What to do? The Steelers play three or four Thursday, Monday or Sunday-night games each year, and they show up as the alternate televised game here in Chicago every once in a while, but that only represents half of a 16-game season if I’m lucky. I might be luckier if I lived more proximate to Pittsburgh, but I don’t. The most well-known option for non-resident fans is NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, which has brought many dollars to many bar owners, but some of us can’t get a DirecTV hookup due to building restrictions or whatever else. Enter Sunday Ticket on the Go.

STotG is the multi-platform version of Sunday Ticket: it’s built to run on smartphones, tablets and “big browser”, a.k.a. your basic Chrome / IE / Firefox / Safari. DirecTV says STotG is strictly for households that can’t get DirecTV due to line-of-sight issues or restrictions on satellite dishes. I don’t know how they enforce this policy — is some offshore firm logging my IP and running test signups in my area to see if I’m cheating? — but our building isn’t cool with satellite dishes (I think), so I was golden to sign up, once I got over the sticker shock of $350. (Damn. And a major point below.) So, the review:

Interface(s): Pretty good. DirecTV did a phat job of fitting the application to the platform. I like to use my work laptop to watch the games, as I can either hook its HD output up to the TV for mucho size or sit it on my lap for sehr schön interactivity. (See this bitchin’ four-game screenshot.) Last week while in Jacksonville, I checked out a few games on the STotG Android phone app and the interface worked well there, too, in a way that wasn’t just a cut-and-paste of the web interface. I like the constantly updating scores, and particularly the inclusion of the RedZone channel — if I’m feeling information overload, I’ll just click that mug and overload is underloaded, or whatever the hell that should say. (RedZone is not a part of my cable package and not yet offered online, plus RedZone obviously wouldn’t include entire Steeler games, so it’s not much of a stand-alone option for now.) I do wish STotG would have highlights show up in chronological order when I click “Play All” highlights, and Twitter junkies like me would also like to see publicly shareable links to individual highlights. So DirecTV: get on that.

Performance: Eh, OK. The video looks good on my phone, but only so-so on the PC’s greater resolution. I like to hook up to my TV via the PC’s HD output, which came through decently but not as well as the broadcast from a game on HD cable. I’m not as good on video-format technology, but it looks like STotG is a 720p HD stream, and that naturally isn’t going to look as good as the 1080p feed coming from the cable box. I also had some account-logout failure in the 3rd quarter of the Houston game that made me miss the Steelers’ only TD, which sucked because that game didn’t exactly have many other highlights for Pittsburgh. There are also some video-quality issues when you try to do the four-games-at-once quadrant view, but they clear up once all four games have been tuned in for a few minutes.

Value: Sucks. Let’s do some seasonal math up in this bitch:

• Bar: 16 games * $20 tab per week (beers and food) = $320
• STotG: (Fees: $350 / 16 games) + (beer: $8 beer-snob two-week supply * 16/2) + ($4 two-week taquito supply * 16/2) = (Per game: $21.88 + $4 + $2 = $27.88) * 16 games = $446.08

That’s a pretty significant difference when you account for food and beer. Excluding those, you’re paying $21.88 per game for STotG — comparable to a bar, but in what crazy world does someone skip food and drink when watching football? That would be like Eric Cantor conversing with someone who isn’t pre-screened to agree with him. I could try to put a dollar value on not having to leave home to watch the game, but then that’s a lot of work for a post I’m not getting paid to write. The point is, dropping some cost-benefit analysis on this STotG offer comes up with a questionable result, particularly in light of available substitutes …

What I’m going to do instead of STotG next year: RedZone plus NFL Rewind equals Tha Shiznit. If NFL RedZone gets this streaming thing going, I plan to combine that with NFL Rewind and get my pro-football fix for a mere $30 plus whatever NFL RedZone charges, which will surely be less than $350.

This plan has some holes: the extent of most of my live Steeler-watching will be RedZone cutaways, and I’ll have to wait up to a day to get a full game on Rewind. But the pro-Rewind Slate dialogue between Tommy Craggs (who was a sports editor at The Daily Northwestern at the same time I was a city-desk editor) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (who worked at TIME Magazine while I was at TIME.com) convinced me that NFL Rewind is a life-changing opportunity to both enjoy the NFL on a new level and shamelessly name-drop journalists I’ve encountered in my career. And you can watch condensed games in 30 minutes? Sheeit, my primetime TV lineup is set for weeks. All for just 20 percent of 2011′s outlandish football-watching cost.

