The Mossberg Solution » Windows Mobile

Tracking Friends the Google Way

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:02:04 +0000

For the past week, I’ve been stalking my sister, my boyfriend and my boss. They’ve also been stalking me, and we still like one another.

All four of us have been using an application that, once downloaded onto a mobile device, uses location-based technology to track its users’ movements. The app then displays the user’s location on a map for friends to see, so they can know where the person is at all times.

We used Google Latitude, a new feature in the search giant’s Google Maps mobile application as of today. People can get this if they upgrade their current version of Google Maps or install Maps for the first time. It works on Google’s G1, most color BlackBerrys, most Windows Mobile devices and some other smart phones. Google says it will soon work on the iPhone, iPod touch and Sony Ericsson phones.

[ See post to watch video ]

Google (GOOG) is arriving late to the party where location-based apps like Loopt (Loopt.com) from Loopt Inc. and Where (where.com) from uLocate Communications are already following people on a variety of mobile devices ranging from basic cellphones to iPhones. These apps rely on GPS satellites, Wi-Fi or cellular towers to locate you and your friends, and then use this data to encourage people to find nearby attractions, local information or social networks.

Latitude is an opt-in-only feature, meaning no one can see your location — or vice versa — without permission. It uses either GPS satellites or cell-tower and Wi-Fi location technology depending on your mobile device’s specifications and what’s most available in certain spots. My trusted testers and I used Google Latitude on three different kinds of BlackBerrys: the Pearl 8130, Curve 8320 and two Curve 8900s. Of these, only the 8900s made use of GPS.

Latitude, a feature in Google Maps, shares someone’s location, status and photo with friends. Location data can update every several minutes when a user is moving.

Along with their locations, friends can share other information on Latitude by updating a status line or changing their picture, which appears as a tiny representative icon on a map. Changes to one’s status or picture will be reflected in Google Talk, Google’s instant-messaging tool, but this doesn’t integrate with other status-related social-networking programs like Facebook or Twitter, and thus may saddle people with another status entry to update.

It’s easy to find fault in Latitude since it often spots people inaccurately, including showing my sister in Boston’s Charles River, rather than in a neighborhood along the river. It’s worth noting that tracking technology in general, including GPS, can be inaccurate. But even with these inaccuracies, my friends and I liked finding one another on our respective maps and used this geographic information to send location-specific messages to each other: I joked with my boyfriend about not leaving his house on time for a dinner and commended my sister on getting up early for church on Sunday.

Usability issues aside, location-based services like Latitude can be just plain creepy, especially when a Big Brother like Google is tracking your whereabouts. So Google incorporated easy-to-change privacy settings so that locations can be automatically detected, manually entered or completely hidden from other people. Or people can sign out of Latitude altogether.

Likewise, users can adjust the level of geographic information they’re willing to share with each person. For example, I might want to share with my boyfriend my best available location information, like a specific spot on a street, and share only city-level location information with my boss.

The city-level information would be helpful for my parents, who often wish they had a better idea of when I’m traveling for work and where I’ll be. But my parents aren’t likely to download Google Latitude onto their mobile devices anytime soon. For them, a special Latitude widget in iGoogle — Google’s personalized home page feature on a PC — might be best. This widget is also useful for people who may have Latitude on a mobile device but are sitting at their desks and want to see where their friends are.

As expected, Latitude worked differently between me and the people who live in the same area, compared with how it worked between me and people who live hundreds of miles away, like my sister in Boston. For example, my boyfriend and I are more likely to use our respective locations to plan where we’ll meet for dinner, while my sister’s current location is just fun to see. Still, my sister and I know one another’s neighborhoods well enough to have an idea of where the other was, and we felt a little more plugged in with each other’s lives when we saw one another on our maps.

People who live in urban settings will likely use Latitude differently than those who live in the suburbs. One of my testers noted that it could be fun using Latitude to see where friends are out in a city on any given night. But because Latitude sometimes pegs people’s locations as a lot farther away than they are — one test spotted a friend 1.5 miles away from his real location — this might be tough data to go on.

