Bowls HD

The original release of Bowls for the iPhone was only half-fulfilling, providing two-at-a-time access to images of Tibetan Singing Bowls that can be touched and rubbed to make hauntingly beautiful sound effects. Good news: Oceanhouse Media’s new Bowls HD - Authentic Tibetan Singing Bowls ($4) fixes that problem, providing a single, static screen with 13 different instruments at once, but it needlessly doubles the price of the first app and sells it separately, despite adding little more to the experience than reusing the same art and sounds. Consequentially, you wind up staring at a flat drawing that only becomes a little more interesting when you rub the bowls, which glow to indicate that they’re being touched; the sound is, again, the big draw here. We love the concept, and the gentle humming of the bowls is relaxing, but this really should have been a universal app at the prior price.