: A defiant gesture in defense of elaborate, expensive, beautiful video games, but with quiet acknowledgments that something bigger is lurking.

Until now, I’ve thought of Foodspotting mostly as an iPhone app which my wife uses to share photos of her meal when we dine out. She loves it. So do enough other people that a million pictures have been uploaded since the app’s launch, making it feel a bit like an Instagram that’s entirely devoted to things you can eat..

But there’s probably a limit to how many folks there are in the world who want to obsessively photograph food. So the new version of Foodspotting that launched this week is designed to broaden the app’s appeal. The photo sharing’s still there–but it feels more like one feature in an app whose primary purpose is to let large numbers of people find and see the best dishes at local restaurants before they place an order.

The new Foodspotting lets you browse popular dishes at nearby restaurants, or pull up a “picture menu” of a specific eatery. Lists of picks from media outlets such as Zagat’s and New York magazine supplement the recommendations from Foodspotting users. And there’s a section of Specials–which consisted of 50% discounts at several restaurants when I checked–which is the start of Foodspotting’s strategy for making money.

With its new emphasis on finding places to go and stuff to eat, Foodspotting feels a bit more like a competitor to traditional sources of restaurant reviews such as Yelp. But the similarities don’t run deep. Foodspotting still focuses on pictures and thumbs-up ratings, not full-blown critiques. And there’s no way to steer other users away from disappointing dishes by giving anything a thumbs down.

Judging from my experience so far, Foodspotting also doesn’t have a Yelplike critical mass of content practically everywhere. At the moment, I’m in Newton Corner, Massachusetts–not exactly a hotbed of fine dining–and only see a few photos from a few restaurants. Yelp, however, has dozens of nearby establishments that have dozens of reviews apiece. (Back home in food-centric San Francisco, Foodspotting is a much richer resource.)

Of course, one of the goals of the new version is to ramp up more quickly. If it works, the app, which was already lots of fun, will be even more fun, and much more useful.

Foodspotting is available for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry; the iPhone and Android editions are the first two to become available in this updated version.

The only input device that the iPad was designed to be used with is the human finger, and designing a decent iPad-compatible stylus is tricky–most of them have blunt, squishy tips that don’t feel like a pen point. But with a brush, being blunt and squishy actually works–and the nicely-made Nomad Brush feels like a real art instrument.

It doesn’t feel exactly like one: For one thing, real brushes, dipped in paint, have a fluid feel that you don’t get when you’re dragging a dry brush over a tablet. And while a real brush is the most gloriously pressure-sensitive input device of them all, this one, like standard styluses, isn’t pressure-sensitive. But in art programs like ArtRage, SketchBook Pro, and Brushes, using Nomad Brush feels much more painterly than working with a garden-variety stylus.

I tried the $39 Nomad Compose, a model with a long brush on one end and a stubbier one on the other. The company makes other models, including the Nomad Play, a stubby version designed for kids. If you paint. draw, or doodle on an iPad, check them out.

For all that Facebook does to help you organize your online relationships, it doesn’t do much to help you interact with folks in the physical world. Every time you enter a restaurant, conference, or hotel lobby, you’re surrounded by strangers who you might be linked to through mutual friends or shared interests. But it’s hard to know who’s who–and if people you know do happen to be nearby, you might or might not stumble across them.

Enter Highlight, a new iPhone app that aims to tell you about the people in your immediate vicinity. Install it on your phone and connect it to your Facebook account, and it’ll begin alerting you to other Highlight users who are within approximately a block and a half of you. You can pull up profiles with information on them from Facebook and send them text messages (such as “where are you, exactly?”). Founder Paul Davison told me that the app is designed to help you meet new people, refresh your memory about people you’ve met before, and alert you to friends who could be lurking right around the corner.

Is there anything creepy about the prospect of random strangers being able to use an iPhone app to determine who you are? Maybe. But people will only show up in Highlight if they’ve joined the service, which should help allay any privacy concerns. And you can choose to be visible only to other Highlight users who you have friends in common with, so you have at least something in common–and can “pause” the app whenever you just don’t want to be identified.

Highlight reminds me of Sonar, an existing iPhone app built around a similar idea. (I stopped using it because it kept notifying me that my wife was nearby–no, really?–and rarely told me about anyone else.) I got to try Highlight a bit yesterday, before it went live to the general public, and it was hard to gauge its usefulness: with only a hundred people using it at the time, it provided only a partial preview of what the experience might be like once thousands or millions of members sign up. But I like the idea behind the app. And if a lot of people start using it, the serendipitious feeling of making new friends and encountering old ones could become an everyday occurrence.

