What's new? Let's start with the Now Playing and What's Hot buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Fans of Midomi, the song-identifying app for iPhone, will still recognize the app when the iPhone prompts an update to version 3.0, even if they don't recognize the new name: SoundHound. The app's core remains the same with its outsize orange button you tap to sing, hum, or record a song you want to ID, buttressed by another button for shier folk to speak the artist or song name, and a text field for old-fashioned typing. What's new is big, and it centers on two additional tabs below, one that lets you browse music trends and another that links up to your iPod library.
Tap "What's Hot" to pull up trend charts for the most popular songs on the Midomi network; the songs that are played more through Midomi than they are on the air; and a list of the most recently "grabbed" tunes that SoundHound and Midomi.com users have identified.
Following any musical entry pulls up an info page from which you can flow into an artist bio, bookmark or share the details, buy the song via iTunes, or watch available YouTube videos. A new lyrics feature presents the words to the tunes within the Midomi app; if that's not available, tapping the "lyrics" button produces Google search results, still within the app.
Midomi's SoundHound also cleverly hooks into your iPhone's iPod library through the "Now Playing" button. The songs you play through SoundHound get funneled into the Midomi network, so you can rapidly interact with your ditty as you would had you sought it out by typing, talking, humming, or recording the tune. Even better, SoundHound can show lyrics for your iTunes song as it plays. Likewise, if your music search turns up a song you've already got, an icon denotes the fact, and lets you play the tune from your own collection.
The robustness of the lyrics feature and the trend charts crowd in on TuneWiki's territory, and threaten to overtake it. Shazam, the other popular music discovery app, could also find itself on SoundHound's lunch menu, except for its loyal following and free price. Even the premium Shazam Encore may continue to appeal to some for its now slightly cheaper price tag and a handy offline mode, but its features pale in comparison.
The cost of owning Midomi 3.0/SoundHound does jump in this release from $4.99 to $6.99, presumably to accommodate the cost of licensing lyrics, though we haven't been able to confirm this yet with the app's publisher, Melodis. What we do know is that with this release, SoundHound is jetting to the front of the music discovery pack, which can only mean more sophisticated improvements down the line for its competitors.
Update: Shortly after this post went up, the app was removed by the developer.
(Credit:
Apple)
File it in the "get this while you can" category. Last week Apple approved a 99-cent application called iRwego that features both the sounds and artwork of the Super Mario series from Nintendo. And yes, it's still up--though probably not for long. Update: the app has since been taken down by the developer.
The app, not blessed by Nintendo, plays more than a minute of music from the Super Mario game while using the iPhone/iPod's accelerometer to take into account any physical movement by the user. In turn, it plays back the same jump sound effect found in Nintendo's Mario games. The idea is to run the app, then stick it in your pocket and pretend to be everyone's favorite plumber.
Along with its accelerometer-powered sound effects, the app also acts as a soundboard, playing familiar sounds like the "worp worp worp" of the green warp pipes, jumping on enemies heads, and hitting the familiar orange question mark power-up boxes. There are also two Mario quotes: "Here we go!" and "Oki doki!" which can be played just by tapping the white, on-screen speech bubbles.
In the app's description, developer Jerome Alves says there's an updated version awaiting approval from Apple that adds extra music as well as vibration for sound effects like breaking bricks. That is, if it doesn't end up in the App Store's blacklist first.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNET. But based on recent IP squabbles over games like Stoneloops of Jurassica, expect action to be swift if Nintendo gets involved. If it does, there are a slew of other Mario-specific apps on the App Store, but most are simply game guides. Though others like Ricky, iMarioSounds and iMario could draw Nintendo's ire, since they don similar use of the company's sound and visual assets.
Here's a demo of what it looks like:
(via the Touch Arcade forums)
Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just a memory, the holiday season is in full swing. For those of us who like to be organized when we hit the stores, creating a shopping list is really the best way to go.
