What’s a music catcher? It’s an app that recognizes/identifies the song that’s playing or the song you’re humming. Have you ever listened to a song that you like somewhere and which you didn’t know its name? That situation used to drive us mad, but it won’t happen anymore if you’re the owner of a smartphone, thanks to music catchers.

Probably the most popular is Shazam. It has first released for iOS and landed on Android a few months later. Its strongest point is its ease of use: just tap on the central button and hold your phone up to catch the track. It will display track’s info such as the album, title, artist, videos, lyrics and more. What’s more, you will be able to buy the track on Amazon, tag it and share tags with friends on Facebook and Twitter, but take in account that Shazam’s database is public-based and availability depends on user’s aim to upload it. The main flaw: its unlimited free version will expire on 1st January 2012. Then, free version users only be allowed to catch 5-7 songs/month. There’s also a unlimited paid version (£2.99).

Unlike Shazam, Soundhound has unlimited catches forever and ever, if you are eager to see some ads on the screen. If not you can upgrade to the paid version ($4.99). What’s more, it’s even faster catching songs. Its quite similar to Shazam: it allows you to buy the track on amazon, tag and share it with your friends on the social network and much more. However, Soundhound includes a search bar with which you can search by typing or by voice search. It contains a great feature: tag location along your request, that way you can remember exactly where you heard the track. The only downside over Shazam is the amount of tracks in its database. But regarding features, Soundhound is way more complete.

What do you think?

Have a happy music apps discovery!

Let’s end the week discussing how it all started and, as far as possible, as we expect how it will evolve. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

The most rudimentary form of casino games appeared even before phones had color displays. They were extremely simple, yet enjoyable games such as slot machines or solitaires. In theory, those phones had WAP and a minimal internal memory, but in practice, they served for little more than playing Snake.

The advent of PDAs, Blackberry and the first phones supporting JAVA let developers create more complex games or, more usually, simplified versions of web games, when not a copy of old MS-DOS games themselves. Nowadays, it can seem somewhat tacky, but at that time it was all we wanted for.

As phones became more advanced, so did the types of games available. Smartphones hatched out and grew rapidly. Since not long ago, they can compete with portable consoles on an equal footing. Android brought with it a wide range of possibilities to exploit by bold developers. It must be realized that each smartphone is a full-fledged computer with connection to the Web to understand how much can be achieved in the next years, when the gap between phone and computer becomes negligible.

Hence arrives the last step taken so far. The combination of casino games, HSDPA connection and social networks has resulted in an explosive mixture.

And what do future is bringing us? If we peek in, a sure bet would be online tournaments with real money or, even better, fake money but real prizes. It doesn’t matter if you give an oven away, or a premium subscription or a batch.gif. People play for sheer pleasure, but for earnings too. May we’re too daring when we say that it’s just a matter of time that big companies sponsor online mobile tournaments, especially those who aren’t directly targeted to pro casino players. Let us explain: do you remember how scratch lotto was reborn from the ashes years ago and airlines hurried to launch their own with flight tickets instead of money prizes? At a quick glance to our crystal ball we know that, if there isn’t any surprise betwixt, the next online casino games will be more or less as we’ve just said: fast, cheap and shared.