Apple Watch 3 saved a stranded kitesurfer

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Apple Watch 3 saved a stranded kitesurfer

The cellular version of the Apple Watch 3 might seem like an unnecessary expense, but a film-maker is claiming that he was saved by the digi-timepiece.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, John Zilles revealed that he was kitesurfing a mile off the coast of California when he wiped out and couldn’t get his kite to fly again.

He started swimming for shore, but after estimating that it would take him over two hours and remembering that there had been shark sightings in the area, he used his waterproof Apple Watch 3 to call the coastguard.

Then, after spotting the boat heading in the wrong direction, he called them back and directed them to his location.

Putting a price on safety

Now, he may have made it safely to shore without their help, but we wouldn’t have fancied a two-hour swim, let alone the risk of shark attacks, so maybe the Apple Watch 3 LTE is worth the starting price, at least if you do extreme sports and like to leave your phone at home.

Of course, you could always get a waterproof case for your phone instead, but Zilles claims he “didn’t want to risk it” and that by having cellular capabilities on his watch he’s feeling more freed from the addiction of phones, as he can leave his at home.

This isn’t the first time an Apple Watch has possibly saved someone’s life either, as there have been reports in the past of their heart rate monitors alerting users to potentially fatal conditions.

Power up your wrist with the best Apple Watch apps

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Call of Duty WWII (2017) trailers, release date, news and features

Update: As we noted in our full review of Call of Duty WW2, the game's online multiplayer mode is currently experience some serious server problems that are holding it back from being truly enjoyable. 

Fortunately, developer Sledgehammer Games is well aware of these issues and has acknowledged player "frustration" in a recent blog post. 

Sledgehammer explains that although last week's update solved "several critical needs [...] it also had an adverse effect on server performance."

Though the game is stable, there are inconsistent experiences and Sledgehammer has said its highest priority is returning to dedicated servers. 

A solution is, apparently, being tested at the moment.

Sledghammer said it's identified the root cause of an issue that's been causing widespread server disconnects, loss of stats and freezing in lobbies. Having identified this, the developer has said it's issued a patch. 

Unfortunately, Headquarters is lower down in the priorities list and is likely to be quiet for a while longer until Sledgehammer has dealt with "the most pressing concerns first."

“This is only the beginning, so thank you for playing" the post finishes, "We won't rest until we resolve everything we can for the community.”

Make sure you check out our guide of things we wish we'd known before we started playing. 

Original article continues below...

It's official: the Call of Duty franchise is returning to WWII in 2017. We've now seen the official reveal trailer, courtesy of a worldwide reveal on April 26.

The Call of Duty franchise faced its toughest year yet in 2016. While the futuristic Infinite Warfare sold pretty well, it was surpassed by other shooters in nearly every way. Titanfall 2’s slick campaign put it to shame, while Battlefield 1’s 64-player battles in open terrain made the familiar Call of Duty formula feel stale.

In the words of Activision, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare “underperformed expectations”, and fans have been calling for a shake-up of the series for this year’s release. Thankfully, there are early signs that their voices have been heard. Here’s everything we know about this year’s Call of Duty game so far, including a tonne of intriguing rumors. 

Cut to the chase What is it? The yearly installment to the biggest FPS franchise aroundWhen it is out? November 3, 2017What platforms? PS4, Xbox One and the PC Trailers and images

Call of Duty: WWII's reveal trailer was released on April 26 and confirmed many of the rumors that we'd previously heard about the game including its World War II setting. 

The trailer features a group of American soldiers as they storm the beaches at Normandy, before cutting to showing a tank convoy being ambushed in the countryside. The trailer ends with a pretty epic action montage, featuring all manner of gruesome delights. 

In the months since the original reveal trailer we've also seen the release of a multiplayer-focussed trailer, and a trailer focussed around the game's zombie mode. On August 14, we also got a private multiplayer beta trailer that highlights the new classes and some of the maps we can look forward to when the game enters private beta on PS4 on August 28, 2017.

Most recently, at Gamescom 2017, Activision dropped the new Headquarters game mode trailer that gives us some insight into what we can expect when we get our boots on the ground later this year. Check it out for yourself below:

News and features

Release date

The game has been confirmed to have a worldwide release of November 3, though customers who pre-order the game will get access to a private beta. It's not clear whether there will be different beta access for different platforms just yet, but we'll update as soon as we know more.

Main campaign

So, Call of Duty is taking players back to WW2 in a "return to its roots." All of the footage in the game's trailer was heavily focused on iconic WW2 imagery with plenty of plane and tank-warfare, beach landings, brutal combat and a distinctly Band of Brothers feel. 

It's been revealed that in the main campaign players will take control of a 19 year old soldier from Texas called Red Daniels who's fighting on the front lines along with his squadmates in the 1st Infantry division. Though Daniels will be the "primary protagonist", players will also play as another soldier and Daniels' best friend called Zussman.

The story will largely follow their journey with their squadmates across a range of well-known historical locations from the war. 

Michael Condrey noted in an interview with GamesRadar, however, that players  would see a diverse and more "global" extended cast that acknowledges the Allies were more than the UK and the US and the Axis force included more than German Nazis. Players can expect to see, he promises, "powerful performances on both sides of the war" from both male and female characters. 

In light of this, Condrey confirmed one other playable character from the French Resistance called Rousseau. Though Rousseau will be playable, it's unlikely the game will focus on her for very long, as Condrey also added that in order to keep the story meaningful and keep players attached to the main characters the game would primarily have players "stay with the squad [...] with Daniels."

In a recent Q & A on the PlayStation blog, studio head Glenn Schofield confirmed that players would play a number of other characters that Red Daniels meets on his journey for short periods and Rousseau is indeed one of these characters. The main story will, however, primarily follow Red. 

Female characters will also, however, be playable in multiplayer. 

Gameplay

Call of Duty WW2 is trying very hard to move away from the idea of the player being a single super solider that can take down the entire Axis force on their own and as a result some big gameplay changes are being implemented.

These changes will focus on making the player interact more with their AI squard. For example, if you find yourself low on ammo at some point, your squard will be able to share ammo with you. This, according to Condrey, is "one of several mechanics" where players must take advantage of different and highly varied skills offered by their wider squad in order to survive.

Another example of this is that rather than ducking for cover in order to regenerate health, players must seek out the medic in their squad in order to receive health packs.

Glen Schofield has said that AI has been improved so that when players interact with their AI squad they'll feel genuinely intelligent and the interactions will have real meaning to the player. 

Apparently, it will be possible for the player to lose members of their squad as they play through the game, which will also have an impact on the kind of help they'll be able to receive: “You can be separated from guys with key abilities that would change how you play – if you’re not with the ammo guy then you have less ability to replenish your ammo.”

There will also be scripted deaths, though it's next to impossible they will result in the loss of any character with a key ability required to complete the campaign.

Multiplayer

Of course, there will be multiplayer and as a result of the jump back in time it will be slightly different. No more boost jumps and high-tech gimmicks – now it's back to a more historically accurate arsenal. Not only has the historical setting had an impact on the game's weapons, it's also going to have an effect on the multiplayer maps and how players interact with them.

This time multiplayer maps will feature real and iconic locations from the war and the different weapons and technology available to players will mean that they'll have to adapt their strategy from what they've grown used to in other Call of Duty titles. 

A big new addition to multiplayer mode is Headquarters which will allow players to be social and interact with one another. Comparisons are being drawn to Destiny's Tower or hubs in World of Warcraft for a better idea of how this is intended to work. 

According to Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty WWII won't be purely a first person experience and a third person view will occasionally happen in multiplayer mode's social space.

It makes sense that in an area where players are able to interact and show off their items the camera would enter third person mode. 

New multiplayer mode with a story

As well as the traditional online multiplayer, Call of Duty WW2 will introduce a new multiplayer mode with a story called War. 

This mode will take the form of "a series of objective-driven conflicts" which will focus on Axis versus Ally team-based gameplay.

Zombies

Zombies will, once again, be making a return in Call of Duty WW2. 

The cast for this mode includes some big names including David Tennant, Katheryn Winnick, Elodie Yung and Udo Kier.  

In an interview with PlayStation Blog the game's lead Jon Horsley said that players can expect to see more of what they know and love in terms of the mode's four-play cooperative gunplay and seemingly endless hoards of Nazi zombies. This time around, however, Sledgehammer hopes it's made the scariest zombie mode yet.

In terms of setting and plot, Horsley revealed that Zombie Mode will be set in a small Bavarian village towards the end of WWII. In a desperate attempt to turn around the war effort, the Third Reich has created an army of the dead and players will be placed in this small village to recover a number of works of art  where they'll explore appropriately sinister areas such as sewers, labs and tombs, taking on these zombie creations as they go. It'll also be possible to use tools and machines in the environments to kill enemies when guns just don't feel like enough. 

You can check out the reveal trailer for the Zombie's mode below. 

Hands on impressions

Single player

Though we didn’t get to try out Call of Duty WWII’s single player campaign for ourselves, we were invited to watch a short hands-off demo which lasted just under 10 minutes. The demo took us to a portion of the campaign mode where the protagonist, Red Daniels, is on a mission with his squadmates to capture a church at the centre of an old European town. 

The demo showed us the first-person experience of controlling Daniels through the town’s twisting streets, showing off the game’s smooth combat controls and impressively realistic graphics. Depending on how you feel about dismembered bodies it might sometimes border on too realistic.

However, capturing the visceral brutality of war is a well-documented aim of Sledgehammer Games for this title and that comes across in this demo's explosive and bloody combat.

Squad goals 

The demo also gives us a peek at the game’s new squad abilities which are replacing mechanics such as health regeneration. 

Where your character was once able to regenerate their health on their own, they’ll now rely on one of their squadmates called ‘Zussman’ to throw health packs to them when needed. 

This is an interesting mechanic and we liked the idea behind it as well as the visuals of it in action. Other than that, the demo didn’t show us too much that took us by surprise - explosive, cinematic and heroic it was what we would expect a good-looking Call of Duty campaign trailer to be. 

Mutiplayer mode

It was for the game’s mutliplayer mode that we got to pick up the controller and try out the three different game modes: Team Deathmatch, Domination and the brand new War. 

Team Deathmatch and Domination are both very familiar forms of multiplayer for anyone that’s already played a Call of Duty game. In Deathmatch you essentially run around the game map with your team, shooting down enemies on the other side, while in Domination you do the same with the added challenge of capturing and keeping flags.

Playing War

It’s the game’s new War node that is by far the biggest and most exciting addition to Call of Duty’s multiplayer and it’s clear that Sledgehammer Games is excited about it. War is the franchise’s first narrative-driven objective based multiplayer mode and casts players into one of two camps: attacking or defending. 

In this mode, the attacking team must try to push across the game’s map by completing a set of four of tasks. In the game we played the first involved capturing an enemy building, the second required us to build a bridge, the third saw us capturing an ammo depo, while the final challenge was escorting a tank through a town’s streets.

The attackers only have a limited amount of time to complete their tasks and if they don’t manage to do so, victory goes to the defenders. 

War is a very different kind of multiplayer experience for Call of Duty but it’s a very welcome addition. It feels fresh and intense and it’s nice to find yourself working with your squad to do something other than protect a flag. 

Not only that the sense of progression moving through the tasks gives is very satisfying in a game mode that usually leaves you feeling like you’re running around the same corner of a map over and over again.  

Whether it has longevity and becomes a mode players will repeatedly return to is yet to be seen, but our hopes are high for it. 

Back to the roots

Sledgehammer Games’ decision to return the Call of Duty franchise to its roots in WW2 was definitely a clever one in our eyes. It may not feel like it, but it’s been 10 years since we saw a Call of Duty title set in this era and game development technology has come a long way since then. 

From what little we played, Call of Duty WWII’s combat is largely the standard affair we’ve become used to, just in a more historical setting than we’re used to seeing. Though multiplayer mode was as fast-paced and fun as ever, it’s certainly a good thing that the more narrative-driven War has been added. 

Though the new main campaign offers something new on its own and will no doubt draw in many fans, War is a new feature with replayability value in the part of the game most of the franchise’s fans will spend the majority of their time, offering a value which will no doubt satisfy many players.

Digital Deluxe Edition

With the Digital Deluxe Edition you'll get access to the beta period, but you'll also get a season pass for the game which means any content released for the game after its release will be free for you. 

This version is available as a digital download only and will set you back slightly more than the Standard Edition with prices starting at £89.99/$99.99.

Pro Edition

The Pro Edition is essentially the Digital Deluxe Edition but in physical form and that means a nice steelbook cover and additional physical merchendise depending on which retailer you purchase from.

