The Sims 3 - The Best Sims so far

Matt Peckham, PC World
The Sims 3 is EA's most flexible, customizable, user-friendly version yet of its bestselling, record-shattering strategic life simulation series.
It's shiny, sexy, and perplexingly emerald-green, but more than anything, The Sims 3 - Electronic Arts' groomed and gussied-up digital dollhouse - is intrepid and wonderful. Wonderful, because it's finally the game the original aspired to be, a sprawling valley-sized slice of virtual reality that's yours to tinker with entirely, no longer hemmed in by invisible barriers or repetitious characters. Intrepid, because its decked-out catalog of deceptively mundane activities illustrates even better how a game where you "tinker with the uneventful" can be so much more eventful than others conventionally packed with explosions, aliens, and magic swords.
Surprisingly, EA didn't mess with core series values, but then, it didn't have to. When your premise hasn't changed ("strategic life simulation") the writing's on the wall: Give your base an order of magnitude more to fiddle with, pretty it up, and make all that "extra" even easier to manipulate. Because it does, The Sims 3 represents a triumph of synthesis and style, an evolutionary leap rooted in progressive customizability, a gracefully architected interface, and several strikingly deep creative tools. Want the year's most compulsively playable, demographically far-flung PC game? You've found it.
PCW Score: 90%

Top Five Digital Cameras for the New Graduate

With commencement speeches abounding, it’s time once again to think about what to get for your favorite new graduate. At the top of many lists (just below Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!“) is a new digital camera. What recent graduates wouldn’t want a flashy new gadget to document the new journey on which they are about to embark? So, herewith, are some of my top picks for the various grads in your life:
(you can buy it on amazon.com)
1. Canon PowerShot SD880 IS
2. Olympus Stylus Tough-6000
3. Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3
4. Nikon Coolpix S230
5. Canon EOS Rebel T1i

Sony to launch smaller, lighter PSP

TOKYO (Reuters)
Japan's Sony Corp plans to sell a smaller and lighter PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld game machine later this year, according to video game websites which cite what they say is Sony's own promotional video clip.
The video clip, which game websites including IGN say was first distributed through Sony's online game information distribution service for paying U.S. subscribers, has been posted on YouTube.
The new device, dubbed the PSP Go, is 43 percent lighter than the current model and comes with a 3.8-inch display, compared with a 4.3 inch screen now, according to the video clip on YouTube.
A spokesman for Sony's game unit, Sony Computer Entertainment declined to comment on the video clip, saying that any announcement on the PSP will be made at the E3 video game trade show that starts on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
According to the video clip, the PSP Go will go on sale this autumn, although the current model, the PSP 3000 will remain in the market.
The newer model's key pad slides out from below the screen, the clip shows. With the PSP 3000, the keys are placed on either side of the screen.
Sony aims to sell 15 million units of the PSP in the financial year to March, up from 14.1 million units a year earlier. The PSP competes with Nintendo Co Ltd's DS.
Shares in Sony rose 2.6 percent to 2,560 yen, outperforming the Nikkei average, which gained 1.6 percent.

Our Favorite Photo Scanners

by M. David Stone, pcmag
Five years ago, many predicted that the days of inexpensive standalone scanners were numbered. Yet largely thanks to the need to preserve photos, flatbed scanners are doing just fine. When inkjet-based all-in-ones (AIOs) first started taking over from single-function inkjets in a big way—starting about five years ago—lots of people predicted the end of the low-cost flatbed scanner. Ironically, however, it's the single-function inkjet printer that's all but disappeared, while flatbed scanners are surviving just fine.
What happened, in large part, is that scanner manufacturers started focusing on photos. In many cases, they've added the ability to scan film (slides and negatives), and have increased scan resolution and other features so they can scan film reasonably well. The result is that although any flatbed scanner is potentially an all-purpose scanner—simply because you can scan anything that will fit on the flatbed—standalone flatbed scanners today tend to focus on photo scanning. More important, they tend to do the job better than inexpensive AIOs.
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Fotki - Social Network

by Michael Muchmore, pcmag
You may want to pronounce its name carefully, but Fotki has nothing to be ashamed of among photo-sharing sites. Fotki doesn't aim to be your complete photo solution; there are no editing tools like those you find in Picasa, or even the online Picnik photo editor offered by Flickr. But it offers a lot by way of photo sharing and social networking—rich personal profiles, journals, friends, guestbooks, even forums. It also offers decent albums, with features including regular tagging and geotagging. But unlike Picasa it offers no people tagging, a social tool that would make sense. It does offer a couple of attractions I haven't seen on other photo-sharing sites: contests and the potential to make money from your photography. You also get free stats on which members have browsed your pictures. But Fotki has a competitive disadvantage if it wants to become the photo social network: The largest photo-sharing site by far is also the largest social network—Facebook.
Full review...

Amazon.com to ship Kindle DX ahead of schedule

by Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service
Amazon.com's new large-screen Kindle DX e-reader will ship earlier than expected, the company said Monday.
Amazon will begin shipping the product to customers on June 10, earlier than the third-quarter release the company had planned.
Amazon unveiled the new e-reader and allowed customers to begin pre-ordering it on May 6. The product, a follow-up to February's release of the Kindle 2, features a larger screen and more memory than either that product or its predecessor, the original Kindle released in November 2007. Kindle 2 also shipped slightly ahead of schedule.
The Kindle DX features a 9.7-inch screen, aimed at making it easier to read newspapers, textbooks, magazines and business documents. Other Kindle products have a 6-inch screen and were aimed mainly at reading paperback novels.
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