Instead of trying to scrawl down lyrics, doing a search on Google (only to be lead to some bizarre lyric website repository that may or may not work, all the while offering me free ringtones and ceaseless pop-up ads), with Shazam's app, I've actually found songs by, well, listening to them. Shazam is slick. You hear a song, start the app, hold your iPhone's mic up to the sound source and viola! It's been 'tagged' and identified like a wild bird you caught on Animal Planet. Another app by Midomi even lets you hum a tune in, search by title, artist and even lets you listen to samples.
Sending the sample for off-site sonic analysis, querying the proper artist remotely, album art and sending a response back to your iPhone in less than 10 seconds is pretty dang slick. The sample time itself is only about 12 seconds! Once you get your result, you can bookmark it, and, if you're in a WiFi hotspot, launch iTunes to buy the song. Most popular songs are on these services. Shazam doesn't work in loud places like clubs, bars or restaurants, but works well in cars or at home.
What these services haven't been able to do, however, is to analyze classical music. I've tried a few times. Shazam says the Beethoven Fifth Symhony is "unrecognized." What would Ludwig say? After humming the piece into Midomi, I got the strangest country folk song in response. This isn't surprising. There are very long phrases in classical music and it makes even die-hard fans puzzle as to "what was that piece?" Having these services decipher classical music presents a lot of challenges. First, recordings of pieces are almost nearly indistinguishable especially if you only had a 12-second sample of them. Also, unlike pop music, where there is one artist performing one song (sure there are cover versions), with classical you have hundreds of ensembles, conductors and performers spanning 50 years of audio recording doing the same 'song' over and over again. For example, there are more than 200 recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony alone!
When (or if) classical music can be deciphered by these types of services it will probably be a great engineering feat. Progress, if this is ever attempted, would probably be incremental. First, identifying a particular symphony, concerto or quartet is, in itself, very difficult. Next, identifying the particular recording will be staggering. All those ensembles and conductors perform pieces many times over leading to various versions and editions that would be a morass of data to sort through. While there's probably not a market demand for this type of service or application, it may serve as Shazam or Midomi's Everest.
For those of us who have a hard time deciding what to eat or where to dine out, Urbanspoon has made a slot machine/roulette application (complete with 'pull' slot machine sound effects) to help us make a decision on where to eat. The application will determine your location from the GPS feature (which is still a pretty marked and powerful feature to the iPhone 3G that invariably raises privacy issues) and you can select he criteria you want, i.e., neighborhood, cuisine and price. And, for some inexplicable reason, you literally shake the phone to activate the selection feature. The wheels spin and your restaurant is selected (Alternatively, you can push the button too). It's a kind of Magic 8 Ball effect. Strange, but amusing.
Urbanspoon with its gourmet result.
(Credit: Kevin Ho)All sounds good in theory, but in actual application, it's a little, well, beta. "California cuisine" encompasses a sweeping and surprisingly large number of restaurants. Also, the $$$ price guide is a bit off with some joints being way above and some being way below. And, in terms of content, well, given that San Francisco's Mission District is home to many Top 100 Restaurants, Burger King was definitely a surprise result.
How 1.0 iPhones use battery life with the 2.0 firmware and all those tantalizing applications is something that may be worth considering against the iPhone 3G's voracious appetite for power. During the past weekend, as new applications get tested out, I've seen the iPhone 3G use more and more power with the charge indicator gradually slipping away, ultimately flashing the "low battery" warning. This warning wasn't something common with the 1.0 iPhone I had. In fact, I had never seen that "low battery" indicator even after 7 days of camping-like condition on the AIDS Ride.
Of course, with 3G, improved sound quality, GPS locating, and very loud ringer, it would make sense that battery life would suffer. Short of putting a stick of plutonium in the iPhone 3G, it would seem a safe bet that power chargers will get a good workout with the iPhone 3G. Invariably, battery fatigue will soon follow and Apple will have a secured a revenue stream of captive iPhone users who will eventually shell out $80 for battery replacement. That or third-party chargers for cars (or solar chargers) will see increased sales. Either way, this is where the 3G falls short.
Loopt has an appealing application that allows you to track your friends and allows them to track you on a graphic map. It's kind of like a GPS-sonar radar that I've just discovered on the iPhone 3G. But, is this application really more like an electronic leash? Will your significant other track you? Will moms and dads track their children this year? Yes, Loopt has an extensive privacy policy that discourages/prohibits kids under 14 years old from using the service, but even one of my most 'public' friends (both online and in off-line) was actually hesitant about installing Loopt on his iPhone 3G. Disclosing your location to a third-party seemed to bother him greatly. The thought is that if you're near a store that is having a special you may get an SMS-text bulletin or coupon. The ultimate direct-marketer's dream once Loopt obtains some demographic information. Your movement patterns are one thing, but add-in your physical location, shopping patterns, travel patterns... You've become a human cookie.
