The Dark Furie

As you can see from the image, Activision have done quite a good job capturing Kurt's image and have apparently motion captured him from various videos. Guitar Hero 5 features quite a few music stars, some still living and some deceased, all of which can be unlocked then used as the main singer in any of the songs. Of course, if the song they're singing isn't one of their own it will still be the original singer's voice that players hear. And that's where Love and legions of Nirvana fans (the majority of them people who discovered the band in the aftermath of Kurt's suicide) have a problem. Kurt put a lot of emotion into his music, and they say that it's a travesty and misuse of his image to allow him to be the singer of other people's songs.

You know what? I was a Nirvana fan many many years ago, before they really hit the big time. I'm not one of these children you see in their fresh Nirvana hoodies, trying to make their choice of music interesting, I was here from the beginning and my view on this is simple - if Courtney Love is so worried about inappropriate use of Kurt Cobain then she shouldn't sign his image up to be used in that game. The game has always been clear about how the images of these stars will be used, and all other stars in the game get the exact same treatment. In fact, despite his amazing talent it'd dishonour his memory more to expect special treatment for him that others don't get. And why blame the game when the person who exploited him when he was alive is clearly doing the same even now?

Also announced today is the new beta of Nokia Messaging. Amongst the minor improvements to the system is a little gem - Nokia Messaging now includes support for social messaging and instant messengers.

Powered by Symbian 1 (S60 5th edition) this touchscreen media powerhouse is the first in a long line of media-centric phones and it's a beauty. The 5 megapixel camera means it's easily good enough for even the quickest snapshots while not being slowed down as much as the latest higher resolution cameras are. The Xpress Music Edition music player is arguably the best on any mobile device and, in my opinion, blows Sony's Walkman software out of the water. This will also be the first Nokia device to sport a capacitive touchscreen.

The phone is only available in a Comes With Music package, giving users a year of unlimited free music downloads, and is rumoured to be the first that will allow tracks to be downloaded with no Data Rights Management restrictions. And with 32GB of onboard storage there'll be plenty of room to store all that music.

With this single phone announcement Nokia just took back the media crown.

Update - The X3
Newly announced as part of Nokia's new X-series is the X3.

This series 40 slider feature phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera for snapshot usage and all the basic series 40 standards. Animated themes change depending on the signal and battery strength, and the accelerometer allows the screen to rotate depending on the orientation of the device. On top of that this is the first series 40 device to come with Nokia Messaging as standard and will feature the new social messaging functionality unveiled today.

Like it's big brother this will be a Comes With Music device offering unlimited downloads for a year. Support is offered for memory cards up to 16 gigabytes although the phone only has 46 megabytes of onboard memory.

This time however I was offered £81 for the phone. Knowing I'd probably get less than that because the battery has swollen up I decided to go for it anyway and sent the phone off, recorded delivery of course. A couple of days later I got an e-mail from them saying that they've checked the phone over and I'll be getting the full amount. A couple more days and a postal order arrived. The whole thing took about a week in total and right now my old phone is being refurbished for sale in countries (the last few ended up in India and Uganda) where the mobile networks are still developing.

What to do with the money? I had considered ordering a professional case for my new phone from Proporta or Krussell or maybe buying the full version of Quickoffice as my usual text editor doesn't work on this phone. Kim and I recently gave Scrubs another chance and actually enjoyed it this time. We had decided that we'd buy it when we found it cheap and sure enough, the complete series 1-7 boxset went down to £73 on Amazon when I found out how much I'd be getting. Even better, it was down to £56 the day before the money arrived. Unfortunately it went back up to £73 the day the money had arrived but we ordered it anyway.

Hopefully it'll be funny enough to take our minds off the war that'll start when my phone explodes in another country.