The Pro Edition is exclusive to Gamestop in the US for $99.99 but it can be purchased from several UK retailers. Both Amazon and Game UK have the Pro Edition for £89.99, though it's worth noting that Game has an exclusive poster and Divisions Bonus Pack for its pre-order customers. 

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Where to find the best Black Friday gaming, gadget and design deals

Wallets at the ready – Black Friday is nearly here. As Friday 24 November approaches, a zillion websites will be offering deals and bargains on all manner of items, from gadgets to garments to games. But with the tsunami of offers set to pour in, where can you go for an expert opinion on what's truly worth your money?

Well, us of course. We'll be pulling together all the best tech bargains on the day and through to the end of deals season. But it's always good to get a second expert opinion before slapping down the cash.

Here's where to look.

Where to find great Black Friday deals

So, if you're after gaming Black Friday deals, head over to our trusted friends over at GamesRadar+.

If you're more interested in gaming with a mouse and keyboard, the Black Friday PC gaming deals and Cyber Monday PC gaming deals from PC Gamer should be your first port of call.

If you're looking to kit your home out with the sleekest premium gadgety, head to T3.com for its Black Friday deals round up.

How about cameras? For photography-related offers, check out the DCW Black Friday camera deals page, while design-savvy creatives should be scanning the cherry-picked Black Friday deals from CreativeBloq.

Happy deal hunting.

Best gadgets: the greatest gear money can buy in 2017

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Final Fantasy's Naoki Yoshida on the challenges of developing for 4K consoles

Now that the Xbox One X has arrived alongside the PlayStation 4 Pro, we have well and truly entered the era of 4K gaming. Sure, many of us still have one foot in the not-so-distant Full HD past but the march onwards has begun. 

Technology is advancing and gaming is changing for both players and developers as a result. As players we know we get incredible gaming experiences from these advancements but what are things like on the development side? 

Game developers are being encouraged to seize upon the technology with greater urgency. There’s no point in 4K consoles if there aren’t any 4K games to play, after all.

Pixel pressure

More often than not we hear developers praise the visual quality these more powerful consoles enable. The word exciting is used repeatedly. But it seems unlikely that everything is rosy when working with new technology – there must be challenges.

A recent interview TechRadar had with Final Fantasy 14’s director Naoki Yoshida confirmed that’s indeed the case. 

When we asked Yoshida how he felt about the new 4K and HDR capable consoles as a developer he told us that they actually make things “quite challenging.”

When comparing 4K to HD, he explained, there are four times as many pixels to work with and this “seems like four times more details you have to put into the game.” While this is an exciting prospect for any creative medium, for games it’s slightly more challenging as “you have to make sure everything can be seen from many different angles, so the cost is tremendous.”

To explain further, Yoshida approached the wall of the room we were sitting in and gestured to some smudged handprints on the white paint. “For example, you see these handprints on the wall? [In games] you wouldn’t have needed these before. But now to try to show the reality in the game you have to start drawing those in. 

Previously you’d say you won’t see it so don’t worry about it, but now you need to make sure it’s there because that’s the kind of reality that people start to expect.” 

The devil is in the detail

That’s a lot of extra effort both financially and creatively, and Yoshida admitted that “sometimes you wonder if the player is actually noticing all these details.” Turning back to the handprints he said, “would all the players stand in front of the handprint and appreciate the detail? It’s not like everyone’s going to buy the game just because there’s a screenshot of all the details we put in the game.”

Even more challenging than achieving the level of realism that people expect, though, is making sure you don’t surpass it because this could mar the gameplay experience just as much: “what you’re seeing on screen is becoming closer to what you actually see in the real world [...] if it’s too pretty or too clean people think it doesn’t look realistic.”

Despite all of these challenges, however, Yoshida still views the console technology very positively: “Being able to work with the new tech and having the investment to allow us to work with it is an honor [as an] engineer it’s very challenging and exciting at the same time.”

It’s because of the challenges and rewards that come from them that Yoshida is certain “we can’t stop” developing for these new consoles. “It keep us going.”  

What about VR?

It’s not just 4K consoles that are changing the gaming landscape, however – virtual reality experiences are continuing to flourish. 

Final Fantasy 15 is delving into the technology with its Monsters of the Deep experience but when we asked Yoshida if this is the kind of thing we should expect to see for Final Fantasy 14 he told us no. 

A test case for made for Titan Battle in VR at Tokyo Game Show in 2014 and Yoshida said that he was happy to see that “feedback was very positive.”

However, developing the experience required working with Sony to create “special graphics and special UI” to “make sure players have the best gaming experience.”

This kind of customisation would be untenable for a game like Final Fantasy 14, Yoshida reasons. “When it comes to 14, considering we have such a variety of content would we make it for such a small userbase? I think the answer would have to be no. It doesn’t make sense from a business point of view.”

That’s not to say Yoshida is against virtual reality technology: “I do believe that in maybe the next 15 or 30 years' time all the games will be VR” he told us, “but today I’m not actually sure how many people will play the game with that heavy device so I think the hardware needs to evolve a bit more.”

Would he be interested in working with the technology in its current form? “If Sony SIE says we will invest, please make it so, then I might consider it.”

Keep an eye out for our full interview with Naoki Yoshida and other directors from the Final Fantasy franchise over the next couple of weeks as we celebrate the series’ 30th birthday. 

These are our favorite PS4 games you can get right now

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Online game from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds dev let players send malware via in-game chat

Here’s something new (and very worrying) in the world of online gaming: Tera, an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG) produced by the same developer responsible for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, had its in-game chat shut down over the weekend following revelations that it could be used as a medium to spread all sorts of malicious nastiness including viruses.

Developer Bluehole launched Tera back in 2011 in South Korea, and it followed to North America and Europe in 2012. It’s an online RPG with combat that plays out like an FPS, but panic struck over the weekend when the game servers were brought down for emergency maintenance to fix a gaping chat-related vulnerability.

Players themselves actually highlighted the flaw in Tera’s chat system, which apparently utilizes HTML, and could reportedly be exploited to bombard other players with dodgy images or links, collect user IP addresses, or even remotely execute malware.

As if MMORPG public chat channels weren’t toxic enough already.

The game’s North American publisher, En Masse, noted at the time: “There are very serious claims floating around of what this vulnerability potentially allows malicious users to do. We are taking these claims very seriously but, as of this time, we have no evidence that the vulnerability is being exploited in these ways or that any player information has been compromised.”

Fixing a hole

En Masse investigated the issue in conjunction with Bluehole, resulting in all chat being disabled save for guild chat last Friday, with the fix subsequently being deployed on Saturday at around 8:00 PST time in the US. Gameforge, the EU publisher, applied the fix on Friday at 16:00 UK time, a day earlier.

So the issue was dealt with fairly swiftly, as you’d hope, although by all accounts players had their game settings reset by the hotfix. Still, better that than a surprise virus arriving via a chat channel…

This is definitely a bit of an eye-opener and a cautionary tale for developers everywhere, for sure, in terms of security considerations when it comes to in-game systems.

And of course it’s particularly interesting that while Tera is hardly a big-name game, its developer is a big fish these days, and the force behind the juggernaut PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Via: Engadget

Your online gaming will run more smoothly with one of our best graphics cards

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Dozens of iPhone X users are reporting crackling speakers

As impressive as the iPhone X is, its performance has certainly been under scrutiny since it launched, mostly for issues with its display.

And now there's a new issue to add to the list, as dozens of iPhone X users have reported that the front-facing earpiece speaker is making crackling or buzzing sounds when used at high volumes.

The reports, which are mostly on MacRumors and Reddit, vary a little in terms of what triggers the problem and at what volumes, but broadly it seems that any type of audio can cause the problem, with some users report it kicking in even at around 50% volume, so it doesn’t have to be super-loud.

It’s unclear how many users are affected, and given the likely millions of handsets in the wild it’s probably a very small number, but it's far from an isolated issue.

Nothing to hear here

We thoroughly tested the speakers on our iPhone X unit during our review period and found them to be powerful and punchy, with no hint of a crackle. We also re-ran the tests as a result of these claims over a variety of tracks and found no crackling ensued.

A similar issue was reported with the iPhone 8's front-facing speaker, but Apple issued a patch to solve this.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on a possible iPhone X speaker crackle, but we’ll update this article if we hear anything new and for now we’d suggest contacting Apple if you’re experiencing this issue.

With screen burn-in warnings and green lines on the display also reported by some iPhone X users it doesn’t sound like this is the worst of the potential problems, but hopefully a fix is on the way.

You can at least keep your iPhone X safe from damage with these cases

Via Engadget

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iPhone X trick gives everyone Superman's X-ray vision*

Apple's customary "just one more thing" hasn't yet extended to the 'invention' of X-ray vision. 

But if you're looking to ape Superman's most useful* super power, the iPhone X's lush screen can do a pretty good job of tricking your eyes into thinking it's possible. 

The team at iFixit, best known for its gadget teardowns, has put the exposed innards of the iPhone X to a good use beyond assessing its repairability factor. It's taken a high-resolution, ratio-perfect shot of the phone as if its screen were made invisible, letting you get a good look at the guts of Apple's latest and greatest.

It's a clever use of the bezel-less display. The edge-to-edge OLED's 1125x2436 resolution is sharp and rich enough to, at a quick glance, make it genuinely seem like you're looking right into the internal workings of the smartphone.

Peek inside

But, by virtue of some irremovable iOS lockscreen elements, it's not quite perfect – you'll still see the clock, battery and connectivity icons, as well as the quick launch app options.

Want to give it a spin? Simply head over to the iFixit website, where you can save the image to apply as a wallpaper. You'll find the option in your Settings menu, under Wallpapers, where recently-saved images are provided as an option. 

Alternatively, open the image in your Photos app and under the 'sharing' icon is the option to set as a wallpaper. We recommend using it as the lock screen, as the icons on top don't look as good.

It's perfect prank material too – should a trusting friend hand over their iPhone X for a few minutes, that'll give you plenty of time to make them think you've deconstructed their more-money-than-sense plaything.

*Not the view of the entire TechRadar officeiOS 11 problems and how to fix them

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The 10 best 4K cameras in 2017

2016 welcomed a barrage of new cameras equipped with 4K video recording, and now almost every major camera manufacturer has implemented 4K shooting somewhere in their lines. 

Perhaps most impressively, the technology has been successfully stretched over models of all billings. So, whether you’ve only got a few hundred pounds to spend or you're willing to stretch to a handsome four-figure sum, it’s likely you can afford a camera with the technology on board.

Just because two cameras have 4K recording, however, doesn't mean to say they're equal. The use of different sensors and different methods of capture, together with variations in output possibilities, mean two 4K cameras can behave quite differently. 

Even something as simple as whether the camera uses the full width of the sensor or applies a crop factor is vital to consider, as this has a significant effect on your effective angle of view. And all of the above is before we even consider supporting features such as headphone sockets, focus peaking, zebra patterning and Log profiles. 

To make things simple, we’ve rounded up what we think are the fittest 4K cameras on the market right now, and sum up why they've made the cut.

It’s hard to know where to start with the GH5. Rather than using a cropped area of the sensor when shooting 4K as was the case with the GH4, the GH5 uses the entire width of the chip and then downsamples the footage in-camera. This also means that framing won’t be cropped, and you’ll be able to use your lenses as if you’re shooting stills. Currently the Lumix GH5 allows you to shoot Cinema 4K (4096 x 2160) at 60p with a bit rate of 150Mbps, while Full HD video is obviously also possible, up to a very impressive 180p. That's not all, as the GH5 offers color subsampling at 4:2:2 and a color depth of 10-bit, delivering greater color information and richer graduations. The GH5 also offers live output to external recorders such as Apple ProRes via HDMI, as well as simultaneous internal recording. That's certainly a comprehensive video spec, but Panasonic is also planning to introduce a number of firmware updates over the coming months to bolster the GH5's recording capabilities even further. 

Read our in-depth Panasonic Lumix GH5 review

At the time of the A7S II's review we said it was the best video-shooting stills camera available, and while much has changed in the market we still reckon it’s a compelling option for the videographer. One of its major selling points at launch – internal recording of 4K footage – has since been matched by many others, but it’s the modest pixel count of its sensor that splits it from its rivals. We found its dynamic range to be very high, and consistently better than rivals at higher sensitivities, while noise was also shown to be lower than cameras with more populated chips. It also has the advantage of using the whole sensor width for recording video, and of being able to record to the memory card while outputting 4:2:2 footage to a HDMI recorder, but proves itself to be capable for stills shooting too. Autofocus is generally fast and built-in image stabilisation is a huge bonus, while the body is sturdier than its predecessor’s too. Overall, while it may not be the newest model, its sensor and video specs give it a handful of advantages over its rivals.

