Audiophiles who have an iPhone or Android phone should do themselves a favor and try out song-searching app SoundHound.

SoundHound (free or $4.99) gives you five ways to name an unknown tune, and delivers the expected artist bios and related video content. It also throws in lyrics, and to its credit, doesn't yank them from the more limited free version.

Our favorite feature, unfortunately found only in the iPhone edition for now, meshes with your on-board iPod to pony up lyrics and bio information for songs you already own.

--SoundHound Infinity for iPhone ($4.99)

--SoundHound for iPhone (free)

--SoundHound Infinity for Android ($4.99)

--SoundHound for Android (free)

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Just in time for the release of Apple's iOS 4 mobile software is an update to iTunes.

Apple released iTunes 9.2 Wednesday with several new features, most of them to enable compatibility with the pending software update coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch on Monday.

According to Apple, iTunes 9.2 now allows:

• Syncing iTunes content with iPhone 4, which officially goes on sale June 24
• Syncing and reading e-books (with iBooks 1.1 installed) 
• Syncing PDF documents as books 
• Utilizing new folders feature for organizing apps 
• Faster syncing

See Download.com for updates to the Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.

Originally posted at Circuit Breaker

Like Shapewriter for the iPhone, Swype is a gestural alternative for the virtual keyboard that spells out words when you trace them with your fingertip. The software senses a finger press to mark the beginning of a word and a lift to denote the the end, then works out one or more possible combinations to make sense of the jumbled letters in between.

Most of the time Swype gets it right, and if you're a slow touch-screen typist for whom the hunt-and-peck method isn't going so hot, now's your chance to try it out.

Swype hasn't traditionally been open to the public (it is, however, preinstalled on some handsets,) so if you're interested in sampling the beta, you'd better make your move. The very limited-time beta offer began on Wednesday and will last "probably a few days," according to Swype's beta site.

Swype beta will work on HVGA and WVGA Android phones in English, Spanish, and Italian (with more to come.) You may experience some limitations since Swype requires complete integration with the phone for all its features to work. However, skip this download if your phone already came with Swype, because you'll find it won't work. Light support will come from the forums.

Swype in action
As useful as it can be, Swype isn't for everyone, particularly if you're heavy into slang, technical terms, and personal names. Depending what you write and how disciplined you are about contractions (me: extremely,) some aspects of the old Swype may have left you yearning for the built-in keyboard.

Over the time I've been beta-testing it, I've received errors about the words I wanted being "hidden" behind other words, words capitalizing in the middle of a sentence, and inconsistent acknowledgment of contractions, the latter two of which Swype's team says this new beta has solved. Double letters also present a challenge, but can jogging over the letter of choice usually resolves it. You can't double-tap the space bar to get a period, but you can swipe out a period and the space bar as a workaround, and the standalone version of Swype doesn't make it immediately known that you've added new words to the dictionary (which it does after you type a words and hit Space.)

Stickler that I am, distrusting Swype slows me down as I compulsively check each word before moving on to make sure it worked. I've witnessed enough mistakes to continue with the editing practice, especially after one humorously ribald interpretation involving an x-rated alternative to the word "gelato."

Interestingly, using Swype has made me aware of some idiosyncrasies in the English language, such as how often we use contractions that double as complete words, and the abundance of words containing double letters.

There are daily aggravations, sure (why, oh why, can't the consumer version tap the dictionary? However, I knew that Swype had become my preferred method of text entry when I caught myself tracing out words on the iPhone's standard touch-screen keyboard. Unsurprisingly, I didn't get too far.

Swype's latest beta is compatible with any Android-powered phone running OS 1.5 or up that also has an HVGA, WVGA, and FWVGA (480x320, 800x480, or 854x480) screen resolution--including (but not exhaustive to) the Droid family, Sprint EVO and Hero, and the Nexus One.

Updated 6/16/2010 at 5:50PM PT with more details and a correction about feature capabilities.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

It's funny to think of the Xobni in-box tool in a box, but that's exactly what is about to happen; as soon as Wednesday, in fact.

A packaged version of Xobni is a new move for the product, traditionally a downloadable Windows add-on for Microsoft Outlook that can quickly index and search the contents of your in-box.

Having an Internet start-up gunning for retail store sales is interesting from a business perspective for two reasons. The first is clearly outreach; Xobni is striving to make its brand known to the same customer base who will buy Microsoft Office 2010 from brick-and-mortar stores.

