All About Iphone

There are plenty of times when you DON'T want that Top-40-hit ringtone going off in a room full of people. Oh, you can set your phone on "vibrate," but that buzz is still audible enough to attract attention (and maybe make you flash on the "dildo in the luggage" scene from FIGHT CLUB).

What's the solution? How about a ringtone that only YOU can hear?

Ultrasonic Ringtones offers just that: ring tones in the 8KHz-22KHz audio range, i.e. right up at the top end of your hearing range. The idea of ringtones in the dog-whistle end of the spectrum was first championed by schoolkids, who wanted to take cell calls under their teachers' noses.

The site lets you "test-drive" each frequency before downloading it, but also cautions that hearing it on your computer and actually using it on your phone are two different things. They also caution that anything over 12KHz will probably be inaudible to people over the age of 20. Still, the 8-12KHz range tones might be right up your alley -- they'll still cut through all kinds of ambient noise, and you won't mistake anyone else's phone ringing for your own.

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As of today, TuneWiki is a legit iPhone app that's available in the App Store. You can check out our tunewiki review from the days when it was available only on Cydia.

Besides being available in the App Store, not much has changed. TuneWiki is a must have app for any music lover.

(From our previous review...)

Features:
- easy to use navigation buttons
- album art support for your music collection
- live song lyrics - sing along with your favorite tunes, and contribute back to the project with lyrics for your songs if they are not in the database.
- music maps - see what songs are playing near your location or in a specific region (like the United Kingdom)
- Tune Wiki Top 50 - see what other Tune Wiki users are playing
- help menu - shows you how to use the tunewiki interface
- very good reliability - never crashed during my tests

Limitations:
- it needs an internet connection, either WiFi or EDGE/3G because all the information displayed is stored on Tune Wiki's servers.
- can be sluggish in low performance network conditions

We are glad that Apple's new iPhone 3.0 allows access to the music library, which encourages developers to migrate their jailbroken-only apps to legitimate ones.

Strangely, TuneWiki is still available on Cydia, which is (we're pretty sure) against Apple's agreements.

Try Tune Wiki for free at the App Store.

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Whether it's that first cassette tape recorder I bought back in the 70's, or my nifty HD camcorder that was financed by Dubya's economic-stimulus check, the mantra is the same: Get An External Microphone! The audio you record will be automatically better than from the built-in variety.

There are now a handful of add-on microphones available for the iPhone and its cousins, with the Brando Workshop Flexible Mini Capsule Microphone claiming to be both the latest and greatest. It boasts battery-free operation, plug-and-play compatibility with the iPhone 2/3/3GS and iPod Nano 4G (sorry, iTouch fans!), a swivel design for omni-directional positioning, and a 25dB gain increase over the internal "iMic."

("Boasts" being the operative word: the unit is not scheduled to ship until the end of July, but the pre-order page also includes sample audio recordings done with and without the Mini Capsule for your own comparison -- and the difference in sound, if legit, is like night and day. Still, if you plan to do a fair amount of audio recording with your iPhone, its MSRP of US$14.00 -- plus another three bucks shipping from Hong Kong -- might make trying it out worth the risk.)

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