Read our in-depth Sony Alpha A7S II review

The previous APS-C-based Alpha A6300 was a big hit with enthusiast users, and the Alpha A6500 builds on its success in many ways. The camera records 6K footage that’s downsampled to 4K for the benefit of quality, and uses the efficient XAVC S codec that has a rate of 100Mbps. This is joined by Log gamma modes, 120fps HD recording (also at 100Mbps) and enhanced zebra patterning to keep an eye on exposure. You also benefit from a 425-phase-detect-point focusing system for rapid focus and a 2.36-million-dot OLED viewfinder, together with 11fps burst shooting at full resolution, all inside a dust- and moisture-resistant body. That's not to mention the welcome addition of Sony's 5-axis in-body image stabilization system. Now that the price has started to fall it would also be a fine choice as an upgrade over previous APS-C-based Sony models.

Read our in-depth Sony Alpha A6500 review

The XC10 is perhaps the least-conventional model on this list, but it’s a viable alternative to the company’s other, pricier, Cinema EOS models. Designed for video but with high-quality stills in mind too, the model blends a 12MP 1-inch CMOS sensor with a 24.1-241mm image-stabilised lens, and packages it in a relatively compact body whose adjustable grip provides excellent flexibility. It records 4K UHD footage at 8-bit 4:2:2 footage internally, and you can call upon the Canon Log option to capture up to 12EV stops of dynamic range. You also get a built-in ND filter, clean HDMI output and focus peaking, and Canon even throws in a loupe so that you can use the rear LCD touchscreen much like an electronic viewfinder. With a smaller sensor than more traditional options, and at a similar price point, it may not be the best option for low-light shooting, but when you consider the zoom lens, form factor and value for money, it scores lots of points. The model was recently superseded by the XC15.

The long-awaited successor to the D810 arrived earlier this year, and Nikon certainly didn't hold back with the specs. With a fresh 45.4MP full-frame sensor, a highly advanced 153-point AF system and 7fps shooting, supported by features such as a tilting touchscreen and whole suite of connectivity options, the the D850 is the most advanced DSLR we've seen. Video-wise, there’s lots to love. The camera is capable of 4K UHD capture at 30p/25p/24p, and that's using all the sensor - no unwanted cropping here, allowing you to take full advantage of your lenses. Other video features include ports for both microphone and headphone sockets, as well as a Flat Picture Profile, zebra patterning and Power Aperture Control. You can also record at 120fps in Full HD quality. A brilliant DSLR that's great at shooting video too.

Read our in-depth Nikon D850 review

“The best Micro Four Thirds camera yet” was what we concluded from our time testing the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, and video is one area where Olympus has made significant improvements over previous models. Not only do you get 4K capture in both DCI and UHD flavours, you also get clean output over HDMI at 4:2:2, a headphone port for audio monitoring and the benefits of Olympus’s fast Hybrid AF system, which works in conjunction with the touchscreen for even easier subject selection. Whether you’re shooting stills or videos, you also get one of the most effective image stabilisation systems we’ve yet seen, which will please those who expect to be largely using the camera handheld. Other reasons why the camera walked away with a full five stars include its excellent weather-sealing, lifelike EVF, and the capability to fire at 18fps with continuous AF and AE tracking. Those who want to easily achieve a very shallow depth of field may not prefer the smaller Micro Four Thirds sensor over larger-sensor offerings, but with the right lens and technique you can still isolate subjects from their surroundings on such a camera without bother. In any case, while Panasonic may have had a head start with video, the OM-D E-M1 Mark II certainly sets the bar high for a flagship Micro Four Thirds camera.

Read our in-depth Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II review

The X-T2 was undoubtedly one of the highlights of the past 12 months, and showed just how much more seriously Fujifilm was taking video recording with its X series. Its 4K UHD footage is created by oversampling – i.e. capturing more detail than required – so the output footage ends up with better clarity and less risk of artefacts. You can also output 4:2:2 footage through the camera’s HDMI port (albeit in 8-bit) and access a Log gamma profile while doing so. Users who enjoy using Fujifilm’s Film Simulations modes for stills will no doubt be pleased to know that you can also use these for video, although the inclusion of a headphone port only on the optional grip, together with the 10-minute time limit on 4K footage (at least without the grip), may discourage some. Still, with weather-sealing, a cracking viewfinder and fast focusing, there’s plenty to get excited about. Ultimately, if you want a smart, retro-styled camera that can shoot high-quality stills and detailed 4K footage, it’s hard to think of a more fitting solution.

Read our in-depth Fujifilm X-T2 review

It might be one of Panasonic’s more junior offerings in its Lumix range of mirrorless cameras, but the Lumix G80 (known as the G85 in the US) has the advantage of being relatively new, and thus kitted out with the latest technology. The Dual IS Mark II system means you benefit from both body and lens image stabilisation, and the former also works to steady unstabilised optics. Footage itself can be recorded at up to 30p, at a bit rate of up to 100Mbps, and you can also call upon zebra patterning and focus peaking to help when recording. Panasonic’s clever Live Cropping feature is also on board, and this allows for professional-looking panning and zooming all in-camera, although this is output at HD quality. One sore point is that there's no headphone port for audio monitoring, although this isn't a glaring oversight when you consider the model’s target market; what’s more key is that there is a microphone port. The fact that the camera ‘only’ has a 16MP sensor is somewhat offset by the fact that it has no optical low-pass filter; we found this recorded excellent details, and with moiré only occasionally visible in footage.

Read our in-depth Panasonic Lumix G80 / G85 review

If you're looking for a powerful all-in-one camera, then you're not going to go far wrong with Sony's brilliant RX10 IV. With a long and fast 24-600mm f/2.4-4 zoom lens partnered with a stacked 1-inch type 20.2MP sensor and fast 315-point phase-detect AF system, it's an incredibly versatile camera. It doesn't disappoint when it comes to video either, with 4K UHD footage captured with 1.7x more information than actually required without any pixel binning, before being downsampled to 4K for the sake of quality. This happens at a 100Mbps maximum bit rate, and you can boost the camera up to 960fps for slow-motion footage too. All of this is supported by a clean HDMI output, zebra patterning and both microphone and headphone ports. You also get an S-Log2 gamma profile in addition to the Picture Profiles (which you can adjust), and Sony’s Gamma Display Assist mode to help you get a better idea of what graded footage would look like. It’s not cheap, but there's nothing quite like it. 

Read our in-depth Sony Cyber-shot RX10 IV review

Sony has enjoyed much success with its RX100 line, and its latest RX100 V picks up from where the Mark IV left off. Many of its video specs are shared with the RX10 III, with footage recorded at 1.7x the amount required and subsequently downsampled to 4K. You can record at up to 30fps and take advantage of the stepless control ring around the lens, while supporting functions include an S-Log2 gamma profile, focus peaking, zebra patterning and slow-motion recording. Naturally on such a small camera you don't get ports for microphones or headphones, although the lack of a touchscreen may bother people more. Still, you do get Sony’s excellent hybrid AF system for focusing. Add a built-in ND filter, high-quality EVF, a tilting screen and a super-fast 24fps burst-shooting mode with autofocus and auto-exposure maintained throughout, and it’s amazing that something so powerful can still slip inside your pocket. The price tag is significant, but if it’s beyond your budget there's still the RX100 IV, which manages to offer 4K shooting and plenty of shared technology at a keener price point. 

Read the full review: Sony Cyber-shot RX100 V

What camera should I buy?Best cameraBest mirrorless cameraBest DSLR

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Need for Speed: Payback review

Electronic Arts’ arcade-style racing franchise Need For Speed has been around since 1994, but recent outings have earned it a reputation as the videogame equivalent of a Dan Brown book. That’s because it sells fantastically well, but nobody can fathom why. How refreshing it would be to assert that the latest iteration, Payback, marks a triumphant return to form for the series. But alas, having played it, that would be an impossibility.

The Need For Speed games have had various high points in the past such as 2010’s Hot Pursuit and 2013’s Rivals, but the series’ most recent outing, a reboot released in 2015, attracted a critical mauling mainly due to its annoying online-only structure. 

Both Hot Pursuit and Rivals were made by Criterion, British developer of the revered Burnout series of games. The shadow of the far superior Burnout – an IP still owned, although apparently shelved, by Need For Speed publisher EA – still looms large over the Need For Speed series, and the likes of Microsoft’s Forza Horizon games have offered stiff opposition recently.

Taking on The House

Past Need For Speed games often featured a cops versus robbers theme, but Payback eschews that in favour of street-racing – along similar lines to Rockstar Games’ much-loved but now dormant Midnight Club franchise. Payback’s action takes place in Fortune City, loosely based on Las Vegas (although, mercifully, with much more elevation changes than its real-life counterpart).

The main character you play is Tyler Morgan, an aspiring street-racer who becomes indebted to a casino-owner whose Koenigsegg – which Morgan was driving – is stolen by a woman called Lina Morgan, who runs Fortune City’s street-racing scene for an organisation called The House. Morgan assembles a crew whose motivation is to get revenge against Navarro and take down The House.

One of the reasons that Need For Speed: Payback creates a poor first impression is that it plunges you into its unrelentingly embarrassing story. The characters are either terminally dull, downright annoying, or both. Making matters worse is the fact that whenever you get to an interesting point in a story-mission – such as having to nail a precise jump – the action is taken out of your hands and a cut-scene kicks in. Payback is clearly attempting to attract an audience addicted to movies like Fast & Furious, but it fails spectacularly, in a great, whiffy cloud of amateurishness and dialogue that Michael Bay would reject for being too basic.

The daily grind

While the story missions are something to be endured, there’s better news elsewhere: you must grind to unlock each story chapter and, for once, the grinding is the most enjoyable part of a game. Payback isn’t an intrinsically bad game: its open-world is large and varied, and the cars handle as you would expect in an arcade-oriented game. Although the off-roaders have an annoying tendency towards fish-tailing, for the most part the cars are satisfyingly tail-happy and eager to drift, so you can turn in early and back them into corners, Ridge Racer-style. 

You do get the odd sequence where you must fight off cop-cars, and there's a mechanic which lets you barge into them, sending them off the road into spectacular Hollywood-style pile-ups (although the game doesn’t dwell on those as much as it should). Overall though Payback’s vehicular combat system completely lacks the precision of the one found in the decade old Burnout games. The sheer glee associated with the sort of maniacal driving you could pull off in games like Burnout is completely absent from Need For Speed: Payback.

At least there’s plenty to do in Payback’s open-world, including street racing, off-road racing, drifting and drag-racing missions. You can earn experience points by racing through speed-cameras, jumping through billboards, catching air off jump-ramps, time-trials along stretches of road, collecting giant chips and racing ghosts of real-life players. There are derelict cars to find, which can be customised into absolute beasts. But every element of Payback’s open-world can be traced back to another game, like some box-ticking exercise. Its design by committee at its worst, and its one of the game's biggest problems. 

Not so finely tuned

Customisation is key to any game that aspires to excite wannabe street-racers, and Payback does contain some interesting customisation systems. There’s a decent visual customisation engine – performing spectacular moves in the game unlocks spoilers, side-skirts and the like, and you can tinker around with decals and paint-jobs to your heart’s content. 

But at the heart of Payback lies its mechanical upgrade system, which takes the form of a trading card game. It's not ideal, and the presence of this element merely smacks of marketing departments looking at how much a young audience is spending on the likes of Hearthstone (something of which Forza Motorsport 7 is also guilty). 

Unless you go to Tune-up Shops and spend in-game currency on Speed Cards, you’ll soon find yourself up against much faster cars. Naturally, you can spend real money on Speed Cards if you can’t be bothered to grind – or can’t quite fathom the unnecessarily complex and utterly unengaging Speed Card system.

There is one interesting idea in Need For Speed: Payback: before each event, you can put money on a side-bet, which adds extra targets for that event. However, even that could have been improved if it the target was adjusted according to the rating of your car, and whether or not you were struggling to win that event. Incidentally, you have to win all the events to advance the story, so if you aren’t keen, say, on the drifting side of the game, you’re a bit stuffed.

Verdict: Don't play it

It will be fascinating to see how well Need For Speed: Payback sells. It is, for example, much less fun to play than Forza Horizon 3, which has been out for a while and can be found cheaply. No doubt EA’s marketing machine will kick into overdrive on Payback’s behalf, but those who buy it will surely find it soulless at best, and positively annoying in parts at worst. 

