Get your karaoke on with iOKi for iPhone

iOKi is a free karaoke app for the iPhone. This is a beautifully designed app with some really cool features, but it doesn’t work as “advertised.” It works, and works really well, but the company left out a crucial bit of information: The app only works when you use your headphones. Why is this so important? When I first reviewed it, I couldn’t get any sound to come from the iPhone speaker. The sound was so low that when I placed my ear up to the iPhone, I couldn’t read the words on the screen. That alone brought the review down to one bar. There is no documentation that says to only use headphones, either in the iTunes description, or anywhere in the app.

It was only by chance that I found out about the headphones when I was using them for a different app and decided to go to iOKi one last time before I turned the review in. The other thing that’s disappointing is that you have to buy songs at $0.99 each, which can be very expensive over time. It would be nice to be able to buy songs in bulk. It does come with two songs, which I didn’t find out until the third day. That’s because the songs were never in the song queue; it was an extremely slow download.

On the plus side, this app is very visually appealing. And there is a cool feature that appears after you’ve completed a song. You can record your voice with different effects and reverb. And you can even use it as a standalone recorder. You also have two playing modes: “Classic” (where you sing as the ball bounces) and “iOKi Challenge” (where it scores you like a game). It also has three game levels: “Beginner,” “Advanced” and “Superstar.” But I’m not sure how each level is quantified. The app also allows you to save the songs to iPhone, as well as post them to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This could easily be a 5 bar app if they let us in on their little secret and also made the songs less expensive.

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