App review: Chop Sushi

There are many match-three games in the App Store, but “Chop Sushi” stands out in this genre. This game proves to be a tasty treat! The object of the game is to match at least 3 types of sushi. The more sushi you match, the more turns you get.

The unique part about “Chop Sushi” is the role-playing twist. You venture into the game as the character, Master Chef. His main goal is to serve the freshest sushi and to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, everyone he runs into has a personal demon that needs to be dealt with. As he challenges them to a match-three sushi battle, he also levels up, gains health, adds new weapons, and defeat the customer’s demons.

The game starts out simple with very helpful tutorials. Tapping on a sushi piece or stone will signal the chopsticks to pick it up. Move the piece by swaying the chopsticks up, down, left, or right. Matching pieces will disappear and more will appear in their place. If you match more than four pieces, you will get another turn. You take turns with your opponent and the battle ends when you or your opponent have 0% health. Match wasabi pieces to damage your opponent’s health. When no moves are available on the board, all the stones crack to reveal what’s underneath them.

There are three modes to choose from — Adventure, Quick Battle, and Challenges. In Challenges, you have to match items in a specific number of moves. In Quick Battle, you can select which land and demon to battle with. But the game is mostly centered around the Adventure mode, where Master Chef can wander around, talk to people, and swim to new lands.

As the game progress, you start to earn new recipes that can help you with your battles. New weapons and healing recipes will have you thinking about your next move as well as your opponent’s. This adds another level of gameplay to keep the game fun and challenging.

Sometimes selecting a sushi piece to move is difficult. The pieces are small, so you’ll find yourself picking up the wrong piece. However, you are not penalized and there is no time limit in the game. This is nice because you never feel rushed.

If you would like to try out this game, download “Chop Sushi Lite” for free and give it a test drive. You’ll be able to play one level and battle three different opponents. The full version is only $2.99 and is worth every penny!

App review: Twittelator Pro

If you’re looking for a powerful Twitter iPhone/iPod Touch client, then you should look no further than Twittelator Pro. If you compare this app to others such as Twitterfon and Tweetie, you’ll probably notice that it isn’t as quick to load when you first start it up. But the tradeoff is a slew of features that you won’t get in the others.

Twittelator has the ability to update automatically in regular intervals that you set in the Settings from within the app. When the app refreshes, if the sound is on, you’ll hear a notification sound to alert you of new tweets. This notification sound will even work if the screen blanks out from being inactive. The auto-updating is pretty reliable and offers something that Tweetie doesn’t (you have to manually refresh).

When there are new tweets that arrive, a number badge will show up in the tab at the bottom. If there are a lot of new tweets, going to that section will mark the on-screen new tweets as read. The number badge won’t go away until you scroll down or up a bit and make sure that you read all tweets. Or if you can’t read them all, a simple quick flick up and down will get rid of the badge. The number badge is great for making sure you don’t miss a thing (or choose to, if you wish) and actually get caught up on all of your missed tweets. This is a necessary thing for any twitter app; unfortunate that even Tweetie doesn’t have this feature.

View a person’s profile simply by tapping their avatar. You’ll see following/followers, location, bio and can view their tweets. It also shows options for DM’ing them, @’ing them, unfollow/follow, and bookmarking them (bookmarks being located in the More section, read on to find out more). When you tap on the username of a person, a menu featuring the selected tweet will pop up and give you options of replying, DMing, RT’ing, emailing the tweet to someone else, copy tweet/link, or marking it as a favorite.

When writing a new tweet, there’s several features that you will see. There will be an icon that has a pin like ones in the Google Maps app. This will allow you to send out a tweet with your GPS location. I suppose this would be good for emergencies, or if you want to have an impromptu tweetup? This has very limited use, I think, but is a nifty little feature to have readily available.

Next is the camera button, which allows you to take a picture or use a library photo. This picture will then be compressed and you’ll get a link with your selected photo service (yfrog, pikchur, twitpic, or moby). Then you can then add some text to your tweet to go with the photo, then send it out to all your followers.

Twittelator also has the ability to copy a tweet or copy the link to a tweet. You’ll be able to do this by tapping the name of the person that you want to copy the tweet or link of tweet. Tap the option, then go to compose a new tweet. Click the icon with the highlighter like icon and then the entire tweet or link to tweet will be pasted into the text entry field.

The last icon is below the 140 character count, and this is where you can browse for ‘twitterkeys’ — little icons that are displayable regardless of what a person is using to view them (unlike emoji, which aren’t compatible on all OS’s or apps) and are browser friendly! A great feature missing from other apps that adds a little spice to your tweets and can be sure that everyone can see them.

The last feature that you’ll see when composing a new tweet is that ‘@friends’ button in the top right corner. Tap it, and you’ll be presented with a list of your friends (people that you follow) that you can scroll through and add one at a time by hitting the + button to the side. It may not be practical if you have a rather large list of people you follow due to scrolling through a large list, but it may be of more use to people that follow less people. Though it seems to keep everyone that you have followed in the past as well. I notice scrolling through that the usernames of people I’ve unfollowed still remain in this list. So it’s something nice, but not exactly practical.

Another major feature of Twittelator is that you can view previews of tweets with pictures (from services like twitpic). It’s very nice to see small previews of photos because sometimes you’ll click to see a photo and maybe you won’t be amused or whatever it may be. With this feature, you can now see pictures that you would want to see instead of being forced to click it, wait for it to load, only to be disappointed.

To view the picture in full size, simply tap it and it will take you to the twitpic page, or whatever other photo hosting service, where you can zoom in/out with pinch gestures. You also get several options when viewing a twitpic page. You can open it in Safari, Email the link, Copy the link, open any link (manually input the URL), or go back/cancel. The way Twittelator Pro handles picture tweets is amazing and much better than other Twitter apps.

In the Settings section, you’ll find a plethora of things to tweak to your liking. How many tweets to load on launch, themes (three themes for now), various options for reading and writing tweets, even Retweet options. Choose from five different link shortening services and get some options for your GPS and Location settings. Photo uploading services? You’re covered with four different services! You can even have high resolution photos (on/off) and clear the image cache. Want more constant refreshes or slower refreshes to avoid hitting the rate limit? You can choose to have auto-refresh on and set the time interval to your liking. And if you don’t like the sound, you can turn that off too. Even settings for subgroups, warnings, Instapaper, and even a Safari bookmarklet.

The last tab is the ‘More’ section, and there are tons of additional stuff for the power-Twitterer here.

Yes, you can manage multiple accounts with Twittelator Pro.You can search for a topic that interests you, look at your own updates, view the DMs that you have sent to others and create various subgroups for better tweet organization. Grouping seems to have become quite popular amongst Twitter users, especially those that want to keep track of their friends in a more organized way. Trends is a necessity in all twitter apps, and Twittelator doesn’t disappoint. If you care at all about the public timeline, you can view that as well. Care about the falling stock market? You can add and keep track of stocks too. View recent tweets from friends, bookmarks (instructions provided in app), favorites, log of Twittelator’s activity, Misc (random tweets? Can’t quite figure it out myself), and Saved (instructions provided in app).

This is an extremely powerful Twitter app for the iPhone. It has enough power to match that of a full-on desktop client, at least I believe it does. If you want an app that has more to offer than just the basics or are just a power-user, then Twittelator Pro is for you. The only thing that prevents it from being perfect is the speed and some lag, but the pros outweigh these minor cons.

iHome iP9 for iPhone and iPod

Once upon a time iHome got the idea to build an alarm clock that not only docked with your iPod but allowed you to wake up to your iPod’s music, and an entire industry was born. A few years later and we’ve got companies releasing everything from extravagant several hundred dollar iPod alarm clocks with dozens of built-in features to inexpensive fold-up iPod alarm clocks that fit easily in your suitcase and everything in between.



And now here comes the iP9, the fifth generation of iHome’s own original iPod alarm clock (the original version was called the “iH5” if that helps you understand the nomenclature a little better), and while it doesn’t necessarily look that different from the original, it turns out the iP9 runs circles around it for the same original $99 price tag. And equally important for a certain segment of users, it works with the iPhone. Which wasn’t always a given.



First there was the iH9, which was essentially the same product as the iP9 but wasn’t shielded against cellular signals and was therefore essentially unusable with an iPhone (unless you count putting your iPhone in airplane mode to be “usable” anywhere but on an airplane, which I don’t). Then there was the $149-priced iP99 which was iPhone-compatible but was otherwise just a minimal step up from the iH9, meaning that iPhone users were essentially paying a $50 surcharge. But now the iP9 gets it right on all counts. It works equally well with the iPhone and the iPod, offers audio quality superior to any other sub-$100 iPod/iPhone alarm clock product on the market, the dual alarm clocks that so many iH5 users used to complain about not not having back in the day, and the remote control that used to cost $20 extra is now included the $99 package. In fact that remote control has also come a long way as it now offers EQ adjustment as well as the ability to navigate up and down your iPhone or iPod’s hierarchal menus (so long as you’re standing close enough to your iPhone or iPod to be able to read its screen). Throw in the built-in AM/FM radio with presets, and the value proposition keeps increasing.



Suffice it to say that iHome’s flagship $99 alarm clock product has come a long way in the four years since it first hit the market. Being picky would be asking why it now only comes in a choice of black or grey and no longer in the original white, but I suppose that would be like asking Apple why there’s no longer a white iPod on the market.



And of course there are other options out there. Altec Lansing’s Moondance Glow alarm clock (which is annoyingly still incompatible with the iPhone) offers superior qudio quality and a wider set of features, but it also comes with a $179 price tag which puts it in an entirely different category. And iHome’s own iP99 is still around, with its price now reduced to $129, but since it doesn’t offer $30 worth of additional audio quality I can only recommend the iP99 over the iP9 to those users who strongly prefer the iP99’s more tunnel-like styling. And of course Chestnut Hill’s $499 George alarm clock is in a category unto its own.