The second interesting point is to consider the bottom-line sales advantage. Although the premium Xobni Plus will cost the same out-of-the-box as it does online--$29.95 (exception: the 15-percent discount posted on Amazon)--retail customers will bypass the free version, which already includes plenty of handy features for Outlook users.

Xobni has also gone the extra mile to justify why a return to boxed software after the download revolution makes sense for its business model with a market research survey suggesting that at least 80 percent of its 2,000 respondents would be somewhat likely to buy software in stores. Xobni is also banking on its presence next to Microsoft Office 2010 to push some sales.

Boxed versions of Xobni Plus will be rolling out in Office Max and Fry's Electronics stores starting Wednesday (though it may not be immediately available in all outlets.)

In Duck vs BP for iPhone, it's your job to save the world's last surviving duck by plugging oil-spewing pipes.

If only life could imitate app. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could fix this catastrophe and rescue wildlife with a few screen taps?

I suppose it was only a matter of time before an app directly referenced the BP oil spill. This one's a game, and a decidedly simplistic one at that, but it is filled with interesting and educational facts about the environment.

Using your iPhone or iPod accelerometer, you "steer" your duck back and forth to avoid falling oil drops. Eventually the pond fills up enough that duckie can plug the pipe. Then you move on to the next level.

Whenever you complete a level or are hit by an oil drop, the game serves up an eco-fact. For example: "Recycled paper requires 64% less energy than making paper from virgin wood pulp, and can save many trees."

The game is free and ad-supported, but you can pony up 99 cents for an ad-free version. Sadly, the author makes no mention of any proceeds going to disaster relief, which I find a bit disappointing. It seems like that would have been the classy thing to do.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

The other night I watched the last half hour of "Toy Story 2" on TV. So what if the children were in bed? It's one of my all-time favorite movies--go ahead and laugh--and I can't wait for "Toy Story 3," which opens Friday.

Needless to say, I was jazzed when Disney's free "Toy Story 3" app arrived yesterday. That is, I was jazzed until I ran it; what a depressing, disappointing, borderline insult of an app.

Here's what you'll find inside:

Woody's Wild Ride
Woody's Wild Ride is a pretty lame-looking action game that's clearly aimed at young children. I have no problem with that. However, my problem is that its $3.99 in-app purchase price.

Toy Story Mania 
Mania is a batch of "Toy Story"-themed carnival games inspired by the eponymous attraction at Disney World. How many games do you get? The Wii version has 30, but this app doesn't specify how many games you get, it could be 30, could be three. Price: $4.99.

So far, this "free" app will cost you $9 if you want to do anything meaningful with it. It's supposed to have comics as well--no doubt for an additional charge; however, as shown in the above video, I can't find them anywhere.

The "Toy Story 3" app does have a few freebies, such as "Toy Story 3" trailers, in-app access to the "Toy Story 3" mobile Web site, virtual pins you collect by buying stuff, and a tool that turns your iPhone or iPod into a wireless controller for "Toy Story 3: The Video Game," but only for the Mac version. Thanks, but I'm a Windows user.

The apps sole redeeming feature is Woody's Greetings, which creates a personalized message, including your child's name, based on answers to a handful of questions. Wait a second! That's not even Tom Hanks' voice! In fact, all of the voices in the app are from sound-alikes.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I was so impressed by the "Toy Story" Read-Along titles, to say nothing of the movies themselves, that I just expected a lot more. I think little children will quickly get bored with this app, if they're  not confused by certain areas of the interface. Also, the bait-and-switch  tactics--the app is free! No it's not!--is sure to annoy parents.

Please, please, please let the movie be better than this. I'm confident that it will be; however, I guess we'll all have to wait till Friday to find out.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Daniel Terdiman's cool look at "Toy Story 3's" groundbreaking tech.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Ever since Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie announced the road map for BlackBerry App World 2.0, we've been waiting to hear the magic words "carrier billing" as a payment option. According to some online reports on Wednesday, that time may be at hand.

We've heard that while BlackBerry App World 2.0 will still offer PayPal as a billing option for commercial apps, RIM will drop the requirement to captain a PayPal account. Instead, RIM will reportedly work with carriers to add the cost of a downloaded app or game to the monthly phone bill. When Balsillie first announced it, RIM planned to roll out monthly recurring charges in 2011.

Other purported enhancements include support for QR bar codes (a la Google's Android) and a search function that's received some back-end tuning.

We also hear tales of a BlackBerry ID that would facilitate transferring the content of one BlackBerry phone to another. There's already some similar functionality in the My World portion of the App World, which tracks your downloads and deletions through the App World app and helps you reinstall them on the same or different devices.