Highlight is currently available in the iTunes App Store; the service part still seems to be invite-only as I write this, but should open up shortly.

When social-magazine app Flipboard debuted on the iPad in July of last year, it instantly became the closest thing yet to a defining app for Apple’s new program–a beautifully-done program that was beautifully tailored to the platform’s strengths. It was hard to imagine it running on any other device.

Starting now, you don’t need to try and imagine what it might be like elsewhere: Flipboard is arriving on the iPhone. It should be available on the App Store around the time this post goes live.

I got a tour of the new app last week from Mike McCue, the company’s cofounder, and have been using it for the past few days. If you’re a fan of the iPad edition, you’ll be pleased with the iPhone one. And I bet a lot of iPhone owners who are new to Flipboard are going to go gaga for it.

At first blush, the iPhone version looks very much like its older, bigger iPad brother–they both sport among the slickest, most thoughtful interfaces you’ll ever see on a mobile app. The features for finding and adding sections of content–from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks, as well as from news sites, blogs, and other sources–are just about identical in both versions. And everything syncs up, so people who use the app on their phone and tablet have the same sections in both places.

But the Flipboard folks had to rethink many fundamentals to make the program work well on a phone–starting with the very act of flipping “pages” that gives the app its name. On the iPad, you flip horizontally; on the iPhone, you flip vertically, as if you were rifling through the cards in a Rolodex. (McCue told me me that it’s a more natural, comfy action to perform with your thumb.)

On the iPad, Flipboard has enough real estate to reformat Web content in ways that almost always leaves it looking better than it did in the first place–especially in the case of stuff from publishers that Flipboard has partnered with, such as the National Geographic, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. It does an excellent job on the iPhone, too, but the smaller screen necessitates a simpler, one-column approach that only works in portrait orientation. Occasionally, items that work wonderfully on the iPad are a tad more ungainly on the iPhone–for instance, some National Geographic photo galleries have captions that oveflow onto a second page.

Like before, Flipboard’s presentation of content varies from source to source: Sometimes you get custom-designed pages, sometimes you get ones that have been automatically streamlined (looking a bit like they do in Instapaper), and sometimes you get the original Web version. In that last case, the app is at the mercy of the original site’s designers, and not every site has a version that works well on an iPhone. Mostly, though, reading on Flipboard is very pleasant: It’s certainly an upgrade from Mobile Safari.

(I did find a few instances where stories were misformatted–whether or not this was a Flipboard issue or something awry at the originating site, I couldn’t tell.)

Until now, unlike competitors such as Zite, Flipboard hasn’t used any algorithmic magic to figure out what stories you might like to read. Instead, it’s relied on human beings to pick stuff–including your friends on Facebook and Twitter, editors and others associated with the Web sites whose feeds are available in Flipboard, and a small team at the company itself. The approach has worked well: The articles and other items that show up in Flipboard appeal at least as much to me as ones collected by algorithms in other apps.

But now Flipboard is starting to use computer science to help find stuff, too. Using technology from the Ellerdale Project, a startup that the company acquired last year, it’s given the iPhone app a section called Cover Stories that attempts to pull together a variety of stories based on a deeper analysis of your social connections and your interaction with Flipboard content. The more you read, the smarter it’s supposed to get about its picks.

Based on a few days with the iPhone app, I didn’t notice Cover Stories being radically more fascinating than other sections of Flipboard, but they did contain some worthwhile items. McCue told me that the company plans to beef up the algorithmic technology in future editions–for instance, to use it to cluster related stories–and to add it to the iPad version. (Cover Stories, along with a few other new features such as support for Tumblr accounts, are iPhone-only at the moment.)

The list of apps that Flipboard competes with was already long on the iPad, and the new iPhone version only makes it lengthier. Among the iPhone apps that feel like rivals in one way or another are Float, News 360, Pulse, and Taptu. Flipboard for the iPhone doesn’t render any of them obsolete, in part because most of them emphasize well-organized news content, while Flipboard is willfully eclectic and more deeply tied into your relationships on social networks. In a single Flipboard session, for instance, you might check out some breaking news, read an offbeat feature or two from a site you don’t know, and enjoy a bunch of photos taken by both friends and strangers; that’s what makes it different and delightful.

As on the iPad, however, the new version’s overall polish and ingenuity raises the bar for apps of all kinds–a welcome characteristic it shares with the new version of Path. And now that we know what Flipboard is like on the iPhone, I have a new question to wonder about: What might it look like on other platforms? McCue didn’t have any news in that department. But he told me that it’s a subject the company will be pondering now that the iPhone version is finished.

