I really liked the idea of this new app from iPopetz – called Monkey – and the look of it, when I noticed it amongst newly added iPhone apps earlier today. Sadly, this one is definitely filed under Big disappointment for now.
The app is supposed to be a ‘true 3D vocal avatar that enables you to record and share your greetings, your songs, your jokes …’. I thought this would be good fun for creating funny clips – making the monkey character say funny stuff or just dance to favorite songs – to send to my daughter. A bit like the excellent 12seconds or Animoto apps, but featuring a funny mokey, and you can’t beat funny 3D vocal avatar monkeys, right?
Read on for why I won’t be sharing anything via this app …
Your mileage may vary of course, but my attempts to use this app have been thoroughly dissatisfying, because:
- The main screen shows you several actions the monkey will perform – waving Hello, clapping, moonwalking, and dancing. Great I thought – I’ll have him dance to a Pink track that is my daughter’s current favorite. Nope – it seems none of these presets can be used with the clips you create. So my monkey just stands there doing not much of anything when I create a new clip. All I can change is the angle of his head and his facial expression.
- So far, I haven’t seen any real lipsyncing as mentioned on the app’s description page – he moves his mouth a bit, but not in time with a song or with my recorded voice.
- Once you finish recording a clip (and replaying it if you want to check what it’s looking like), you can choose to ‘Send It’. Cool. Not so cool though is that there is only one option for where to share it to, which is to the ipopetz.tv site – and that site wants to install a ‘3D viewing add-on’ before it will show you any clip you threw up there. No thanks – judging by the very poor execution of this app, I’m not keen to install any further software on my PC thanks very much.
- The app’s keyboard – which you need to use to attempt to give your submissions a title and assign yourself a nickname – is just about completely unusable. In four separate efforts, it could never get letters right, and had the charming habit of bombing out of text entry fields completely when trying to backspace to correct its constant errors.
Monkey is a $1.99 app that would currently be overpriced if it was free. Nice idea, piss poor execution …
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TAGS: Crap apps