Also on Balsillie's road map last April was the promise of more enterprise apps in the App World catalog, and free and paid catalogs for all countries that App World currently supports.

RIM has events focused on the App World scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, so the official word could come as early as Wednesday afternoon.

(Via PhoneScoop)

Lime Wire managers have plans to transform the nation's largest file-sharing network into a legal music service, company representatives told CNET.

"It will have unrestricted downloading and streaming," a spokeswoman said in a statement. "It will be easy-to-use and easy to pay for. It will allow consumers to better discover music through advanced search tools, find more recommendations, and have access to millions of songs on-demand."

The only thing that might be missing from a new LimeWire music store is, well, music--or at least tracks from the four largest record companies. At this point, the top labels, which account for more than 80 percent of song sales in this country, want little to do with LimeWire.

There is plenty of reasons for that, music industry insiders told CNET. For starters, Lime Wire has yet to show the new service to the top labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Music. Then, there's the fact that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood last month found Lime Group, parent of software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton liable for copyright infringement. Wood's decision could mean the defendants will be required to pay upward of $1 billion in damages.

Then finally there's this: during the past 18 months, representatives from some of the major labels have met with Lime Wire leaders on at least three different occasions to discuss creating a legal service, said the sources. Each time they were "rebuffed."

For most of the top record companies, the time for talking is over. On Friday, Lime Wire's attorneys must file papers explaining to the judge why she shouldn't order the file-sharing service shut down. This is in response to a request made earlier this month by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the top recording firms, which asked Wood for a permanent injunction against Lime Wire. The judge has plenty of options and could place restrictions on the service without forcing it to close, but legal experts predict Lime Wire is unlikely to survive.

"Mark Gorton thinks he's smarter than everybody else. Certainly, he thinks he's smarter than his attorneys. I don't feel sorry for any of these guys."

--Wayne Rosso

Lime Wire's management refused to discuss the meetings with the major labels or why an agreement was never reached but did issue a statement on the subject. "LimeWire has always been willing to work with the music industry in the creation of a solution that address labels concerns," a company spokeswoman said via e-mail. "Accusations that we are not willing to work with the industry are simply not true."

LimeWire was created in 2000 by Gorton, a bond trader and hedge fund manager. At that time, file-sharing services and networks seemed to spring up everywhere on the heels of Napster. Suprnova.org, Scour, LokiTorrent, OiNK, TorrentSpy have all either been shut down by the courts or closed due to the heavy cost of defending themselves in court. But none of them came close to reaching the size of LimeWire. Users of the software account for 58 percent of the people who said they downloaded music from a peer-to-peer service last year, according to a survey by the NPD Group.

Lime Wire's success is one of the reasons the music industry is unlikely to show Gorton or the company much mercy. The way label executives figure it, that success came at their expense. They point out that Gorton isn't one of these alleged freedom fighters distributing content for the good of the public--not that they agree with that either. But with Gorton, he was pocketing millions of dollars that rightfully should have gone to musicians, songwriters, and other music artists, say the sources.

When Wood granted summary judgment for the music industry, she noted that Lime Wire grew annual revenue from $6 million in 2004 to $20 million two years later.

In private conversations, important music industry decision makers have described Gorton and Lime Wire's administration as "disingenuous." These label honchos are skeptical that Lime Wire's is sincere about working hand-in-hand on a legal service. The speculation at the labels is that Gorton is attempting to clean up Lime Wire's image so Wood might go easier when assessing damages.

Naive or duplicitous?
To many at the big labels, Gorton only began reaching out after May 11, when Wood granted summary judgment and he began staring at a potential $1 billion judgment. It hasn't escaped notice that since Wood's decision, Gorton and Lime Wire leaders have launched a public relations campaign.

"Perhaps I was naive," Gorton told The New York Times last month as he described himself as someone who tried to do right by the music industry and that he believed the sector would eventually embrace his ideas. "If I knew when the lawsuit started what I know now about the music industry," he told the Times, "maybe we would have done something different."

To say that those Gorton quotes were met with skepticism in the music sector is an understatement. "Limewire's Mark Gorton has best spin doctor ever," Ted Cohen, a music-industry consultant and former EMI executive, wrote on his Twitter page. "Shame on NYT."

Even some from the peer-to-peer side say Gorton's quotes aren't supported by the record.

Wayne Rosso, the former president of file-sharing software maker Grokster, said that in 2005 he worked in coordination with Andrew Lack, the former chief of Sony Music, to try to convince the top peer-to-peer sites to go legitimate. Lack tried to convince the sites to adopt a filtering system so everybody could make money, Rosso said.