In conclusion: STotG is probably not worth the money. I shelled out for it this year, but having done some more research, I think RedZone + Rewind is the way to go for the 2012 season. Just in time for the Steelers’ many old dudes to wither and fall off the roster.

1. I had BlackBerrys for work and found them useful but nothing revolutionary;
2. I mistakenly chalked the iPhone hype up to characteristic Apple-fan hyperventilation;
3. I stuck to my old clamshell phone because I’m really cheap.

Now that I’ve jumped to an Android smartphone, this HTC Incredible is practically grafted onto my hand. Why? It’s the dope applications. My friend Ben recently got one and asked me which ones to load up on his phone, so to spread the love around, I went with 16 of my favorites here to fill up your home screen. So load up your Android phone with these mugs — all of them free — and you’ll be set:

Gmail: Awesome job replicating the web experience. I also like using this app separate from the main mail app to keep my work / personal email divide simple.

Twitter: They hooked up their Android app. The HTC Peep app is kind of weak, and the native Android Twitter client does a cool job of syncing with your contacts, but this thing is well done. Each new release updates the functionality nicely, including a pretty well-done widget.

Yelp: No need for Google Maps when you hook this app up – finds local stuff based on your location, and the ratings make it easy to narrow down which one you want to try. It’s weird now to think of city life without Yelp – nice work, Eric.

Dolphin HD: It took three Android browsers before I settled on this one. The native Android browser is displays Flash and has good graphical capabilities, but it’s slow; Opera Mini is fast but can’t do Flash and isn’t great for images or fonts; but Dolphin HD is just right. I also like the gesture interface.

NPR News: You get the major news without headline overload in an easy-to-read text format, plus hourly audio news summaries and easy audio download for other pieces. Haters can hate, but I give props to NPR as a rare non-hyperbolic news outlet.

BBC News: With this and NPR, apparently I’m a sucker for taxpayer-funded news, but I reach for this app when I want to remember that there’s a world of news outside the United States. Thanks, hyperbolic news cycle.

Chicago Tribune: Finally, a news outlet that can stay afloat without government money. (Wait … nevermind.) This app is apparently still in beta, but I love it. I’ve been looking for a solid Chicago-centric app for my phone, and this one nails it – breaking headlines, further in-depth local news from the paper, the Opinion section that I now read a lot more often (even as John Kass’ political nicknames irk me) and handy weather on the app homepage.

The Weather Channel: Loads better than the crappy HTC weather app that comes loaded with the phone, and stays in your status bar for a constant look at the temperature. Could use some cooler animation, but has all the info I need heading out the door.

BeyondPod: Tried several podcasting clients; this one’s easily the best.

ESPN Scorecenter: I should probably look beyond ESPN for potential sports-score apps, but when this one has everything I need and a super-intuitive interface, there’s no point in bothering.

Out of Milk: Solid shopping-list app, and I’ve tried several. You can scan barcodes, easily sort your items and cross them off with a single long press.

WordPress: For maintaining an entire site on a 3×5 screen, you can’t beat this one.

Facebook: Gets all your FB needs in a FB-branded package that looks exactly like you’d want the mobile-fied version of Facebook to look. I also like that the widget is just status updates — FB’s made it hard to find those anymore.

Chase: I mentioned these guys as a positive example for work recently, because in digital-consultant speak, they’ve got the multi-channel touchpoint optimization thing down. You can get the same banking done whether you’re at the teller, ATM, website or phone site/app, each one in a channel-friendly format. The deposit-by-photo thing doesn’t work that well, but it’s still a cool idea.

People: It’s a native app, but I love the automatic Facebook and Twitter syncing, the ease of importing contacts from Google, and the contact formatting. (Though why can’t I enter a letter and jump ahead when browsing the list?)

