When a new application surfaces, it gets one of two possible answers: “How the hell did I live without it before? Did it have to take this eternity for someone to come up with this?” or “WTF were they thinking?”. Well, today I have 2 new services to present you, and I’ll leave it to your fine judgment to tell me which one goes into which category.
midomi
Steve Litchfield at AllAboutSymbian has just reviewed midomi. Although Steve seems to ache over the lowercase initial name (we agree), he seems to come out decently satisfied with the result. So what it midomi? Basically, it allows you to find the name of that tune that has been going round in your head for a while. All you have to do is open the application and hum or sing at least 10 seconds of the song. midomi will then do its magic, processing the record, and comparing it to other people’s recordings. According to Steve, the result is pretty decent, with him coming up with 50% true results. We didn’t try it yet, so we can’t give you an accurate percentage number, but we won’t question Steve’s singing abilities.
Many users might compare this to Shazam ID which got Stefan’s stamp of approval a while ago. The difference is that with Shazam ID, you have to wait for the song to go on the radio and use Shazam ID to record a snippet and get the song’s details, whereas with midomi all you have to do is sing the song yourself, anytime, anywhere. This would make midomi a great solution for those “Oh shit, this song is spinning like a hamster on my brain’s wheels, but I don’t know the name to download it (or buy it)”.
The midomi service has been here for a while, but they just released an S60 native application, which is free should I add. Now if only they did it a while back, when I was stuck on Alalie Lilt- Flaws and browsed the whole web for 18 months trying to get the song’s title and artist.
Quetim
Although this service has a proper initial name, I doubt it can offer more than that as a satisfaction. I have never ditched an application this fast, but this one is just plain ridiculous! Quetim is an attempt to answer the eternal problem of slow SMS typing,…, by coming up with an even slower solution, stunning! The whole concept is that you open Quetim‘s webpage, type your message in the upper box, process it. The site will then give you a code, that you will scan using the Quetim java application that you installed on your handset. You will then be presented with the option to send the message to a contact.
So what? Now in order to send a “quick and easy” (as they say on their site) message, I have to be in front of a computer, open my web browser, go to quetim’s site, type the message, process it, get my phone, wait for the java application to load, point my camera to the screen, capture, wait for it to process the image, and then type my contact’s name. Astonishing! Just how much easier would it have been to type the bloody message on my phone?!
I reckon that Quetim could be just what someone somewhere might be looking for now, but it’s not for me. I am just struggling to decide whether to put it in the “totally stupid” or the “utterly useless” category. For those of you looking for a real “quick and easy” text input and sms solution, you might want to take a look at BlueText by Psiloc, that Ricky has just previewed and try to grab one of those 5 free licenses we are offering!