After using Latitude for a while, I grew to recognize familiar location mistakes like home or work, and knew where my friends actually were. But it’s unfortunate that locations aren’t more accurately marked.

Latitude returned the most precise location results when determining where the two GPS-using BlackBerry Curve 8900s were at any given time, though these spots still weren’t perfect. If a mobile device doesn’t have GPS or if GPS simply isn’t available in the area, cellular towers and Wi-Fi will help a determine location. These alternate methods use less battery than GPS, so they will work instead of GPS when Google Maps isn’t running in the foreground of a device.

Latitude users can opt to allow their location to automatically update every several minutes while they’re moving. A Friends List that appears with the map lists people in order of who is moving starting with who moved most recently. Users can send text messages or call friends directly from this list, or find nearby spots like bars or movie theaters by typing into a search box; restaurant information includes ratings and reviews. Directions to and from friends’ locations are also available, and you can plan your route via car, mass transit or walking.

Location-based services like Latitude are great for keeping tabs on friends and could even come in handy in other situations — such as when parents want to know where their kids are or when elderly relatives want to let someone always know their whereabouts. But I wouldn’t want to depend on them in an emergency.

Google Latitude Web Site

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

HTC Can't Disguise Windows Mobile Flaws

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:20:02 +0000

New iPhone competitors continue to crop up, though most are mobile devices from companies that simply slap on a touch screen in hopes of fooling consumers. The real key to the iPhone’s success is its software, and finally, signs indicate that other companies are starting to pay more attention to making good software to go along with their hardware.

One welcome sign is an effort by companies trying to improve Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile operating system, which has a reputation for confusing navigation and hasn’t had a major update recently. Kinoma Inc., for example, recently released an application called Kinoma Play that runs on Windows Mobile devices and gives users a markedly better way of handling photos, videos, music and Web browsing.

The HTC Touch Diamond, due out this month from Sprint, tries to hide Windows Mobile software.

This week, I tried yet another software program that is designed to run on top of Windows Mobile software. But this time, the software is at the heart of a device designed by the same company: HTC Inc. I tested the HTC Touch Diamond, due out from Sprint (S) sometime this month for $250 (after a $100 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract.

Taiwan-based HTC started out in 1998 as a maker and designer of mobile devices for other companies. A year ago, HTC launched the first device under its own name in the U.S., and now, Sprint, AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (DT) sell HTC-branded devices. The Diamond incorporates HTC software, as well as software from Sprint, MobiTV, TeleNav and others. But it isn’t a stretch to imagine HTC trying to create a fully end-to-end model (hardware and all software) in the future.

The Diamond has a touch screen, but it’s smaller than Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — 2.8 versus 3.5 inches. This screen lacks the iPhone’s multitouch functionality, and its smaller size robs space used for touch gestures like flicking or scrolling with a finger. Yet like the iPhone, it relies solely on an on-screen keyboard for all text entries. Even with the Diamond’s stylus, the keyboard felt small and cramped. Using just your fingertips was next to impossible.

After using the Diamond for a week, I can say that despite its handsome TouchFLO 3D software and animated icons like photos that flip from one to the next with a flick of finger, this device failed to disguise the frustrating interface of Windows Mobile often enough for my taste.

It reminded me of the brown paper bag book covers my Dad helped me make for schoolbooks when I was a kid: They looked great on the outside, felt sturdy and clean and created a blank canvas for homemade doodles that were often more interesting to me than the books they covered. But my book covers couldn’t change what was underneath; pages of frustrating algebra were just a flip away.

HTC’s sleek software tries to hide Windows Mobile, but menus from the Microsoft operating system are constantly popping up. HTC’s email program, for example, is represented by an animated envelope icon that, when selected, cleverly flips twice before sliding an email message half-way out and giving you a three-line peek at what’s inside. If only reading and responding to email were half as entertaining. Selecting the animated envelope opens the old, cumbersome Windows Mobile email program.

Also, the touch capabilities of the Diamond’s screen didn’t work as well as they should. Finger flicks that should have scrolled through lists instead seemed to select individual items in a list, as if they were sticky.

