Game Review: Mini Golf Club Makes An Ace

    

Being a golfer and and a Windows Phone user is tough. In fact, it downright stinks having Let’s Golf 2 as the only real golfing option. Sure, there are games like Stickman Golf and a few others in the Store, but honestly, none of them deliver much in the way of a golfing experience. When I was messaged by Zoltán Gubics to give his game Mini Golf Club a test drive, I jumped at the chance to do it.

After just a few minutes of figuring out how hard to strike the ball, Mini Golf Club had me. The graphics are simple, yet very refined. The play was ultra smooth on my HTC One M8 for Windows. Overall, except for figuring out how hard to hit the ball, the controls were very intuitive as well. With aiming being done by panning around the hole with your finger and the “hit” button being located in the lower right corner of the screen, there isn’t much to figure out otherwise. I give the graphics an excellent rating and the controls a bit better than that. Challenging play that is simple to learn – it’s a definite winner.

Now down to the nitty gritty here… Mini Golf Club has only a 32MB install size. I didn’t get a chance to run it on my lowly Lumia 521, but I can only say it was smooth as butter on my M8 for Windows. It offers up a great challenge for puzzle game lovers and for golf enthusaists alike. If you have a spare 5 minutes, you should give it a quick look and decide if you can master the 27 holes of frustration. This one was definitely a nice surprise for me and it’s earned that permanent home on my M8 just for the sheer fact that I can watch the reaction on people’s faces when they miss a putt.

Mini Golf Club is free from the Windows Store.

Download Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/mini-golf-club/649347b1-bfde-4d53-a79e-c25a54b66833?signin=true

Get A Crazy Deal On SanDisk Memory

Did you snag that new phone or tablet for Christmas but are a bit concerned about the storage capacity? Don’t fret. Amazon has you covered with a complete selection of SanDisk memory cards and drives for up to 73% off.

From the 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $7.99 to the $89.99 SanDisk Ultra 128GB MicroSD card, there is something for everyone.

Amazon Link

Cyber Dust Makes Its Way To Windows Phone

With all the news lately about the demise of third party access to SnapChat and the lack of an official Windows Phone App leaving people stranded, it is easy to forget that there are other players in the game. Cyber Dust is one such player that apparently values Windows users a bit more than those other guys. Cyber Dust is a messaging app that offers so many different reasons to use it, that it is hard to justify not having it installed on your Windows device.

First off, it is a full featured messaging client. Pictures, videos, voice memos, and just plain texts are all delivered in the manner you choose for free. PIN locked, encrypted messages can be delivered to a single user or blasted to one of your groups instantly for no charge at all. Cyber Dust will even notify you if someone decides to ‘capture’ your message with a screenshot. It’s everything that people wanted in those other guys, but smoothed out and ready for primetime.

Cyber Dust doesn’t stop there either. It is also available to a world wide market, making it a very cost effective messaging platform for overseas users. It also is a great solution for business users that require a bit more security than the typical SMS or messaging program offers. Overall, if word spreads about Cyber Dust, it could easily become one of the best messaging platforms on the market today. Performance wise it is already there, but the user base is still rather small since it just launched.

Cyber Dust gets a huge thumbs up from me, even though I am not the prototypical user of Apps like this. I’m not one that usually hides my Windows Phone much, so sneaky messages aren’t really a concern for me, but I do understand the market and why people would want them. Fortunately, Cyber Dust answers the call for users that need exactly this service and it does so beautifully!

Cyber Dust is available in the Windows Store and is free.

Back From Christmas Break…

One of the downsides to having so many people wanting to you test things is that sometimes you have to take a step away from what you love in order to realize why you love it. For the last few weeks, I’ve been test driving a few devices including the monstrously amazing HTC Desire Eye for AT&T. Over the last few weeks, seeing the Apps and power of the new “Android” devices, made me realize that Windows Phone is still my home OS. While it may have quite a few new short comings, especially in the world of Apps, overall, it seems to offer the most comfortable interface around.

So, even though I have to give up picture messaging, which honestly, my wife is the only one that sends me images anyways, I am back on my gorgeous HTC One M8 for Windows, but not using the device on Verizon as their monthly rates are just too darn high for me. Even their $45 a month prepaid plan is $10-20 a month more than I pay for GSM prepaid offerings. Currently, I am enjoying a nice plan from PTEL Mobile, which sets me back $35 a month, with the second month free when I ported my number in to their service.

So far, PTEL Mobile has delivered on the network speeds, which appear to be T-Mobile’s native LTE speeds, and with a 2 month run for $35, how can one not want to give it a shot. The 500MB of data is easily enough for my M8 to run well while out and about (and believe me, after seeing some of the Android data usage, I LOVE Data Sense so much more!) and away from Wi-Fi. Of course, if you need a bit more, you can visit PTEL Mobile and see the other options as well.

For me, the $35 plan is the only one that I will touch as the cost goes up pretty quickly without getting much more thrown in. If you need more data than the $35 plan hands out, both Net10 and Straight Talk offer about 3GB of high speed data for around $50 a month. If you can get by with a little less, the $39.99 GSMT plan from Red Pocket Mobile gives you 2GB of data before being throttled down to 2G speeds.

Overall though, the T-Mobile MVNO’s offer quite a bang for the buck. More data, faster data and unlimited talk with text is quite the deal to be had for such a small monthly cost.

Grab The HP Stream 7 32GB Tablet For $99.99

If you are a Microsoft user through and through, you owe it to yourself to check out the deal that Amazon.com has on the HP Stream 7 Tablet right now. For $99.99, you not only snag a pretty nifty little Intel Atom powered tablet, but you also get a load of benefits for your Windows Phone that come with it.

For starters, you get the 7” HP Stream 7 Tablet. It has 32GB of internal storage, 1GB of RAM and is equipped with bgn WI-FI. Then you add in the value of the included Office 365 subscription (shareable to 5 devices) and the 1TB of OneDrive storage. No matter how you look at it, the HP Stream 7 Tablet has something of value in it for anyone that doesn’t have a good gaming/productivity device within reach at any moment.

You can grab your HP Stream 7 Tablet for $99.99 at Amazon today or maybe you want the full 4G portability of the HP Stream 8 with T-Mobile 4G built in for $199.99.

Source: Amazon.com

App Review: VinVid Saving Life 6 Seconds At A Time

Even though I’ve never been a huge Vine user, mostly due to the fact that watching 6 second videos of others can be downright boring, I have to admit that VinVid – Vine Downloader by D3staz caught my eye right off the bat. The fact that I could go on to Vine, grab the URL for my favorite clip, then download it, that just made sense.

VinVid has one of the most simple interfaces on the planet. Simply open the App, paste in the URL of the post you want and poof, you own it. There’s no super duper thrills or gimmicks here, just a well coded App that does exactly what you want it to. VinVid is one of those Apps that could have been ruined by trying to do too much with it. Fortunately, D3staz kept things simple and VinVid is a total winner. The 2MB install size is a bonus as well.

If you are a Vine users, go grab VinVid for free right now in the Windows Phone Store. If not, grab it and check out the official Vine or 6sec. You might just find a new way to share yourself online.