But the same could have been said about previous Need For Speed games, which nevertheless shifted millions of units. However,  surely the Need For Speed franchise is now one flop away from a radical reappraisal? If only EA would abandon it in favour of a revival of Burnout.

This game was reviewed on Xbox One

TechRadar's review system scores games as 'Don't Play It', 'Play It' and 'Play It Now', the last of which is the highest score we can give. A 'Play It' score suggests a solid game with some flaws, but the written review will reveal the exact justifications.

For our top gaming recommendations, check out our guide to the best Xbox One games and best PS4 games. 

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Samsung quietly confirms the new Galaxy A5

Samsung’s sure to make a big splash with the Galaxy S9 early next year, but it also has a new mid-ranger on the way, in the form of the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2018).

We know it’s on the way because Samsung has posted a support page for the phone on its South Korean website. 

Or rather, it’s posted a page for the SM-A530, but given that the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) has the model number SM-A520 and the Galaxy A5 (2016) is the SM-A510 there’s little doubt that this is the Galaxy A5 (2018).

Sadly, the support page for the unannounced model doesn’t currently have any information on it, but some rumors have already circulated. 

GalaxyClub.n,l for example, has recently found evidence that the A5 (2018) will have an 18.5:9 display, which is the same ultra-widescreen aspect ratio as the Samsung Galaxy S8.

Mid-range upgrades

And prior to that Android Authority reported that the phone would have a 5.5-inch Full HD+ display, 4GB of RAM, an Exynos 7885 or Snapdragon 660 chipset, dual front-facing cameras and a water-resistant build. 

We’ve also heard that the next phones in the A range will get Samsung’s Bixby assistant.

Of course, none of this is confirmed yet, but we should know the final specs of the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2018) soon, as its predecessor was announced in January 2017, so the new model could be just a couple of months away.

Hopefully it will improve on the Galaxy A5 (2017), which we gave four stars to in our review, praising its battery life, build quality and OLED screen, but noting that its CPU could be better for the money.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is also in the works

Via Phone Arena

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Chromebooks are soon to get a major boost in multitasking flexibility

Touchscreen Chromebooks are about to get a good deal more flexible when it comes to multitasking with apps in tablet mode, thanks to the introduction of a split-screen view that will allow users to snap two apps side-by-side.

Note that this feature hasn’t been officially announced yet, but it has been talked about previously, and it has now been spotted in Chrome OS dev channel version 64 by tipster Francois Beaufort.

This major boon for touchscreen Chromebooks goes under the name of ‘Split View in Tablet Mode’ and once you activate it, the feature shows all of your active windows, and you can snap whichever apps you wish into highlighted areas to view them side-by-side.

Image credit: Francois Beaufort

Android aggro

The caveat here is that if you’re using Android apps on your Chromebook, some of these don’t support ‘snapping’, and therefore won’t function with the split view mode – with Android games being particularly problematic, it seems. Although some games don’t lend themselves very well to multitasking anyway…

Nonetheless, this is clearly a very useful extra ability which is inbound for Chrome OS, so fingers crossed its transition from testing is a smooth one. As Digital Trends observes, the feature is likely to go live in Chromebooks early next year.

Another notable recent development in the world of Chrome OS-powered laptops is the news that you could soon be sending texts from your Chromebook – another string to the flexibility bow.

One Chromebook makes the cut for our best laptops list

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Qualcomm signs up for Chinese ventures

Qualcomm has another distraction, even as it’s fighting off Broadcom’s unwanted bid. The company has made overtures to three Chinese mobile vendors, laying the groundwork for a possible $12 billion worth of contracts over the next three years.

Under the eyes of Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, Qualcomm signed three memoranda of understanding (MoU) with Chinese mobile vendors,  Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, each of which expresses a non-binding interest in the purchase of components with an aggregate value of no less than $12 billion over the next three years.

 US and China relationship 

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf was part of President Trump’s Department of Commerce Trade Delegation to China,“I’m honored to represent Qualcomm as part of this important Trade delegation, which showcases the importance of win-win business relationships between the US and China,” said Mollenkopf, . “Qualcomm has longstanding relationships with Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo and we are continuing our commitment to investing and helping advance China’s mobile and semiconductor industries,” said Mollenkopf.

 Qualcomm Technologies has been supporting the Chinese mobile ecosystem for almost 25 years and continues to expand its investments and projects in China, establishing a number of branches, joint ventures and R&D centers in Guizhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, among others.

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The best Android games of 2017: our top picks

It's been ten years since Android was first announced and in that time we've seen hundreds of thousands of games hit the Google Play Store, but obviously not all of them are high quality, and with so many available it can be tricky to make sure you're putting your cash in the right place.

Some titles are expensive and nothing more than just poor ports of a console game. Others are only a meagre amount but are genuinely more entertaining and enthralling than anything found on a console a few years ago.

When deciding what Android game is best for you, well... you've got a few choices to consider.

Firstly, remember that you won't have just one game on the go at any one time. You might have a title that's great for playing on the sofa or commute, and one when queuing at the bank.

Some work better with headphones, others don't - and we thoroughly recommend playing through a few regularly to find the games that work the best for you. Nothing better than finding something you just can't wait to play again and again!

Want to improve your Android phone in other ways? Check out the best Android apps in 2017

Unlike the iPhone, the amount of dedicated gaming controllers for Android phones is a bit more bland, as there aren't as many for specific phone models... and the games that support them can be varied too.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a good look at what's out there, and many controllers aren't overly expensive.

Back to the games: have a think about the variety of titles to check out, whether you want something that taxes you, is a quick-fire frenzy or an RPG that you can play locally with friends.

That's why we're here - telling you the games that you need to play because we've tried them out ourselves. We head through the new and bubbling lists of titles each week, have a look at what's good and let you know.

We try to keep this list as fresh as possible, so if your favorite falls off the chart then it's not a bad game... there's just more out there to try.

So get ready to get clicking through our gallery... we guarantee you'll have found something to play before you know it.

New: Death Road to Canada ($9.99/£9.49/AU$13.99)

Death Road to Canada is a zombie movie smashed into a classic retro game. Little pixelated heroes dodder about a dystopian world, bashing zombies with whatever comes to hand, looting houses, and trying to not get eaten.

The road trip is staccato in nature. The game constantly tries to derail your rhythm and momentum. In Choose Your Own Adventure-style text bits, the wrong decision may find you savaged by a moose. Elsewhere, intense ‘siege’ challenges dump you in a confined space with zombie hordes, often armed only with a stick. Handy.

These abrupt elements can grate – as can the slightly slippy controls that aren’t always quite tight enough; but otherwise this is an ambitious mash-up of RPG and arcade gaming, with generous dollops of black humor – and BRAIINNZZZ.

Love You To Bits is a visually dazzling and relentlessly inventive point-and-click puzzler. It features Kosmo, a space explorer searching for the scattered pieces of his robot girlfriend, bar the lifeless head that’s still in his clutches. Which is a bit icky.

Don’t think about that too much, though, because this game is gorgeous. Through its many varied scenes, it plays fast and loose with pop culture references, challenging you to beat a 2D Monument Valley, sending up Star Wars, and at one point dumping you on a planet of apes.

Now and again, you’ll need to make a leap of logic to complete a task, and puzzles mostly involve picking things up and using them in the right place – hardly the height of innovation. But this game’s so endearing and smartly designed you’d have to be lifeless yourself to fail to love it at least a little.

Run-A-Whale is a sweet-natured endless runner. Well, endless swimmer, given that its protagonist is a friendly whale giving a lift/thrill ride to a shipwrecked pirate.

There’s no tapping to leap here, though; in Run-A-Whale, you hold the screen to make the whale dive. When you let go and he breaks the surface, he soars (very) briefly into the air, before returning to the water with a splash.

As ever, the aim in Run-A-Whale is survival – and that in itself isn’t simple. The game’s one failing is it sometimes makes it really tough to avoid hazards, which can include whale-stopping walls someone’s carelessly built beneath the waves.

Mostly, though, this one’s a gorgeous romp through beautiful landscapes, grabbing coins, occasionally being fired into the sky by a cannon, and regularly fending off giant crabs and octopodes.

Sidewords is a rare word game that isn’t ripping off Scrabble or crosswords. Instead, you get blank grids with words along two edges. You must use at least one letter from each edge to make new words of three or more letters. Each selected letter blasts a line across the grid; where lines meet become solid areas filled with your word. The aim is to fill the grid.

On smaller levels, this is simple, but larger grids can be challenging – especially when you realize a massive word (that on discovery made you feel like a genius) leaves spaces that are impossible to fill. Fortunately, Sidewords encourages experimentation, and so you can remove/replace words at will.

It’s clever and a bit different; and if you tire of the main game, you can fire up mini-game Quads, which marries word-building and Threes!-style sliding tiles. Two for the price of one, then – and both games alone are worth the outlay.

Freeways is one of those games that doesn’t look like much in stills, but proves ridiculously compelling from the moment you fire it up. In short, it’s all about designing roadways for autonomous vehicles.

It comes across a bit like a mash-up of Mini Metro and Flight Control. You link roads together, often by designing monstrous spaghetti junctions, only you’re armed with tools that make you feel like an urban planner drawing with chunky crayons while wearing boxing gloves.

The game’s crude nature is part of its charm. It’s more about speed and immediacy than precision, a feeling cemented when you realize there’s no undo. When your road system gets jammed, your only option is to start from scratch and try something new.

In truth, the inability to remove even tiny errors can irk, not least when roads don’t connect as you’d expect. Otherwise, Freeways is a blast.

Card Crawl mixes solitaire and dungeon crawling, and does an awful lot with a four-by-two grid of cards.

In each round, an armor-clad ogre deals four cards, which may include monsters, weaponry, potions, and spells. Beneath sits your adventurer’s card, two spots for items to hold, and one to stash a card for later.

To progress to the next draw, you must use three of the cards dealt to you. For example, you might grab a sword, use that to kill a demonic crow, and then quaff a potion.

Getting through the entire deck requires strategy more than luck. For example, down health potions when you don’t need to, and you may not survive later when weaponless and battling multiple enemies.

Generously, the basic game is free; but we recommend buying the one-off IAP to unlock the full set of cards and game modes.

Miracle Merchant has you mix potions for thirsty adventurers, fashioned from stacks of colored cards. Each customer asks for a specific ingredient, and mentions another they like. Across 13 rounds, you must manage your deck to ensure everyone goes away happy. Fail once and your game ends.

Decisions must be made carefully, because once cards are placed, they can’t be moved. Combinations prove vital for success: pairs of cards boost your score, as does matching cards to the colored icons found on those already in play. There are also ‘evil’ cards with negative values to overcome.

The game doesn’t feel as refined as the developer’s own Card Thief, but we enjoyed its elegance. There’s no messing about with special powers and leveling up – it’s just you, cards, and a set of rules. There’s perhaps a touch too much reliance on card counting and luck, but Miracle Merchant’s nonetheless a simple, engaging, unique stab on solitaire.

Linelight is a gorgeous, minimal puzzler that pits you against the rhythmic denizens of a network of lines levitating above a colored haze. Your aim is simply to progress, inching your way along the network, triggering gates and switches, and collecting golden gems.

Early puzzles are content to let you get to grips with the virtual stick (one of the best on Android). Soon, you’re faced with adversaries that kill with a single touch. But these foes aren’t merely to be avoided – they must also be manipulated into position to trigger switches that open pathways that enable you to continue.

Now and again, new mechanics keep things fresh, as do abrupt changes in pace, such as a memorable several-screens-long pursuit/dance with an enemy towards the end of the game’s first section. In all, Linelight’s an enchanting, vibrant, superbly designed experience – an essential purchase for your Android device.

Fowlst is a playable, immediate old-school arcade game featuring an owl who’s trapped in hell “for some reason”. As you tap the left or right of the screen, he briefly flaps in that direction before gravity does its thing. Your aim: survival – easier said than done in endless rooms of angry demons.

Fortunately, you can fight back. Smacking into a demon destroys it. (Note: this really doesn’t work with massive whirling buzz-saws.) Some demons spit out loot when they expire, enabling you to power-up your owl in its subsequent lives.

And it turns out you’ll be grateful for rockets that shoot out of your behind when tackling giant (and oddly goofy) caterpillar-like bosses and the huge flame-spewing demons determined to make your time in hell, well, hell.

cityglitch is a superb turn-based puzzler that appears to play out in a digital city of virtual skyscrapers being attacked by system glitches. Imagine your favorite virtual reality movie presented as a game from 1983, slathered in neon, and you’re halfway there.