The Diamond isn’t all bad, of course. Plenty of people will like its smaller size because the iPhone and RIM’s (RIM) BlackBerrys seem too large and brick-like to hold up to an ear for phone calls. Next to my BlackBerry Curve, the Diamond was of comparable thickness but measured smaller in width and length.

Despite its size, the Diamond is packed with features. It has a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus that doubles as a camcorder, and comes with four gigabytes of internal memory and a removable battery. I taped short videos — something the iPhone can’t do — and found the sound and video footage to be adequate.

HTC touts the Diamond’s browser, which is based on the Opera browsing engine but is designed for HTC. It opens Web pages in views that fit the screen and text is automatically resized as users zoom in or out, though this resizing was sometimes slow.

Unlike the iPhone, Web sites that are opened on the Diamond’s browser don’t resemble the actual site as you would see it on your computer. I opened CNN.com (TWX) and WSJ.com (NWS), two sites that are packed with text and graphics on a regular browser. On the Diamond, they quickly were rendered in list format with mostly text-only. I easily touched the screen to follow links to full stories.

Like the iPhone, the Diamond has an accelerometer, though it’s called the “G-Sensor.” When it worked, this feature flipped the screen to match the horizontal or vertical direction in which the device was being held. Photos flipped instantly, but the Diamond’s G-Sensor took almost three full seconds to respond as I flipped from vertical to horizontal while using the browser. And some Web sites didn’t respond to the G-Sensor flips at all.

A special YouTube application developed by HTC was easy to find on the device and worked quickly. My videos were organized into categories for All, History, Bookmarks and Search, though this last category required using the finger-fumbling keyboard. In one step, I emailed a link from a YouTube video to a friend using the device, with a still shot from the video included in the message.

Overall navigation on the Diamond isn’t as intuitive as on the iPhone or iPod Touch, nor was it as easy as on a touch-screen Windows Mobile device running the Kinoma Play application. The iPhone and iPod Touch use quick double-taps on touch screens to zoom in or out, and multitouch capabilities resize images with pinching gestures; Kinoma Play uses a long touch to zoom in. The Diamond used double tapping on some screens, but not enough for me to grow comfortably reliant on it. A small, circular pad beneath the device’s touch screen provided a more dependable method for zooming in or out of screens: tracing the perimeter of this circle clockwise with a finger zoomed in; counterclockwise zoomed out.

The HTC’s software animation is put to good use on its Weather screen. Here, animated illustrations of each day’s weather appear on the screen: suns spin, clouds move in, rain appears to fall. Even moons appear on the device at night to accurately reflect the weather in a city at a specific time.

It is exciting to think about other mobile-phone companies giving better software a real try, especially those that attempt to improve Windows Mobile. But HTC’s Touch Diamond doesn’t hide the outdated operating system well enough or often enough for a user to want to buy a whole new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Kinoma Touches Up Clunky Windows Mobile

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:36:02 +0000

Think about a mobile device with a touch screen that’s designed to work with smart software. A single tap on its surface instantly zooms in on images; a flicking gesture moves one photo off the screen and pulls another one on. Menus appear with clever animation, and actions like downloading and emailing photos and videos are intuitively incorporated, rarely more than one step away.

Bet you’re thinking about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’m actually describing a Windows Mobile device. In fact, any touch-screen Windows Mobile device made in the past couple of years can perform the aforementioned functions — as long as it’s running a new application called Kinoma Play.

This much-needed shot in the arm for Windows Mobile comes from Kinoma Inc. and for $30 can be downloaded onto a computer or directly onto a device from www.kinoma.com. It works on touch and nontouch screens alike, though touch features do add a lot of pizzazz. After installation, Kinoma Play seems to totally take over the device’s multimedia functions, hiding every trace of Windows Mobile’s clunky, antiquated, menu-driven operating system.

Kinoma Play in action, clockwise from top left: a media interface, touch-screen navigation, upload to YouTube, picture rotation, search by characters, and photo zoom.

It smoothly opens and displays all types of media, including photos, videos and music. But it’s also a fast search engine for multimedia content on the phone, on the Web or even on your computer via remote search. Kinoma Play works with services including YouTube, Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb and SHOUTcast. And a section called the Kinoma Guide compiles over 100,000 podcast episodes, radio stations, videos, live television and Webcam clips, panoramas and photos into easy-to-browse categories.

