I was fortunate enough to get my hands on Noise.io a couple of days before its release. Now, a couple of days after, I have been absolutely stunned by the iPhone synthesizer and even bought the application, despite already having it, to support the small but talented development team who have invested months in this project. Fortunately, they’ve already shifted something in the region of 2000 copies to synth-heads across the globe and the more people with Noise.io the better the community, and user generated content, will get.
So, without further ado, head over the fold for my full Noise.io review.
P.S. if you want a cracked version of Noise.io, or are looking for the Noise.io cracked app, need a Noise.io crack or want Noise.io cracked… suck it up and buy the $9.99 application, you cheapskate! Failing that, wait for the demo version, it’s called “Noise.io Pro” for a reason.
You may, or may not, have noticed that we’re getting fairly close to that most wonderful time of the year, when radio stations start playing Mistletoe & Wine, scarf and gloves become a daily necessity and mince pies are back on the supermarket shelves.
It’s also a time of the year where a fiercely drawn out competition takes place on both the real and virtual high street between the manufacturers of toys, games and other technology wonders.
The Gadgetoid team was kindly invited down to the St Martins Lane Hotel, London to get a hands-on look at some of Microsofts games and gadgets that will be available in stores in time for christmas. Follow the jump for our thoughts about the New Xbox Experience, Live Mesh and more…
Alas, I’ve been so addicted to actually playing with it, and so busy traveling down for the Microsoft Christmas Showcase that I didn’t have time to crank out a review to coincide with its release, rest assured a review is on its way for this fantastic iPhone synth- if you’re in a fit of indecision about whether or not to purchase it that must be resolved immediately then take my advice and do so!
I can say, with absolute certainty, that if you have any interest in sound design or synthesized music then this is an absolutely essential iPhone purchase that will blow you away with its sheer power. The idea of turning your iPhone into a pocket-sized synthesizer with this much power seems like a pipe dream, Noise.io has not only gone and done it but set the bar so absurdly high for competition it’ll likely be unchallenged for months, if not forever.
The concept of an iPhone Synthesizer is pretty brave, the memory management issues in the iPhone’s firmware are a pain to deal with and cause every single application to experience periodic crashes. You’ll be using Noise.io so often that you will, unfortunately, experience crashes and perceive them as being more frequent. Rest assured, though, that Noise.io is freakin’ stable and rebooting your iPhone before (and after, if you want other Apps to run without crashing) using it is a good idea.
From my first tentative try of the disappointing and absurd Band for iPhone, to immediately googling “iPhone Syntheszier” it’s been about two months with quite significant delays to the release of Noise.io. But those delays have more than paid off with some of the functionality they took the extra time to include, the step sequencer for example, being instrumental to my love of the app. What we have now is an absolutely genuine iPhone Synthesizer that looked so good on paper that people claimed it was vapor-ware. The reality of Noise.io is, however, beating all but the wildest of expectations and the only serious complaints I’ve seen thus far are lack of WAV export and crashes due to the iPhones rather unfortunate take on memory management and Noise.io’s heavy use of the iPhone’s resources. Perhaps a firmware 3.0 will make things better, only time will tell.
I will continue to tinker with Noise.io and create patch banks, but I’m sure there are sound designers out there who will massively eclipse my skills and come out with some awesome content for Noise.io that will go down a storm with the less tech-savvy owners and with those who just want to use Noise.io as a live performance tool.
Piel Frama have really pulled out the stops with their leather HTC Touch Pro Case. Which is a shame, because after playing with the Touch Pro itself I am massively underwhelmed and utterly unable to get excited about it. But that’s a whole different story.
If you’ve picked up the HTC Touch Pro and are enjoying its generous specifications, and sexy screen, but are decidedly disappointed with the godawful case it comes bundled with then the Piel Frama HTC Touch Pro case is probably what you’re looking for. It completely blows away the Piel Frama iPhone 3g Case I reviewed recently in terms of fit, finish and functionality and is, without a shadow of a doubt, exceptionally well made.