As the hero darts from rooftop to rooftop, they’re immersed in grid-based puzzles, which incorporate runes you light to eradicate the glitches. The brilliant bit - and this is a rarity in gaming - is cityglitch doesn’t tell you how to deal with anything.

You must discover how to manipulate cats, ghosts, arrows and other foes, outthinking the set-up you’re provided, in order to emerge victorious across the 95 surprisingly diverse challenges.

No Stick Shooter is a single-screen shoot ’em up that marries the best of old-school retro blasters with modern touchscreen controls.

As its name suggests, there are no virtual D-pads to contend with. Instead, as the aliens menacingly descend towards your planet, you tap their general location to fling something destructive their way.

The key to victory doesn’t involve tapping the screen like a lunatic, though. Your weapons need time to recharge, and specific armaments work well against certain foes. In a sense, it all plays out like a strategy-laced precision shooter on fast-forward, with you clocking incoming hostiles, quickly switching to the best weapon, and tapping or swiping to blow them away.

There are just 30 levels in all, but only the very best arcade veterans are likely to blaze through them at any speed – and even then, getting all the achievements is a tough ask.

Super Samurai Rampage is a manic swipe-based high-score chaser, featuring a samurai who has - for some reason - been provoked into a relentless rampage.

Said rampage is dependent on you swiping. Swipe left and you lunge in that direction, slicing your sword through the air. Swipe up and you majestically leap, whereupon you can repeatedly swipe every which way, fashioning a flurry of airborne destruction akin to the most outlandish of martial arts movies.

Along with dishing out death, you must ensure you don’t come a cropper yourself. And attack is your only form of defense, because when you’re moving, you’re also deflecting incoming projectiles. You’re also likely racking up quite the body count, which accumulates in bloody retro-pixel form at the foot of the screen.

It’s of course entirely absurd, and without much nuance; but Super Samurai Rampage is an arcade thrill that’s entertaining, and where repeat play is rewarded with gradual mastery – or at least lasting a few seconds longer before your inevitable demise.

Yankai’s Peak is a puzzle game that combines box-pusher Sokoban, pyramids, and the evil mind of a sadistic games creator, intent on making you weep.

The basics are simple: each level plays out atop a triangular grid. Your blue pyramid must nudge colored pyramids onto matching triangular spaces. Movement and nudges come by way of flipping your pyramid in one of three directions, or ‘pinning’ one of its corners and having it spin, taking along anything it touches for the ride.

The manner in which pyramids interact is far more complex than the square boxes found in Sokoban, and that’s what transforms Yankai’s Peak into a truly testing challenge. Even early levels can stump, until you hit upon the precise combination of moves required to achieve your goal.

Deep into the game, it may take days to crack a particularly tough challenge, although you’re at least aided by unlimited undos, and a level map that gives you access to several puzzles at once.

First Strike is an oddball combination of territory-snagging board game Risk, and classic defense arcade title Missile Command. You pick a nuclear power and set about building missiles, researching technologies, annexing adjacent states, and – when it comes to it – blowing the living daylights out of your enemies.

The high-tech interface balances speed and accessibility, although games tend to be surprisingly lengthy – and initially sedate, as you gradually increase your arsenal, and shore up your defenses.

Eventually, all hell breaks lose, including terrifying first strikes, where enemies lob their entire cache of missiles at an unlucky target. If that’s you and your defenses aren’t strong enough, prepare more for ‘the end’ than ‘game over’ as the screen shakes amid all the destruction.

It’s thoughtful and clever (and often chilling), but First Strike never forgets it’s a game – and a really good one for real-time strategy fans.

The first two Riptide games had you zoom along undulating watery circuits surrounded by gleaming metal towers. Riptide GP: Renegade offers another slice of splashy futuristic racing, but this time finds you immersed in the seedy underbelly of the sport.

As with the previous games, you’re still piloting a hydrofoil, and racing involves not only going very, very fast, but also being a massive show-off at every available opportunity.

If you hit a ramp or wave that hurls you into the air, you’d best fling your ride about or do a handstand, in order to get turbo-boost on landing. Sensible racers get nothing.

The career mode finds you earning cash, upgrading your ride, and probably ignoring the slightly tiresome story bits. The racing, though, is superb – an exhilarating mix of old-school arcade thrills and modern mobile touchscreen smarts.

Samorost 3 is a love letter to classic point-and-click adventure games. You explore your surroundings, unearth objects, and then figure out where best to use them. Straightforward stuff, then (at least in theory – many puzzles are decidedly cryptic), but what sets Samorost 3 apart is that it’s unrelentingly gorgeous, and full of heart.

The storyline is bonkers, involving a mad monk who used a massive mechanical hydra to smash up a load of planetoids. You, as an ambitious space-obsessed gnome, must figure out how to set things right.

The game is packed with gorgeous details that delight, from the twitch of an insect’s antennae to a scene where the protagonist successfully encourages nearby creatures to sing, and starts fist-punching the air while dancing with glee. Just two magical moments among many in one of the finest examples of adventuring on Android.

Mushroom 11 finds you exploring the decaying ruins of a devastated world. And you do so as a blob of green goo. Movement comes by way of you ‘erasing’ chunks of this creature with a circular ‘brush’. Over time, you learn how this can urge the blob to move in certain ways, or how you can split it in two, so half can flick a switch, while the other half moves onward.

This probably sounds a bit weird – and it is. But Mushroom 11 is perfectly suited to the touchscreen. The tactile way you interact with the protagonist feels just right, and although your surroundings are desolate, they’re also oddly beautiful, augmented by a superb ethereal soundtrack.

There are moments of frustration – the odd difficulty wall. But with regular restart points, and countless ingenious obstacles and puzzles, Mushroom 11 is a strange creature you should immediately squeeze into whatever space exists on your Android device.

Slayaway Camp is a sliding puzzle game that looks like Crossy Road – if Crossy Road had turned into a 1980s horror flick. The aim is to assist psycho slasher Skullface, hacking to pieces loitering campers and cops, across dozens of levels of pixelated gore.

Essentially, it’s about pathfinding. Skullface slides until he hits something. The key is to ensure that’s a camper, and not a cop’s gun, or something equally deadly that will end his bloody rampage.

For those of a sensitive disposition, it’s worth noting Slayaway Camp is more ridiculous than horrific – even its cut-scenes (with emphasis on the cutting – and hacking) are very silly.

More importantly, the slasher thing isn’t a gimmick atop a rubbish game – although Slayaway Camp doesn’t drip with innovation regarding the puzzling bits, the challenges are solidly designed and increasingly devious as you hack your way through its many levels.

In the late 1970s, Space Invaders invited you to blast rows of invaders. In the mid-1980s, Arkanoid revamped Breakout, having you use a bat-like spaceship to belt a ball at space bricks. Now, Arkanoid vs Space Invaders mashes the two titles together – and, surprisingly, it works very nicely.

Instead of a ball, you’re deflecting the invaders’ bullets back at them, to remove bricks and the invaders themselves. Now and again, Arkanoid is recalled more directly in a special attack that has you belt a ball around the place after firing it into action using a massive space bow.

Increasingly, though, the game is laced with strategy, since your real enemy is time. A couple of dozen levels in, you must carefully utilize powerful invaders’ blasts and onscreen bonuses to emerge victorious – not easy when neon is flying everywhere and the clock’s ticking down.

In platform adventure The Big Journey, fat cat Mr. Whiskers is on a mission. The chef behind his favorite dumplings has disappeared, and so the brave feline sets out to find him. The journey finds the chubby kitty rolling and leaping across – and through – all kinds of vibrant landscapes, packed with hills, tunnels, and enemies.

The game comes across a lot like PSP classic LocoRoco, in you tilting the screen to move, the protagonist’s rotundness increasing over time, and several of the landscape interactions (oddball elevators; smashing through fragile barriers).

But The Big Journey very much has its own character, not least in the knowing humor peppered throughout what might otherwise have been a saccharine child-like storyline about a gluttonous cartoon cat.

As it is, The Big Journey isn’t terribly challenging, but it is enjoyable, whether you drink the visuals in and just dodder to the end, or simultaneously try to find every collectible and beat the speed-run time limits.

Initial moments in point-and-click adventure Milkmaid of the Milky Way are so sedate the game’s in danger of falling over. You play as Ruth, a young woman living on a remote farm in a 1920s Norwegian fjord. She makes dairy products, sold to a town several hours away. Then, without warning, a massive gold spaceship descends, stealing her cows.

Fortunately, Ruth decides she’s having none of that, leaps aboard the spaceship, and finds herself embroiled in a tale of intergalactic struggles. To say much more would spoil things, but we can say that this old-school adventure is a very pleasant way to spend a few hours.

The puzzles are logical yet satisfying; the visuals are gorgeous; and the game amusingly provides all of its narrative in rhyme, which is pleasingly quaint and nicely different.

Hero of the hour Dennis finds himself unicycling naked in this gorgeous platform game best described as flat-out nuts. In iCycle, you dodder left or right, leap over obstacles, and break your fall with a handy umbrella, all the while attempting to grab ice as surreal landscapes collapse and morph around you.

The mission feels like a journey into what might happen if Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam were let loose on game design. One minute, you’re entering a top-hatted gent’s ear to find and kiss a ‘reverse mermaid’ on a levitating bike; the next you’re in a terrifying silhouette funfair that might have burst forth from a fevered mind during a particularly unpleasant nightmare.

Some of the levels are tough, and there’s a bit of grinding to unlock new outfits. But if you want something a bit more creative on your Android, you can’t do much better than iCycle.

On first playing Invert, you might think you’ve seen it all before. You sit in front of a grid, and tap buttons at its edge to flip patterns of tiles. The aim is to get them all to be the same color within a limited number of moves.

The smart thing about Invert is its restless nature. Rather than giving you endless puzzles based around a boring square grid, it keeps shaking things up. New buttons appear that perform different actions, and alternate grid types force you to keep changing your approach.

Invert’s not thrilling, but it is compelling – it keeps you cracking ‘just one more’ puzzle, until you eventually realize you’re dozens in, and it’s gone dark outside.

It’s wrong to coo about graphics when a game is otherwise uneven, but with Lumino City we’re going to do it anyway. And that’s because this puzzle-oriented adventure is drop-dead gorgeous, with truly stunning hand-crafted scenes that feel like someone squeezed a ridiculously expensive animated movie into your Android device.

The puzzling is more variable. The quest to locate your kidnapped grandfather requires defeating numerous logic puzzles. Some are irritating, with plug/switch events becoming old long before the end. But it’s hard to grumble on encountering a pathfinding puzzle involving a house that literally spins round, and a really sweet scene where you learn a song on a guitar.

Our advice: gawp at the visuals, drink in the atmosphere, and use a walkthrough to speed through the boring bits.

Anyone who thought Nintendo would convert a standard handheld take on Mario to Android was always on a hiding to nothing. But that’s probably just as well – Nintendo’s classic platformers are reliant on tight controls, rather than you fumbling about on a slippy glass surface.

Super Mario Run tries a different tack, infusing plenty of ‘Marioness’ into an auto-runner, where you guide the mustachioed plumber by tapping the screen to have him perform actions.

You might consider this reductive; also, Super Mario Run is a touch short, and the ‘kingdom builder’ sub-game alongside the main act falls flat. Still, really smart level design wins the day, and completists will have fun replaying the world tour mode time and again to collect the many hard-to-reach coins.

If you never thought a solitaire-like card game was an ideal framework for a tense stealth title, you’re probably not alone. But somehow Card Thief cleverly mashes up cards and sneaking about.

The game takes place on a three-by-three grid of cards. For each move, you plan a route to avoid getting duffed up by guards (although pickpocketing them on the way past is fair game, obviously), loot a chest, and make for an exit.

Card Thief is not the easiest game to get into, with its lengthy tutorial and weird spin on cards. But this is a game with plenty of nuance and depth that becomes increasingly rewarding the more you play, gradually unlocking its secrets. It’s well worth the effort.

In The Escapists, you find yourself in jail with lots of dinky pixelated inmates. The aim, as the title suggests, is to get out of there – but how?

The game’s not telling. Beyond a very brief tutorial, The Escapists is very much a sandbox, dumping you in its universe and having you explore. You go about your day as an inmate, using opportune moments to venture into places you shouldn’t, and fashion the tools you need to escape.

The going can be slow, and there’s always the risk of someone wrecking your plan at the last second, especially if you get complacent. But this is nonetheless a compelling puzzle/strategy title – and if you’ve always wanted to whack a guard with a bar of soap in a sock, The Escapists is the game for you.

A young boy hurls himself down a massive well, with only his ‘gunboots’ for protection. There are so many questions there (not least: what parent would buy their kid boots that are also guns?), but it sets the scene for a superb arcade shooter with surprising smarts and depth.