After almost a week with this application, I changed the way I thought about on-the-go Web browsing for media. I forgot about typical browser functions like typing a Web site’s name into a URL bar and instead did plenty of things online with my portable device without deliberately thinking about being online.

Kinoma Play is so well-designed that I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface, which still lags behind the iPhone’s. But, alas, it’s about media only. It isn’t designed to supplant, and doesn’t change or improve, any of the phone’s more common functions, like overall email and Web browsing, calendar, contacts or productivity programs.

Kinoma is working on Symbian, Linux and even iPhone versions of its application and will release one of those versions by the end of this year.

I ran into a few problems while using Kinoma Play. On three different occasions using two different devices, my touch screen froze when I tried to start the application, and the only way I could fix the problem was by completely rebooting my device. Once in a while, I experienced slow performance, though this could have been attributed to my network connection. And Kinoma Play lacks a one-step shortcut to its home screen; currently, users must press a “Back” soft key on each screen until they reach the home screen.

But the pluses of Kinoma Play outweighed these hassles, especially considering how enjoyable this application was to use. I tested Kinoma on two Palm (PALM) devices running Windows Mobile: the not-yet-released Treo Pro, which will be available here in the fall for an unlocked, unsubsidized price of $549, and the $250 (after discounts and two-year-contract rebates) Treo 800w available from Sprint (S). Both have touch screens that work best with an included stylus, though a fingernail or fingertip worked for me in most cases.

Upon installation, Kinoma Play automatically scans a device’s media and organizes it into categories under a section called My Media Files. I was especially eager to see how photos were handled, so I started out in the Pictures category.

All Kinoma screens have a set of familiar navigational tools that appear as soft keys at the bottom of the screen; they show up when the bottom section of the screen is touched and disappear when touched again. On the bottom left, a “Back” arrow takes users to the previous screen. On the bottom right, a list-like icon represents what Kinoma calls the Menu Pod. When touched, this pulls up three succinct menus — for media, settings and another action related to the program that’s open.

I opened some photos that were stored on the Palm Treo Pro and touched the center of the screen with my finger. A quick tap on the screen zooms in on each photo, and a small inset of the photo with a box representing the magnified area appears on the lower right of the screen. I dragged this tiny box around in the inset image to change where I was zooming. To zoom in on a photo slowly, I simply touched and held my finger on the screen for a longer period of time. A quick tap after either zooming method will quickly snap the image back to normal view.

I moved from one photo to the next as I do on my iPod Touch: by placing a finger on one edge of the photo and flicking left or right across the screen. Rotating was fun and easy to do when I drew a circle on the photo with my fingertip in the direction that I wanted it to rotate. The image followed whatever motion I drew. To rotate the photo 180 degrees, I drew a larger half-circle.

I selected Flickr from Kinoma Play’s list of services and signed into my Flickr account in just a few steps. My photos and those of friends were just as easy to browse as my own photos, thanks to Kinoma Play’s built-in tools. The Menu Pod icon offered a one-step way to play all photos in slide shows; music could be selected to play in the background.

With a touch on the Menu Pod icon, users can add any media to favorites or to an “on-the-go” list. This same tool also sends multimedia to others via email; I used it to send friends photos of a recent trip to California as well as a YouTube link to video footage of Sen. Joe Biden speaking.

Kinoma makes something out of every action. The Menu Pod button seems to jump into the center of the screen when summoned, and each of its three menus spins like a tiny top to get out of the way so another menu can be seen. Other screens seemed to do a mini back flip as they opened or closed. And long lists seemed to bounce when scrolling reached the top or bottom.

In the Services menu, I used Audible to listen to part of an audio book and listened to rock and country songs on Web radio stations from SHOUTcast and Live365.

I particularly liked using the Kinoma Guide, which is constantly updated with material that streams to your devices when you open it. I found a Restaurant Guys podcast in which chef Cat Cora was interviewed, and even saved it for later listening by downloading this seven-megabyte podcast to my device in one clean step. Kinoma wisely adds all downloads to a special section that’s easy to find. The last 100 things you looked at on Kinoma Play can be found in a section called History.