Unfortunately, though, there aren't many services that do a great job at creating those shopping lists. Too often, they provide very simple functionality. Realizing that, I've compiled a handful of services that do perform well for anyone looking to get organized this holiday-shopping season. In this list, you'll find a few sites and a few iPhone apps to check out.
Let's get started.
Get your shopping on
Amazon Shopping List Not to be confused with the company's Wishlist, Amazon's shopping list helps you keep track of all the products you want to buy.
Overall, Amazon's Shopping List is useful. It's not the best service in this roundup, but it if you're looking for simple, one-click experience, Amazon's tool provides it. That said, I should note that you can't simply add any product on Amazon to the list. Unfortunately, I could only find items that could be added in the grocery, beauty, gourmet food, and health and personal care pages. Even then, not all the products listed in those categories were capable of being added to the shopping list. It was a little disappointing. But if you're a heavy Amazon customer who shops in those categories, try it out. If not, there are some better services out there.
My Amazon shopping list needs more products!
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Boxedup Boxedup is one of my favorite services in this roundup. It makes it quick and easy to find products anywhere from the Web and add those to a shopping list.
When you start using Boxedup, you'll need to download a Boxedup button that's added to your browser (I was using Firefox, which it works well with). From there, simply go out to any online retail site and click on the Boxedup button when you want to add the item to your shopping list. Upon doing so, it's added to your Boxedup list for later viewing. You can also add items to your profile right from the Boxedup page, but to be quite honest, that's not how the service was designed and that functionality is a little suspect. Regardless, having the option to add content to your list from just about anywhere on the Web is fantastic. Boxedup works quite well. Check it out.
Boxedup helps you add content from just about anywhere.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Start-up company Gigzee recently updated its free gig-finding iPhone app. I love live music, and I'm always happy when there's another iPhone app to help me find out what's going on. But Gigzee's competing in an already crowded space, and it doesn't have much to set it apart from its competitors.
The concept's familiar enough: Gigzee uses the iPhone's GPS transceiver to detect your current position, then lists live music gigs happening in the next two days, within a certain distance (the default is five miles). You can also enter a ZIP code to get gig listings for another area, view gig locations on a map, and customize the date range to show all gigs within the next month, for example.
Unfortunately, that's about all there is. There's no way to track favorite artists, which means it falls short of the free JamBase iPhone app. JamBase lets you track favorites on its Web site, then link the iPhone app to your account to see a list of gigs only by those artists. (My absolute favorite app in this category, the $2.99 iConcertCal, saves you this manual process by automatically pulling favorite artist information from your iTunes library, but apparently it has a bug and has been removed from the iTunes store for now, and I can no longer get it to open on my iPhone. Bah humbug!)
More importantly, these apps are only as good as their databases of concert information, and here Gigzee appears to fall short. In a quick test, the JamBase app showed me six live gigs happening within five miles of my location tonight. Bandloop, which is also free, showed me a remarkable 12 gigs. (But Bandloop can only show gigs in the next two days--there's no way to get a longer-duration list, which is why I don't use it.) Gigzee? Only three.
I've spoken to Gigzee founder Anurag Jain, and he's a big-time music fan with lots of interesting ideas, like letting artists link their MySpace profiles and automatically post gigs to the site. But so far, the service still looks like a work in progress.
I love tools that are all about providing people with information they want, and on Tuesday, the video game industry's official ratings board got my attention with something awfully useful.
The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) announced on Tuesday its new iPhone app, which is designed to put the board's full written summaries of more than 2,500 video games right at parents' fingertips.
A new iPhone app from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board allows parents to see the full ratings summaries of more than 1,500 video games.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)The idea is that with the app--officially called ESRB Rating, and available now, for free, in Apple's App Store--parents can punch in the name of any game rated by the board after July 1, 2008, and see not just the official rating--such as "M" for those 17 and up, or "E" for everyone--but the ESRB's full written summary of the title. The ESRB began writing the full summaries on July 1, 2008. Users of the app can also search for information about titles from before that date, but they will see only the basic letter rating and a brief content description.