The bottom line is that the iP9 is the best sub-$100 iPod/iPhone alarm clock product on the market, an impressive fact considering that companies like Logitech and XtremeMac (and too many others to list) have been nipping at iHome for years with impressive alarm clock offerings of their own. And those competing products will continue to come to market as more iPod and iPhone users decide they want to wake up to their own music (and of course we’ll review those products as they do).



But right now my money is on the iP9. If $99 is your budget and you’re not looking for a portable alarm clock (iHome and various competitors offer those as well), the iP9 is hands-down the best alarm clock stereo system for use with your iPhone or iPod.

App review: iNapkin

Remember the days when notes were scribbled onto napkins for sudden spurts of inspiration? Seems a bit odd nowadays in the digital age to be seen scribbling on restaurant napkins, but if you’re the nostalgic type, there’s iNapkin.

iNapkin provides the user with a digital napkin, where your ideas, scribbles, and doodles can be captured freely without limitation. The magic with the canvas that is not seen in other apps is that the napkin can be in three different sizes and you can zoom in with pinch gestures with the Hand tool. This enables the user to be able to zoom in to write notes or even create a sketch with finer details. With this, a user can put as much info as they need on a single napkin without really worrying about how cramped the napkin will be.

But how do you fit the entire napkin on the screen? Well, you can’t have the entire napkin in one view of the screen, but then why would there be three different sizes of napkins? Because iNapkin’s Hand tool enables the user to also pan across the napkin canvas as well as zooming. So if you’re out of room on the first space of the napkin, you can move to the other empty spaces and continue scribbling. So if you choose the Large size (960×960), there will be plenty of blank space for you to jot down more.

Since this app is mainly to replicate the old method of quick jots on napkin paper, the pens available do not have adjustable size and are only the basic ink colors of blue, red, and black. Pretty basic, but so is the entire idea behind the app: napkin notes. There’s also a small or large eraser in case you make mistakes. Are you done with your napkin? Then you can tap the icon representing a hard drive to save your note to your photo library.

This is a pretty neat note taking app that replicates that feeling of napkins pretty well. If the other note taking apps don’t fit your bill of being able to freely sketch out ideas if you need visuals or graphs, then this may be a keeper.

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App review: Flight control

Ever watched the movie Tin Cup and then wondered just how stressful a flight traffic controller’s job really is? Here’s your chance to find out, on a metaphorical level at least, thanks to Flight Control. The game claims to put you in charge of landing planes at the Los Angeles airport, but in reality you’re only responsible for two runways and a helipad (if only the real LAX were that simple to get in and out of).



Each time an airplane or helicopter appears from one of the outer edges of the screen, you use your finger to draw its landing path: red airplanes land on the large runway, yellow planes on the small runway, blue helicopters on the pad. It sounds simple enough, but the two runways criss-cross each other, and planes arrive from random directions. What starts off as the best-laid of plans quickly goes to crap as planes and helicopters start arriving more frequently and you’ve got to get creative in heading off mid-air collisions; as soon as two of them crash, the game is over.



Flight Control is, like any good game, deceptively addictive. There are no distinct levels or difficulty settings, just a sky that gets filled with more and planes and choppers until you eventually have no way of keeping them all out of each other’s paths. Like with Tetris, there’s no winning – each time you play you’ll either eventually crash out or quit out of frustration. But that’s the fun of it, of course. Each time out you’ll get just a little bit better, and after you’ve built up some experience with the game, it does seem to “slow down” to where you’re better able to manage your way multiple near-collisions at once.



At some point, however, you do realize that you are in fact playing the same game over and over again. Maybe you got distracted last time out, or maybe you got unlucky enough to be given six red planes to land in a row and just ran out of room on that side of the screen. So you try again and again, trying to perfect your craft, except that by design there’s no achieving perfection.



In that sense it’s a good thing Flight Control only costs a dollar; if it cost five bucks I’d criticize it as being too simplistic and too much of a one-trick pony (99¢ is a “sale” price; the four star rating is based on the regular $3 price). But unlike most games in this price range, this one is worth a little more than its price tag. This game is a perfect candidate for in-app transactions that could allow you to try your hand at different airports whose runways are at different angles, just to mix it up again once you’ve reached your comfort level with the default runway layout. But no such luck, at least for now.



The game does come with a pause button, presumably intended for bathroom breaks and such. I’m not sure whether it’s considered cheating if you pause things just to stop and study the screen in the hopes of coming up with a better way to reroute the planes already on the screen, but the option is there nonetheless. As is the choice of either hearing the game’s built-in sound effects or continuing to listen to your music that was playing when you launched the app – an option that far too few iPhone games offer.



I’ll give you a few harmless hints that might make gameplay a little less maddening at the outset: when a plane first appears you can use your finger to drag any route you want from the plane to either the runway or just out into the middle of nowhere. I’ve found that your best bet is to go ahead and steer it toward the runway right at the outset, otherwise it’ll just end up flying around aimlessly and getting in the way. If you end up having to change its path later on because another plane appears in its path, you can easily do so by drawing a new path for it with your finger.



If you need one plane to arrive at the runway just a little later so another plane can land first, you can give it a more circular path. But remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and the best thing you can do to avoid clutter is get your planes landed as quickly as possible. So if you start a plane off on a winding course but are able to shorten its path up later on, do so.



My high score was 49, which I got on my sixth attempt and haven’t been able to replicate since. One criticism of the game is that I don’t know whether 49 is good or bad, since there’s no feedback of that sort. But proof of Flight Control’s addictiveness is that I’m still trying to beat my score.

iPhone Bluetooth car shootout

iProng goes hands-on with in-car bluetooth solutions for your iPhone from Kensington and Contour Design

Let me begin this review by saying that while my car lacks integrated Bluetooth connectivity, I am ultimately not the ideal buyer for one of these products as my time in the car is usually minimal. I live in a small town, so my daily commute is often under ten minutes. However, I do like the idea of a Bluetooth car kit, but in the testing of these products, I put more miles on my car than I normally would in any given day.

I’ll look at each product separately before comparing them.



Kensington Hands-Free Visor Car Kit


The Kensington bluetooth kit is on the surface a nice product. It clips to your visor and has a built-in microphone and speaker so you can easily hear and be heard. It has three large programmable speed dial buttons, as well as an answer/hang-up button and a slider at the top of the unit to control speaker volume. It also comes with a USB-based car charger and spare battery (but more on that later).

As far as initial set-up goes, pairing your phone to the bluetooth receiver is simple and painless and after the initial pairing, all need to do is make sure bluetooth is enabled on your phone and hit the power button on the unit to pair them. When you leave your car, nothing more is required, as the unit will power off automatically after 15 minutes when a paired device is removed.


Setting up the speed dial buttons is a little more frustrating, as you must actually be engaged in a call with the person to whom you want to the speed dial to, although this is an understandable move to make the unit more user-friendly and accessible, it is still a little frustrating that you must be on the phone with them – and having the phone ringing will not work. I tried setting up a speed dial with a friend who was not answering his phone at the time, and had to wait for the voicemail to connect before the speed dial would be set. By then, he had a useless voicemail in his inbox. After that, however, the speed dial is a wonderful addition. It allows you to make a call without actually reaching to your phone, which keeps your eyes on the road.

Regarding call quality, I tested both units with windows up and down at various speeds (up to about 65mph give or take) and I was informed by my test subjects that the Kensington unit sounded quite good. Even at 65 mph with the windows cracked, they reported that there was only slight background noise. One drawback, though, is that the speaker on the Kensington unit is not loud enough. While people reported they could hear me clearly at top speed with the windows down, I struggled to hear them, even with the unit turned up to maximum volume. The same was true with the windows up. In slower situations, though, the volume was perfectly acceptable, so if you commute to work and are in primarily stop-and-go traffic, you should be able to hear your calls fine.


A nice inclusion on Kensington’s part, is a spare battery along with its car charger. This means that if you battery dies, you can easily pop in the spare, that has been charging all along, and continue about your business. The only possible drawback is if your battery dies mid-call, as there is no way to charge the battery directly from the charger– it must be removed and put into the charger. However, in my testing, I never actually ran out of power, and Kensington does claim a 10 hour life for calls for each battery, which is more than acceptable for all but power users.

Contour Design
SurfaceSoundCompact

The Contour SurfaceSoundCompact, like the Kensington car kit, is quite easy to pair initially with the iPhone. To power on the unit, one must swing down a small rotary arm with a microphone on it, which prompts a connecting noise and a voice confirmation when the devices are paired. This is nice, as it allows you to position the microphone at various angles to help with audio clarity during calls. However, there is also a drawback with having the arm as the on/off switch– if you forget to put the arm back to its closed position when you leave the car, the device will stay on; there is no auto shutoff feature. Contour does claim the device has 21 days worth of standby time, and admittedly, accidentally leaving the device on never drained its battery, even when I did so overnight, but it is a potential issue if you’re on the phone and in a hurry and forget to turn it off.

Again, when when driving, ease-of-use is a factor on a product such as this, and the Contour does fairly well at it, except that the buttons for answering a call and adjusting the volume are on the side of the unit (the side covered by the rotating arm when closed) which can make using the device difficult at first. One has to remember where the volume up/down button is (on the “top”) versus the call answer/end button (on the “bottom”) when taking calls or adjusting volume in-call. Granted, the buttons are large enough to feel and there is a tactile difference between them, but there is a slight learning curve that could be slightly distracting while driving. After a few times, though, I found them easy enough to remember and use, but potential buyers should be warned about the slight learning curve.

As far as call quality goes, in my testing everyone reported that my voice came through clearly even at high speeds with the windows cracked. Perhaps it is also the larger speaker, but I found that call volume was better in the Contour SurfaceSound than in the Kensington unit. At 65 mph with the windows cracked, I could hear things on my end much easier, though there was a little straining. At the same speed with the windows up, the speaker more than compensated for road noise.

Contour claims a battery life of 15 hours of talk time, and though I did not time the conversations, nor did I talk for 15 hours in a row with the unit, I did find that the overall battery life was quite good. In two weeks worth of testing, the battery was only beginning to die, though it should be noted that my testing was more on the “moderate use” side than “heavy use.”