These days in the tech world, much attention is being paid to applications sold on Apple’s App Store for use with the iPhone or iPod Touch. But Kinoma Play is one application that is desperately needed by Windows Mobile users, and it just might remind them that they can better navigate media-related Web services — without having to buy a new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find all our columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

A Shopping Trip To the App Store For Your iPhone

Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:50:02 +0000

The single best feature in Apple’s second-generation iPhone 3G isn’t the increased speed or the GPS location-finding feature. It is something called the “App Store,” a clever distribution mechanism for third-party programs that can run on the iPhone and on its close cousin, the iPod Touch. And you don’t even need a new iPhone to get the App Store. It is also part of a free software upgrade for older iPhones and a $10 upgrade for the Touch.

Scrabble is just one of the many ‘apps’ available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

In just the first 10 days since the new iPhone and the App Store launched on July 11, more than 900 programs — applications, or “apps,” in tech jargon — have been introduced by numerous developers. Over 90% cost less than $10 or are free.

Even more noteworthy: iPhone and Touch users have downloaded 25 million copies of these programs, ranging from silly sound effects to challenging games; from news readers to restaurant locators; from social-networking programs to business applications.

We have been furiously downloading and trying out scores of these programs, using a new iPhone 3G, an original iPhone and an iPod Touch, and in general, we are very impressed. We found the process of choosing and downloading apps to be easy and quick, and most of the programs to be useful or entertaining. The vast majority are nicely designed, with great graphics and effective, simple user interfaces.

The easy availability of so many programs written by developers beyond Apple (AAPL) itself makes the iPhone a true computing platform, like a pocket-sized Windows or Macintosh PC. With so many programs already available, and many more in the pipeline, iPhone and Touch owners can have a device with fresh, different capabilities every day.

But the process isn’t perfect. For one thing, it is controlled by Apple, which can theoretically bar a program from distribution or take its time making one available.

There are also some glitches. If you download a lot of apps in a short period, it can slow the phone’s next synchronization with iTunes to a crawl, while iTunes tries to back up all the new programs, each of which can contain numerous hidden files. And there’s a bug in the new iPhone operating system that causes apps to crash, and can even force the iPhone or Touch to reboot, if you use a large number of the new apps in quick succession. Apple says it is working on fixing the latter problem.

Also, Apple’s claim of over 900 programs is somewhat misleading, because more than 100 of those are individual books you can read on the phone.

Apple’s baby isn’t the first smart phone that has attracted developers. Thousands of third-party programs already exist for Nokia (NOK) phones, BlackBerrys, and phones running the Palm (PALM) and Windows Mobile operating systems. But, compared with the graphically rich, snappy iPhone apps — many of which fetch data from the Internet at high speed — the typical program on these older platforms looks positively primitive.

AOL’s AIM program

The App Store can be accessed either from the device itself or from Apple’s iTunes software on a Windows or Mac computer, which then transfers the app to the iPhone or Touch. The programs cover a wide range.

Some fill in obvious holes in Apple’s original complement of iPhone software, things the iPhone has lacked that other phones have. These include AOL (TWX) Instant Messenger, a variety of task and to-do lists, sophisticated note takers and a voice dialer. There are numerous versions of popular board, card and word games, like solitaire, mahjong, Scrabble and Sudoku. There are also eye-popping iPhone versions of popular video games, some controlled by the phone’s motion detectors, which allow you to move cars and characters by just tilting the phone.

Numerous programs let you perform Internet functions without using the Web browser on the iPhone or iPod Touch. These include news readers, Internet radio players, sports-information apps, and programs that let you blog or use Google (GOOG) or Facebook or MySpace.

There are business programs from Oracle (ORCL), Salesforce.com and Bloomberg. And there’s a clutch of Bible programs.

Some are simply goofy, like a virtual Star Wars-like lightsaber, a rotary-phone dialer and a virtual “stapler.” And several programs turn the phone into a flashlight for emergencies.

There are way too many interesting apps to review here, but these are some we liked, in no particular order.