Just over a year ago, the ESRB began making those summaries available to the public through its Web site, and through a mobile site (m.esrb.org). But the Web site isn't convenient to a parent who is actually out shopping for junior, and the mobile site is not something that many people who have standard cell phones will use, especially if they have to pay extra for data. An iPhone app is just so much easier.
Brilliant on-the-fly tools
Add this app, then, to the growing list of tools available for the iPhone and other smartphones that give consumers the ability to arm themselves with the most information about products and pricing while they actually have boots in the Best Buy, so to speak. Others include the brilliant SnapTell, which delivers comparative pricing information about books, DVDs, video games, and other items from sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gamespot, and others based solely on a photograph, and RedLaser, which scans items' bar codes and delivers similar pricing information.
But what makes the ESRB app so terrific, it seems to me, is that it provides parents with exactly the kind of nuanced information they need to properly choose the kinds of games they want to buy for their kids. Sure, the basic letter rating gives some context--if you're concerned about violence or racy content, you probably want to stay away from "M"-rated games--but within a single rating category, there is still a wide spectrum of content.
For example, the hottest game in the world right now is Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game has an "M" rating, but that just doesn't say all that much. Reading the summary, though, a parent can see much more: "Realistic gunfire, explosions, and cries of pain are heard during the frequent and fast-paced combat. The most intense depiction of violence occurs during a 'No Russian' mission where players take on the role of an undercover Ranger: Several civilians are gunned down at an airport as players are given a choice to participate in the killings (e.g., players can shoot a wounded civilian that is crawling on the ground), or walk by and observe without opening fire."
The app arms parents with the information to make informed buying decisions.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)That's a little more informative than "M," isn't it.
To be sure, kids are going to be able to get the games they want regardless of what their parents buy them. But given that games can cost $60 apiece--at least for the AAA console games--it may be that they don't quite have the means to sneak off with each and every first-person shooter they desire. They may still be dependent on Santa Claus, aka their parents, to get them the bulk of their games.
And, of course, those buyers who don't have an iPhone still will have to struggle to access these summaries, and it's unlikely that retailers will be providing them in any useful form.
But all in all, I find this precisely the kind of thing that puts the power over decisions about which video games to buy right back where it belongs: in parents' hands. We are in an age where so many pundits, politicians, and others are moaning and whining about the breakdown of society, and parents are complaining about the corruption of their children.
Well, complain no more: If you've got an iPhone--and I certainly hope the ESRB puts this app out for Android and other smartphones soon--you can do the research yourself. And then if you're still unhappy about the content in the games you buy your kids, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Corrected at 12:50 p.m. PST: This story incorrectly reported how many games rated by the ESRB would have summaries available through the iPhone app. It is more than 1,500.
(Credit:
Scott Stein/CNET)
My Thanksgiving was spent in the New York City area, since my family all live on Long Island. But, since I live in the city in an area that's not conducive to owning or parking a car, I'm a renter when it comes to trips. As a result, services like Zipcar and other rental agencies are of great importance to me, as is the quality of their services as opposed to their apps.
When it comes to Thanksgiving car rentals, the city's supply dries up incredibly quickly--weeks in advance, if my attempts were indicative. In particular, Zipcar--the service that's high-tech enough to have an app that unlocks your car for you and offers a mobile rental portal for phones--showed me a map full of unavailability. My car savior came from another service, Connect by Hertz, that happened to have plenty of cars available. And, by coincidence, there's no app. I'm also an iPhone user, and I've become dependent on my apps. But this weekend, I learned a bit of a lesson about phone dependence: sometimes, perhaps, it's better not to have an app for everything.
A me-too competitor to Zipcar, Connect by Hertz is another car-sharing service that has prices and vehicles similar to Zipcar's, as well as a system that uses your membership card as the access key. Connect by Hertz requires a yearly membership equivalent to Zipcar's and works off the same car-sharing model, using your membership card as the car key and offering free gas fill-ups.
It's far from ideal to be subscribed to multiple services, as I am. But the difference is availability: a day before Thanksgiving, Hertz had cars in the city ready to go, many of them, on its Web site. I'm inclined to shift over to Hertz simply to not be stuck on major holidays.
