Ever heard a song on the radio or television, in a store, or at a club, and wondered what it was called or who was singing it? With the Shazam app, you may never wonder again. Just launch Shazam and point your iPhone's microphone at the source of the music. In a few seconds, the song title and artist's name magically appear on your iPhone screen, as shown in Figure 16-1.

Figure 16-1. Point your phone at the music (left) and Shazam tells you the artist, title, and more (right).

In Shazam parlance, that song has been tagged. Now if tagging were all Shazam could do, that would surely be enough. But wait, there's more After Shazam tags a song you can

Shazam isn't great at identifying classical music, jazz, or opera, nor is it adept at identifying obscure indie bands. But if you use it primarily to identify popular music, it rocks (pun intended).

Shazam is amazing. It has worked for us in noisy airport terminals, crowded shopping malls, and even once at a wedding ceremony. Heck, Shazam is so good we'd have happily paid a few bucks for it.

Wolfgang's Concert Vault is an app that provides you with free access to the largest collection of concert recordings in the world. Some of our favorites include The Who, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elvis Costello, and David Bowie. And if those particular artists don't appeal to you, you'll find concert recordings by hundreds upon hundreds of other artists.

What's cool is that these are exclusive recordings you probably haven't heard before and probably won't hear elsewhere. They include master recordings from the archives of Bill Graham Presents, the King Biscuit Flower Hour, and many others.

The Wolfgang's Concert Vault iPhone app (see Figure 16-2) is simple and clean but contains most of the functions found at the associated Web site (http://www.wolfgangsvault.com), which is shown in Figure 16-3.

Figure 16-2. The Wolfgang's Concert Vault iPhone app has a simple, clean interface.

Both applications let you tag a concert as a favorite, create playlists of songs culled from different concert recordings, search for songs or artists, and listen to complete concert recordings at no charge.

If you love music and want to hear unique live performances of songs you know and love, Wolfgang's Concert Vault is the app for you.

Figure 16-3. The Wolfgang's Vault Web site is more graphical but the iPhone app delivers most of the same free goodies.

Do you ever come across a Web page you'd like to read later, when you have the time? Sure, you can bookmark those pages, but wouldn't it be nice if you could somehow save them to your iPhone and read them at your convenience? And wouldn't it be even nicer if you could read them without Internet access, such as when you're on an airplane?

We're happy to inform you that you can if you just download the Instapaper iPhone application from Marco Arment. Then, when you're surfing the Web on your Mac, PC, or iPhone and see a page you want to read later, select the special Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet. From then on, you can read the page whenever you choose with the Instapaper iPhone app.

Figure 16-4 shows the Instapaper app displaying some of the Web pages we've saved with the Read Later bookmarklet. And Figure 16-5 shows what one of the articles looks like when you read it with the Instapaper app.

Figure 16-4. Instapaper displaying some Web pages we saved for our future reading pleasure.

Figure 16-5. This is what the 50 Greatest Guitar Solos page looks like when we read it in Instapaper on an iPhone.

Instapaper is particularly good for long airplane trips. The week before Bob travels he makes a point of grabbing lots of Web pages with his Read Later bookmarklet to ensure that he doesn't run out of good stuff to read during his flight.

reQall is much more than just an iPhone app. It's a complete and feature-packed system that captures information that's important to you and makes it easy for you to remember that info at the appropriate time.

The cool part is the unique way reQall works. You speak to the reQall application (see Figure 16-6). Then and after a short time, your words are converted into text and sent to you by e-mail, text message, or instant message (or any combination of those three) as well as saved right in the reQall iPhone app (see Figure 16-7).

Figure 16-6. Tap this screen and speak for up to 30 seconds.

Figure 16-7. Your speech is converted to text and, among other things, displayed in the reQall app.

And reQall's voice-to-text translations are surprisingly accurate, with better than 95 percent accuracy. In fact, the only mistake in the example in Figure 16-7 is that the person's name is Chuck, not Truck.

Now that alone would be worth more than the price of admission (which, may we remind you, is free), but there's more: reQall understands certain words and can use them to route your reminder to the right place at the proper time. For example, it understands dates and times so you can have reminders that include a time or a date or both. The reminders show up in all the places mentioned previously on the appropriate date and at the appropriate time. reQuall also understands the word buy, and will put reminders that use that word on your shopping list. And it understands other words, including note, ask, tell, remind, meet, and meeting. And if you care to share reminders with others, you can do that, too.

We've been using reQall for a few months and have seen several free updates and upgrades that just keep making it better and better.

How can you not love a free iPhone application/service that is elegant, useful, helpful, easy to use, and fun? We recommend reQall without hesitation. In fact, we think you'd be crazy not to try it.

We like movies, so we both use the Now Playing app a lot. Feed it your zip code, and then browse local theatres by movie, showtime, rating (see Figure 16-8), or by distance from your current location (see Figure 16-9). Another nice feature is the ability to buy tickets to most movies from your iPhone with just a few additional taps.

Figure 16-8. Now Playing displays this week's film offerings as rated by www.rottentomatoes.com.

Figure 16-9. The theaters closest to our current location.