StumbleUpon

The service already had an “Explore an Interest” search option that let you enter a keyword and then stumble through sites that related to it. Now it’s much more prominent–it’s part of the StumbleBar, which it wasn’t before–thereby encouraging you to focus your stumbling if you choose. And the list of interests on the StumbleUpon home page is more prominent,

StumbleUpon has also signed up a bunch of media companies and other organizations–from Funny or Die and the CNN to GE and Campbell’s–to create 250 channels, which are feeds of their content. You can follow a channel, then stumble around it, letting you wander randomly in one particular site.

As always, what makes StumbleUpon interesting isn’t StumbleUpon: It’s the sites it leads to, which are quirky, unpredictable, and, much of the time, really neat. That hasn’t changed, and it remains mighty appealing even if you direct your exploration a little more than you might have in the past.

The StumbleUpon folks gave me a sneak peek of the revised service, and I enjoyed what I saw. (I don’t check in on the service all that often, but when I do, it’s hard to stop stumbling.) The whole experience feels more modern, and I’ll bet StumbleUpon fans like it, as long as they can get used to the all-new look, which has little in common with the site’s old, familiar self. (The StumbleUpon mobile apps haven’t been updated yet and don’t sport the new design and all the new features, but they’ll get them at some point.)

If you check out the new version, let us know what you think.

He was also a charismatic leader and public figure, who held people in thrall with his product announcements and presentations.

But does that mean you would enjoy watching a 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview, visually consisting of one continuous close-up of his face?

Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. That charisma, combined with the simple fact that Jobs had some interesting things to say back in 1995, make Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview–a film playing in special theatrical engagements around the country this week–a reasonably interesting and informative film. But it could have been much better.

In those long-ago days of the first Clinton administration, technology journalist Robert X. Cringely interviewed Jobs for the PBS series Triumph of the Nerds. Aside from a small portion used in the final cut, the interview was believed lost. Then someone found a VHS copy, and the rest is, if not history, than at least movie distribution.

There’s no filmmaking craftsmanship whatsoever in The Lost Interview. After a brief, new introduction by Cringely, the camera stays on Jobs as he talks. Occasionally an unseen Cringely asks a question. Every so often, the image freezes and Cringely (the 2011 version) provides a little narration to help bring us over to the next part of the interview. Since the image was transferred from VHS, it looks horrible.

But 1995 was a great moment to capture Jobs in amber (or at least videotape). He had been fired from Apple a decade earlier, soon after his triumph with the Mac. Apple was on the skids, and Jobs’ second startup, NeXT, had failed to set the world on fire. The following year, Apple would buy NeXT, and Jobs would triumphantly return to the company he’d co-founded, leading it to greater successes.

Jobs talks about how he first became interested in technology, about the Apple I computers that he and Steve Wozniak built by hand, and the astonishing success that followed the release of the Apple II. He remembers first seeing a graphic user interface at Xerox PARC and realizing that that will be the future of computing. His only complaint about Microsoft (the truly big giant in the industry in 1995) “is that they just have no taste.” He predicts, accurately, that the Web will change everything, but assumes that Apple’s days as an important company are over.

He’s at his best early on, when he describes how he and Wozniak–then teenage buddies–slowly and almost accidentally turned their hobby into one of the most important and successful businesses in history. He also does well when he discusses how companies (including Apple) go wrong. Companies, especially successful ones, become driven by marketing, or by process (which he doesn’t really explain that well). Either way, they forget about improving their content, which is–after all–what it’s all about. Not surprisingly, he has nothing nice to say about John Sculley, the PepsiCo Vice President who became president of Apple and fired Jobs (“I hired the wrong person”).

I’ve never been a Jobs fan–or an Apple fan. I don’t trust charisma (except in performing artists, where you don’t have to trust it). And I don’t like Apple’s “walled garden” approach to technology, where the company that makes the box gets to decide what you can do with it. That’s limiting and it leads to vertical monopolies. Nevertheless, I found the interview interesting and informative, at least most of the time.

But there’s a limit to how much time you can watch a single close-up, and The Lost Interview begins to wear out its welcome well before it’s through. With a little extra work–perhaps inserting illustrative photos over the course of the interview–Cringely and his team could have made an invaluable documentary, capturing an important figure at a career low point that would soon end. Instead, they merely give us a record of in interesting conversation.

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview will play for two days—this coming Wednesday and Thursday—in selected theaters around the country. The Aquarius theater in Palo Alto, California will host the film’s only seven-day run.

[This post republished from BayFlicks.net.]

