For all its pros, the enV2′s slicker younger sibling has got plenty of cons. Read on for the good, the bad and the just plain weird.

The good:

Definitely a design improvement over the previous iteration, the phone is attractive and the qwerty keyboard is easy to get used to. The camera takes high quality pictures that look great on the clear inner screen, good enough on the smaller outer screen, and hold up when you upload them.

Call and sound quality are fine. Not amazing, but at least adequate. Battery life, especially given two full color screens, is outstanding.

Flipped open, the top feels sturdy, and stays open in two positions — flat, or at an angle for better viewing — and the speakers project well.

Similar to the iPhone, the enV3 gives you the option of organizing your text messages by contact rather than date, so you can retrace a conversation, or months’ worth of conversations. You can also text/read texts from the front screen, though the organization can get wonky.

Web access and mobile email (with customizable new mail alerts) are good, if not phenomenal. The delay can be anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes from the time an email arrives. If you’re looking for BlackBerry functionality, get a BlackBerry.

The bad:

Closed, the keypad does auto-lock, but the lock, undone with just a press of the OK button, is not robust. I’ve found myself butt dialing once again. We, as a cell-using race, should really be past this by now. The alternative option of putting in a locking code feels like more hassle than its worth (unless you’re the paranoid type and do this anyway).

The vibrate should be stronger — the subtle vibe can lead to missed calls, even while tucked into those tight jeans.

(With flip closed) On older LG phones, while typing text messages in predictive mode you could go back to a word that you forgot to next and next it later. That is, say you wrote “Heading good now” instead of “Heading home now,” (since “good” comes before “home” in the T9 hierarchy for that key combination) you could just back up the cursor to after “good,” hit the next button and choose “home” instead. For some reason you can’t do that anymore (once you type it, it’s typed), and in such scenarios you have to delete the word letter by letter and type it again. It’s a pain, one of those things that seems minor, but annoys time and again.

Front screen scratches easily.

The just plain weird:

Every now and then it shuts off on its own. No warning, just off. Many users have complained of this on Verizon’s website. Along with occasional screen freezes this indicates bugs that require immediate attention.

When composing a text message with the full keyboard, the keys are set to “abc,” or no-initial-caps. Being a stickler this means I have to hit Shift before each sentence. But being lazy, it also means that I write a lot of text messages in all small letters, which shames me. The default is the same when writing emails, too, but there, one hit of the Shift key gets you ALL CAPS, and only after two is it correct. Where is the logic in this? Especially for emails one would think that proper capitalization would be first, then no caps and only THEN all caps. Am I the only one who thinks about these things? (Please, don’t answer that.)

You can take photos with the flip open (be careful with the fingers on your right hand – they’re likely to obscure the lens), or with it closed. And that’s cool. But shooting closed you have to turn the phone sideways (so it’s aligned as though the top is up). And that’s really awkward. Better move would have been to design the device to rotate the picture when you open the flip. Duh.

The bottom line: This phone is kind of awesome. So it’s too bad that it’s so shitty. Wait til they work out the kinks.

GH5, released in September, follows the vein of this evolution. Since I couldn’t care less about customizing my avatar’s visage and wardrobe or scoring a Marshall stack, for the purpose of this review I’ll focus on a just a few of the pithier, niftier new features. Like Party Play mode, in which tunes play continuously from a track list and players can drop out whenever they lose interest or need to refresh their PBRs, and jump in with the press of one button. In case earlier versions weren’t quite ADD enough for you.

Also cool is that you can play with any combination of instruments. If no one wants to take rhythm, you can all be lead guitarists. Got three drum sets at home? Have at it. Plus, you can play all 85 songs right off the bat, without unlocking them. Beating each song the first time ’round is typically a fun and exciting — if occasionally frustrating — rite, but really, who has time anymore?

Activision also added GH Jam mode, so you can jam along with songs, using the controller to produce notes. Music Studio, where you compose original music with the peripherals, debuted in World Tour. You can make and mix your own tracks, and upload them to an online server.

GH5 got some unsavory reviews from one particularly unsavory commentator: Courtney Love. The game features a CGI Kurt Cobain, which, somewhat morbidly and, indeed, disturbingly, can be played like any other character. Meaning: Grunge Rock King sings Vampire Weekend and Gov’t Mule. Love might be a psycho, but even Dave Grohl knows that shit ain’t right.

On the plus side, the game also gives Muse’s Matt Bellamy his guitar hero due:

Basically, no reason not to have this game.

Come on Schwartz. Come on Schwartz.

The fundamental premise of the Mattel Mindflex makes it one of the coolest games ever. Seriously, ever. (Note, I didn’t say most fun, I said coolest. There’s a difference.) The object is to move stuff with your mind. Here’s the gist: You put this doodad on your head, then you stare at this li’l Nerf ball real hard, then suddenly the ball starts floating. You levitate the thing. It’s pretty trippy.

