Billboard Launches Official iPhone Application!

One of the things that I found was fantastic about the application, upon using it, was that there was everything on the charts you could possibly want. The App gives the user unparalleled access to the hottest 10 Charts, including:

- Hot 100
- Billboard 200
- Pop Songss
- Country Songs
- Digital Songs
- Radio Songs
- Hip Hop & R&B
- Latin Songs
- Dance Club Play Songs
And
- Rock Songs

The application allows the user, in a beautifully presented way, to view all of the latest and greatest songs on each of these charts, with details such as "Also Charted On", "Tracks on Album", and "Listen and Buy" features, along with artist images and album art. It's truly a very rich media experience for the user.

Perhaps one of the best features of the Billboard.com iPhone Application is the ability to allow the user to browse through Historical Chart data. For those of you whom are unfamiliar, Billboard.com used to charge a subscription fee for users to be able to see historical charts as far back as they go. Now, with the Billboard iPhone App, you can view the historical charts as far back as the data will allow, for the Hot 100, for example, they allow you to go back into the 50's!

This could perhaps be the killer aspect of this application, and one definitely making this app worth the price of admission. This app is fantastic in what it's allowing users to do, a sort of industry first in the mobile world.

Another great feature of the Billboard.com iPhone App is the face that the user can not only browse through songs and view their chart position, but can also click the "Listen and Buy" button to purchase them directly from iTunes! This makes finding that number 1 hit and downloading it a snap.

When combining this with the amazing historical chart search functionality, they put the user in a fantastic position to search through and find all of the oldies that they remembered from a different time, and collect the songs to spark their memories. It's truly a great feature, and one not even included in iTunes itself, making this a prolific application for browsing, discovering, and purchasing music.

Searching for things has become a part of our daily lives. It's as integral to some as getting up in the morning and stepping outside to find out what the weather will be like. In light of this, Billboard.com has chosen to include a comprehensive search functionality into the iPhone application that allows users to search through albums, artists, and songs. One thing I must say is that the search function in this application is fast.

Results are returned within mere seconds (usually under 2-3 seconds), and fantastically accurate. Although the current display of the search output is for "Songs" and "Albums", the artist parameter seems to be used when searching through the catalog anyway. A search for "U2" will bring up all of U2's famous albums.

Overall this is a fantastic iPhone application, and at $2.99, the amount of content in this application make it well worth the menial price being asked. I would recommend it again and again to everyone I know with an iPhone. Great job, Billbaord.com and Ocean20 Technologies, for collaborating on this project and coming up with what I believe will be an absolutely killer application.

Direct link to the App: Billboard.com iPhone App