A while ago I read something like 60% (I’m making that up) of people use their cell phones as a flashlight. Of course now I can’t find the article that I read that in but I would bet that I’m not far off. I use my iPhone almost everyday as a flashlight when I’m going to bed because the way the light switches are set up in my apartment.

So having an app on my iPhone that turned it into a flashlight is very handy. You have a few choices to pick form: Flashlight, Torch and myLite. Of course the one I use is no longer avaiable: Light by Erica Sadun.

One common feature and the one I’ll be focusing on is all of them can turn your screen white. It sort of reminds me of the old Palm apps that turned your screen into a mirror by turning all the pixels black. The white screen for all the apps, except for for Light, can only be as bright as your current brightness setting. So if you need more light you have to open up your settings and change it then re-open the app. Light automatically turns up the brightness to the highest setting. This sometimes is annoying because it doesn’t set it back to the setting you had it on.

Flashlight doesn’t do anything other then turn your screen white. Not much to say there other then it’s free.

Torch on the other hand shows a splash screen and requires you to tap the screen to turn on or off the light.

myLite, last but the most feature rich. Features on an app that turns you iPhone into a flashlight? What? That doesn’t make sense. myLite allows you to change the color and make it darker from your current brightness setting.

Well it’s that time again, Thanksgiving and Thursday. Time for FOOD! Yay. With it being Thanksgiving I figured that it would only be fitting to review a food related app. So I give you Urbanspoon.

Urbanspoon is a fancy little app that allows you to find new restaurants near you or even find ones you already know. Urbanspoon makes use of the accelerometer; when you shake the phone it will preform a random search based on your preferences. It uses a slot machine style interface where you can lock in your preference of neighborhood, type of cuisine and price (or how expensive the place is).

Urbanspoon also allows you to register, find your friends and write reviews of places you’ve been. I haven’t used this feature yet but it does look promising.

If you are looking for a particular restaurant you can use the search or browse features:

Also if you want to just see what is around you, use the Near me functon. I’ll use the built in aGPS to figure out your location and give you a list of the closest restaurants.

Over all Urbanspoon is really easy to use. It has a straight forward interface and gives you pretty good results. I have found though that sometimes (very infrequently) that some of the information is wrong. Sometimes it’ll bring up a restaurant that has been closed down (for years in one case) or moved. They do provide a way to you to notify them of changes but I haven’t see the changes take yet. This could be somewhat troublesome if you are in an unfamiliar place.

Nice little free app that is worth your time if you like to eat (and who doesn’t like food?)

Shazam!

Sounds fun right? I thought I would start a series about iPhone apps and if I find them useful or not. I’ll review things like the interface and the ease of use as well as the functionality of the app.

Function

Shazam, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a music tagging app. You hold it up to a speaker, it listens and then returns what the song is. It works like magic but isn’t.

Interface

Here’s some screen captures of the interface:

When you first fire up Shazam you get to the Recent Tags screen:

Pretty straight forward. Tap on a tag and get tag details:

From here it’ll search Youtube and iTunes to see if a video or download is available. Tapping on the approate link will launch the corresponding app. You can also do a couple of other things from here: Email/share the tag or attach a photo to the tag. Sharing the tag can be handy.

Tap on the “Tag Now” button and it’ll start listening via the iPhone mic:

After its done listening it’ll show the details or the not found message:

You can also change the listening time:

The longer the listening time supposedly helps with figuring out what song it is. I have mine set to the longest (15 seconds), though I haven’t noticed a difference one way or the other.

Over all the interface is pretty clean and clear to use.

Accuracy

Shazam does a pretty good job of figuring out what song its listening to. Though I’ve tried to get it to recognize some obscure Jazz that I have from the 20’s and 30’s and it couldn’t figure it out. It could figure out some of the more popular music from that era. It also figured out some local bands here from Denver. So they must update themselves pretty quickly. It even is able to pick up low music in crowed bars/restaurants, though not all the time. Of course this all happens within a few seconds. How they manage to do that I beyond me. I had found a PDF from MIT (I think) that described how it could be done in micro-seconds. But alas I can’t seems to find it anymore.

Summary

Overall it’s a great little app. It’s free, which is an added bonus to the functionality it offers. Though I would gladly pay for it. So if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch go download it. Shazam is a must have!

Update:
I found the PDF I was thinking of yesterday. Its on An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm [PDF]. And it is by someone that works at Shazam Inc. It’s also not from MIT but hosted on Columbia University’s servers.