At first in Downwell, you’ll probably be tempted to blast everything, but ammo soon runs out. On discovering you reload on landing, you’ll then start to jump about a lot. But further exploration of the game’s mechanics reaps all kinds of rewards, leading to you bounding on monsters, venturing into tunnels to find bonus bling, and getting huge scores once you crack the secrets behind combos.

The game might look like it’s arrived on your Android device from a ZX Spectrum, but this is a thoroughly modern and hugely engaging blaster.

In an awkwardly laid out space colony, Cosmic Express tasks you with setting out train tracks that enable colorful little aliens to get to their destinations. Each little biodome has an entrance and at least one exit, and the tracks you draw become increasingly labyrinthine as the tests gradually toughen.

Visually, the game’s a treat, and the premise is simple enough that anyone can pick it up – there’s not even any crisscrossing of tracks, like you get in the ostensibly similar Trainyard. But eventually you realize Cosmic Express is as devious as that classic, not least on encountering gloopy aliens who leave carriages in such a state no-one else wants to get on.

Smartly, the game’s branching level unlocks also mean you’ve always got several puzzles to try, rather than ending up stuck on a particularly tough one.

That game where you cast a shadow on the wall and attempt to make a vaguely recognizable rabbit? That’s Shadowmatic, only instead of your hands, you manipulate all kinds of levitating detritus, spinning and twisting things until you abruptly – and magically – fashion a silhouette resembling anything from a seahorse to an old-school telephone.

The game looks gorgeous, with stunning lighting effects and objects that look genuinely real as they dangle in the air. Mostly though, this is a game about tactility and contemplation – it begs to be explored, and to make use of your digits in a way virtual D-pads could never hope to compete with.

You might have played enough automatic runners to last several lifetimes, but Chameleon Run nonetheless deserves to be on your Android device. And although the basics might initially seem overly familiar (tap to jump and ensure your sprinting chap doesn’t fall down a hole), there’s in fact a lot going on here.

Each level has been meticulously designed, which elevates Chameleon Run beyond its algorithmically generated contemporaries. Like the best platform games, you must commit every platform and gap to memory to succeed. But also, color-switching and ‘head jumps’ open up new possibilities for route-finding – and failure.

In the former case, you must ensure you’re the right color before landing on colored platforms. With the latter, you can smash your head into a platform above to give you one more chance to leap forward and not tumble into the void.

There’s a distinct sense of minimalism at the heart of Edge, along with a knowing nod to a few arcade classics of old. Bereft of a story, the game simply tasks you with guiding a trundling cube to the end of each blocky level. Along the way, you grab tiny glowing cubes. On reaching the goal, you get graded on your abilities.

This admittedly doesn’t sound like much on paper, but Edge is a superb arcade game. The isometric visuals are sharp, and the head-bobbing soundtrack urges you onwards. The level design is the real star, though, with surprisingly imaginative objectives and hazards hewn from the isometric landscape.

And even when you’ve picked your way to the very end, there’s still those grades to improve by shaving the odd second off of your times.

Still not sure? Try out the 12-level demo. Eager for more? Grab Edge Extended, which is every bit as good as the original.

Graphic adventure Myst was a smash hit on its release in the mid-1990s, and even today is likely to make PC gamers of a certain vintage misty-eyed on hearing its name.

The game tasked you with roaming small islands, interacting with objects to solve frequently obtuse puzzles that would propel you further on in Myst’s strange backstory (involving magical books that trap people within or fling them at other worlds).

Time marches on, but realMyst for Android is nonetheless worthy of attention. The original Myst’s ’slideshow’ style of movement has been transformed into a free-roaming adventure, modernizing a game that’s still a classic, with reasonably robust touchscreen navigation.

And while there’s too much backtracking, the brain-smashing puzzling is rewarding to the patient and thoughtful – as is the game as a whole, not least for anyone keen to explore every nook and cranny within a set of imaginative tiny worlds.

In stills, Causality resembles a run-of-the-mill puzzler that’d be easy to dismiss. But it’s in fact an Android gem – a terrifically clever game that messes around with time travel… and your head.

The aim is to get each spaceman to an exit that matches the color on their helmet. They automatically run, and so must be guided using arrow tiles, while also dealing with buttons, switches, and hazards, like mysterious shadowy spacemen that devour anyone they touch.

Portals complicate matters further, flinging spacemen through time so they can assist their earlier selves. It takes a while to grasp the nuances of this concept, but Causality lets you experiment, moving back and forth through time until you find a solution to any given problem, whilst quietly grumbling that, if anything, that bloke in Doctor Who has it easy.

Harking back to classic side-on platformers, Traps n' Gemstones dumps an Indiana Jones wannabe into a massive pyramid, filled with mummies, spiders and traps; from here he must figure out how to steal all the bling, uncover all the secrets, and then finally escape.

Beyond having you leap about, grab diamonds, and keep indigenous explorer-killing critters at bay, Traps n' Gemstones is keen to have you explore. Work your way deeper into the pyramid and you’ll find objects that when placed somewhere specific open up new pathways.

But although this one’s happy to hurl you back to gaming’s halcyon days, it’s a mite kinder to newcomers than the games that inspired it.

Get killed and you can carry on from where you left off. More of a hardcore player? Death wipes your score, so to doff your fedora in a truly smug manner, you’ll have to complete the entire thing without falling to the game’s difficult challenges.

There’s more than a hint of Zelda about Oceanhorn, but that’s not a bad thing when it means embarking on one of the finest arcade adventures on mobile.

You awake to find a letter from your father, who it turns out has gone from your life. You’re merely left with his notebook and a necklace. Thanks, Dad!

Being that this is a videogame, you reason it’s time to get questy, exploring the islands of the Uncharted Seas, chatting with folks, stabbing hostile wildlife, uncovering secrets and mysteries, and trying very hard to not get killed.

You get a chapter for free, to test how the game works on your device (its visual clout means fairly powerful Android devices are recommended); a single IAP unlocks the rest. The entire quest takes a dozen hours or so – which will likely be some of the best gaming you’ll experience on Android.

Pinball games rarely look as good as the tables in Atomic Pinball Collection. And, fortunately, this pair of beauties plays wonderfully as well. In Masks of Glory, you get a colorful, fast, ramp-laden table that finds you as an underdog wrestling your way to glory. In Revenge of the Rob-O-Bot, you face off against an angry giant droid laying waste to a city.

The pinball is closer in nature to traditional fare than the fantastical offerings found in the likes of Zen Pinball – you feel Atomic’s tables could exist in real life. And that’s even more apparent when you start noticing details such as slightly worn components and missing flecks of paint.

Still not convinced? You can download the entire thing for free, only paying up when you hit a million points on either table.

Some people argue programming is perhaps the best ‘game’ of all – and a brilliant puzzle. Those might be people you’d sooner avoid at parties, but Human Resource Machine suggests they could have a point. In this compelling and unique puzzle game, you control the actions of a worker drone by way of programming-like sequences.

The premise is to complete tasks by converting items in your inbox to whatever’s required in the outbox – for example, only sending zeroes. Like much programming, success often relies on logic, with you fashioning loops, and using actions such as ‘jump’, ‘if’ statements, and ‘copy’. These are arranged via drag and drop on a board at the right-hand side of the screen.

That might all sound impenetrable, but Human Resource Machine is in fact elegant, friendly, and approachable, not least due to developer Tomorrow Corporation’s penchant for infusing games with personality and heart.

Somewhat akin to The Room in space, _PRISM is all about manipulating floating mechanical geometric shapes, trying to get at the gem buried within.

Each of the structures before you is ridiculously intricate, with all manner of switches to flick, patterns to match, and components to twist and rotate. At any given moment, a seemingly innocuous action may entirely change the setup of what’s before you, unveiling further puzzles to wrap your head around.

Although we mentioned The Room earlier, _PRISM isn’t in the same league when it comes to difficulty.

Instead, _PRISM’s challenge is fairly slight, even if you sometimes require finger gymnastics in order to succeed. But its atmosphere and cleverly designed challenges make it well worth seeking out for puzzle fans – especially if you’ve a larger Android device to play on.

Coming across like a sandbox-oriented chill-out ‘zen’ take on seminal classic Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy has your little space-faring hero exploring a massive handcrafted world peppered with walls, hero-squashing boulders, and plenty of bling.

Much like Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy is mostly about not being crushed by massive rocks – you dig paths through dirt, aiming to strategically use boulders to take out threats rather than your own head. But everything here is played out without stress (due to endless continues) and sometimes in slow motion (when floating through zero-gravity sections of space).

The result feels very different from the title that inspired it, but it’s no less compelling. Tension is replaced by exploration, and single-screen arcade thrills are sacrificed for a longer game. As you dig deeper into Captain Cowboy’s world, there are plenty of things awaiting discovery, and even tackling the next screen of dirt and stones always proves enjoyable. 

In the fantasy world of Solitairica, battles are fought to the death by way of cards. The foes barring the way to your quest’s goal set up walls of cards before them, which you smash through by matching those one higher or lower than the one you hold.

Then there are spells you cast by way of collected energies. Meanwhile, the creatures strike back with their own unique attacks, from strange worm-like beings nibbling your head, to grumpy forest dwellers making your cards grow beards.

In short, then, a modicum of fantasy role-playing wrapped around an entertaining and approachable card game. And on Android, you have the advantage of the game being free – a one-off IAP only figures if you want to avoid watching adverts, and have access to alternate decks to try your luck as a different character.

There’s a sweetness and a beauty about Samorost 3 that’s rare in a world of gaming so often obsessed with gore, blood, grittiness, and guns.

It features a little gnome trying to thwart the machinations of an evil wizard who largely obliterated a tiny universe with his steampunk dragon.

The gnome explores tiny planetoids, unearthing objects, interacting with the locals, and solving puzzles to move his quest towards a heroic conclusion.

Samorost 3 harks back to classic point-and-click fare. You tap about the place, and have your brain smashed out trying to find sometimes almost unreasonably obscure solutions.

But the magic here is in the lush visuals, lashings of personality (the little gnome bobbing about and gleefully punching the air during one music-oriented sequence), and gorgeous animations and audio that are integral to the entire production.

For a game that eventually pushes your observation skills, precision and nerve to breaking point, Linia is almost absurdly easy at first. At the top of the screen, you’re given a small selection of colors. The aim is to spear them in order, by slicing through shapes below.

This is simple enough when the shapes are static. It’s more than a tad tougher when the little blighters won’t stay still, or when they unsportingly evolve and mutate, doing everything they can to try and make you fail.

The end result is kind of a minimal, artistic, exactness-obsessed take on Fruit Ninja. And for our money, it’s an essential download – especially on devices with larger displays.

Anyone expecting the kind of free-roaming racing from the console versions of this title are going to be miffed, but Need for Speed: Most Wanted is nonetheless one of the finest games of its kind on Android. Yes, the tracks are linear, with only the odd shortcut, but the actual racing bit is superb.

You belt along the seedy streets of a drab, gray city, trying to win events that will boost your ego and reputation alike. Wins swell your coffers, enabling you to buy new vehicles for entering special events.

The game looks gorgeous on Android and has a high-octane soundtrack to urge you onwards. But mostly, this one’s about the controls – a slick combination of responsive tilt and effortless drifting that makes everything feel closer to OutRun 2 than typically sub-optimal mobile racing fare.

The original and best of the GO games, Hitman GO should never have worked. It reimagines the console stealth shooter as a dinky clockwork boardgame. Agent 47 scoots about, aiming to literally knock enemies off the board, and then reach and bump off his primary target.

Visually, it’s stunning – oddly adorable, but boasting the kind of clarity that’s essential for a game where a single wrong move could spell disaster. And the puzzles are well designed, too, with distinct objectives that often require multiple solutions to be found.

If you’re a fan of Agent 47’s exploits on consoles, you might be a bit nonplussed by Hitman GO, but despite its diorama stylings, it nonetheless manages to evoke some of the atmosphere and tension from the console titles, while also being entirely suited to mobile play.

A knowingly smart shooter, The Bug Butcher channels classic arcade titles but wraps everything up in a charming cartoon style, peppered with energetic, humorous dialogue.

The backstory is that you’re trying to ensure those few scientists that remain in an infested research facility aren’t eaten by whatever horrors they created. Mostly, this involves shooting said horrors, which often split apart.

You’ll also have to save any scientists grabbed by aliens who think they’re a tasty snack, while scooping up bonus weapons when you fancy unleashing quite a lot of projectile hell.