A final note on the Contour unit: there is a small metal bump on one side of the unit (the side that presses against the visor) which I can only assume is meant to help hold the unit in place and prevent it from slipping. However, this also means that to remove it, you must be sure to lift up the entire unit rather than just sliding it off the visor. If you don’t lift it up, the bump, which is slightly pointed, will drag across the visor, potentially causing damage to it. I understand the rationale behind this, since the all-metal body is heavier than Kensington’s plastic body; however, there should be some sort of warning about this in the manual, as I caused several slight tears in my car’s visor the first time I tried to remove /reposition the unit.

Side-by-side comparison

Overall, both units have advantageous features and either one would be perfectly usable by anyone, but there are some advantages and disadvantages to both. For one, Kensington’s inclusion of a second battery is quite nice, as the only way to charge the Contour SurfaceSound is via a cable. Granted they include a USB car charger which allows one to charge either in the car or from a computer (or other USB charger, though they do say using the device with another USB charger will void the warranty). However, if your unit dies mid-trip, the only options are to dangle a cord from your visor to the cigarette lighter or remove the unit from the visor to charge. Both are less than ideal, as the first option puts a cord in your field of vision (rather distracting), while the other forces you to remove it from an ideal location, making taking calls more difficult and possibly impacting audio quality on the other person’s end.

The other slight downside to the Contour product is that since it lacks any speed dial functionality, other than answering and ending calls, all other actions must be made from your phone. If you wish to call someone, you must pull out your phone, find the contact, etc which, as many states with laws about non-handsfree phone use will agree, can be distracting while driving. There are useful shortcuts on the unit for redialing the last call made or received, but if you wish to call someone new, you’re going to have to resort to the phone itself.

In terms of comparing call quality, the overall winner is the Contour. Everyone I called using it said that it was easier to hear me and the overall quality was better.

The bottom line on these units is that the speed dial and extra battery are very nice for the Kensington, but the Contour unit overall has better call quality and a louder speaker for those who have trouble hearing or will be using the unit on a car trip (such as myself).



Carlos Santana interview

Carlos Santana and I are sitting on a couch and he’s telling me everything from why he feels younger today than he did when he performed at Woodstock forty years ago, to what the next chapter of his storied musical career might entail, to why he’s about to start playing a few dozen shows in Las Vegas each year. But in addition to being one of the most celebrated, popular and influential artists in the history of recorded music, he’s also likely the most famous person to release his own app for iPhone users.



So what led Carlos Santana to the iPhone, both as a user and as the namesake of an iPhone app? “I’m through with the smoke signals,” as he puts it. “I was the guy who went from the smoke signals and the mirrors, like the Apaches, straight into the iPhone, so I have no concept of computers. I was still with cassettes. And so it fascinates me just how much the human imagination has gone into making things accessible. I can put all my library of records and cassettes and CDs into my laptop and then into my iPhone. And I’m basically more than just curious now. I’m eager to ride that. It’s kind of like a highway, kind of like a freeway, and this stuff is like billboards. So I wanted to join it.”



The Santana iPhone app is a gateway into the world of Santana, with full-length music videos, a sampling of songs from over the decades, recent news and upcoming tour dates (the next version of the app, already in the App Store cue, will include web links for buying tickets), and even instructional videos from Carlos on how to play Oye Como Va and Black Magic Woman on guitar – along with a link to the “Architects of a New Dawn” website where Carlos isn’t afraid to express his current worldview. Nor was he afraid to do so during our interview.



“I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa. And with those songs from John Lennon or Bob Dylan, ‘Blowing in the Wind’ or ‘What a Wonderful World’ or ‘One Love’ or ‘Love Supreme’ I realized that it’s all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba. There’s a lot of walls still up. You know, the walls here in the United States between Fox Networks and just regular people who aspire to change the world without being cynical or arrogant. Because we do believe that peace is possible.



“So I utilize everything, whether it’s Maria Maria’s restaurants or shoes or music with Clive Davis, Yo Yo Ma, Justin Timberlake or Kirk Hammett from Metallica, we utilize everything that is available to us to give back, to invest. And what Arnold is not investing, or Barack Obama so far, which is invest in education for teachers in schools, bring the boys home, and legalize marijuana so you can make more money and pay more teachers a higher salary and erect more schools. I’m not afraid to create a website that is called ‘Architects of a New Dawn’ so we can ask ourselves how far have we come fighting like gorillas over a water hole and now fighting over oil, because clearly that’s what we’re there for, and going into a new dimension where we can actually, again, ask ourselves how far can we go instead of how far have we come?”

Santana’s live shows are legendary for their energy. So is there anything special Carlos has to do to get himself in the right mindset before he heads on on stage with his band each night? “All the musicians in my band, they’re leaders in their own right. They all play with John Scofield, Michael Stern, Pat Metheny, the best musicians in the world. Miles Davis, Prince, you know? Tower of Power. So I’m surrounded with le creme de le creme of musicians that can go anywhere we want to go, whether it’s jazz or reggae of African. The only thing we haven’t done so far is country & western and Riverdance music. But I think if we combine those two with some ska (laughs), it can be done.



Would he really go there? “Nothing is impossible at this point. The only thing that we need to do is first accept that the only reality is God’s love. Everything else is an illusion. And then you’ve got that energy that you can go on stage and do it. Like Elton John says, play Black Magic Woman, Maria Maria, Smooth and every song in the set like it’s the first and last time you’re ever gonna do it. It’s not wishful thinking. You can actually will yourself to do it because as you know, your body just follows your thoughts. If you think like a loser then you’re gonna be a loser, your body’s gonna get tired. If you think like a winner, everybody benefits. Your body will have, like, boundless energy because you’re inspired. You’re not depending on food. Kind of like when you fall in love, you know? When you’re in love man, you don’t need food, you don’t need a lot of things. You’re about this high off the ground, want to know what she smells like, what’s her favorite song, color, what she tastes like, all that kind of stuff. And so it’s important to stay in love with life and with the possibilities and opportunities.



Many fans have divided Carlos‘ music into two chapters, the first being the classics like Everybody’s Everything and Oye Como Va, the second being the genre-bending collaborations from Supernatural onward. So does Carlos foresee a third chapter in which his music takes on a whole other incarnation?



”Oh sure, you know? To combine Yo Yo Ma, Andrea Bocelli with African rhythms, some real far out Grateful Dead, Screaming Jay Hawkins for humor. You know, the main thing is we’re not afraid to try things. We’re not afraid to go hang out with Alice Coltrane when she was here, or Wayne Shorter or Herbie, we’re just not afraid because we’re bringing an element of openness and we want to complement, you know? So it’s not competition, it’s not comparing. And for me it’s just one breath, you know? It’s just that in that breath we’re able to cover from A to Z in music. It’s only eight notes. Actually seven, the eighth one is the first one again. Twelve if you count the ones in between. So I agree with John Coltrane: damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts.”



This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, a event that saw a young Carlos Santana take the stage and launch his career. What does he think of his younger self now, looking back? “I feel like I’m younger now because I’m not with fear. I was with a lot of fear back then. There was a lot of fear and anger and distrust. But at the same time there was a lot of acceptance to go almost from junior high school to being on stage with Sly Stallone or Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Michael Bloomfield. It was quite a gift, man, to walk into this door that Bill Graham provided for us, and Clive Davis, and then again Clive Davis with Supernatural, and I look at them just like doors, just like this is another door here in Las Vegas. They’re doors of opportunities and possibilities, you know? I started playing the guitar in Tijuana and basically being a dishwasher in San Francisco, and I dreamed that I could hang out with Michael Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia, and I just kept going.”



This month Carlos announced that he’s taking up residency at The Joint at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, a deal which will see him playing about thirty-six shows in town per year. How does he feel about spending so much time in Vegas, a town that appears to be a polar opposite from the San Francisco Bay Area he calls home?



”I’m having fun hanging around with me no matter where I am now. So it could be Las Vegas, a parking lot, I mean I’ve seen Bob Marley, he played in front of Tower Records in San Francisco, same thing with Traffic. So I said damn, you know, if they can play in the streets. Real musicians, it’s an illusion that Carnegie Hall or Madison Square Garden, to me it’s all one heart at this point. Coming into Las Vegas, which is a city that’s based basically on investing in illusion and luck, chance and fortune, we’re bringing another element, the element of God’s grace, which has nothing to do with luck, fortune or chance. It brings the guarantee and reassurance that God guarantees a happy outcome for everyone. That takes care of that. To the illusion, we bring a genuineness. Genuineness is knowing that we can play in South Africa, 2010 World Cup, center stage with all of the drummers from Africa, Brazil and Cuba, very few bands can do that. Very few bands can understand the language of those rhythms and take it to the next level without showing off or anything like that.



“It’s a language that if you speak it correctly then you touch all the families of the world. So no, I don’t look at Las Vegas like I used to, like it’s a duality or in opposition to who I am. No, not anymore. To me it’s an opportunity, possibility to be of service to more people who need financial assistance like students. There’s no greater satisfaction than being of service to humanity than by providing financial assistance to students who can go to the next step in their lives because they graduated with supremely high honors and grades from high school but they don’t have money to go to universities.”



Looking out into the audience, what’s more gratifying, seeing kids enjoying his music or seeing adults who’ve been fans all their lives? As it turns out, the answer is a little bit of both. ”They’re bringing their children,” he says of his older fans. “I’ve never seen so many kids. You know, I swear to you, children under twelve and they’re freaking out, they’re bugging out. We invite them on stage in the last half an hour and it’s an incredible blessing from God to be able to be sixty-one and become like what I wanted to be, like my dad and B.B. King.

interview by Bill Palmer

iProng mag #39: Carlos Santana interview, Skype for iPhone and more

iProng Magazine’s 39th issue features a cover story interview with music legend Carlos Santana. This issue also features interviews with Tyrone Wells, Telling on Trixie and Goodnight Burbank star Hayden Black – along with reviews of iPhone and iPod hardware accessories and software apps including the new Skype app for iPhone.