NY Times: I might read NPR, the Trib and the BBC more often than the NYT these days, but I can’t hate on these guys’ ability to be out in front of the news industry on almost every interactive count. This is an even better newsreading experience than nytimes.com on the PC.

Bonus 17th item: Angry Birds: The rest are all apps, so I’ll justify squeezing one more in because it’s an awesomely addictive game. You just can’t front on the blue splittable bird flying out of the slingshot.

Also-rans: Pandora, Google Translate, American Express, Tumblr, Astro, IMDB, Epicurious, Kayak.

Shoulda had it – tough end to a roller-coaster season, but there’s always next fall. In the meantime, back to full-time hockey fandom.

Steelers 17, Packers 10. OH YEAH.

Steelers 21, Jets 17.

(And Packers 24, Bears 23.)

At Philadelphia -8 Houston
At Minnesota -6 Buffalo
At Miami -4.5 Cleveland
At Tennessee 0 Jacksonville
At Kansas City -8.5 Denver
At NY Giants -7 Washington
Chicago -3.5 At Detroit
At Green Bay -9.5 San Francisco
New Orleans -6.5 At Cincinnati
Atlanta -3 At Tampa Bay
At San Diego -13 Oakland
At Seattle -6 Carolina
At Indianapolis -5.5 Dallas
St. Louis -3 At Arizona
At Baltimore -3 Pittsburgh
At New England -3.5 NY Jets

And in the 11 Points game, I like Atlanta. I forgot to pick these games recently, but comparing the past several weeks to how I chose in Pick ‘Em, I’m at 10-2 in those games. That’s tied with Accuscore for the best method thus far, and considering NFL picks is all I write on here these days, it’s also equally boring.

In its ongoing drive to capture every dollar of revenue generated in some related way by pro football, the NFL started its NFL Network-hosted Thursday night games this week, so I had to jump in quick with the Atlanta pick yesterday that, fortunately, turned out to be correct. Now I just gotta run the table on the other 13 games.

At Atlanta -1 Baltimore
Indianapolis -7 Cincinnati
At Jacksonville -2 Houston
Tennessee -1 At Miami
Minnesota -1 At Chicago
At Buffalo -3 Detroit
NY Jets -3 At Cleveland
At Tampa Bay -6.5 Carolina
Kansas City -1 At Denver
At San Francisco -6 St. Louis
At Arizona -3 Seattle
At NY Giants -14 Dallas
At Pittsburgh -4.5 New England
Philadelphia -3 At Washington

Hey, how about that: a winning week at last. I tied for the lead in my league, but apparently lost on one of the tiebreakers, because I did not get the desired green highlight from Yahoo! for my tally.

Let’s do this:

Chicago -3 At Buffalo (Toronto)
San Diego -3 At Houston
New Orleans -6.5 At Carolina
At Minnesota -8.5 Arizona
At Atlanta -8.5 Tampa Bay
NY Jets -4 At Detroit
At Baltimore -5.5 Miami
New England -4.5 At Cleveland
NY Giants -6.5 At Seattle
At Oakland 0 Kansas City
At Philadelphia -3 Indianapolis
At Green Bay -8 Dallas
Pittsburgh -4.5 At Cincinnati

And for the 11 Points game, I like Oakland. 6-2 at those.

A little late getting these up today, but I did get the Yahoo! picks in on time. There are only 13 games this week, so getting up over 50% is going to be some tricky shiz.

San Francisco -1 Denver (In London! “‘Ello, guvnah, fish and chips, let’s overrate our World Cup team!” (Isn’t that what British people say?))
At Dallas -6.5 Jacksonville
At Detroit -2.5 Washington
At NY Jets -6 Green Bay
At St. Louis -3 Carolina
Miami -1 At Cincinnati
At Kansas City -7.5 Buffalo
At San Diego -3.5 Tennessee
At Arizona -3 Tampa Bay
At Oakland -2.5 Seattle
At New England -6 Minnesota
At New Orleans -1 Pittsburgh
At Indianapolis -5.5 Houston

And in Sam’s 11 Points game — after Brett Favre drunk texted his way into oblivion last week, I’m 5-2 in Sam’s chosen games — I like the Dolphins. That’s unless the refs give the AFC North team a free one again. (Thanks for that last week, btw.)