Do take a little care, though, if you’re using a larger Android device – the controls have a tendency to assume you have banana thumbs.
 

Based on cult web hit Gimme Friction Baby by Wouter Visser, Orbital has you fire orbs into a tiny galactic void. Each bounces, comes to rest, and expands until touching something else. If one crosses the danger line above your cannon, well, it's game over.

It’s much harder to explain this game than to play it, but we’ll do our best. The screen rapidly fills, but you can obliterate existing orbs by firing others at them. During collisions, the numbers within static orbs decrease by one. Should any orb's number hit zero, it explodes, the wake depleting nearby orbs.
See, we told you.

Density of explanation aside, this is a beautiful game of dazzling neon and increasing tension. Larger balls create huge explosions and the potential for combos and higher scores, but leave you less room to maneuver.

Varied modes test your timing (Pure's oscillating gun), aim (Supernova's manual cannon), and whether you're Brian Cox (Gravity's orbs that arc around those already on the screen).

You've got to love a game developer that figured it would be a smart move to mash together the swipe-based navigation from dating app Tinder and a strategy title about ruling a kingdom. The danger, perhaps, is Reigns could be seen as simple and throwaway – yet it's anything but.

Sure, the basics are extremely straightforward: you deal with a never-ending stream of requests from your subjects by swiping left or right to respond. But your decisions affect how content the church, people, army, and treasury are. If any get too miffed (or even too happy), your reign comes to an abrupt end.

Cleverly, you then continue on as your heir, and Reigns' true genius becomes apparent. While you can blithely swipe your way through the ages, there are missions to complete, solutions to which may only become apparent over a great many years. Want to beat the Devil? You'll have a few centuries to prepare!

You have to feel for the little beastie in Badland 2. Having somehow survived all manner of horrors last time round, the winged critter is now hurled into an even deadlier circle of hell. As before, the aim is to reach an exit, avoiding traps such as massive saw-blades, bubbling magma, and flamethrowers belching toasty death in all directions.

Your means of survival is mostly to flap a bit. This time, though, rather than prod the screen to flap rightwards, you can flap left or right, which comes in handy for navigating deranged levels that now scroll in all directions.

There's perhaps a lack of freshness in this sequel, despite such new tricks and a smattering of unfamiliar traps, but Badland 2 remains a visually stunning and relentlessly cruel arcade experience among the very best on Android. (Do, though, buy the IAP – the atmosphere and momentum is obliterated when ads appear.) 

Adam Jensen is a man with a plan – and also quite a lot of cybernetic implants. The plan is to take down the bad guys – and the cybernetic implants go some way towards helping with that, enabling Jensen to remote-hack computer equipment as he makes his way round this angular turn-based take on the popular console series.

Rather than getting all first-person, Deus Ex GO plays out more like clockwork chess, as you move from node to node, activating switches, manipulating enemies, and trying very hard to not get horribly stabbed to death.

Like its forerunners, Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO, this puzzler surprisingly echoes much of the atmosphere of its console forebears; and while it perhaps lacks Hitman's sheer audacity and Lara Croft's elegance, the brain-bending puzzles still appeal.

One of the most exhilarating games on mobile, Impossible Road finds a featureless white ball barreling along a ribbon-like track that twists and turns into the distance. The aim is survival – and the more gates you pass through, the higher your score.

The snag is that Impossible Road is fast, and the track bucks and turns like the unholy marriage of a furious unbroken stallion and a vicious roller-coaster.

Once the physics click, however, you’ll figure out the risks you can take, how best to corner, and what to do when hurled into the air by a surprise bump in the road.

The game also rewards ‘cheats’. Leave the track, hurtle through space for a bit, and rejoin – you’ll get a score for your airborne antics, and no penalty for any gates missed. Don’t spend too long aloft though - a few seconds is enough for your ball to be absorbed into the surrounding nothingness.
 

There’s a disarmingly hypnotic and almost meditative quality to the early stages of Mini Metro. You sit before a blank underground map of a major metropolis, and drag out lines between stations that periodically appear.

Little trains then cart passengers about, automatically routing them to their stop, their very movements building a pleasing plinky plonky generative soundtrack.

As your underground grows, though, so does the tension. You’re forced to choose between upgrades, balance where trains run, and make swift adjustments to your lines. Should a station become overcrowded, your entire network is closed. (So...not very like the real world, then.)

Do well enough and you unlock new cities, with unique challenges. But even failure isn’t frustrating, and nor is the game’s repetitive nature a problem, given that Mini Metro is such a joy to play.

A massive upgrade over the developer’s own superb but broadly overlooked MegaCity, Concrete Jungle is a mash-up of puzzler, city management and deck builder.

The basics involve the strategic placement of buildings on a grid, with you aiming to rack up enough points to hit a row’s target. At that point, the row vanishes, and more building space scrolls into view.

Much of the strategy lies in clever use of cards, which affect nearby squares – a factory reduces the value of nearby land, for example, but an observatory boosts the local area. You quickly learn plonking down units without much thought messes up your future prospects.

Instead, you must plan in a chess-like manner – even more so when facing off against the computer opponent in brutally difficult head-to-head modes. But while Concrete Jungle is tough, it’s also fair – the more hours you put in, the better your chances. And it’s worth giving this modern classic plenty of your time.

There are varied mobile takes on limbless wonder Rayman's platform gaming exploits. The 1995 original exists on Android in largely faithful form, but feels ill-suited to touchscreens; and Rayman Adventures dabbles in freemium to the point it leaves a bad taste.

But Rayman Jungle Run and Rayman Fiesta Run get things right.

They rethink console-oriented platformers as auto-runners – which might sound reductive. However, this is more about distillation and focus than outright simplification.

Tight level design and an emphasis on timing regarding when to jump, rebound and attack forces you to learn layouts and the perfect moment to trigger actions, in order to get the in-game bling you need to progress.

Both titles are sublime, but Fiesta Run is marginally the better of the two - a clever take on platforming that fizzes with energy, looks fantastic, and feels like it was made for Android rather than a 20-year-old console.

A decidedly dizzying take on platform games, Circa Infinity exists in a sparse world of concentric circles. Your little stick man scoots around the edge of the largest, and a prod of the action button when he's atop a pizza-slice cut-out flips him inside the disc.

He can then make a leap for the bobbing circle within, at which point the process repeats.

Only the next disc may be patrolled by any number of critters intent on ejecting the stick man from their particular circle.

The net result is an odd-looking, disorienting arcade title that proves fresh and exhilarating. With 50 levels and five boss fights, making it to the end of Circa Infinity is a stern challenge; getting there quickly should test even the most hardened mobile gamer.

A few levels in and you might wonder whether klocki has taken the notion of a relaxing puzzle game a bit too far.

It's easy almost to the point of being a sedative, merely having you swap tiles on a flat plane, in order to fashion complete pathways. But klocki is a smart cookie, very gradually introducing new concepts so slowly you barely notice; but pretty soon you find yourself immersed in rich and complex tests.

Later levels have you battle three-dimensional shapes, switches, and tiles that rotate; and despite the minimal aesthetic and noodly audio, it never really gets old. The game is, however, quite short - a few hours and you'll probably be done.

Still, the low price-tag ensures klocki remains great value, especially if you take the time to savour its charms rather than blazing through its challenges at breakneck speed.

The Room is a series about mysteries within mysteries. It begins with a box. Fiddling with dials and switches causes things to spring to life elsewhere, and you soon find boxes within the boxes, layers unravelling before you; it's the videogame equivalent of Russian dolls meets carpentry, as breathed into life by a crazed inventor.

The Room's curious narrative and fragments of horror coalesce in follow-up The Room Two, which expands the 'boxes' into more varied environments – a séance room; a pirate ship. Movement remains restricted and on rails, but you're afforded a touch more freedom as you navigate your way through a strange clockwork world.

The Room Three is the most expansive of them all, featuring intricate, clever puzzles, as you attempt to free yourself from The Craftsman and his island of deranged traps and trials.

Get all three games, and play them through in order, preferably in a dark room when rain's pouring down outside for best effect. It's a terrifying and - ultimately - infuriating experience that will have you toying with the idea of having to go online for walkthroughs until you finally crack the mystery.

There are some clues, but generally these are very gentle hints at best.

You might moan about trains when you're again waiting for a late arrival during your daily commute, but think yourself lucky reality doesn't match Train Conductor World. Here, trains rocket along, often towards nasty head-on collisions. It's your job to drag out temporary bridges to avoid calamity while simultaneously sending each train to its proper destination.

From the off, Train Conductor World is demanding, and before long a kind of 'blink and everything will be smashed to bits' mentality pervades. For a path-finding action-puzzler - Flight Control on tracks, if you will - it's an engaging and exciting experience.

The developers of Osmos HD call it an 'ambient arcade game'. It's a strange description, but apt, since Osmos is often about patience and subtlety. You guide a 'mote', which moves by expelling tiny pieces of itself. Seemingly floating in microscopic goop, it aims to munch motes smaller than itself, expand, and reign supreme.

This is easy enough when other motes don't fight back, but soon enough you're immersed in a kind of petri dish warfare, desperately trying to survive as various motes tear whatever amounts to each-other's faces off.

And then occasionally Osmos throws a further curveball, pitting you against the opposite extreme in scale, dealing with gravity and orbits as planet-like motes speed their way around deadly floating 'stars'.

In Her Story, you find yourself facing a creaky computer terminal with software designed by a sadist. It soon becomes clear the so-called L.O.G.I.C. database houses police interviews of a woman charged with murder.

But the tape's been hacked to bits and is accessible only by keywords; 'helpfully', the system only displays five search results at once.

Naturally, these contrivances exist to force you to play detective, eking out clues from video snippets to work out what to search for next, slowly piecing together the mystery in your brain.

A unique and captivating experience, Her Story will keep even the most remotely curious Android gamer gripped until the enigma is solved.

You probably need to be a bit of a masochist to get the most out of Snakebird, which is one of the most brain-smashingly devious puzzlers we've ever set eyes on. It doesn't really look or sound the part, frankly - all vibrant colors and strange cartoon 'snakebirds' that make odd noises.

But the claustrophobic floating islands the birds must crawl through, supporting each other (often literally) in their quest for fruit, are designed very precisely to make you think you've got a way forward, only to thwart you time and time again.

The result is a surprisingly arduous game, but one that's hugely rewarding when you crack a particularly tough level, at which point you'll (probably rightly) consider yourself some kind of gaming genius.

There's something of a children's animation vibe about Warp Shift, with expressive Pixar-like protagonist Pi floating about brightly colored boxes, aiming to find an exit that will take her a step closer to home.

At first, it's a bit too simple. You slide boxes, tap to make Pi scoot about, and sit there smugly, wrinkling your nose at how easy it all is.

But Warp Shift gradually starts clobbering you with additional tests: colored doors that must be lined up; a cuboid chum to rescue and lob at the exit; switches; move limits to attain enough stars to unlock subsequent stages.

The mix of enchanting visuals, familiar mechanics and gently stiffening challenges proves stimulating and captivating.

You initially get the feeling Rush Rally 2 is treading a fine line, unsure whether to steer towards being an arcade game or a simulator. It certainly lacks the demented rocket-like speeds of an Asphalt 8, but Rush Rally 2's more measured gameplay nonetheless gradually reveals a sense of fun.

Sure, the standard rally mode can be sedate, although the game's nonetheless happy to frequently catapult your car up a hillside when you mess up a turn. And then there are weird missions, such as dodging missiles as you negotiate hairpin bends (Colin McRae never had to deal with such things.)

But when belting along in Rally Cross mode, Rush Rally 2 suddenly clicks. You'll use other cars as brakes and spin off into the gravel, before gunning the engine and blazing back into the thick of it. Even then, this racer's a more challenging and thoughtful affair than most, but it's just as gleefully exciting when you're bombing down the final straight, and take the chequered flag by fractions of a second.

It's always the way: you're minding your own business when - BOOM! - you're suddenly propelled into a gargantuan space maze. At least it's the way if you're Captain Cowboy. This smart arcade title comes across like seminal classic Boulder Dash in space. You dig through dirt, grab diamonds, and avoid being crushed by boulders within the asteroid.

There are also floaty space bits, nasty space laser turrets, space bus stops and a space disco. At least, we're told that's the case, because we've never found the last of those things; but we'll keep trying, because Captain Cowboy is superb.

(The trailer is also one of the best we've seen, so watch it and then buy the game.)

One of the most gorgeous games around, FOTONICA at its core echoes one-thumb leapy game Canabalt. The difference is FOTONICA has you move through a surreal and delicate Rez-like 3D vector landscape, holding the screen to gain speed, and only soaring into the air when you lift a finger.