Tap here to read this issue

Skype comes to the iPhone

It’s official: Skype has been released as an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. And since Skype allows you to make phone calls for free, no one will ever have to worry about going over their minutes or paying a cell phone bill again. It’s the end of AT&T as we know it! Anarchy will reign supreme! World governments will fall! New planets will be discovered! Well, not exactly. In reality, while Skype for iPhone is in fact a big deal, its real impact may have relatively little to do with cellphone carriers or minutes at all.



But we’ll get to that in a moment. First, for those who aren’t familiar with what Skype is, it’s a piece of software that allows you to use your Mac or PC as if it were a telephone by making calls over your existing internet connection to other people who have Skype on their computers. The “phone call” consists of talking into your computer’s built-in microphone and hearing the other person’s voice coming out of your computer’s speakers – or using a headset to make things sound better.



Skype’s potential has always been impressive. Since you’re already paying for unlimited high-speed home internet (dial-up laggards need not apply), making Skype calls via your computer doesn’t cost you anything. Nor does the Skype software itself, which is free. But the limitations are two-fold: first, using your computer to make a phone call is a bit geeky, even though not difficult. And if you want to call someone, they have to have the Skype software launched and running on their computer at the time you want to call them (and be in a position to sit down at their computer and take the call). If you want to use your Skype software to dial an actual telephone number, you’ll have to a couple cents a minute to Skype for the privilege.



But here comes Skype for the iPhone, a mobile device, meaning that you no longer have to sit in front of your computer to make (or receive) or Skype call. You can walk around, use your comfy iPhone earbuds if you want, and use Skype on a device that was actually designed to be a telephone. But here’s the bomb drop that’ll make some of you wonder what all the hype is about: Skype can only be used on your iPhone (or iPod touch) if you’re within range of wifi. In other words, those 3G and EDGE networks that allow you to make a phone call or check your email on your iPhone anytime you want, from anywhere you want? You can’t use the Skype app over those. In fact, for most iPhone users, the wifi limitation means that you’ll only be able to make phone calls on your iPhone over Skype if you’re at home, or maybe at work, or at a wifi-enabled coffee shop or hotel.

In other words, AT&T really doesn’t have much to worry about. Or do they? While iPhone Skype users are going to continue to use up as many minutes per month on their AT&T plan while out and about each day, the real key here may be that while you’re at home in the comfort of your own wifi network, you can make as many lengthy free phone calls as you want. For iPhone users who don’t have a traditional landline phone and are always worried about how those hour-long iPhone calls make from at home to their loved ones are going to impact their minute usage, here’s the opportunity to bypass that completely. And for those iPhone users who’ve only been keeping a landline phone installed at home specifically for those multi-hour phone calls, here might be their chance to finally cancel their landline once and for all.



But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Skype app is that allows you to make phone calls from your iPod touch when you’re within range of wifi. The majority of apps in the iTunes App Store (games, entertainment, etc) are of equal value to iPhone and iPod touch users, while a chunk of others (social networking apps and other apps that require some kind of network access in order to be used) are potentially of less value to iPod touch users since they’re limited as to where and when they can use such apps. But Skype might be the rare app that’s more valuable to iPod touch users than to iPhone users, as it adds a whole new kind of functionality (phone calls) to the iPod touch that wasn’t there before.

Sure, there are already a handful of third-party apps in the App Store that tie into Skype. But just as usage of Twitter apps would increase ten-fold if Twitter would just go ahead and make an app for iPhone instead of leaving it entirely in the hands of third-party developers who may or may not share Twitter’s vision and may or may not be able to get the word out to the user base that their product even exists, the recent addition of an official Skype app to the App Store is what will truly set Skype usage on the iPhone and iPod touch platform in motion on a wide scale.

It’s worth noting that Skype’s text chat feature (similar to using AOL Instant Messenger or iChat) is included in the Skype app and unlike phone calls, the text chatting can in fact be done over the cellular network, which means it’s available to you any time.

Well, that is any time the other person happens to have Skype up and running. In fact, the rather low odds of any two users happening to have the Skype app running on their iPhone or touch at the same time is pretty small unless the two users have scheduled something in advance (if you have illusions that you’re going to be able to Skype-call someone on their iPhone and it’s going to magically start ringing even if they don’t have the Skype app running at the time, forget about it – that’s not the way it works). So the real potential here is probably more about iPhone and iPod touch users being able to call other Skype users on their computers for free (it’s a lot easier to leave Skype running on your computer 24/7 than on your iPhone), along with the ability to make international calls from your iPhone or touch and only pay a couple cents per minute to Skype instead of paying insane insane international call rates to AT&T.



As far as the Skype app itself, it looks fantastic (in fact more attractive than the computer version of the Skype software), and fits right in with the motif used by many of the better-looking iPhone apps. In other words, this wasn’t some half-baked port from another platform; this app is for real.



While it’s yet to be seen what kind of an impact the Skype app will have on the overall platform, and users will find varying value in it depending on their own needs and usage patterns, the bottom line is that Skype has finally (officially) arrived on the iPhone and iPod touch platform.


And while the wifi-only nature of making calls via the Skype app means that true corporate-collapse worldwide anarchy will have to wait for another day, at least the Skype app itself is free for the taking.



GNB: Hollywood Report

Goodnight Burbank has been one of the more popular and award-winning television series on the web over the past few years. So what’s the scoop on your new show, “Goodnight Burbank: Hollywood Report”?



It’s a spin-off set during a new daytime entertainment show that the fictional channel 6 is now running. Gordon had been promised his own show but at the last minute Kelly is added to the roster – and he’s pretty pissed off about it. But he’s really got nothing to be worried about. Despite being on Hollywood’s back step, they’ve still got virtually zero access to the stars.



At its heart though, it’s all about the characters and this season has tons of stories for them. Kelly Jones starts dating George Michael, the pop star who’s been on a ‘gay conversion’ at a church. My character Gordon gets done for a DUI and winds up getting into it with Tom Hanks who happened to be arrested the same evening. The fictional producer of the show played by the gorgeous Monica Young decides she’d be happier as a man so begins her transition to be what turns out to be the most feminine, beautiful men ever. I’m telling you, it’s 20 episodes of lunacy that you’ll get some real big laughs from and it just premiered on Babelgum.

Just to be clear, Tom Hanks and George Michael are not actually on your show, right?

They might! You’ll have to tune in and find out.

So why Babelgum?

Why not? They wanted some great new content with which to brand their new relaunch so what can I say, they’ve got great taste! They licensed these 20 original episodes for one year so that’s where you can find them. Just head to babelgum.com then search for ‘Goodnight Burbank’. Click on the episodes to show up to see which number they are, then watch in order!

It’s funny how if you’re doing music or an audio podcast, it’s so clear cut: put it in iTunes. But video is a whole different deal.

This is why I hate the term “podcasting” because it makes people think you need an iPod of some kind of access the content, and that’s just so not the case.

And yet the irony is that “podcast” is the one word that’s actually gotten through to the mainstream, even though they don’t know what it means.

Right. It was just adopted early enough that that’s what the word has become. I don’t refer to anything I do as podcasting. I call it online content, web TV, anything like that, that really gives you a better idea of what you’re getting.

Is the spinoff also available in a podcast format?

A It’s available both on Babelgum’s site and if you have an iPhone you can download their iPhone app which is hugely popular and watch ‘em there. And you can just add @goodniteburbank – yes, it’s spelled differently, the regular spelling is too long – to your twitter account for lots of topical jokes about the news.



Newsstand for iPhone

In this day and age, the easiest way to keep up with news from anywhere in the world, straight from the source, is by RSS feeds. There are RSS feed readers for the desktop, or web services that allow you to keep track of all your newsfeeds. What about some RSS readers for the iPhone? Well, there are several slick RSS apps, but the one that stands out the most is Newsstand.

The interface is clean and simple, with no gimmicky looking UI but rather, what iPhone apps should look like. View all unread items with the button at the top, or even flag articles and view them later with the flagged option. The app comes preloaded with several popular feeds, but you can easily get rid of them and add your own, with the simple Edit button at the top. For easier ways to delete feeds, swipe across an item and a delete button will appear, much like in Mail.app.

While Newsstand can be a standalone reader, you can also use it to import your feeds from other services as well (Google Reader, Bloglines, or OPML files). With an import, you will get all of your feeds as well as the folders that you organized them in, that is, if you organize them at all. There is even an export option, which will create a new email that you can send to yourself or another Newsstand user. This allows one to restore subscriptions later or even transfer them to another device, which is pretty useful if you know you’re going to need it. Not necessary, but nice to have anyways, just in case.

Please keep in mind though, that the ‘Import’ feature is not a SYNC. It merely imports the feeds to the app itself, but WILL NOT sync with your Google Reader or Bloglines. Also, there won’t be options such as Starring, Sharing, or Commenting [for Google Reader] because it doesn’t sync. So if you were looking for an app that will perfectly sync with Google Reader, this may not be what you were looking for.

The lists and articles are flexible with viewing, allowing both portrait and landscape modes. So if you prefer the wider screen with landscape then you can have it. Don’t like landscape? That’s cool too; stick with portrait mode. One neat little thing with Newsstand that you won’t find with any other RSS iPhone app is an actual ‘newsstand’ when viewing your list of feeds and folders in landscape mode. Blogs become digital magazines and newspapers that you can scroll through, and open up like a real magazine or newspaper.

However, even though the shelf view is pretty cool to showoff to friends and just flick through for fun, it isn’t exactly practical to actually do all the reading with that mode. The small digital booklet will be split in two; left side will be the list of all available articles for that feed, and the right will be the article itself. If there are pictures in the article, you will have to scroll around to view all of it due to small and limited screen space. The text is pretty small and hard to read, although I suppose some people wouldn’t mind. Overall, a nifty little mode that’s nice to showoff, but not great for practical use.

