This is easily one of the more useful applications I have on my iPhone which is surprising because I had expected it to lose its novelty factor after a week or so. What is it I hear you ask? Well Shazam is a nifty program that helps you identify songs. All you have to do is click on the Tag Now tab and it will ‘listen’ to the song that is playing and then identify it through some magical engineering which I suspect has to do with frequencies. How is this useful besides being one of those apps that you whip out to show a friend at a club and then lose its novelty factor?

 Well I’ve been able to use it to identify songs playing in the background of a TV show (Thicke’s When I get You Alone was playing on one of the season five episodes on Entourage.) And best of all, it can help me identify Chinese songs that are encoded in those weird characters. Trust me, this is a massive help when you can speak Chinese fluently but are unable to type or write the characters. (All I have to do is email the tag to myself and then copy and paste it to my iTunes info.)

It’s not available to Hong Kong iTunes account holders but if you have a friend who has a US or UK account, borrow their password to download it for free and simply authorise your computer for their account. (Each iTunes user account can work for up to five computers.)

 Image: Courtesy of Shazam