"At the time, [Grokster and I] sincerely tried to get licensed with any one of [the music industry's] ridiculous models at the time," Rosso said. "We did that because we wanted to convert the user base. We saw it couldn't go on like it was. We knew that the system had to change. It was a time of great chaos."

Rosso said he has some bitter feelings about negotiations with some of the P2P companies. "You expected the record companies to lie to you," he said. "You didn't expect these P2P guys to do it."

As for Gorton and Lime Wire managers, Rosso said they wouldn't even discuss the idea of creating a legal site. He said they and other P2P services believed "they were untouchable" because of some favorable victories that Rosso's Grokster had won in court. Rosso said he knew that the triumphs wouldn't last (and they famously ran out at the Supreme Court). After reading Gorton's recent comments in The New York Times, Rosso dismissed the executive's babe-in-the-woods self portrait.

"He's no Willy Wonka, I'll tell you that," Rosso said. "He knew what he was doing. The problem is Mark Gorton thinks he's smarter than everybody else. Certainly, he thinks he's smarter than his attorneys...I don't feel sorry for any of these guys. They had plenty of opportunity to do something legitimate. They chose something else."

Originally posted at Media Maverick

Apple's Mac OS X 10.6.4 update Tuesday contained several additions of note to serious photographers: support for several cameras' raw image formats and for tethered shooting with Canon cameras in the company's Aperture software.

Apple, like photography software rival Adobe Systems, is on a constant treadmill supporting new cameras' raw formats. The proprietary file formats offer higher quality and greater flexibility, but each camera has its own format for software companies to decode.

By my scrutiny of previous Apple announcements and the updated Apple raw image support page, here are the new cameras supported beyond earlier updates: the Canon PowerShot S90; the lower-resolution Canon sRAW and mRAW formats from newer SLRs; the Leica D-LUX 4; the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, DMC-GF1, DMC-GH1, and DMC-LX3; and the Sony Alpha DSLR-A450 and DSLR-A500.

Also new is expanded support for tethering, in which a camera is connected to the computer, usually by USB cable, so images are immediately available after shooting. It's a desirable feature for studio photographers who want to see the latest shots, scientists taking photos through microscopes, and journalists sending photos to editors on a deadline.

Many Nikon cameras had native tethering support in Aperture, but now new Canon models get the same treatment: The Rebel T2i/Kiss Digital X4/550D, 1D Mark IV, Rebel T1i/Kiss Digital X3/500D, 1D Mark III, 7D, 5D Mark II, Digital Rebel XS/Kiss Digital F2/1000D, Digital Rebel XSi/Kiss Digital X2/450D, 1Ds Mark III, 30D, 40D, and the Digital Rebel XTi/Kiss Digital X/400D. For a full list of supported models, check Apple's tethered camera support page.

The raw and tethering support reflects the ever-closer ties between cameras that capture the images and computers used to handle the images. For enthusiasts and professionals, the computer is increasingly essential to the photographic process.

Aperture users can start a tethered session by selecting File|Tether|Start Session, at which point the software asks for file naming and location particulars for the shots. You can take the photo either with the camera itself or with a button in the software, but there's no way to control camera settings through Aperture or get a live view version.

On the MacBook Pro I used for testing with a Canon 5D Mark II, each image took a couple seconds to arrive on the computer and a couple more seconds to render a more polished version. Although each new shot arrives as it's taken, you can go view, edit, and otherwise handle images as you shoot.

One more tidbit in the 10.6.4 update should help those exporting images later edited in Adobe's Photoshop CS4. Although images exported from Aperture stored metadata such as captions and titles in accordance with the newer Metadata Working Group guidelines first released in 2008, some older applications including Photoshop CS4 couldn't read the data. Apple changed how Aperture writes metadata into exported images so it can be read now, though.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Flock made its name as a Firefox remix that came loaded with custom add-ons for tightly integrating social networking with daily Web browsing. Just opened to the public, the Flock 3 beta keeps its social goals intact while replacing its Firefox base with Google-supported Chromium. The new Flock experience is vastly different than before, and is related to the old version in name only.

It's currently available only for Windows, although Flock CEO Shawn Hardin said in an interview two weeks ago at the CNET offices in San Francisco that a Mac beta should be ready in July. The new Flock strips the social networking support down to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. By limiting initial support to the two dominant social networking players and the two dominant media-sharing sites, but making access to them fast and generally comprehensive, the new Flock is able to demonstrate why it's useful without overwhelming users.