In normal viewing of an article, you have options at the bottom: Flag, Themes/Font Size, Share, and View [the webpage]. Flagging will result in the item getting a flag, and thus viewable when you click the Flagged Items option at the main screen. Themes will bring up several different themes to choose from to view articles, and you can also change the font size to your personal liking. Share allows you to send the piece via email, Delicious, and even Twitter. The Twitter integration is pretty awesome; not many other RSS apps include this (from what I’ve noticed). The view webpage seems to be a standard among many iPhone apps (not just RSS readers) so it’s not really anything that special.

Also, when viewing the list of pieces, there will be an option at the top that will allow you to share the entire list of articles by email, which will include links to the original website and the beginning of each article. Useful if you want to share a new blog with someone that isn’t aware of it.

If you’re overrun with feeds and can’t go through them all, the check at the bottom means ‘Mark All Read,’ which will allow an easy escape from the hundreds or thousands of items that you would otherwise have to waddle through.

When fetching new items, Newsstand will allow simultaneous downloading from multiple feeds. You can increase the number of simultaneous downloads from Settings.app, however, be aware that the more you set the likelier the app will freeze or take longer to be responsive again during downloads. The default setting is for two simultaneous downloads, which I personally think is enough. Refreshing items is quick and painless with the tap of the circular icon, which will then go through all feeds to check for anything new since you’ve launched the app.

Overall, this is a very nice RSS reader for the iPhone. Only complaints I have is the no sync and tedious reading with the digital booklet version. Other than that, this app is great for reading RSS on the go!



Tyrone Wells interview

Born a pastor’s son just outside of Seattle, Tyrone Wells grew up listening to the choirs at church and his father play the accordion at home. While he loved music and played guitar in college as a hobby, it didn’t hit him that he could have a career as a musician until after he graduated. If you didn’t know anything about Tyrone you would think he was just another down-to-earth twenty-something year old passing time till he figured out what he wanted out of life. Aside from his vertical height and genuine friendliness there’s nothing that stands out and makes you think he would be the intriguing, artistic force he is on stage.

I had the opportunity to interview Tyrone over lunch during a “rest” day on his tour (he was still working that day promoting the album, he would just not have to perform that night) and I saw him perform the next night at the Highline Ballroom in NYC. Having listened to his new record, Remain, a solid pop-rock effort, I didn’t expect the passion and soul that he delivers through his voice and music in his live show to be what it was.

Tyrone sings from his heart and captures the audience with that raw but focused power on his own songs and old favorites like “With a Little Help From My Friends.” He has taken major steps from writing and singing the love found/ love lost songs that have been on his past efforts. The first single off the record, “More,” is a beautiful and heart wrenching song that you might have heard as the theme song on Intervention this season. That song has been important not only for Tyrone who said it is still cool to hear his own music on the radio and on TV but also for many of his fans. He has had a few approach him and tell him that song took them through a really hopeless time. It helped them find meaning again and basically saved their lives.

“Writing is my favorite part of what I get to do,” Tyrone said. Then he must have been in heaven working on the album. Co-writing for 4-5 months both in the US where he worked with Tim Myers, David Hodges and Matt Scannell and in London with Martin Terefe and Iain Archer. Its his second major label release but the first in which they have seen it the whole way through. Tyrone’s major label debut was slated to be his third indie release when he was signed by Universal and the CD, Hold On, was released by Universal untouched. Tyrone wrote and co-wrote over 60 songs for the new record which usually happens when artists are told to write more till the label thinks they have a hit song to push to radio. When I asked him if it felt daunting to have to answer to his label throughout the making of the CD he said that Universal was actually very hands off and it was liberating creatively because he was allowed the space he needed and the financial backing to take the time he needed to create in the studio.

Tyrone really shines though when you hear him live and see the emotion he pours into his music. He broke out of the LA music scene selling out a 1000 seat club. “The majors came calling,” he says making it sound incredibly simple. But, Tyrone definitely paid his indie dues. He released two albums on his own, toured through the NACA College Market circuit setting a record 152 interest forms filled out by schools at a showcase at NACA Nationals and worked for “five years doing everything on my own steam.” As he became more popular he was requested to perform for peoples weddings, proposals (sometimes couples had a special song) even funerals. As first it seems like strange place for an artist to perform and Tyrone explained that he has those same hesitations at first but that “it means a lot to be the breath and voice of hope and closure in such a difficult time.”

Back when he was unsigned Tyrone was performing his song “Sea Breeze” at a swap meet and a girl on her cell phone was next to the stage telling her friend that some singer-songwriter was playing Sea Breeze. Tyrone asked her who she thought wrote it and she said her friend Sam did. She would barely believe him when Tyrone told her it was actually his song and they proceeded to find out that Sam was talking credit for another song as well. Its a funny story and you get to hear the song acoustically afterwords so check it out here. Tyrone said that Sam never did come forward and apologize for claiming he wrote those songs. As a songwriter, I’m not sure I would feel flattered that they loved a song so much they tried to steal credit for it (even if it is just among friends) or a little angry that they might not have thought I was good enough that anyone would ever hear it and find out. Tyrone definitely handled it well, I hope Sam at least watched the video and appreciates his 15 minutes of shame/fame.

Definitely check out Tyrone’s new album Remain though if you have a chance to hear him live thats even better. You will probably find him on the next Rockboat cruise! He’ll be the guy thats tall, bald and super friendly so you won’t miss him.



Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone

The sudden popularity of the iPhone as a gaming platform and the apparent ease of adapting existing games to it have led to a flurry of classic computer video games being released through the App Store of late. In our last issue I took a look The Oregon Trail, an ancient quasi-educational game whose attempted update for the 21st century was hit-and-miss. And now we get to play Wolfenstein 3D, widely acknowledged as the first legitimate first-person shooter game ever made, on our iPhones and iPod touch for five bucks.



There’s nothing educational about Wolfenstein, unless you need an education on how to shoot your way through a Nazi castle full of armed-and-evil SS officers, zombies, and even a giant Hitler. But this game is flat-out fun, if you’re into that sort of thing. And moreover, the iPhone version does a masterful job both in adapting the controls to the iPhone’s interface and in staying true to the original game.



In fact, aside from the controls themselves, there’s little if anything that’s different about this version of Wolfenstein. You can tilt the iPhone to control your movement, which works well enough, but I found that the more “true” way of playing the game was to leave the tilt control turned off and instead make use of the slider on the lower right hand corner of the screen (which can be moved to other corners of the screen or split into separate controls on the left and right if desired). Sliding up or down on the arrows to move forward or backward, and using the arrows to pivot left or right, feels remarkably like using a mouse to maneuver through the original game.



Beyond that, it’s basically 1992 all over again. Move from room to room, shoot the bad guys before they shoot you, discover more ammunition and health packs along the way, and try not to get killed as you maneuver your way through each level looking for the power switch so you can shut down that part of the castle and move on to the next.



As you move through the castle, a map is gradually uncovered showing you where you’ve been, making it easy to navigate back to parts of the castle you’ve already been to when necessary. This comes in handy when you encounter the occasional door that requires a key to get open, then have to hunt throughout the rest of that level to find the key before returning to the locked door. But confuse that for any overt intellectualism in this game; other than occasionally bumping into a secret passage and not being too reckless about using up your ammo, this game is really just an opportunity to go around shooting bad guys.



My high rating is awarded according to the philosophy that a classic game like this one should be adapted to the iPhone as faithfully as possible. I don’t care that the graphics are the same quality as they were in 1992, and in fact I’m glad that nothing new has been added, with the folks at id Software wisely resisting any temptation to do Wolfenstein 3D what George Lucas did to the Star Wars movies when he rereleased them; even the most well-intentioned of minor additions only serve to shatter the nostalgia and take you out of the game mentally.
That having been said, as well as this one has turned out, here’s hoping that John Carmack and the gang just might feel compelled to offer us some modernized iPhone-specific sequels to Wolfenstein in the future.



There are a couple of minor gripes worth mentioning. During gameplay you’ll acquire progressively better guns, but in this version there’s no way to switch between them; a rapid-fire chaingun goes through ammo too quickly when you’re running low. And if you’ve already acquired the chaingun but then encounter the machine gun, you’ll inexplicably get downgraded to the machine gun.



And while you can safely leave the game in favor of taking a phone call or checking your email and then go right back to the point in the game where you left off, I encountered a minor glitch where exiting the game and then returning mid-level can cause some of the treasure items to reappear even if you’ve already collected them. This bug favors the player, as the extra treasure will merely boost your health even more, but it’s worth mentioning that this is clearly a glitch as you can finish a level and be told that, for instance, you collected 41 out of a possible 39 treasures, or be informed that you’ve collected the last treasure on that level even as you’re staring at more treasure in front of you. It’s a minor glitch that doesn’t really affect gameplay (and as I said, can only favor the user), and it’s something that can easily be cleaned up by the developer in an app update, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.



On the plus side, for less-skilled gamers like me, there are four different difficulty levels, ranging from one easy enough that I beat all six levels without dying, to so chock full of bad guys that I can still barely make any headway on it.



If you’re too young to have played Wolfenstein 3D on your computer back in the day and you’re wondering what the fuss is all about, just remember that this game isn’t about sophisticated graphics or complicated characters or anything along those lines – it’s about killing some evil Nazis and not feeling the least bit bad about doing so.



Telling on Trixie interview

A year ago Telling on Trixie’s Derek Nicoletto and Brad Small showed up to the iProng table at PodCamp NYC, guitars in hand, and performed for a crowd of podcasters. Ever since I’ve been looking forward to Telling on Trixie’s next album “Ugly, Broke & Sober” which was just released last week. I caught up with Derek to get the lowdown on everything from the new album, to his SXSW experiences, to why Telling on Trixie’s music is legally available for use on podcasts.

Last time we talked, you were funding your new album through your fans. How did that work out?

In three months we raised $20,050 from 90+ people in five different continents.  Ugly, Broke & Sober, our recent release, is the direct result of our fans financial, creative and emotional support.

Ugly, Broke & Sober is the name of one of the songs on the new album. What led you to choose that for the album title?


Ugly, Broke & Sober – the song – came first. It tells the story of three people who have surmounted the insurmountable. Can you imagine jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and surviving? It still blows my mind even sitting here to think of the fantastic life that person has today, after coming to that point in his life.