Now, the question is: does not having apps or mobile portals make services like Connect by Hertz more off-the-beaten-path, and thus paradoxically easier to reserve with? Does not having an app make you the equivalent of that below-the-radar cafe that's somehow avoided crowds despite serving delicious food? And am I, by posting news of this, possibly doing the very thing I'm trying to avoid in the first place, blowing this secret up?
Of course, there's always lesson No. 2: don't drive anywhere for Thanksgiving.
The App Store has been a huge success for Apple and for some developers, but there have been a few hiccups along the way. Apps have made it past Apple's rigorous reviews machine only to be pulled down permanently, or have their developers required to remove key features.
Those who still have some of these apps can consider them collector's items, since they continue to work, despite not being able to be re-downloaded from the App Store. We've rounded up 10 of the most notable pulls (along with one that had to be tweaked for less functionality). Click the slideshow link below to get started.
Any we missed? Leave them in the comments.
This Friday, commonly referred to as Black Friday, marks the beginning of the 2009 holiday shopping season in the U.S. Some people love braving the crowds for holiday deals. But if you don't and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, any of the free apps below will help you shop from wherever you happen to be.
Amazon Mobile
Shopping Amazon for Dachshund themed gifts
The Amazon Mobile app (iTunes link) lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to search, shop, compare prices, read reviews, and make purchases on Amazon.com. Existing Amazon customers get complete access to their existing shopping cart, wish list, payment and shipping options, order history, 1-Click settings, and Prime membership benefits.
One experimental feature, Amazon Remembers, lets you snap a photo of a product while you're out, so that you can refer to it later. In addition, the app will try to find the product in Amazon's catalog.
B&N Bookstore
B&N reserve in-store
The B&N Bookstore app (iTunes link) lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to search books, DVDs and Blu-ray, CDs, toys and games, home and gift items, video games, and practically anything that B&N sells. Locate retail stores and browse additional store features such as cafes, event schedules, children's story times, author appearances, and free Wi-Fi.
The app also makes interesting use of the iPhone's camera. Take a photo of the front cover on a book, DVD, or CD, and the app will find it for you. Once the item has been found, you can get information about it that includes editorial reviews, customer ratings, and a chance to reserve a copy for pickup at your local store. You can use the Discover section of the app to get ideas for gifts this holiday season.
Best Buy Weekly Deals
Best Buy weekly deals
The Best Buy Weekly Deals app (iTunes link) brings you the latest weekly deals from Best Buy and lets you browse or search its inventory. You can access product ratings, reviews, accessories, and large product images. The app also lets you manage your BestBuy.com shopping cart and complete the purchases on a mobile version of Best Buy's Web site. Like all the other apps we've written about, this one has its own tool (called IdeaGiftr) for finding gifts. This app is definitely worth a look if you want to catch the Black Friday bargain sales at Best Buy this year.
Best Buy - Gamers Club
If you know someone who's an avid gamer, you might consider the Best Buy - Gamers Club app (iTunes link) that offers a lot of what the Best Buy Weekly Deals app offers, but concentrates specifically on gaming.
eBay Mobile
eBay shopping for Apple iPhone
One of our favorite iPhone apps is eBay Mobile (iTunes link), released in 2008 and later seeing some nice improvements.
eBay's app gives you nearly 100 percent of the eBay experience on your iPhone. It's not as feature complete as the Web site, but it works well enough. You can search for items to purchase or bid on, place bids, watch items, and purchase items all from your iPhone. Once the sale or auction is complete, you can even pay for your purchase on your iPhone.
Target mobile app
Target mobile app - no wiener dog would be caught wearing this
Target's iPhone app (iTunes link) lets you search for products at your local store, check their availability, and even find out where the item is located inside of the store. Like the Best Buy app, this one lets you browse the weekly deals available at Target.
Additional features include referrals to other store locations if your store is out of stock on a particular item, plus gift suggestions based on gender, age, price, personality, or occasion.
