Tunerific review

Richard Goodwin

We review the trial version of the Symbian guitar tuning app Tunerific

Published on Sep 18, 2009

As any guitar player knows, having an accurately tuned instrument is an absolute must.

How could you do justice to ‘Stairway to heaven’ or ‘Smoke on the water’ without a perfectly tuned axe? Well, now you can use your Symbian device to ensure that you are always in tune.

Because this is a trial version, there are a few features missing - and you only have A chords open to you.

However, it is still quite a robust little app, with some potential, and once the full version is released it will sport over 300 chords as well as 12 individual tunings, which is pretty good, and somewhat better than a lot of analogue tuning pedals.

However, the installation process was troublesome to say the least. First off, the Ovi Store wouldn’t recognise our log in details, which was seriously annoying.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a running trend with the Ovi Store, and is something Nokia really need to rectify. In the end, we had to try four times before the app was successfully installed, and all for just a trial!

While this trail version is free, the fully fledged version - due out soon - will cost $9.99, or 10 Euros. Judging by the usability of the trail app this may interest some, however, it is a rather large price tag for a novelty tuner!

Additionally, we also struggled to see any potential applications for a phone based tuner, over say, a proper digital or analogue tuner - of course it would be cheaper, but musicians usually strive for quality, particularly when it comes to sound and tonality.

The tuner function, which uses the inbuilt microphone on your device, is surprisingly sensitive.

Nevertheless, at times it is very inconsistent - maybe this is something that will be ironed out before its full release? - and sometimes even drops out completely, making tuning your guitar quite a long winded process - although, the dropping out could have been a problem with the device we tested it on.

As trial versions go, Tunerific is okay - nothing more, nothing less. It is a novelty app at best.

Whether the full version will be any better is anyone’s guess, but there are definitely some serious issues, such as the drop-outs, that need to be addressed before they can expect anyone to fork out the best part of £10 for it!