So, we started with a very strong song and let our fans debate the name of the album. We remained the artistic source of the choices, but the fans hashed out their opinions in our myspace and websites.  I suggested some lyrics for various other of the tunes.   Brad really wanted “Ugly, Broke & Sober” to be the title, because he most bands name their album something fabulous, like “The Fame,” “Hot Fuss,” “All the Right Reasons,” or “Give ‘Em All a Big Fat Lip.”  If we think something is funny or ironic, we usually go that route.  A Connecticut newspaper just called our album the best pop rock album with the ugliest name and album cover he’s seen in a long time.  Score.

Should I even ask who that woman is on the album cover?

Zondra Foxx is our cover model.  She’s a famous NYC drag queen. The picture came before the album title – I want to put that in writing. I was looking through photographer Mike Fisher’s photographs, which usually feature beautiful photographs of nature in Cherry Grove, Fire Island. All of a sudden, after a picture of a deer on the beach, Zondra’s face appeared, aiming a crusty smooch at the camera lens. I begged Mike for the photo and scored the model release from Zondra.  

What made you decide to cover Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You”? You’ve turned it into enough of a rocker that I didn’t even recognize it as being a cover song until the lyrics kicked in.

The fans voted overwhelmingly for us to do a cover song on this album.  We surprised them with this cover, by taking that sugary tune and kicking it in the crotch. I love that you didn’t recognize it at first. Mission accomplished.

As in the past, you’ve made your new album “podsafe” for legal use on podcasts? First of all, on behalf of the podcasting community, thank you for that. Second, were there pros and cons you had to debate before deciding to make Ugly, Broke & Sober podsafe, or was it an automatic decision to do so?

It’s an automatic decision. To date, we’re a self-sufficient band whose only support comes from our fans and members of the media who are kind enough to include us in their programs or publications. Why the hell would we get in the way of that?  It’s the only thing that keeps us going, and it’s going really well.

From the reports I’ve heard about Telling on Trixie’s time at SXSW last month, one minute you were talking with Margaret Cho and the next minute you were punching Jason Reeves? What really happened out in Austin?

From your questions, I can tell you read my tweets at twitter.com/tellingontrixie. So, MTV Logo apparently thought it would be funny to follow my band around with a TV camera for the week. We ran around before and between the Telling on Trixie shows. The band played RedGorilla twice, the Music Gorilla showcase, and our own acoustic show that we set up ourselves with singer -songwriter Avi Wisnia.   For the interviews you heard about, our band’s publicists at Reybee basically followed me around for four days, typing and yapping frantically in their iPhones to see what other artists would be hanging out where I would be running around. As you know, SXSW week is crazy and you can’t throw a rock without hitting some rock band.  Over the course of four days, Telling on Trixie performed four times and hung out with Margaret Cho, Amanda Palmer, Girl in a Coma, Yelle, Late of the Pier, These Arms are Snakes, Semi Precious Weapons, Jason Reeves, Rachael Sage, My Jerusalem, Aqualung, the Von Bondies, the Queen Killing Kings, Dana Falconberry and some punk band from Chicago named Blackbox. We already knew many of these people; some of them we met for the first time.  That’s why I love that week. It’s totally nutso. 

Last year you made a funny to video Stevie Nicks as a way to explain the album funding program to your fans. The other day you finally met her in person. How did that go?

There’s no mystery that one of the benefits of being in a band is you get invited to some pretty fantastic stuff. Our bassist Tom Welsch and I were invited to this private listening party for Stevie Nicks’ new live solo album, “The Soundstage Sessions.” After the press was done with her, we got to speak briefly in this roped off area. After hours of debating what my first words were going to be to my number one influence, she surprisingly spoke first.  She opened the conversation with the most random comment. I’m still keeping those words to myself, but she spoke to me like she’d known me forever. It totally caught me off guard.  In an effort to keep my cool, I didn’t mention that silly video. But Stevie Nicks knows my name now.  Wowza.  

What is Telling on Trixie doing with the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life this month?

For the second year in a row, we’re performing for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life at NYU. This year, the ACS is using our song “The Deepest Dive” in their Luminaria March. Telling on Trixie is donating $1 to the American Cancer Society for every download we receive of The Deepest Dive during the month of April on iTunes and Amazon or any other digital retailer. Direct links to the songs can be found on our myspace at myspace.com/tellingontrixie.  

You’re in the process of filming the video for the lead single “Crash Me Up” from the new album. What should we know about it?


It’s a tapestry of video clips from our fans from all over the world and shots of Telling on Trixie in many cities in a few different countries. It’s a collective effort, as was our album.



ASCAP NYC on-site report

As an indie singer/songwriter I am constantly trying to find a balance between the creative and business sides of my career. It often gets overwhelming and I feel like a bit of a circus act as I juggle writing songs, booking shows, practicing and promoting it all to get people to care that I do any of this. It is incredible when anyone comes along that can offer me some help to stay balanced on that tight rope 50 feet above the audience in their underwear (that never did work for me). Its even better when those helpful people are working to save me from things that I am clueless about and don’t even realize are issues yet.

Thats just one of many things ASCAP does. One of three US performing rights organizations (the other two are BMI and SESAC), they work to protect and raise awareness for our rights as songwriters. ASCAP fights for those rights in court, congress and in public education to make sure that our ability to make a living from our works isn’t Jeopardized. When I first started writing music I barely knew about copyrighting my songs to prove that they were mine, I certainly didn’t know anything about being paid when my song is on another artists record, on TV/ film or any of the many uses that might occur. One of ASCAP’s current trenches is the use of music online. By the way, I appreciate the irony of publishing this article in a magazine dedicated to the digital revolution and promoting the artists that are pushing the boundaries forward, but, ASCAP is fighting for us within that new model. For instance, if someone goes to listen to your song on a website and clicks through eight pages full of advertisements to get to your song and you’re only getting a revenue share on the page that your song is viewed on, that’s a problem. As I notice more and more people coming repeatedly to my websites to stream and not to download music I think those details can well be the difference between me being able to make a living from music or not. That ad share issue just one of the fights ASCAP is taking on and the great thing about it is that I don’t have to think about it. There are people in my corner just because they want to be there and think we deserve more, while all the ’suits’ are taking care of their agendas and getting their nickels and dimes from our work so will we!

I’m telling you all this because I recently attended the first ever New York Sessions conference by ASCAP. Having been very successful on the West coast with the I Create Music Expo, ASCAP decided to start this “one-day music career boost” in New York City. I was a little skeptical at first, in the interest of full disclosure I am actually a member of BMI, their competitor, a decision I made when I first released my album, but, I have noticed over the years just how much ASCAP supports independent music and songwriters wether they are just starting out or they are a seasoned veteran.

The highlight of the day was the keynote interview with Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas. He was funny, incredibly honest, down-to-earth and very inspiring as he outlined his path in music . His best advice was: “Just get up and do it.” It sounds really simple but sometimes you need to hear that from someone you respect to get it together. Rob exemplified someone who had found what worked for him and found success. He gets up every morning to write and as he put it, “Sometimes it sounds great and sometimes what I write sounds like crap.” Our job is to show up and do our part to be present mentally and do our best. I think it’s also really important to find what works for you as a songwriter. As a young writer I gather a lot of information about how people get creative ideas, promote their music and even how they practice so I can try out what works for them. If it works for me too then its another tool to use to help me succeed.

After the keynote there were four sessions happening, two at a time simultaneously, along with a lot of networking and exhibits from select companies and on different programs ASCAP offers its members and the music community at large such as music education, insurance, grants and scholarships, songwriting workshops and more. I think I got a lot out of the session called “Your Dream Team: Manager, Label, Publisher and Attorney Working Together for You.” It was comforting to hear from the panelists how patient you have to be as you work your way into the business but that once you add someone to your team, the two of you then work together to choose another team member and so on. You’re still working just as hard if not harder but you have a little support and your using everyones contacts to get things done.

The other point both the panel and Rob Thomas stressed was the necessity of making some specific decisions, forming a clear plan and then going after what you want with focus and direction. I took this as: decide who you want to add to your team first. Why do you want them on your team? Are you ready for the work they can give you and will you rise to the occasion to impress them further and then add your number two person? I added some more team members to the list in my plan that you might feel better starting with: Booking Agent, College Booking Agent, Licenser (to get music placed on TV and Film) and Publicist. I’m sure there’s more that you can think of.

The last session of the day was a round table discussion between professional songwriters on what works for them creatively and professionally. A lot of questions were taken from the audience throughout the day in the sessions and morning keynote but the last session gave the most specific advice to songwriters from how they keep track of song ideas and what they bring to cowriting sessions to how they handle sexual tension in such a personal business. The day closed with a networking party and you could really sense a feeling of excitement as a lot of people had a new sense of focus and purpose for their music, I think having a sponsor for some free beer probably helped connect people a bit too!

The conference was more geared to a performing songwriter though a lot of the information can be applied to the business for songwriters honing their craft and trying to get placements for their songs. Its important in almost every industry to network and there was definitely a sense of community and support at New York Sessions. If you can make it, ASCAP is hosting their 3rd annual I Create Music Expo in Los Angeles this April 23rd – 25th which is what spun off the NY Sessions (www.ascap.com/expo). Even if you have been to lots of conferences before I suggest reading up at this blog post on what to expect and how to make the most out of conferences from Ariel Publicity.

With the economy juggling us awkwardly across that same tight rope there is no better time than now to make your own safety net by building your network, developing your craft and in turn boosting your career as the ASCAP EXPO says it will do. Create your own luck, in the words of Rob Thomas again, “Just get up and do it.”



Arachnid for iPhone

Sure, Mobile Safari is a great built-in web browser that simply beats the browsers on other mobile devices, but it still lacks some features. Like a clean interface, that would enable one to have a full screen dedicated just to the web page they want to see. This is where the Arachnid web browser for the iPhone/iPod Touch comes in, brought to you by Bugeye.

