The first thing to note is that the app is a 30 trial version. After the trial period you have to pay for it, or switch to “Shazam Lite”. Given that this app will likely only hold novelty value for me, I doubt I’ll pay money for it.

Music detection seems to work pretty well. It successfully tagged tracks from The Offspring, Atreyu, Crowded House, The Vines and the Avenue Q soundtrack. It couldn’t handle one the Harry Potter soundtracks, Mephiskapheles or Heartsdales. I guess it will work fine for more common songs but will choke on slightly obscure ones.

The real test will be how it handles songs on the radio or broadcast in a public space – the ones I don’t already know. The Ovi Store also lists a couple other apps of this type so I’ll try those out as well. One even claims to be able to detect songs being hummed. Let’s see how that deals with my tonedeaf humming!

Realestate.com.au is still has a few things missing, such as allowing for more fine-grained searches and displaying a bit more information about each property (such as what type it is). Overall though the site is easy to use and navigate. It’s good to see that some large sites are starting to transition to functional mobile versions as it makes browsing the web from your phone a whole lot nicer.

Try it on your mobile now.

I installed MobilePress and it appears to working very well. My impetus was that I was sick of trying to access my blog on my Nokia E71 which, although it has a fairly full-featured browser, is still a small screen making it an utter pain to scroll around. Not to mention the pointless download of many superfluous kilobytes of data. So hopefully, if you happen to be looking at this on a mobile browser, it will be that much easier to read.

While I was at it I also had a go at WPhone and Wordmobi. WPhone is similar to MobilePress in that it presents a different interface for mobile browsers but, in the case, does it for the WordPress administration area. I haven’t used it too much so far but it seems functional enough. Wordmobi is functionality the same as WPhone but is an S60 (Symbian) application so I don’t even have to worry about downloading unnecessary data or how the interface is rendered – only the data I need is retrieved and sent. Interestingly it runs on Python, which I didn’t even know was available for Symbian. That in itself may require further investigation in future as it could seriously lower the barrier to entry for programming mobile applications.

One final thing to note is that I installed the two extensions via the WordPress plugin system available through the admin panel. It was stupidly simple and meant I didn’t have to mess around with FTP clients and the like. I’d say it was a very positive experience and practically worth an upgrade to 2.7 in itself! I’m hoping that having better mobile access to my blog will help me carry through on my new year’s resolution to post more frequently.