Today Agile Partners (creators of GuitarToolkit and previously reviewed Star6) released their newest iPhone/iPod Touch app, TabToolkit, the ultimate guitar tabulature resource. If you are like me, which would mean you play guitar because I do, then you don’t always remember to bring the tab of that new song that you printed out when you find yourself with a little time to play. TabToolkit manages to make this something of the past and does it with lots of style.

TabToolkit allows you to load your own tab files (in either Power Tab, Guitar Pro, text or PDF file types) and will play them back to you with a synthesized instrument as it highlights the note you are supposed to play in tab notation. Guitar Pro and Power Tab files also allow standard musical notation alongside the tab. You can also change the speed of playback from the settings menu, set up a metronome, and change the type of notation, left- or right- hand notation, and whether there is an instrument guide showing at the bottom of the screen. Speaking of the instrument guide, this is one of the coolest parts, especially for beginners (both to keyboard or guitar), because it shows you exactly where the tab corresponds to on the instrument.

This is an amazing app and even though the price is a little steep ($9.99) it is well-worth it, every guitarist with an iPhone or iPod Touch should add this to their set of tools. TabToolkit comes with a few, pre-selected tabs already installed but you can add your own by clicking on the “plus” sign at the bottom right and going to the website it gives you. You can purchase TabToolkit on the App store right now for $9.99.

I’ve been using Aardvark since they opened the doors and it is an amazing service. Not only can you get answers to your questions from multiple people (giving you the quickest and easiest way to find information when you need it) but you can also answer questions and help others. I’ve made buddies on Aardvark and I’ve also looked at questions and thought, “They should have just Google’d that one.”

Well, now Aardvark have opened another door and it’s one that makes it so much more simpler to get answers to your questions. The main tab of the app has a box for you to ask your question and it lists all the questions that you’ve asked or answered in chronological order. There’s a tab for you to view current questions to answer and to view your buddies on Aardvark.

Overall, a great, simple app that does that it should. The iPhone/iPod Touch app is out and ready to be downloaded from the App Store free of charge.

 
PALO ALTO, Calif. – September 15, 2009 — Today Kinoma announced that its flagship product, Kinoma Play, is now available for Nokia S60, the world’s dominant smartphone platform. Nokia S60 users can now enjoy the best way to find, play and share media in a beautiful, fast, easy-to-use application.
 
Kinoma Play lets users find media fast by browsing the extensive built-in Kinoma Guide app or searching leading media sites including YouTube, Flickr and SHOUTcast. It allows them to play media in all popular formats including Windows Media, MPEG-4/H.264 and iTunes AAC. Finally, Kinoma Play users can easily share what they’re enjoying using Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and more.
 
“Kinoma Play connects your media and your social networks with a power and simplicity unavailable in any other S60 application,” said Peter Hoddie, CEO of Kinoma. “It’s not just that Kinoma Play does more — it’s how naturally and intuitively everything works together. Nokia users have been asking us for Kinoma Play since its release on Windows Mobile, and today we’re proud to announce that their ‘killer app’ has arrived.”
 
“Nokia’s goal is to provide the best media experience possible on mobile, so we’re thrilled that Kinoma Play is now available for Nokia S60 phones,” said Purnima Kochikar, VP, Forum Nokia and Developer Communities, at Nokia. “It’s exciting and fun for consumers who want to play and share the world’s
best entertainment content, and indispensible for business users who need constant access to the latest business and financial news. Innovators like Kinoma show that the only limit to Nokia platforms is their imagination.”
 
Setting a New Standard for S60 Applications, and for Mobile Media
As a next-generation media player, Kinoma Play is peerless. It makes standalone single-media players obsolete, enabling effortless command over music, video, podcasts, audiobooks, Internet radio and photos. Whether playing media from the phone, web sites or social networks, Kinoma Play makes the experience fast, fun and easy.
 
In addition to playing personal media, Kinoma Play puts the “best of the web” in the palm of your hand with quick, easy access to content including millions of hours of on-demand and live video, more than 30,000 radio stations, tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts and millions of photo albums.
 
Connecting Content and People Like Nothing Else Can
With deep support for major social networks including Twitter and Facebook, Kinoma Play makes sharing media as natural as playing it. Share photos and links to your favorite music and YouTube videos in seconds. Use the built-in Last.fm app to “scrobble” your personal playlist and learn more about favorite artists, then use Kinoma Play’s unmatched YouTube app to watch their music videos.
 
Exclusive cross-social sharing allows users to share everything with everybody in a way that would be clumsy or impossible with other applications — for example, users can share YouTube videos on Facebook, share Facebook photos on Twitter, share podcast episodes via SMS and more.

Pricing and Availability
Kinoma Play for Nokia Symbian/S60 devices (S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 or Feature Pack 2) is available immediately at kinoma.com for $29.99 U.S. Kinoma Play supports Dutch, English, French, French Canadian, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
 
About Kinoma Play
Kinoma Play is the best way to play and share video, music, podcasts, radio, photos, panoramas and audiobooks on your phone. As the first social media browser, Kinoma Play has changed the mobile media landscape and quickly established a reputation as a must-have application for Windows Mobile.
 