The SENA Dockable iPhone 3g Flip Case proved to be my favourite of the SENA batch and thus it is deserving of the first complete review.
I received a total of 5 iPhone 3g cases from SENA, representing a broad variety of their range. It was quite a mixed bunch and the Pebble-black Dockable case wasn’t immediately a clear winner because I found myself quite partial to the tough burgundy, crocodile skin effect Magnet Flipper. The only reason why the Dockable edged out the Magnet Flipper was, in fact, the semi-neutral pebble black style which I felt a little more comfortable carrying around.
I realize now that I must be reaching dangerous levels of geekiness; I find myself mentally adding the word “pwnage”, complete with the deliberate typographical error and associated change in enunciation, every time I see the brand name PURE. I really wish I was joking.
Now I have got that out into the open I would like to introduce the PURE i-10 iPod Dock which took me all of approximately half an hour to form a positive opinion of.
There are few products you can pick up and immediately form enough of an opinion of to warrant bashing out a review the same day. Keyboards are a good example, particularly because one can simultaneously use them and write about them. The PURE i-10 iPod Dock is another example. The moment I removed it from its packaging this very morning, witnessed its minimalist form with a gentle nod to the iPhone/ipod Touch design aesthetic and felt its quality reassuring weight I knew it was going to be a good, solid product and further testing proved that I was not far wrong.
The guys over at Noise.io have received a lot of flak for their bold move to delay the application in favour of packing in features and doing some serious re-structuring of their synthesis engine in order to support them.
Apparently they’ve received complaints by email that their application is a scam and/or vaporware and have responded in kind by offering a couple of audio demonstrations for download at their website.
Whilst the audio demonstrations would certainly not constitute definitive proof of Noise.io’s existence to naysayers they’re a nice thing to have at this stage.
We’re fast running out of days left in September, so I can only wish the Noise.io developers all the best and hope they manage to crank it out within a week. If not, it’s no loss, I would rather see a fully functional, polished and finished Noise.io later rather than risk a buggy, incomplete, early release killing support for the project and souring opinions of what could turn out to be one of the best iPhone applications, certainly for anyone musical, ever.
If you’re eying up the iPhone 3g as a device to guide you on Geocaching adventures then read on; This is not a general review of the iPhone and, as I am new to Geocaching and the iPhone is the only device I have used, I will be unable to draw comparisons between the iPhone 3g and other PDA-based or handheld GPS solutions.
However, I will look briefly at the iPhone 3gs strengths and weaknesses as a Geocaching device and give you some tips and tricks on getting the most out of it. I will be detailing only core functionality of the iPhone using no additional software or hardware other than a laptop computer from which I read co-ordinates and browsed for caches when planning trips at home.
I’m not even going to deny that I am a band-wagon jumper. I have bought into the iPhone, love it, and want to leverage the popularity of the device to bring iPhone accessory reviews to Gadgetoid.
You may or may not have already heard of Piel Frama, they have manufactured leather goods since 1945 and began producing phone cases in 1984 (co-incidentally the year that I was born). Since then Piel Frama have built up a reasonable level of prestige as a manufacturer of luxuary leather cases for PDAs and Phones and those years of experience are reflected in their products which are hand-made to a superb level of quality.
The wait is over for those of you who survived the fierce temptation of the iPhone 3g. I didn’t and I find my excitement for the HTC Touch Pro somewhat mitigated as a result, but none-the-less it’s a fanastic example of a Windows Mobile Phone with more oomph than you’ll ever need and more features than you’ll ever find the time to use; I wouldn’t say no to a free one!
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You may, or may not, have noticed that we’re getting fairly close to that most wonderful time of the year, when radio stations start playing Mistletoe & Wine, scarf and gloves become a daily necessity and mince pies are back on the supermarket shelves.