I tested this out a few months ago and wrote about it for Popular Science. The itch to try it for myself was strong enough that I actually put that ridiculous thing on my head in a public place, and tried to be the ball. The headband has a sensor — a dry contact electrode — that rests on your forehead just above the left eyebrow, over the SP-1 region of your brain’s frontal lobe. That’s the part of your noodle involved in things like problem solving, motor function, memory, language and judgment. (Clips on your ear lobes take a baseline reading as a control.) When activity in the area increases, the game runs an algorithm to translate that into a level of concentration, which then determines the level, or height of the ball. The headband and game base communicate over a wireless bandwidth similar to Bluetooth. Amazingly, you look like even more of an asshole in this contraption than the jerks with their LED-flashing earpieces. Added bonus.

There is a small fan inside the base that sends the ball afloat. The harder you concentrate, the stronger the puff of air, and the higher the ball goes. Everyone has his own way of  “concentrating.” Mattel’s people suggested thinking in another language (if you know one). Some people do math problems. I had a hell of a time finding something specific that worked, and actually found the most success when I tried not to think of anything. Go figure: neurotic cerebral New Yorker thinks hardest when trying to quit thinking.

Once you’ve got the thing airborne, you’re charged with getting it around — and over and through — a series of customizable obstacles. Hoops and bars and such. The fan is on a circular track, and you move it along the course by turning a dial on the front of the base. As it travels it takes the hovering ball with it around the track. When it approaches an obstacle it’s your job to raise or lower the ball as needed. I’ve got to say, when I got the thing to go through the little hoop I was downright psyched. I always knew I was a fucking Jedi. The Force is strong in my family. I also, oddly, expected to somehow feel it heave itself over the lip of the ring, and was surprised when this didn’t happen. I suppose that’s a natural reaction, since typically when I move things there is some level of contact involved. (Except, of course, when I’m moving you, dear reader, with my profound prose….  Doody! Ha. Made you look.)

The Mindflex was set to be released next month, but it’s already available on Amazon and other online retailers. If you have 80 bones to toss around (don’t pay more, it’s suggested retail is $79.99), I’d say it’s a pretty neat toy, and could make for impressive parlor trickery. Otherwise, I’d highly recommend popping by Toys R Us around Christmas time and seeing if they have one on the floor you can try. Sort of frustrating, sort of dumb, totally awesome. I mean, I mentioned the part where you move shit with your freaking mind, right?

For about the cost of an evening of pints you can, for the first time, bring home the popular bar game Big Buck Hunter. Released this month by Jakks Pacific ($40), Big Buck Hunter Pro home edition is a simple plug and play for your TV. (That means you don’t need a game system – just those yellow and white holes in your set.) No question that the game is manufactured by a toy company, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play it with a bunch of your grown up friends and a six-pack apiece. In fact, I recommend a six-pack apiece, to blur the sights on the game’s fundamental drawbacks.

A couple basic set up tips. Get this game out of the box before you’re ready to play. Technology has come a long way since we were kids, but packaging has not. A couple dozen twist ties keep this puppy firmly hinged to the cardboard. I forgot how hard we had to work to get to the good stuff. If you think of it like a puzzle, I guess it can count as an activity unto itself. Another thing that we still have to contend with: battery compartments with tiny screw closures. I don’t know, man, but I’ve never known three AAA batteries to be such tough contenders for a standard snap-in cover. Annoying.

Once you’ve got everything out it’s a fairly simple task to get started. The game software is concealed within the shotgun peripheral, a light, sawed-off version of the real controller, which works the same way — trigger & pump reload — and plugs into the A/V inputs on any TV screen. Place the sensor on top of the set and turn them both on. It’ll prompt you to shoot at a target in the top left of the screen, then one in the bottom right, to calibrate the gun. Once you’ve done that (possibly twice if you’re not standing far enough away) you’re ready to hunt. Like the arcade original you can choose single- or multi-player, one-off or full trek modes by aiming at the options and pulling the trigger. You can also play just the bonus rounds (more on that later), which is a nice touch.

You might get the immediate sense that this is going to be easy when you see crosshairs on the screen indicating where you’re aiming. Don’t be fooled. It’s not easy. Unfortunately, that’s not because it’s such a challenging game, but because the interface is mega-laggy. You still have only a short window in which to squeeze off shots at passing deer, but at least at first you’re going to spend most of that time trying to figure out why those crosshairs didn’t follow your aim across the screen. Keep playing and you’ll get a slightly better sense of the lazy response, but it’s just not going to feel like the real thing. You could paint that as an added feature, though; you’ll feel behind the ball, a bit delayed, vaguely off center — just like you were throwing back beers at the bar. While testing this game I played with one drunk guy. As a control, naturally. He did seem to jive with it a bit more quickly than the rest of us.

I’m definitely into the option to play just the bonus games, which overall requires significantly less dedication than a whole hunt and are easier to master off the bat. My favorites are probably knocking out the hillbilly’s hooch jugs and hitting the flying saucers — they make this great “ding!” when you do. While I could do without the flatulent sound effects in the cow patty mini-game, I’m otherwise bullish on it. The frogs-on-lily-pads one is much more difficult. And then there’s the Caddy Shack gopher rip-off whack-a-mole round, which, half way through, becomes a bizarre neon-lit underground attack I dub the Gopher Rave Massacre. See below.

The Headline: Gopher gunned down in nightclub shoot out

The takeaway: It only takes five minutes to realize that this game kind of sucks. But you’ll play it for two hours.