About Kinoma
Kinoma makes software with a focus on design, simplicity, and fun. Its software powers the media experience on millions of devices on 14 carrier networks for customers including NTT DoCoMo, Palm, SoftBank Mobile, Sony, and more. Kinoma’s latest innovation is Kinoma Play, the world’s first social media browser.
Kinoma is a registered trademark of Kinoma, Inc. For further information, visit kinoma.com. Follow @Kinoma on Twitter (twitter.com/Kinoma) for the latest news, and subscribe Kinoma’s blog at blog.kinoma.com via email or RSS.

Ever had the desire to create your own samples, maybe DJ a nightclub for a photoshoot? Well now you can, and it can be done with your iPhone with Star6!

All in all this looks like a really cool app, I wish I had bought the iPod Touch with a speaker now so I wouldn’t have to plug in headphones to use this app. Everything works with a simple press of the triangle-shaped buttons to either use presets or your own samples. You can modify the parameters by tilting your iPhone back and forth to raise the Pitch, Speed, Gate, Sample Order, Sample Size and Randomness. Then, when you are all finished and you have the most awesome beat, press record and upload it to your PC and share it on the Star6 website.

Star6 is available now on the Apple App Store at an introductory price of $6.99.

So, now that I’m running Android 90% of the time on my HTC Touch I had to find an app to get to Plurk (my favorite micro-blogging site). It seems there is one out there and its name is Pluroid!

It’s not an official app but it can be downloaded in the Market for free. If you use this (in my opinion) much better micro-blogging platform be sure to check it out!

Today I received an email from my friends over at Kinoma, they have released a new version of their mobile media browser — Kinoma Play — that I reviewed last year and this update is smoking!

Toshiba TG01 (docomo PRO series T-01A) + Kinoma Play walkthrough from KinomaTV on Vimeo.

This video is a 20 minute walkthrough that shows off all the new updates to Kinoma Play, it’s a bit long but it shows all the new stuff that you can do with the newest version of this great mobile app.

The search for THE BEST keyboard for Windows Mobile is one that everyone who actually wants to do work on their PDA engages in every so often. I’ve tried a few of the keyboards out there (not even scratching the surface, I’m sure), but I think I’ve finally found one that’s worthy of being on my phone … at least until a better one comes out — FingerKeyboard v2.1.

I was just stumbling around the forums at PPCGeeks.com the other day and found this treasure of an app. So I grabbed the QVGA version, plugged my phone into my MacBook, and installed the CAB. It took a while and eventually seemed like it had gotten stuck (I left it sitting for about 20 minutes) so I pressed the END button and checked the program list. Lo and behold, it was installed. The keyboard itself is a great keyboard, with copy/paste/undo/redo, vibration feedback, click sounds, customizable emoticon shortcuts, and customizable shortcuts + much more, you can’t beat it. And the price, well, nothing is better than free. That’s right, this keyboard is FREE.

The only problems that I ran into were that on a QVGA device the keyboard with the arrow buttons was too big and only left a small space to see what I was typing, also the landscape orientation wasn’t correct. Whether this was because the application didn’t fully complete installing or not I don’t know.

FingerKeyboard v2.1 is freeware from the guys at PPCGeeks.com. They have versions for QVGA, VGA, and WVGA phones so no one is left out.

Over at The Consumerist today they have a great article about a nice iPhone app by Verisign (only iPhone for now, doesn’t support iPod Touch) that lets you secure your transactions on Paypal, eBay, and a few other sites. There’s also a step-by-step guide on how to set up your PayPal account to work with the iPhone app.

Note: In the comments, tvmitch pointed out that you can also have PayPal send you a six-digit code every time you want to login in case you don’t have an iPhone, just click the option that Chris Walters marked with “not this one!”.

The Mobile Manager for Netflix allows you to add, remove, move and watch trailers for movies in your Netflix Queue. I just did a little bit of testing on the app and it worked just like you think it would. I was able to remove a few movies, move a movie around in my queue, and add a new movie to my queue easily and all in about 5 minutes time.

The preview trailers are surprisingly clear and even while I was in a low signal area I still was able to buffer enough to watch the trailer well enough.

This is a free app from Microsoft but you have to have Microsoft Livean account with to download it. I also had to fill out a small form before I could download the app (I didn’t see any way to skip that even though I had a Live account). For all the prerequisites you have to do you’ll be ready to add and remove movies from Netflix at a moment’s notice!

In about 2 and a half hours MobileCrunch is going to start giving away iPhone app promo codes. They say that there will be promo codes for “dozens of applications, each worth anywhere from 99 cents up to $30 bucks.”

Basically it’s going to go down like a Woot-off: the promo code will stay up on the site until they give away all they have for that app, then the next one will show up. If you want to grab a few free apps make sure that you keep refreshing this page from 9 AM EST until they are done, because once the codes are gone they are gone forever.