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One of the best iPhone applications I’ve tried so far is Shazam. This utility will listen for several seconds to a song that’s playing wherever you happen to be. Shazam uploads audio data to a server, waits for a response, and then tells you the name of the song, the album on which it’s found, the name of the group, etc. You also get a picture of the album cover. Further, a log is kept of all the songs you’ve analyzed so that you can decide later whether to buy the CDs. I tested the application with several songs in iTunes and with some background music in a movie or two. Shazam’s ability to detect which song is playing – even with distracting foreground/background noise – is amazing. The only flaws I’ve found so far involve its inability to identify jazz and classical music. Many songs from those genres appear not to be in the company’s database.
Check out Shazam in action. Then get it from the Apple app store. The application is currently free!
Have you ever taken a photo with your iPhone and found distracting background elements that ruined the shot? Now you can salvage some of those pictures with this simple technique. While viewing the photo you wish to crop, use your fingers on the iPhone’s screen to zoom in as much as necessary to eliminate the undesirable background item(s). Then do a screen capture by clicking the on/off button while holding down the Home button. Your new screen capture — the cropped photo you wanted — has now been saved to your photo collecton! You’re all set to email your modified photo to friends, blog it, etc. Of course, this trick can result in too much detail loss if you zoom too much, but for quick cropping without a photo editor, this approach is hard to beat.
I was curious to see just how fast the iPhone 3G could pull down some data, so I ran a few tests. I could consistently get 1.69 Mbps in the bandwidth test. This is quite impressive considering that cable modems just a few years ago offered only 1.5 Mbps throughput. So we now have cell phones with faster wireless data access than cable modems delivered not long ago.
It was reported in May of this year that AT&T promises 7.2 Mbps throughput by 2009. That is Wi-Fi speed (on the slower end).