Toys "R" Us Big Book Favorites
Toys "R" Us shopping deals
The Toys "R" Us Big Book of Favorites iPhone app (iTunes link) helps you to find toys by category and popularity. You can use the app to make a list of your favorites and share the lists you create via e-mail. Product details are readily available including images, descriptions, prices, and customer reviews.
The app includes features that help you to save money on your toy and electronic purchases at Toys "R" Us and includes the usual store location features that we are used to seeing in all apps of this type.
You might want to hide this one from your children, especially if you are keeping your toy shopping list on your iPhone.
Wal-Mart
The Wal-Mart mobile app (iTunes link) is by far the least useful of all the apps and a disappointment coming from a retailer as large as Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart's app is disappointing lacking many basic shopping features that other retailers offer in their apps.
The app's sole focus is on the sale of Wal-Mart's electronics. If you want to see more, the app will refer you to Wal-Mart's full Web site that fortunately is available in a mobile edition. We were surprised to find that this app doesn't begin to touch the surface of the inventory available at Wal-Mart and doesn't offer a way a way to browse Wal-Mart's current weekly sales and specials. However, it does remind you how many days are left before Christmas and helps you locate stores.
Are you armed with your iPhone or iPod Touch and ready for the holiday shopping season? Do you have any other Apple mobile device shopping tips you would like to share? Tell us about them in the comments.
Apple's App Store has been a runaway success, but it's also been mired in controversy due to the application approval process. The company, however, isn't making apologies for its stringent gatekeeping and insists it's acting in the best interest of its customers.
(Credit:
Apple)
"We've built a store for the most part that people can trust," Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, told BusinessWeek in an interview posted Monday. "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works."
Schiller offered BusinessWeek a breakdown of app rejections. Of the applications sent back to developers, about 90 percent are due to technical issues and simply need code tweaks to make the apps work properly.
About 10 percent are rejected because they try to steal personal data or try to help someone break the law or because they contain content that Apple considers inappropriate, BusinessWeek reported.
About 1 percent are turned away for reasons that fall into gray areas, Schiller told BusinessWeek.
One of Apple's latest run-ins with a developer was over the use of Apple product images in Rogue Amoeba's audio-streaming app called Airfoil Speakers Touch. After three-and-a-half months of back and forth over an update for the already-live app, Apple is apparently going to let the company resubmit the app update with the product images intact as originally submitted. However, the ordeal has apparently soured Rogue Amoeba on future development for the App Store.
"At this time, we have no plans to return to the platform," Rogue Amoeba CEO Paul Kafasis told CNET on Monday. "Apple has corrected one small problem with their review process. But the platform as a whole still has many issues that need to be addressed before we consider it a viable place for our business to commit resources."
The App Store currently has more than 100,000 third-party applications available for download. Apple has reported more than 2 billion downloads since the online store opened in July 2008.
Apple's iPhone platform has attracted a wide range of developers, including many gaming companies over the last year. While competition in attracting developers is increasing among mobile operating system companies, it seems the performance of the App Store will keep Apple at the top of list.
French mobile gaming company Gameloft said at an investor conference on Friday that it is cutting back its investment in Android in favor of the iPhone, according to a Reuters report. Gameloft's finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said "many others" were doing the same thing, although he didn't mention the other companies by name.
Rochefort said the main reason for choosing the iPhone over Android was "due to weaknesses of Android's application store."
"It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue," said Rochefort.
Gameloft has more than 75 games available in the App Store and Rochefort said they sell 400 times more games for the iPhone than they do for Android.
Games are a big focus for Apple, especially with the release of its newest iPod Touch in September. It was there that Apple began comparing itself to the gaming elite like Nintendo and Sony.
Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said during the event that the buying experience was "too expensive" and "not a lot of fun." Schiller also pointed out that, at the time, there were more than 21,000 gaming titles on the iPhone, compared to 3,600 on Nintendo, and 600 on Sony.
Earlier this month, Apple said it had more than 100,000 apps available with over two billion downloads.