Minor interface changes belie the significant changes in how Flock operates. Being based on WebKit, it looks similar to Google Chrome and Apple Safari. The tabs aren't flush with the top of the browser as they are in Chrome, and the new home page is set to your Flock account manager. There's a big Google search box in the middle of the page, which is part of a new search monetization partnership between the two companies, and text links to your most-recently visited sites. At the top, just below the bookmarks bar, there are links to the Flock-enhanced features favorites and groups.

In addition to the repurposing of the Home button and the Flockification of Favorites, there are three other changes. Next to the Favorites button there's a new "Talk about this page" button that instantly shrinks the URL and lets you share it via Facebook and Twitter. On the other side of the location bar, the split preferences buttons have been merged into one to create room for a hide button for the new sidebar.

When you launch the new Flock, it'll ask you to add your Facebook and Twitter login details. You can opt out, but there's no point to Flock if you're not using it for social networking. You must also create a Flock account to take advantage of the social networking tools. This allows you to access your Flock settings from any Flock browser, but it does carry the standard risks of remote "cloud" storage.

Once you're set up, it will automatically open with its new sidebar open. Situated on the right, this sidebar marks the first Chromium sidebar, according to Hardin. More importantly for users, the sidebar becomes the social networking nexus in the new Flock by creating a stream of your friends' updates.

Built mostly in HTML5, the sidebar itself is fairly configurable and feels lightweight. There's a button at the top to hide it, and it moves quickly. The immediate function of the sidebar is to let you read and reply to updates without leaving the page you're on, but it does much more. The friends stream comes with a broad range of filters to make it easy to see only the updates that you need. Not only can you limit it to Facebook only or Twitter only, but you can also narrow each of those streams further. You can slim Twitter down to direct messages only or new tweets only. Facebook can be put on a major diet, too, including limiting Facebook updates to status-only or filtering out wall posts.

Flock supports multiple accounts from the same service, but you're only allowed to be signed into multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. Users can also create groups of friends, and filter the stream by them, too. Two group titles come with Flock, Best Friends and Co-workers, but the browser leaves it to you to fill them out. This can be done by hitting the Edit button at the bottom of the list, or through the Groups tab on the Flock home page. Filling them out will give you a pretty good hands-on tutorial on how to create your own groups.

There's a strong HTML5 bent to how to you do things in Flock 3. You can drag and drop friends to reorganize them, or click on them and then choose an action. Flock does not yet automatically merge contacts, although Hardin said that was feature is planned for later this summer. For now, you can drag and drop contacts to merge them into a single identity.

In general, the new minor features work well, although that's not always true. Unlike Chrome, Flock supports RSS feeds out of the box. It also lets you Favorite the feed itself, and the new Flock makes sharing those favorites much easier than in other browsers. You can toggle a Favorited item as being public or private, or opt-in to setting your Flock profile page to public to provide a single space for your Favorited items to land on.

The "Talk about this page" button for Facebooking or Twittering a page is a long-overdue browser feature that obviates copying and pasting. The "superbar" approach to the location bar, where default search engine searches are combined with history and bookmark searches, has been bolstered by Flock-specific matches from your friends.

However, it does come with a bucketload of news-related bookmarks in the bookmark bar. It's not clear why and it adds an unnecessary amount of clutter, basically rendering the bar useless unless you clean it out first. Similarly, the unified options menu to the right of the location bar might overwhelm some users.

The beta felt fairly stable over a day and a half of testing, although installing it did feel slower than other browsers. Once loaded, there were no noticeable hang-ups.

Flock has seen impressive growth in the past year, much of it coming from Facebook users, according to Hardin. He said that 87 percent of people who've recommended Flock on Facebook have recommended it to six or more friends, and that it's the most popular Facebook-managing desktop app. The browser is the sixth most-popular browser in Europe, he added, behind the five major players of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Through May 2010, Flock took about 0.07 percent of the global market, a tiny number but rapidly growing according to the graph.

What this all means for Flock's relationship with Mozilla isn't as clear as you'd expect. Flock will continue to support the Mozilla-based branch of the browser, and anticipates releasing version 2.6 soon. Flock has had a relationship with Mozilla for five years, said Hardin, and he added that no decision has been made yet about severing it.

Originally, Flock's success appeared to be dictated by the willingness of users to take a performance hit in order to gain its robust social networking features. The new Flock 3 beta reduces the overall feature set while providing more focused features, and anecdotal performance hits weren't noticeable. Assuming the browser can maintain its nimble behavior, the big question about Flock is whether users want the utility and distraction of always-on social networking.