Slowly but surely, many of the best iOS apps are coming to Android, and their quality once they get there is improving. Case in point: The excellent air travel search engine Hipmunk, which arrived in a version for Android phones this week. Its Android version is just as good as the iOS one–good looking, easy to use, and brilliantly useful. (It ranks flight options by a price/complexity formula it calls “Agony,” and, as you can see above, shows which flights have Wi-Fi.

Hipmunk does flight search better than competitors such as Kayak and Bing Travel, but it’s not the only airfare research tool you’ll ever need, mostly because it only shows prices available through Orbitz, and routes you there when you’re ready to buy. Still, even if you just use the app to look for flights you’ll buy elsewhere, it’s invaluable. And it’s nice to see it didn’t get watered down on its way to Android.

Jambox–Jawbone’s nifty super-small, battery-powered Bluetooth speaker/speakerphone gadget–got even a little niftier this week. Jawbone released version 2.0 of the Jambox’s software. It’s available on new Jamboxes, and current owners can download the free upgrade via the MyTalk service. The big new feature is LiveAudio, a technology that’s designed to make sound more multidimensional, including support for binaural recordings–ones recorded using a special technique that only needs two speakers to create a 3D audio effect that can be spectacular. Jawbone provided me with a unit with the new software for review.

Binaural recordings have been around for decades, and are generally meant to be heard over headphones. In fact, the Wikipedia article on the technique specifically says that the 3D effect doesn’t work over speakers. But Jawbone has figured out how to make it work on the Jambox.

When the Jawbone folks demoed binaural audio for me using sound files they’d chosen, the effect was dazzling. My ears and brain thought that they heard different sounds coming at them from different directions in all 360 degrees. I also had fun using my iPhone 4 to stream audio I knew was recorded binaurally (such as Pearl Jam’s appropriately-named album and some demo tracks) to the Jambox.

As for random other music from my collection and streaming services, games, and movies, probably not recorded binaurally: some of them sounded meaningfully richer and more multidimensional with LiveAudio turned on; in other cases, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. But even when LiveAudio isn’t a factor, the Jambox still sounds great for a speaker system you can hold in the palm of your hand.

With LiveAudio turned on, the maximum volume of the Jambox is much lower than when it’s off. (You can easily toggle the effect by pressing both the volume buttons at once.) I didn’t find this to be a crippling flaw. You want to be sitting within three to four feet of the Jambox to hear the binaural effect anyway, and it wouldn’t really work in a room with much other noise. It’s for personal listening, not for parties. You might have a bigger issue with low volume if you like to listen to music loud, though–some of the folks discussing the new software at Jawbone’s site aren’t pleased.

LiveAudio works only over Bluetooth, not over a cabled connection between the Jambox and an output device. (I get good results with music-over-Bluetooth from an iPhone, but tend to use a cable for my Mac–when I push music to the Jambox or any other wireless device over the Mac’s Bluetooth connection, it sometimes gets garbled.)

Jawbone says it’s going to work with artists and others in the recording industry to create binaural recordings. I wish it luck; I’d like more of them. And while I wouldn’t invest in a Jambox under the assumption that binaural will be everywhere, the Jambox is still a very cool smartphone accessory–especially if you use it for both music listening and speakerphone calls, which helps make its $199.99 pricetag sound a little less intimidating.

Enter Targus and its upcoming Lap Lounge, an iPad 2 stand that is meant to do exactly what its name suggests: sit comfortably in your lap when you’re lounging around in the house, on the plane, and so forth.

Apple has done a good job in bringing down the weight of the iPad 2 to make it a whole lot easier to hold for extended periods of time. That said, after awhile it still becomes a pain, sometimes literally. That’s why I really like this accessory.

Just snap the iPad 2 into the stand, and then adjust the angle to your liking. A cut out in the plastic casing allows the sound from the speaker to be amplified and directed towards you. It’s the same concept as cupping your hand around the speaker, which I’m sure many of us have been done at one point or another (hey, it works!).

The bottom of the stand is a canvas bag filled with the same stuff that’s in bean bags, and adds practically no weight. Having this sitting in your lap for extended periods of time isn’t going to be bothersome at all. I’ve actually also used it to place the iPad on my nightstand and adjust the viewing angle to watch content like it was a television, and it worked well.

Certainly if you’re a heavy digital media consumer on your iPad, a stand like this would be of some value. The downside is the price — $50 — which some might consider a bit steep. Then again, iPad 2 cases average about $35 to $40.

Targus says the Lap Lounge should be available shortly from Targus.com as well as its network of retailers, although no exact ship date has been set.