Assuming you’ve survived hours of waiting on line or weathered various technical problems, Apple’s app store is online. Anyone with iTunes can have a look; it’s right inside the iTunes Store (formerly the iTunes Music Store). But while Apple’s development platform is impressive, early in the game a lot of the actual music apps seem to me to be, frankly, underwhelming. (Some of the non-musical apps look far better, like the lovely free client for awesome note-taking service Evernote.)

Click through to App Store > Music, and you may feel like you’ve entered a time warp to simplistic handheld music apps from the Palm and Windows Mobile platforms, only dressed up with shiny new eye candy – and $5 and $10 prices. You’ve got your choice of several guitar tuners and metronomes, and various sound toys that mimic instruments. Also, I find the iTunes interface rather annoying. You get a bunch of shiny icons but it’s hard to find specific tools. So, after all these years, are we still struggling to catch up to late 90s Palm apps? Really?

We’re not going to be satisfied until every touch controller in the house is functioning as an X/Y pad for music. Nintendo DS? Check. Wacom tablet? Tablet PC? Claro que si. So what’s up with your Palm? That stylus isn’t doing anything. miniMusic has the hookup:

AxisPad miniMusic [Product Page]

Interestingly, the X/Y pad here can both control internal sounds (designed in miniMusic’s own software), or act as a MIDI controller for sending data to other devices or software. US$19.95, with a full demo available; could be worth it as illustrated below. miniMusic also make various other nice tools for the Palm platform, this being just one of them.

In fact, the only hardware left out is the Windows Mobile / PocketPC platform, unless anyone knows of a solution. (I wonder if miniMusic’s stuff will work with StyleTap, which lets you run Palm software on Windows Mobile gear.)

Other X/Y controllers? Do let us know.

A powerful music workstation in a handheld? Regular readers know that subway/airplane-friendly portable music creation is a reality, and here’s another tool for you. miniMusic helped launch the handheld music creation craze, and their Palm/Treo software just got a big update.

BeatPad 1.1 is an update to miniMusic’s pattern sequencer. The “point-one” is actually a pretty major upgrade:

Built-in sounds: The Krikit soft synth is now built-in, so you can incorporate multi-timbral, polyphonic sound on supported Palm devices (including the Treos).

Pattern features: Pattern chaining and a library for organizing your patterns

MIDI export: Here’s the real killer feature — you can export beats as MIDI files, so you can use your Palm as a scratchpad, then load into Reason / Live / Logic / whatever when you get home. (That’s missing in most other handheld software I’ve seen.)

US$29.95 on its own, but miniMusic has also introduced its Pro Music Suite, with BeatPad, the NotePad notation app, and the SoundPad synth editor (for creating Krikit sounds for the other two apps). Plenty of other ssoftware from these guys, too, including a Kaoss Pad-like X/Y touchpad synth called AxisPad, coming soon. We’ll be watching. (Of course, I’m still PocketPC loyal; anyone know if there’s a Windows Mobile app that supports MIDI export?)

Cris (aka atariboy) sends us Theremin emulators for your PDA — it’s theremin to go. Cris writes:

Pete Moss ThereMini (US$10):
This guy has a Theremin emulator with MIDI out, no less! For PalmOS on his Palm software page.

Got a PocketPC? check out Clanger. (Free) You can even change the tremelo rate and decay time.

Cool stuff. Got an app you love for your Palm, PocketPC, or phone? Let us know. (Okay, my current favorite phone app is the “off” function, but how about you?)