We appreciate that we can read reviews, play movie trailers, and e-mail movie listings to others with a single click. We also enjoy the recent addition of information and movie trailers for soon-to-be-released films and DVDs.

Other free movie apps are out there, but we like Now Playing best.

We've long been fans of Pandora on the computer. So we're practically delirious that this custom Internet radio service is available gratis on the iPhone.

It works on the iPhone in much the same way it does on a PC or a Mac. You type the name of a favorite musician or song title and Pandora creates an instant personalized radio station with selections that exemplify the style you chose. Figure 16-10 shows some of the eclectic stations we created. Tapping QuickMix plays musical selections across all your stations. Tapping New Station, at the bottom of the screen, brings up the iPhone keyboard so that you can add a new station built around an artist, song title, or composer. You can also select from stations Pandora has packaged together around a particular genre.

Figure 16-10. Eclectic online radio stations from Pandora.

Suppose that you type Beatles. Pandora's instant Beatles station includes performances from John, Paul, George, and Ringo, as well as tunes from other acts doing their own hits.

And say you type in a song title, such as Have I Told You Lately. Pandora constructs a station with similar music after you tell it whether to base tunes on the Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, or other rendition.

Pandora comes out of the Music Genome Project, an organization of musicians and technologists who analyze music according to hundreds of attributes (such as melody, harmony, and vocal performances).

You can help fine-tune the music Pandora plays by tapping the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon below the album cover of the song being played, as shown in Figure 16-11.

Figure 16-11. Have we told you lately how much we like Pandora?

If you tap the triangular icon, you can bookmark the song or artist being played, e-mail the station that the song is playing on, or head to iTunes to purchase the song directly on the iPhone (if available).

The folks over at Amazon made a splash with the company's Kindle electronic readers. (When it comes to introducing high-profile products, we think the folks at Apple know a little something about making a splash too.) But although Ed is a fan of the Kindle reader, even he thinks they're expensive — $359 on up at the time this book was in production.

Kindle for the iPhone, on the other hand, is perfectly free, though of course you're still on the hook for buying electronic versions of books. You can do that from a PC or a Mac and wirelessly transfer them to the Kindle app. Or within the app, you can tap Get Books, which transports you to Safari on the iPhone. And from there you can purchase titles in the online Kindle Store.

E-books for Kindle are deeply discounted compared to their physical counterparts; most new release bestsellers cost just $9.99.

The books you own show up in a list like the one shown in Figure 16-12. Tap the title you want to read.

The Kindle app doesn't have near as large a screen as you'll find on a dedicated Kindle reader. But the reading experience on the iPhone is surprisingly good, plus you can perform such tricks as adjusting the font size and text color (black, white, sepia), adding bookmarks, and reading in portrait or landscape mode by rotating the device. Controls for customizing your reading are shown in Figure 16-13. And with true iPhone flair, you can pinch to zoom in on what you're reading. The iPhone can even show off Kindle book covers in color, which not even the Kindle itself can do.

Figure 16-12. Tap to read a book in your Kindle library.

Figure 16-13. Controls to make reading more pleasurable.

If you own a Kindle reader, you can switch back and forth between it and the iPhone Kindle app, without losing your place in whatever you're reading, a feature Amazon calls Whispersync. Bookmarks and such are synced. And that's downright novel.

Leave it to Apple to come up with one of the coolest iPhone apps money can't buy (because it's free). It's called Remote, and it lets you control music playing in iTunes on your computer, Apple TV, or AirPort Express.

With Remote, you can use your iPhone to do almost everything you can do in iTunes: Play, pause, skip, shuffle, search, or browse your iTunes library. Better yet, you can perform these actions from anywhere in your house that has Wi-Fi.

Remote is free, but it does require a couple of basics: a computer running Apple's iTunes software and a Wi-Fi network.

Yea, yea, we know: Plenty of phone directories are on the Internet. But WhitePages Mobile is an incredibly handy resource for finding home and business numbers on the fly or doing a reverse phone lookup (you have the number but have no clue whose number it is).

When new listings pop up, you can add them to your contacts or update existing contacts. And you can get maps and directions to where folks live or work. In some cases, WhitePages Mobile provides other information, including the age range of the person and some of the people living in the person's household. And WhitePages uses GPS to detect your current whereabouts.

You're probably thinking, "Why in goodness' sake do you need an app that makes phone calls when you're already carrying a cell phone?" Well, Skype calls are routed over the Internet through what geeks refer to as VOIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol). And if you frequently call friends, colleagues, or relatives who are overseas, you can save money by not paying AT&T's lofty international rates. As with Skype on a PC or a Mac, direct calls made to other Skype members are free, and you can also instant message them. Through Skype, you can also call landline or mobile phones in the United States and around the world at low rates while not exhausting your monthly AT&T allowance.

If a person is in your Skype contacts, just tap his or her name to call and begin a chat. You can display all your contacts or only those presently online. The app also is integrated with your iPhone contacts; if you tap a phone number there, the number is prepopulated in Skype's on-screen dial pad, shown in Figure 16-14.

Figure 16-14. You can tap out a real phone number on Skype.

You can also summon the on-screen dial pad while on a call, as well as mute or place a call on hold and turn a speakerphone on or off.