To me, it's not necessarily the third-parties I'd be concerned about, but would disclosing your location to first-parties, i.e. your friends and family, be the best thing? We are all entitled to privacy of course. (Well, penumbras of privacy under the Constitution). Some choose to have Dick Cheney-like undisclosed location privacy, while others have Martha Stewart ankle-tracker privacy. But, balancing privacy requires takes a certain amount of prudence (or sanity perhaps) that will evolve as the line between public and private blurs even more. At least, at this point, Loopt allows you to opt out and only updates your location when the application is launched. What happens then you can't opt out any more? That'll throw all of us for a loop. (Sorry for the pun).
Let's face it, the iPhone can do a whole bunch of things, some necessary (like talking, texting and emailing) and others not-so-necessary (like the rolling-a-make-believe-ball-into-a-peg-fame) pretty well. But, you would hope that one of the more basic features like the weather function would work better than it does. Sure, the icons are pretty and easy to understand. One of my favorites is the ambiguous sun-with-raindrops icon, so you know that it's supposed to rain and be sunny, right.... The forecasts are not detailed, and have questionable accuracy at best. I've been noticing this trend for months now, but this should't be the case as weather forecasting and even simple reporting is going to get more relevant as weather (i.e., global warming) becomes a greater and more pernicious factor in our lives (think about it: tornadoes in the midwest that have record wind speeds, snow in the Dakotas in late April, hurricanes that wipe out countries).
As such, because the interface is simple and only provides basic forecasts and conditions, you would hope that the iPhone weather feature would be at least accurate. Think again. I've seen it almost everywhere I travel. Today, for example, for San Francisco it says it's cloudy, when it's sunny. It said it was 61 degrees when it was 51 degrees (earlier it said it was sunny when it was cloudy). In Australia, I remember the forecast being sun and rain on alternating days. In reality, it was exactly the opposite. Same was true for Hawaii. Same for Iowa. So, as Apple's engineers work on the next 3G iPhone (or would-be SDK iPhone app folks toil away for current iPhones) I can only hope they can improve upon the weather feature.
Polar Bear Farm, working with a reversed engineered SDK, have created two prototype applications that caught my eye. Of course, this coming from someone who thinks hacking involves coughing and jailbreaking involves Folsom prison. But with that said, the New Zealander guys (and they are literally guys) from Polar Bear Farm demoed a search function for iPhones that searches contacts and calendars. Beyond that, and more ambitious are their video recording feature (still in development) and even more ambitious peer to peer poker (with other players) using your iPhone as your hand of cards instead of actual physical cards. While the video compression details haven't been worked out (each second being about 3 MB is a bit excessive) and the poker applications a twinkling in their eyes, outfits like Polar Bear were my first exposure to the types of outfits really innovating with the iPhone. I wonder what's in the pipeline....
Video recording iPhone applications from down under - Polar Bear Farm's offering
(Credit: Kevin Ho)Facebook and Meebo introduced new applications for iPhone users this week. I had been awaiting these two apps as, sadly, these are two of my addictions - social networking and chatting.
Facebook's typical page would load in my iPhone's Safari browser decently well. Loading the page and surfing around was pretty fast regardless of being on the EDGE or on a Wi-Fi network. However, on Safari, I soon came to realize that I couldn't change or update my "status" and was forever stuck doing whatever it was I was doing in the morning I updated my status. I mean I know my friends want to what I'm doing at all hours of the day, right? I discovered that you could text your status to "FBOOK" and that would take of the problem. However, with Facebook's new iPhone application located at iphone.facebook.com (only accessible if you're on an iPhone), this issue was resolved. The iPhone-specific application's design is slick and less graphically intensive, which is great if you have to access the site via the spotty EDGE network from AT&T. The user-interface is pretty simple and elegant. Friends and updates are given a wide toolbar look and you can navigate without having to enlarge or shrink the page. The top menus feature the most commonly used content. Only drawback is having to enter your login credentials each time you've exited the application/site, but I suppose that's a good security feature as well as not having to maintain an open network connection to an otherwise idle account.
Meebo
I had also been awaiting an iPhone-only application for Meebo (the universal chat Web site that merges and allows you to use the most common chat programs - i.e., AIM, Yahoo, MSN and GTalk. While Meebo's regular page would load up in the iPhone's Safari browser, you couldn't actually send a message or do anything useful once you logged in. So, when I found out that Meebo had created a version for iPhones at wwwm.meebo.com I was stoked. I logged in as usual and was happy to see my friend list appeared and it looked as if I was good to go. The user interface is quite similar to Facebook's iPhone version, horizontal displays for contacts, clean, simple and easy to navigate almost inviting you to ping someone.
But, my test fell short and ended prematurely as after I tried to ping a co-worker an error screen stating "network connection interrupted" and "java application detected" brought me back to the login screen. Two more attempts have been unsuccessful thus far. I'll keep you posted as to how it works out.
Overall, with these two applications coming online, I'm eager to see what else is in the works. It would seem that these two applications have common design elements that are likely to be incorporated for future iPhone applications. While it may be too early to predict, I would have to guess that upcoming iPhone non-Apple applications will be hallmarked by clean, non-scalable pages that display content in that, well, iPhone-way, simply and cleanly, but somewhat lacking... Luckily, however, one sacrifice I don't mind as content is culled down to fit the iPhone is that these pages and applications do not feature as many ads as their PC-based ancestors.
- prev
- 1
- next
