Listen Up, iPhone!

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but as Lisa said, I’m young, I’m hip, I’m in the know.

To put it bluntly, I AM APPLE’S DEMO! And to be honest, I’m a little disappointed. Let me tell you why …

Now, I have a BlackBerry Pearl through the new AT&T …

… cool right? Well, yes and no. It was bestowed by my boss when I was recently promoted and needed to start a pretty intense travel schedule but, due to corporate policy, I have a no frills version without a camera and no ability to play music. I like to call it the smart phone that didn’t quite make it into the gifted program at AT&T University. Which is fine, I love it just the same; or so I thought.

Now, I was sated for a while, but after the honeymoon period was over and it wasn’t enough to be able to Google on a whim I thought, “Wait, why not just get an iPhone and expense my monthly bill?” Brilliant, right? Well, again, yes and no. At heart, like many of you I’m sure, I’m a tech geek, but very undercover and very hardnosed. Whether or not I’m in the market for a new phone, when one comes out I will pore over side by side browsers comparing phone specs and capabilities until I can’t see straight. Throw into the mix that I’d have to swallow a considerable cancellation fee and I’m even more manic. That being said, the iPhone isn’t the one for me just yet.

I know what you’re all thinking, “Another yahoo complaining about the iPhone. Give it a rest already!” But I have an argument that you may not have heard just yet. For my money, Verizon has the music recognition software technology to beat (at the moment), and I’m not willing to dole out the extra cash until the iPhone can seriously compete with VCAST.

So what exactly is music recognition? Well, there’s no mystery really, it is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine walking down the street and hearing a great song coming from a car that is stopped at a light, or watching TV and hearing a song you can’t live without having on your playlist as the background for a commercial. Now imagine being able to hold up your cellphone to the music and having it tell you the name of your new favorite song and then downloading it for you. Awesome, no? Need a bit more convincing? Here’s further background Via Newsweek.

Music recognition is finally going mainstream in the world of mobile. But the feature is simply a new twist on a relatively retro technology. These phones link to the same databases that supply the song information for applications like iTunes and Windows Media Player so that they can provide you with the artist, album and track information of a CD you slip into your laptop. Verizon’s service uses the U.K.-based Shazam database; Sony Ericsson links to Gracenote.

In cell phones and laptops alike, the key to unlocking a song’s identity lies in a six-second, incredibly specific music sample. “It’s a finger-printing technology,” says Ty Roberts, Gracenote’s chief technology officer. Roberts explains it like this: as you hold your phone up to the music you want to identify, the phone’s music-recognition application records a six second sound bite. It measures and records specific frequencies of the music down to a thousandth of a second. This is the fingerprint that the application then compares to the more than 60 million songs by more than a million artists in the Gracenote database. (Verizon uses a similar service, Shazam, and draws from a database of over 4 million songs.) And the fingerprints are so specific, Roberts says, that they differentiate between covers, live albums and studio recordings-miniscule variations like a new guitar, varying vocal quality and a slightly different drum line will all affect the “print.” No two performances are exactly alike, Roberts says. (Source)

Come on Apple, seriously?

You’re going to let yourself be beat out by a RAZR?

You invented iTunes for the love of Pete!

I mean the Listen program was a noble attempt, but it is a third-party application and we all know what those can do to your iPhone …

I’m sure that Steve is cracking the whip for a comparable widget to be rolled out with the next iteration of the iPhone, but have they missed the boat? You tell me. Are there any iPhone users out there who have discovered a service or program along the same lines? We’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, I’ll continue to plod along with my BlackBerry.

Bacilio Mendez II hails from the birthplace of Wallace Stevens, but now calls New York City home. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and is currently working towards a Master of Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute. Bacilio likes cake.