STEPHEN FRY

Stephen Fry is wowed by Nintendo’s magical Wii

Last week I looked at the remarkable rebirth in the fortunes of Nintendo, a renaissance engendered by two products – the DS, a pocket gaming device, and the Wii, a larger living-room machine.

The Wii arrived in Europe last year and demand has been allowed massively to outstrip supply, causing howls of anguish from those who, like Veruca Salt and me, always want it now. You can buy a basic Wii from any old Woolworths, but the Wii-Fit add-on is still made, as the saying has it, from purest unobtainium.

Photograph: Itsuo Inouye

Wii is white and dinky. It connects to your TV by ancient Scart connectors, for heaven’s sake, eschewing 21st-century HDMI. Its graphics, power and storage capabilities are nothing like as impressive as those on a PlayStation or Xbox, it can’t even play back basic DVDs – but it has a USP that makes up for all that.

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Stephen Fry has a lot of affection for Nintendo’s DS, which he finds much more engaging than Sony’s PSP

Poor Nintendo. Those clever little handheld games in the 80s: small, orange, plastic “Game & Watch” devices that opened up like a book. A gorilla threw barrels down at you while you leapt about a beeping LCD world. Then came the NES Game Console, followed by the highly successful Game Boy. After that, things began to go wrong: the Nintendo 64 and its successor, the GameCube, failed to penetrate what was now an enormous market. The oldest video games company of them all was in trouble: Donkey Kong and the Mario Brothers seemed destined to go the way of Atari and Sega, Pong and Sonic the Hedgehog, while the big boys would be left to slug it out with their PlayStations and Xboxes. That was Sony and Microsoft’s plan, and no one doubted it would be so. Nintendo, as a games brand, was about as hot as Waddingtons.

“I Nintendo live for ever, or die trying” – Mario Marx.

And then came its “seventh generation” offerings, the DS and the Wii (pronounced “wee”). The assumption made by Sony and Microsoft was that awesome processing power, state-of-the-art graphics, smooth animation and voluminous storage would make their big beasts market leaders. Nintendo staked all on cheaper devices that stressed a personal relationship between player and machine. The DS was all about a highly portable, stylus-driven environment, while the Wii – well, the Wii changed the rules completely.

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Stephen Fry is stunned by the sheer brilliance of the Spinvox, which translates voicemail into text

However uninterested you may be in technology, it is likely that you use a voicemail system. If you have a mobile, then it will probably be the one provided as standard by your network. You dial 121, or 123, and dance the ghastly Menu Minuet until you’re done. The Apple iPhone has introduced a patented “visual voicemail” system, which presents a list of onscreen messages enabling you to play them in whichever order you like, but for 15 years that has been it so far as innovation goes.

But now we have SpinVox, a most extraordinary service that takes your voice messages, translates them into text and then sends them to you as either email or SMS text message. Or both.

Photograph: Steve Forrest/Rex Features

Here’s how it goes. I call you up, but you are out, or busy, and I am played your outgoing message: “Yodi, this is Dork Talk Reader, sorry I’se not in, but like leave a message after the tone, innit, and I’ll be in your face laters.” I leave my message: “Sorry to miss you, darling Dork Talk Reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle-pip.” Now, if you, Dork Talk Reader, are a SpinVox subscriber, within minutes or less you will get a text as from my number that looks like this, inverted commas included:

“Sorry to miss you darling dork talk reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle (?) pip” – spoken through SpinVox <*n> where <*n> refers to the number assigned to the message. You can call a SpinVox number (which will replace your old network voicemail number) and press *n to hear my message the old-fashioned way.

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Stephen Fry ponders the preposterous twist of circumstance that made ‘laptop machines’ an anagram of ‘Apple Macintosh’

‘Laptop machines”, by one of those preposterous twists of circumstance that make you wonder who is running things and why they haven’t got anything better to do, just happens to be an anagram of “Apple Macintosh”. If an anagram is a derivative rearrangement of essential elements, then one might be disposed to argue that such has been their rise in influence and prestige that almost every new digital product seems to be an anagram of Apple.

The MacBook Air, a superlight machine with solid-state hard disk, no CD/DVD drive and only one USB port, caused something of a splash when it landed in the laptop lake a few months ago. Designed as a travelling wireless subnotebook, Apple seems to have timed its emergence better than poor Palm, whose ill-fated Foleo now looks to have been a great idea just six months (which is one and a half digital years) ahead of its time. In February, I wrote enthusiastically about the Asus Eee, like the Foleo an Open Source, solid-state machine weighing less than a kilo. As the misguided fad for PC Tablets fades into memory, subnotebooks seem to have become the Next Big Thing.

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Stephen Fry on sprightly camcorders the size of a packet of Rothmans. They’re cheap, they’re light and they’re fun.

Dork Talk on YouTube

Video. Your mobile phone might be capable of it, your compact digital camera almost certainly is and there are dozens of dedicated camcorders available that can write moving picture information to all kinds of media at all kinds of qualities for all kinds of money. Why, then, a basic handheld video camera that can do nothing else? a) What is the point? and b) Where is the market? The answers, refreshingly, are a) Fun and b) The young.

I am looking at the Flip Ultra from Pure Digital (£94-£99), and the Vado Pocket Video Cam (£89.99) from Creative. Each is the size of a packet of Rothmans; a light, “barebones” camcorder with a small LCD screen; basic playback, zoom, record and bin-it buttons; a built-in speaker; tripod mount connections; 2GB of memory; and a cunningly recessed USB cable. The most striking distinction between the two is that the Flip takes standard AA batteries, while the Vado has a lithium-ion unit, charged through its USB connection to a PC or Mac. The Vado has a two-inch screen to the Flip’s 1.5.

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