The main feature of this web browser app is that it utilizes the entire screen for pages, so that there is much more real estate room on the screen for viewing online content. If you use Mobile Safari, you will notice that the top of the screen is taken up by the address bar and Google Search. The bottom of the browser will be taken up by back/forward buttons, add bookmark or home page button, and bookmarks, along with viewing all current Mobile Safari windows. All of these bars takes up room on the screen, which leaves the user with less content available to view at once. When compared to the Arachnid browser, this becomes a very noticeable difference.

Of course, to say that this uses the entire screen space for a page, how does one navigate around within the browser? It’s simple with a small translucent spider logo in the lower right corner of the screen. This logo will have a spinner to show that pages are loading, but also has another use: tap it to bring up address bar, settings, back/forward, “Send to Safari/Mail”, and bookmarks. Another tap on it will make all the bars go away, showing just the webpage. 



When you tap on the address bar and start typing in an address, it is like Mobile Safari. It will bring up visited pages if you start typing something that was previously visited. This is especially useful with a rather long URL, or even with just how iPhone typing is, saves seconds wasted typing with the keyboard. Adding bookmarks is also similar to Mobile Safari; tap the book icon and hit + to add a new bookmark. Make sure to tap the star next to the URL, for this ensures it will show up in the bookmarks. You can also search within your bookmarks to enable easier access to your favorite pages if you’ve accumulated quite a large list.



Some features besides full-screen viewing that make this app worth a look is the Lock Orientation setting. You know you’ve been surfing the internet from Safari in bed, while on your side. Ever deal with the accelerometer of the device changing the orientation of the webpage without you wanting it to? Now, when you change the setting to Lock Orientation, the app will lock itself into the current orientation when you put the setting in effect. No more unwanted orientation changing!

Also, Arachnid seems just a nanosecond faster than Mobile Safari, but the difference is not that noticeable unless compared side-by-side (there are video reviews available on YouTube that show this). It’s unknown what makes Arachnid just a smidge faster than Safari, but it’s barely noticeable. Not a major deciding factor, but one should be aware of this.

Arachnid is a good web browser, but that isn’t to say that it has no flaws. Unlike Safari, you can only view one page at a time instead of separate windows. So you can’t jump around on different sites at the same time, which is a shame and would be a wonderful addition in future updates if possible. Also, I have had some issues with logging in to personal banking accounts, such as WaMu. There was an update that supposedly fixed login issues with Google accounts, which is true, however that doesn’t apply to my banking account. Just a warning (at least for WaMu/Chase bankers). But I suppose you can easily remedy this with the option to ‘Send Page to Safari’ if you have login issues like I have. This will save time rather than clicking the Home button and then going to Safari.

Overall, this is an enjoyable web browser to use, especially because web pages look much nicer without all the clutter that Mobile Safari brings along. If you value your screen space, then you should definitely give this browser a try. I bought it when it was $2.99 in the App Store, however, now you can grab it for yourself for $1.99; well worth the price in my opinion.



Graham Nash interview

Pore over the history of music and you’ll find Graham Nash’s name etched into a number of chapters. He was a founding member of The Hollies, he’s the “Nash” in Crosby, Stills & Nash, and combined with his own solo career he’s piled up enough music to recently release a career-spanning boxed set called Reflections. But he’s also an authoritative Mac and iPhone user, so when Graham called me up for the interview, my only quandary was which of the two topics to ask him about first.



I suspect we could talk about Apple all day once we get started…



All day!



…so I’m thinking we should start with the boxed set first, otherwise we may never get to it. The obvious question is why did now feel like the right time to put Reflections together?



It’s strange, my school song when I was a kid was “Forty years on when afar and asunder,” and forty years has always stuck in my mind as as interesting period of time. And it’s been forty years. It’s actually longer, isn’t it? I think it’s been forty-four or something. It’s been a long time for me. I mean I cut my first hit record in May of ’63, for God’s sake.



There are sixty-four songs on the boxed set, which sounds like a lot, but like you said you’ve had your solo career, every subset of Crosby Stills Nash & Young, The Hollies. How do you narrow it down to just three discs worth of songs?



You know, I think the songs kind of take care of that. Particularly in CSN we had what we laughingly referred to as the “reality rule.” And the reality rule went like this: if I sit you down and sing you a song, and you don’t react, you’ll never hear that song again. But if I sit you down and sing you a song and you go “oh man, I know what we can do in the chorus,” or “I’ve got a great line for that,” then I know that that song is worth bringing up.



And so we’ve always done that with ourselves, we’ve always recognized, I think, the best part about our own selves, and we’ve always tried to support that.



You’re not done making new music though, are you?



Absolutely not! This is a milestone, not a millstone.


Can I ask you about Barack Obama?

Absolutely. What would you like to know?

You and Crosby performed in support of his campaign, so how are you feeling now that’s he’s President?

I’m breathing! I didn’t realize just how depressed I was about the political situation for the last eight years until Obama came around. And I think what has happened is the reason why there’s all this giddiness and hope and lightness around this man is, first of all he’s bringing it, and secondly, we’re coming out of the dark. So it’s like getting our eyes used to the different lighting, you know, when you come out of the dark into the bright light you kind of have to squint. I feel that I’m doing that. I didn’t realize just how bleak and how dark the Bush administration had been.



I mean of course I keep up with it daily, I know about the things they’ve done to the Constitution and our civil rights, I know all that stuff. But to have Obama promise something, let’s just say for instance Guantanamo, and on his first day or second day in office, close it down. It’s astounding. If we believe in this man, I believe that he has the talent to keep us together and to face these problems and to defeat them.



I was talking with Crosby about nine months ago and I asked him if he still thought music could change the world, and I want to ask you the same question: cam music still change the world?

Absolutely. You’ve got to understand, most of the brilliant ideas on the planet come from one person. Rarely a bunch of people. If you can reach one person with an interesting idea or a different way of thinking about something, or a way through a problem, or face a situation that I’ve faced and this is how I’ve dealt with it kind of stuff, I think that musicians are providing a cultural service to the population. I really do. I really believe that a song can change the world. I know that couple of my partners disagree, but I still truly believe it.



Was it your photography endeavors that first brought you into the Apple fold?



No, it was my curiosity that brought me into the Apple fold. What happened is that our accountant and our tour manager and one of my best friends, Mac Holbert, who runs Nash Editions, which is the printing company that I have, used to do the accounting on the tour by hand. And with a crew of forty, of somebody changed per diem on one day, you’d have to rewrite the whole thing and add them all up and make sure they balanced. And then this guy introduced him to one of the very first, I think VisiCalc, which was the very first database program, and then he had the ability of putting everything, changing one line and having all the lines change instead of having to do it by hand and rewrite it.



And I began to realize that computers were going to be an incredibly important part of communication. 



So you were an early adopter.



Absolutely. I was scanning photographs, there used to be a thing called a Thunderhead that you put on this kind of typewriting thing, and it was an amazing, really crude scanning device. And obviously photo manipulation programs that preceded Photoshop by five years.



You were a Mac user during the “dark days” when everyone thought Apple would go under. Were you worried?



No, because I’d tried to use a PC and it was insanely difficult. And I realized that the Mac environment was so much friendlier, and so much easier to fix, I could fix it myself practically. I didn’t have to bring in an engineer with a degree. I’ve loved Mac from the beginning.



Have you participated in the whole iPod and iPhone revolution?



Oh yes. I was walking by the Apple Store, and a couple of the keys were sticking on my son’s iPhone, and I was going to get him a new iPhone but they told me to hang on because early this year, in a couple of months, they’re coming out with a different model. Probably just a thirty-two gigabyte model, but still, different.


Did you get an iPhone on day one?



Oh yeah, on day one I went down to this mall outside of Detroit in Troy, Michigan, and I tried to get one but couldn’t. I got one three days later.



I love that I can get geeky with you on this stuff. What are your favorite iPhone apps?



Well, an entire medical dictionary for instance. Where am I? Where is the nearest post office? Those kind of things. I love those. Flashlight, that’s a cool one. Level is a cool one. And I’ve got various photo stuff in there, a small app that just came out that will allow you to add light to a photograph that didn’t have it previously. Great stuff. This is a four and a half inch by three inch by half inch wide piece of equipment here, and we’re traveling the world with it. This is fantastic.



What amazes me is when I’m traveling for a couple days I don’t always take my laptop with me anymore, I just take the phone.



Just take the phone. I mean it’s a little slower, as we know, but absolutely.



You’re on both sides when it comes to the iTunes Store. You’re selling your life’s work there, and you’re also consumer on the other end. When that was announced in 2003, were you one of the musicians who said “I can’t wait to get my stuff in there” or were you skeptical?



I was not skeptical. I’m a communicator. I want to communicate to as wide a spectrum of people as possible. I want to make my music available to as many people as possible. I have problems with the technology in iTunes, and the quality of downloads, you know, you’re not getting the full spectrum of stuff. I mean it’s certainly passable for a lot of people. So I had my qualms on the quality of iTunes stuff, but you can’t quarrel with… it happened to me yesterday. I needed a Buddy Holly album because I’m going to play this Buddy Holly show, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, which happened on my birthday, and I’m going to play the show in Clear Lake, Iowa, at the very barn that he played his last show. So I needed to learn a couple of songs, and instantly in my hotel room, five minutes later is a Buddy Holly album right there on my computer. It’s fantastic.



They sent me the boxed set, I’ve got the three CDs here, but otherwise I would have just downloaded it through iTunes. Do you think there’s still a need to put out a multi-CD set, or do you think that’ll be gone in five, ten, fifteen years?



I think it will be gone in less than that. I don’t think it’s economical for record companies to do it. I think CDs will be replaced by other stuff. Right now it seems like it’s being replaced by vinyl, which is pretty funny. Kids are finding that vinyl is a better sound for them. It has more humanity, it has a richer environment that you can listen to. So I think pretty soon CDs are going to be out the window.



What do you think is going to happen with the major record labels?



