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The iPad has made it possible to create some very impressive pieces of music. It's hard to imagine something as complex and deeply intellectual as composition happening on a device used more often to play bird-tossing games, but there are some truly impressive compositions and even more impressive apps to create those works. One such app is Sketch-a-Song, providing a sleek, drag-and-drop interface to create songs with the tap of a button.

Sketch-a-Song starts by requiring you to register an account. You can choose to connect to Facebook, but Facebook integration is deep and the settings are not immediately … Read more

Surround Video is not an app in the sense that you can actually do anything with it. There are no buttons to create your own videos and no way to edit or add content to the existing videos. The content that is provided is almost entirely technical demos of what Surround Video can do, but it is still an interesting experience. As more of these videos are added it will be interesting to see what filmmakers choose to do with Surround Video.

When you open this app, you will find four technical demos of what Surround Video does. The technology … Read more

There are quite a few music apps for the iPhone - apps that allow you to play your music, create playlists or download music differently than you would in iTunes or the Music app. However, few of those apps offer anything unique or different from Apple's built-in tools. iTagPlayer manages to do so, albeit in a limited package. However, despite its limitations, iTagPlayer is worth checking out because of the unique way it presents your music.

When you turn on iTagPlayer for the first time, it starts scanning your music for tags related to the genres of that music. … Read more

The idea of an hourglass timer is a good one. Consider for a moment how bland the average timer is for the iPhone. The built-in timer is pure function and very little style, and the other apps that try to replace it are not much better. So why not use an interactive hourglass to represent the passage of time? While the concept is sound, the execution in Hourglass Timer is largely ineffective.

Start the app, choose an amount of time, and press start. The hourglass will be flipped and the timer will count down. However, instead of actually keeping track … Read more

Your iPhone is immensely distracting. It doesn't matter what you do for a living and how diligent you are, it is likely that, at some point in your day, you are wasting at least some volume of time using your phone instead of working. GoWork attempts to help people who have this problem by gently "reminding" them to get back to work after a certain amount of time. While it works to some degree, it is fairly limited in many ways.

The concept is very basic. Set a time frame for how long you are allowed to … Read more

PDF files are much easier to send and read than your standard Open Office files. This app claims to convert your Office files into PDFs, but it does the bare minimum to live up to that name. In fact, Open Office to PDF Creator seems much more like a basic file viewer than anything else.

Most of Open Office to PDF Creator's navigation buttons are clouded by ads that take up the top and bottom of the screen. That really doesn't matter, since you can do most of the converting right from your file menu. Converting .odt files … Read more

The development of new chips that deliver zippier performance, smoother gaming, faster Web surfing, and longer-lasting battery life will soon make their way into new Android tablets. While the chips themselves -- and the high-end tablets that will house them -- have yet to be released, we have it on good authority that they'll deliver on their promise.

Gaming is an increasingly popular way tablet owners are spending time with their devices, and chip makers are paying attention. The gaming experience on Android tablets has improved in just the last year, and it's bound to only get faster, … Read more

There's a newcomer hanging around town. It has 5 spacious inches of screen space. It flaunts a 13-megapixel camera. You can't deny the allure of its 2,600mAh battery. All those specs may put it one up on its competitors, at least on paper. But just because the Samsung Galaxy S4 wants to be top dog, doesn't mean the other guys aren't going to put up a fight.

The lead contenders to challenge the Galaxy S4 for the smartphone throne are the iPhone 5, the HTC One, and the BlackBerry Z10. They all have their claims … Read more

Ace Queen HD is a simple game wrapped in an elaborate package. At first glance it's not immediately clear what type of game it is, but after spending a few minutes in just the first level, you will see that it is nothing more than a hidden object game. While there is nothing wrong with hidden object games, the execution is lacking in many ways, the story is non-existent, and the price point is unrealistically high.

The goal of the game is to compare two images of the same scene and find hidden objects on the right side that … Read more