Touch Piano and Guitar review

Andrew Spode Miller

We review Touch Piano and Guitar, a music applicqation for touchscreen Symbian phones

Published on Jul 13, 2009

With the launch of the 5800 Express Music came Symbian 60 5th generation – bringing with it support for a touchscreen interface. We now see the same operating system on the N97.

The inclusion of touchscreen has certainly whet the appetite of developers with a slew of applications upgraded and ready to work.

When the phone was launched in Hong Kong, they bundled with it a selection of applications to demonstrate the touch screen ability by a company called Activate. Although these never found their way to the UK model, they have been packaged up and are but a Google search away.

Touch Piano is written in Flash but only takes a few seconds to load. You can either go straight into using it, or configure it slightly. Configuration is limited, but it basically comes down to how loud you want it to play, what language you want the interface to be in and how you want the piano to look. There is the choice of the bright white, or the ivory looking keys with a wood finish (our favourite).

Once inside the program, you're presented with just over an octave of notes, laid out as a piano. These are activated by simply touching the keys on screen. The player quickly responds and plays you the note, however if you want to follow up with a second note there is a noticeable delay as it has to finish playing the first. If you click a run of notes, you'll be waiting while these play one after each other.

Multi-touch is not supported which makes chords an impossibility and neither is holding your finger down and running it across the keys - the natural first reaction when you see a virtual keyboard.

On the top you have a selection of different sounds – Piano, Violin, Flute, Saxophone and Guitar. These are poor MIDI quality effects that sound very little like their intended instruments.

Touch Guitar has a similar selection of settings with the addition of a chords page. Here you can view the vast selection of available chords and add them to your main store on the left hand side. When playing, these primary chords can be selected. To play the chord, in theory you just strum the guitar - in practice though, it just doesn't work. You might hear the first and last note, or one in the middle – but never the whole chord. Not only this, but the sound that comes out of the “guitar” is actually a piano.

Touch Guitar is not worthy of the name it is given. Touch Piano, although a little flawed is rather useful for getting starting notes for acapello singing or tuning your instrument whilst on the move.