They were very silly. They made a mistake in trying to put Napster out of business, they should have been hip to the oncoming business model of the digital world. There’s no way you can put the toothpaste back into the tube when you reduce everything to zeroes and ones and are able to distribute it wirelessly over the air. They didn’t see it coming. They were warned. They were arrogant. They didn’t take any notice, and finally they’re probably going out of business unless they get a business model that includes the digital world and make it satisfying to customers.


The balance of power has shifted clearly into Apple’s hands. They sell the most music, they sell the most popular music hardware. Do you think we have to worry about Apple potentially becoming too big and almost dangerous out of having too much power?



I don’t believe so. I mean shouldn’t we be worried about Google? Shouldn’t we be worried about Yahoo? Shouldn’t we be worried about Microsoft? You can’t worry about these things. Apple had a brilliant programming team and a brilliant design team and a brilliant man in Steve Jobs who seems to have his finger on the pulse of what people want. I mean he’s already taken on the telephone companies and beat them, he’s already taken on the music industry and beat them. I mean Holy Crap. And I certainly wish him the best of health.



The last time I saw you on television, you were on American Idol. How did you end up getting involved in that?



I’d been asked to do American Idol several times and turned it down, quite frankly. And then a friend told me about Idol Gives Back, and I began to check out the charity arm that tries to make a difference in people’s lives by giving them money and attention. And when I saw what they were doing for children’s rights, for feeding children and educating children in this country and other countries, I decided that that, combined with a beautiful blonde folk singer who when asked what her favorite thing to do would be, said that she would love to sing Teach Your Children with Graham Nash. And when I thought about that, and I thought about her, and I thought about the exposure, and I thought about Idol Gives Back, I relented.


And I was very happy to do so. I had a great time and they treated me with great respect. I thought that Brooke White and I did Teach Your Children brilliantly, acoustic. It was so different from the rest of the show, which was high-powered rock.



What would you like to see Apple bring out next?



I would like them to make a computer for the road that is half the size of a fifteen inch MacBook and twice the size of an iPhone, with a QWERTY keyboard and total wireless and a very large hard drive. Now we’re talking.



So maybe start where the MacBook Air left off, and keep shrinking it.



Yeah, until you can maybe not put it in your inside pocket, but certainly put it in your outside pocket and carry it around like that. And a battery that lasts more than four hours.


JBL On Stage IIIP

Several years ago JBL released the On Stage for iPod, a small donut-shaped speaker system with an iPod dock in the front and outward-facing speakers on the sides which allowed the system to fill up a room with audio rather impressively for its size, and I remember thinking that the product would be much more practical if only they’d fill in that donut hole in the middle with a battery compartment so you could actually use it as a portable device instead of having to carry the power cable with you. Then a few years ago JBL released the sequel, the On Stage II, which gained a nice RF-based remote control (the rare remote that can not only work from fifty feet away, but also work through walls since line-of-sight isn’t required), and I remember writing that it was a nice update but I still wished they would fill in that donut hole with a battery compartment.



Flash forward to the present and here comes the On Stage IIIP, and guess what? JBL finally agrees with me, as the center portion of the latest iteration of the product is now filled in with a AA battery compartment which finally allows the On Stage to fulfill its potential as a lightweight little two inch tall, seven inch diameter speaker system that you can carry around in one hand and now fire up anywhere at any time. The “P” in the product’s name, a sign of the times, denotes iPhone compatibility. Oh, and it now comes in black instead of the original all-white design.



There are other fundamental changes to the On Stage in this iteration as well. The up and down volume controls, located on the front of the unit just to the left and right of the iPhone/iPod dock, were once touch-sensitive pads but are now tactile buttons you have to actually press with tip of your finger. There’s a loss of “coolness” factor there, but in my time with the IIIP, I found that it ended up not mattering in a functional sense. My concern before I used the product was whether pressing the button would cause the unit to slide around, but as it turns out the rubber feet on the unit’s bottom keep it plenty steady.



The other fundamental change with the IIIP is, unfortunately, a step backwards. The “works through walls” RF remote has been replaced with a much more common and inferior infrared remote which requires a line of sight with the product for the remote to work; if someone or something is in the way then you’re out of luck, even if you’re trying to use the remote from just a few feet away. Seeing as just how few iPhone and iPod speaker systems actually come with RF remote controls, perhaps JBL felt it was too much of a luxury for what is ultimately a mid-priced product.



Speaking of pricing, based on the $169 list price, the IIIP would be no more than a four star product. While its audio output (in terms of both quality and max volume) is very impressive for its size, the IIIP doesn’t measure up to the audio you can get from other (admittedly larger) portable systems in the $170-$200 price range. However, the street price for the IIIP is $129 at Amazon and elsewhere, which puts the product into a whole different pricing category, and in fact at $129 the On Stage IIIP is one of the best portable options on the market in its price range, either for iPhone or iPod usage.


Mophie Juice Pack for iPod touch

The rising popularity of the App Store and the fact that most of its “iPhone” apps are also compatible with the iPod touch means that the world’s thirteen million iPod touch users are finding just as many excuses to blow through their device’s internal battery before the day is over as their iPhone-using brethren – and that’s if the iPod touch’s ability to play music, podcasts, movies and TV episodes wasn’t enough of a battery burner to begin with. It only stands to reason that an external battery can be of as much value to an iPod touch user, and so it’s no surprise to see that an iPhone-specific battery solution has been adapted for the iPod touch.



One of the most popular and straightforward iPhone battery products is the Mophie Juice Pack, a black rubber cradle which depletes its own battery while charging up the iPhone (or keeping it at 100% charge) such that if you start with a fully-charged iPhone, using the Juice Pack will effectively double your battery life. Mophie’s new Juice Pack for the second generation iPod touch works in a similarly straightforward fashion: the touch slides into the docking port in the Juice Pack. and away you go. The one fundamental difference is that since the iPod touch’s headphone port is on the bottom of the device and is therefore necessarily blocked by the Juice Pack’s design, a pass-through headphone port on the bottom of the Juice Pack does the trick. In my hands-on tests, the audio coming out of the Juice Pack’s headphone port sounded no different than what was coming out of the iPod touch’s own headphone port, so there’s no detectable loss of audio quality and no complication.


But what about battery life? That is, after all, the whole point of such a product. In my tests I found that, as with the Juice Pack for iPhone, Mophie’s claims of doubling the iPod touch’s battery life do turn out to be true. Which is no surprise; there was no reason to believe that the company would be accurate with its claims for the iPhone but not for the iPod touch.



The Juice Pack precludes your ability to use a protective case with your iPod touch, and yet only covers the back, sides, and bottom, leaving the touch’s top two corners (the two corners most likely to be impacted by a drop) exposed. However, you can easily use third-party protective film on the touch’s screen in conjunction with the Juice Pack.



Then there’s the question of how carrying your iPod touch around in a rubber cradle that makes it about twice as thick affects your usage of the device. If you’re used to carrying your touch in your front pants pocket you’ll likely be fine if your pants are fairly loose-fitting, but might have a problem squeezing the combined iPod touch and Juice Pack into your pocket if you wear tight pants.



As it turns out, again perhaps not surprisingly, the Juice Pack’s strong and weak points with the iPod touch are largely the same as with the iPhone: the battery indicator lights are on the back but should be on the front so you don’t have to flip the device over to see how much power is left (MiLi’s competing product for iPhone gets this right but isn’t available for the iPod touch). And the inclusion of a mini-USB port on the bottom of the Juice Pack instead of an actual iPod/iPhone dock connector port is a flat-out wrong decision; while you can use the included USB cable to charge the Juice Pack from your computer’s USB port, and simultaneously charge the iPod touch by slipping it into the Juice Pack while charging, the fact that it’s not a real dock connector port means that you can’t sync your iPod touch while it’s docked inside the Juice Pack – and if you travel with a laptop, you’ll need to bring two cables with you, one for charging and one for syncing.



That having been said, the Juice Pack continues to be more manageable bulk-wise for the average user than the “triple battery life instead of double” but bulkier and more awkwardly shaped iV from FastMac. And the Juice Pack also continues to be a far more practical option than the generic iPod/iPhone batteries that snap onto the bottom of the device and end up being too awkward and fragile to plug into the iPod touch while either using the device in your hands or carrying it in your pocket (even though these products can be had for $50, they’re a compromise).



So is the Juice Pack for iPod touch right for you? That’s going to be a different answer for each of you, one that depends on how often you find yourself running out of battery power, how much of a problem that is for you when it happens, and how often you can see yourself carrying your iPod touch around in a product of this size and shape – the photos on the first page of this review will give you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for in terms of bulking up your touch by carrying it inside the Juice Pack.



As an aside, it’s worth noting that my relatively high four-star rating of this product is less of a stamp of approval on the product itself, and more of an approval of the fact that the product exists at all. Currently, the Juice Pack is the only iPod touch-specific battery cradle on the market (the FastMac iV is a hybrid-compatible). However, the MiLi battery pack for iPhone 3G is a better choice than the Juice Pack for iPhone 3G; the MiLi just doesn’t exist for iPod touch. And even Mophie’s own newly announced “Juice Pack Air” for iPhone 3G appears to be a more mainstream-attractive solution than the standard Juice Pack due to the fact that the Air doubles as a protective case (protecting the iPhone’s top two corners), and even though its battery presumably won’t be as strong as that of the Juice Pack itself, the Air will be a slimmer product.



So while I have no knowledge (inside or otherwise) of any other iPod touch-specific battery cradles coming down the pike, Apple’s recent announcement that there have been nearly as many iPod touches sold (13 million) as iPhones sold (17 million) suggests that we just might see more iPod touch battery cradles coming to market as 2009 wears on.



That’s my way of saying that if you think you might want a battery cradle for your iPod touch at some point down the road but you don’t need it now, then you might well wait awhile and see what else emerges, either from Mophie or from a competitor. But on the other hand, if you need more battery life for your iPod touch right now, the Juice Pack for iPod touch is an imperfect but straightforward and highly usable solution that is in fact available right now.



This hands-on review is of the Juice Pack for second-generation iPod touch, but there’s a separate Juice Pack available for the discontinued first-generation iPod touch as well.

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