I'm a programmer looking to play in the mobile world. The application I'd like to play with would support my musical hobbies. I suspect a mobile phone with a music player could easily be programmed to support a classical musicians practice sessions.
- Should be Easy: Play an A at 440 Hz (or 438,442) for tuning.
- Should be easy: Metronome with beat patterns
- The fun part: I hit a simple record, play a snippet, and can play it back so I can hear the notes I missed. You can almost do this with some sound recorders - but the need to clumsily select a file, save, open a different app to play back, usually makes it unusable. The value add is found in making this extremely easy.
Technically:
- A microphone and existing API for sound input. The ability to use an external microphone would be even better.
- Access to media player APIs without the need to open external apps or do clunky things with files.
- Adequate access to playback API to create specific notes and beat patterns.
- As a hobby application, this should not require expensive tooling. I can switch to a new phone to use the application.
- Bonus points for something that easily ports to a netbook.
I will admit I new to the world of sexy phones. I currently use an obsolete voice device with text messaging. I won't revealing my current flavor of programming because learning a new platform is just fine.
I'd have to go ahead and recommend Android for sure and perhaps Blackberry.
Reasoning:
- iPhone apps are written completely in Objective-C and C. Porting it
requires additional effort and you seem to desire something that
sits on a netbook.
- iPhones tend to be expensive (although you can get a cheapo iPod
touch no problem)
However iPhone has great support for points 1, 2 and 3. So it's up to you, ease of development will probably land on iPhone. Ease of portability and development comes from Android and Blackberry.