Rob's Rants

[Update 9/2/09: added CAB file at end of post.]

If you’re a long-term Windows Mobile user, it’s sometimes hard not to look at the iPhone or at Android phones and not get a little jealous at some of the cool apps built for those platforms. Sure, if you use your phone for work, we can laugh at the other people struggling to connect to an Exchange server or to open and edit Word or Excel docs. But once the workday is done or on the weekend, it’s hard not to envy your iPhone friends when they whip out the phone, take a picture of the SKU code on the new Wii game, and tell you that it’s cheaper 2 miles away at Target. Or, as happened to me, when we were sitting in a bar having a beer and a song came on and I couldn’t for the life of me remember who sang it. So my friend whips out his phone, and asks the bartender to hold it near the speaker behind the bar, and voilà — the name and artist is displayed. How cool is that?

Well, someone finally ported one of these apps to Windows Mobile. As I saw on the Wingster site (for T-Mobile Wing and TouchPro 2 phones) there is a Midomi cab running around out there, which I decided to try. If you don’t know Midomi, it’s a website that will identify songs by capturing a small segment through your system’s microphone. You can either play a song from the radio or TV or somewhere, or, and this can be the scary part, sing or hum a part of  a song. Because of this, Midomi has become something of a Karaoke site, with people recording their own songs. Most of which are horrible and painful enough that I wanted shove a dinner fork into my ears in the first few seconds just to make the pain stop. But we don’t really care about that — we care that Samsung apparently ported a Midomi app to Windows Mobile for release on some of their touchscreen devices and that the port works on Windows Mobile Standard, albeit with some issues.

The Problems

The main issue that I can see is that the app was designed for touchscreen devices which typically have much better resolution than the Dash 3G. So the screen is pretty distorted on our phone. And the ‘Menu’ command doesn’t work — it freezes the app. But otherwise, the app does what it’s supposed to do, and if you have the Task Manager mapped to a convenient key, exiting the app without the Menu isn’t so bad.

So, here’s what you have to deal with.

The main screen is severely distorted, but still usable.

Distorted Main Screen

And, it works surprisingly well. I tested it in a weird way and it actually worked — while watching the Road to Europe episode of Family Guy on my TiVo (linked below) I had it sample the Kiss song (starting at 4:33 into the linked video) by holding my phone near the speakers of my sound system. And even with some dialog happening it got the song correct:

Correct!

And the app even went on to suggest the correct links:

Correct Links

So, bottom line — as long as you can put up with quirky navigation and never using the Menu command, we can finally have a cool app like our iPhone friends.

Here’s a crappy YouTube post of the Kiss scene from Family Guy:

Update:

This evening, I tested the voice recognition with my 4 1/2 year-old. She sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. And the program figured it out with no problem and presented me with 7 or 8 different versions that I could download. Amazing!

Here’s the CAB I used: Midomi.cab

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