AOL Radio

AIM: free

This version of AOL’s popular instant-messaging program does a competent job with text chat, though it can’t yet do video or audio chats, or transfer files. Because Apple isn’t allowing third-party programs to run constantly in the background, you can’t receive new messages in AIM while doing other things. This will supposedly be fixed by new Apple technology due later this year.

AOL Radio: free

While the iPhone and Touch contain full, terrific iPod capabilities, they don’t come with Internet radio players like this one. It can stream music and talk from a wide variety of online sources, including the Internet versions of broadcast radio stations.

Evernote: free

This is an elegant note-taker that has been on computers for a while. You can jot down text notes, store photos or dictate audio memos. And it synchronizes with your Evernote account on Windows or Mac PCs or the Web.

Instapaper: free

A handy way to store Web pages on your iPhone or Touch for reading when you’re offline. While on your computer, an Instapaper button added to the Web browser can snag Web pages for your personal Instapaper database. Then, when your iPhone or iPod Touch is online, it synchronizes with the Web-based Instapaper database. Later, when you’re offline, the pages are still there on the device, ready to read.

Travelocity TravelTools: free

You can use this to check flight schedules, gate assignments and security waiting times. While you can’t book flights through this app, there’s a button that automatically calls Travelocity’s toll-free booking line.

More Cowbell!: free

This is inspired by the Christopher Walken/Will Ferrell Saturday Night Live skit, which made the lowly cowbell a cult musical instrument. Whenever you tap the on-screen cowbell, it makes the recognizable, hollow sound heard in songs like “Down on the Corner,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. You can play along with any song you choose on the iPod Touch or iPhone.

Touch Tarot: $0.99

Touch Tarot

Touch Tarot is a digital tarot-card reading that takes place on your iPod Touch or iPhone, instead of at a table inside an incense-scented tent at the county fair. Phrasing above each card tells its general category, and below each card is a brief explanation of its meaning. For example, we turned over the Wheel of Fortune card in one card reading, and it said, “Advancement for good or ill. The unexpected may occur. Good fortune.”

iWant: free

The iWant app displays 12 black-and-white icons on your device’s screen, each representing a different category of something you might be looking for — including restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, drugstores, banks, car rentals and movies, among others. The device identifies your location, and each category can be tweaked to search by distance or highest rankings from Yelp, a user-written rating service.

Urbanspoon: free

Urbanspoon resembles a slot machine: From left to right, columns show the location, cuisine and cost of nearby restaurants. Instead of pulling a lever to start the slot machine, you simply shake your iPhone or iPod Touch whenever you want to find a restaurant. When it stops, you see the name of a restaurant near you and its classification in each category. (You can also specify what location, cuisine or cost you’re looking for.)

Air Hockey: $0.99

Air hockey works like the game you used to play in your best friend’s basement. You play against the computer, using a fingertip to push red or blue mallets that move a puck around the screen-turned-table and trying to sneak the puck past your computer opponent to score a goal.

MotionX Poker: $4.99

MotionX Poker

This is an addictive poker game, played with realistic, beautifully rendered dice instead of cards. The cool thing is that you roll the dice by simply shaking the iPhone or iPod Touch; convincing sound effects accompany each roll of the dice.

MLB.com At Bat: $4.99

There are lots of cellphone apps and services that can give you live updates on baseball games. What’s special about this one is that it adds video clips of key plays that you can view while the games are still in progress, using the full power of the gorgeous screen and video player on the iPhone and the Touch.

Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D: $9.99

This is a rollicking, fun iPhone and iPod Touch rendition of the classic video racing game, where you control your car by tilting the phone. The graphics are good, and the game-play is responsive.

Truphone: free

This is the first app for the iPhone that allows you to make cheap phone calls over the Internet instead of using the built-in cellphone capability, which can be much costlier, especially for international calls. In our tests, we had some trouble at first, but after we removed and re-installed the program, it worked fine. Calls to 40 countries are six cents a minute to landlines and 30 cents a minute to cellphones. The iPod Touch lacks a microphone, so this app works only on the iPhone.

Write to Walt and Katie at mossbergsolution@wsj.com