Smartly, FOTONICA offers eight very different and finite challenges, enabling you to learn their various multi-level pathways and seek out bonuses to ramp up your high scores. Get to grips with this dreamlike runner and you can then pit your wits (and thumbs) against three slowly mutating endless zones.

You might narrow your eyes at so-called 'realism' in mobile sports titles, given that this usually means 'a game that looks a bit like when you watch telly'. But Touchgrind Skate 2 somehow manages to evoke the feel of skateboarding, your fingers becoming tiny legs that urge the board about the screen.

There's a lot going on in Touchgrind Skate 2, and the control system is responsive and intricate, enabling you to perform all manner of tricks. It's not the most immediate of titles - you really need to not only run through the tutorial but fully master and memorize each step before moving on.

Get to grips with your miniature skateboard and you'll find one of the most fluid and rewarding experiences on mobile. Note that for free you get one park to scoot about in, but others are available via IAP.

The bar's set so low in modern mobile gaming that the word 'premium' has become almost meaningless. But Leo's Fortune bucks the trend, and truly deserves the term. It's a somewhat old-school side-on platform game, featuring a gruff furball hunting down the thief who stole his gold (and then, as is always the way, dropped coins at precise, regular intervals along a lengthy, perilous pathway).

The game is visually stunning, from the protagonist's animation through to the lush, varied backdrops. The game also frequently shakes things up, varying its pace from Sonic-style loops to precise pixel-perfect leaps.

It at times perhaps pushes you a bit too far — late on, we found some sections a bit too finicky and demanding. But you can have as many cracks at a section as you please, and if you master the entire thing, there's a hardcore speedrun mode that challenges you to complete the entire journey without dying.

Most online play pits you against other people, but Dreii is all about cooperation. The aim is to build structures from geometric shapes, having them reach a pre-defined point for a set period of time, whereupon you can move on to the next task.

That sounds deathly dull, but Dreii's many quirks transform a basic building blocks game into a mesmerizing experience. First, your character is a strange patterned levitating creature, which grabs shapes with a fragile tether. On early levels, controlling everything is tough enough, but when you have to carefully stack shapes and battle gales and water, Dreii becomes a hugely challenging experience.

The online component is a slice of genius. Hang around a level for a short while and someone else will likely drop in to lend a hand. Communication is limited to just a few stock words, but you'll soon form your own language with your temporary friends.

You can then wiggle your levitating beast to try and get across that you're thrilled at completing a particularly fiendish task or frustrated that a sausage-fingered buffoon has just demolished a carefully constructed tower.

At its core, Forget-Me-Not is Pac-Man mixed with Rogue. You scoot about algorithmically generated single-screen mazes, gobbling down flowers, grabbing a key, and then making a break for the exit.

But what makes Forget-Me-Not essential is how alive its tiny dungeons feel. Your enemies don't just gun for you, but are also out to obliterate each other and, frequently, the walls of the dungeon, reshaping it as you play.

There are tons of superb details to find buried within the game's many modes, and cheapskates can even get on board with the free version, although that locks much of its content away until you've munched enough flowers.

If there was any justice, Forget-Me-Not would have a permanent place at the top of the Google Play charts. It is one of the finest arcade experiences around, not just on Android, but on any platform - old or new.

One thing we didn't see coming was the resurgence of the text adventure on mobile devices. But Lifeline is even simpler than the likes of Infocom's early 1980's classic Zork, mechanically being little more than a branching Choose Your Own Adventure narrative.

But the way it's executed propels it into must-have territory. Lifeline begins with a plea for help, and you're soon drawn into a tale of desperate survival, with your choices dictating whether a stranded astronaut will live or die.

Great writing soon has you wrapped up in the story, and clever use of time makes everything feel all the more real. For example, you may leave your remote friend to trek across a massive crater. In a typical game, you'd immediately discover how they got on; here, they might respond hours later, or, more ominously, not at all.

Giving you a sense of the emptiness and vastness of space, and the risks in exploring the void, isn't easy for a bite-sized survival game, but Last Horizon somehow succeeds.

The idea is to leave your broken world behind, roam the galaxy in your rocket, and 'harvest' living worlds. Doing so loads information into your terraforming kit, for when you reach your destination.

During your journey you battle massive suns, asteroids, black holes, alien lifeforms, and lots of gravity. This is simple fare - more Lunar Lander than EVE Online - but it has a great sense of atmosphere. And although repeating the first three flights can be a little tiresome if you keep dying (hint: be more patient), Flight X mode's procedurally generated maps provide great replay value.

If you're fed up with racing games paying more attention to whether the tarmac looks photorealistic rather than how much fun it should be to zoom along at insane speeds, check out Horizon Chase. This tribute to old-school arcade titles is all about the sheer joy of racing, rather than boring realism.

The visuals are vibrant, the soundtrack is jolly and cheesy, and the racing finds you constantly battling your way to the front of an aggressive pack.

If you fondly recall Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge and Top Gear, don't miss this one. (Note that Horizon Chase gives you five tracks for free. To unlock the rest, there's a single £2.29/US$2.99 IAP.)

Old-school 8-bit platformers just don't work on touchscreens, due to pixel-perfect gameplay that demands tight, tactile controls. I Am Level's genius is in fusing the core elements of such games (Spectrum-style graphics, single-screen puzzle-oriented challenges, and an explorable map) with modern mobile thinking.

Thus, each of your efforts builds on the previous one, and your rotund avatar gets about by you tilting your device or pinging him across the screen using springs and flippers. It's essentially Jet Set Willy meets pinball and it's fantastic.

Sadly, developer Stewart Hogarth passed away in 2015, at the far too young age of 34. So snap this one up before it vanishes forever, and play a few games in tribute of a talented games creator.

The shard's of Jennifer's memories are scattered about the world of Lost Journey, and it's up to you to collect them, largely by bounding about platforms in small puzzle-oriented levels that are not that much bigger than the screen. The twist — or, more accurately, flip — is that you can invert the level at any point. On doing so, pits become hills, giving you the means to reach previously inaccessible places.

Anyone looking for speedy Mario-style larks might find Lost Journey's take on platforming rather sedate. But if you're keen on more thoughtful platform fare, it's a very good buy; and the atmospherics and visuals certainly make for an aesthetically pleasurable time as you try to help Jennifer find her lost self.

There's a great sense of freedom from the second you immerse yourself in the strange and futuristic world of Power Hover. The robot protagonist has been charged with pursuing a thief who's stolen batteries that power the city.

The droid therefore grabs a hoverboard and scythes across gorgeous minimal landscapes, such as deserts filled with colossal marching automatons, glittering blue oceans, and a dead grey human city.

In lesser hands, Power Hover could have been utterly forgettable. After all, you're basically tapping left and right to change the direction of a hoverboard, in order to collect batteries and avoid obstacles. But the production values here are stunning.

Power Hover is a visual treat, boasts a fantastic soundtrack, and gives mere hints of a story, enabling your imagination to run wild. Best of all, the floaty controls are perfect; you might fight them at first, but once they click, Power Hover becomes a hugely rewarding experience.

(On Android, Power Hover is a free download; to play beyond the first eight levels requires a single £2.29/$2.99 IAP.)

It turns out what makes a good snowman is three very precisely rolled balls of snow stacked on top of each other. And that's the core of this adorable puzzle game, which has more than a few hints of Towers of Hanoi and Sokoban about it as your little monster goes about building icy friends to hug.

What sets A Good Snowman apart from its many puzzle-game contemporaries on Android is a truly premium nature. You feel that the developer went to great efforts to polish every aspect of the production, from the wonderful animation to puzzles that grow in complexity and deviousness, without you really noticing — until you get stuck on a particularly ferocious one several hours in.

This one's all about the bling - and also the not being crushed to death by falling rocks and dirt. Doug Dug riffs off of Mr Driller, Boulder Dash and Dig Dug, the dwarf protagonist digging deep under the earth on an endless quest for shimmering gems. Cave-ins aren't the only threat, though - the bowels of the earth happen to be home to a surprising array of deadly monsters.

Some can be squashed and smacked with Doug's spade (goodbye, creepy spider!), but others are made of sterner stuff (TROLL! RUN AWAY!). Endlessly replayable and full of character, Doug Dug's also surprisingly relaxing - until the dwarf ends up under 150 tonnes of rubble.

There are plenty of great pinball games for Android, but Pinball Arcade is a bit different. Rather than reworking an old PC hit or going nuts with animatronics and effects that simply wouldn't work in the real world, this app seeks to become a fully playable digital museum - essentially (legal) MAME for pinball.

You get Tales of the Arabian Nights for free, and one other table is regularly unlocked for unlimited play. They all look superb and work especially well on 7-inch tablets and above. Importantly, the tables also play like the real thing, whether you grab old-school classic Black Hole, the creepy and weird Bride of Pin•Bot, or more modern fare like The Addams Family.

This is one of those 'rub your stomach, pat your head' titles that has you play two games at once. At the top of the screen, it's an endless runner, with your little bloke battling all manner of monsters, and pilfering loot. The rest of the display houses what's essentially a Bejeweled-style gem-swapper. The key is in matching items so that the running bit goes well - like five swords when you want to get all stabby.

Also, there's the building a boat bit. Once a run ends, you return to your watery home, which gradually acquires new rooms and residents. Some merely power up your next sprint, but others help you amass powerful weaponry. Resolutely indie and hugely compelling, You Must Build a Boat will keep you busily swiping for hours.

Poor Hendrik: an ill wind blew away his brand-new house and his hair, and the only thing he has left is a pair of teleporting shoes. You must find the scattered remains of his home, along with uncovering the mystery of the wind. This means using the power of a single digit to teleport your way through 120 levels set across four different worlds.

Yes, we're in one-thumb platform-game territory again, but Blown Away's elegant teleport mechanic (essentially, tap where you want to go) feels fresh and exciting. Each level is a carefully crafted puzzle to solve, requiring precision movement and timing as you teleport about and quickly recharge your shoes' batteries by marching along for a bit. Note that you get 30 stages for free, and can buy the rest of the game with a single $2.49/£2.14 IAP.

If you're of a certain age, the words 'Pro Pinball' will bring a huge grin to your face. In the 1990s, it was the pinball simulation series for your PC, featuring amazing physics, great table designs, and stunning visuals.

Pro Pinball for Android is a remastered take on Timeshock!, bringing the original table bang up to date with high-quality graphics and lighting, touchscreen controls, and a top-notch soundtrack. It still plays wonderfully, and we can only hope loads of people buy it, enabling the developer to bring other Pro Pinball tables to mobile.

The term 'masterpiece' is perhaps bandied about too often in gaming circles, but Limbo undoubtedly deserves such high praise. It features a boy picking his way through a creepy monochrome world, looking for his sister. At its core, Limbo is a fairly simple platform game with a smattering of puzzles, but its stark visuals, eerie ambience, and superb level design transforms it into something else entirely.

You'll get a chill the first time a chittering figure sneaks off in the distance, and your heart will pump when being chased by a giant arachnid, intent on spearing your tiny frame with one of its colossal spiked legs. That death is never the end — each scene can be played unlimited times until you progress — only adds to Limbo's disturbing nature.

People who today play mobile classic Canabalt and consider it lacking due to its simplicity don't understand what the game is trying to do. Canabalt is all about speed — the thrill of being barely in control, and of affording the player only the simplest controls for survival. ALONE… takes that basic premise and straps a rocket booster to it.

Instead of leaping between buildings, you're flying through deadly caverns, a single digit nudging your tiny craft up and down. Occasional moments of generosity — warnings about incoming projectiles; your ship surviving minor collisions and slowly regenerating — are offset by the relentlessly demanding pressure of simply staying alive and not slamming into a wall. It's an intoxicating combination, and one that, unlike most games in this genre, matches Canabalt in being genuinely exciting to play.

From a gaming perspective, the most important aspect of touchscreen devices is that they give you new ways to play, but relatively few developers take full advantage, instead choosing to ape traditional controls. Framed is an exception, flinging you headlong into an animated comic of sorts. Your aim is to improve the fortunes of a spy, fleeing from the cops — and worse.

Panels are dragged about and rotated, and new ideas regularly appear, including you having to carefully shift scenes on the page at exactly the right moment. This is a stylish and finite affair that ends before it gets old, leaving you satisfied but nonetheless hoping for more.

Has a bit of an 'indie' vibe about it this one, with Badland offering a weird, dark and gloomy world, in which you fly about in control of a… blob thing.

Your blob gets bigger and smaller, splits into loads of mini clones, and generally baffles you about what might lie around the next corner. We like a bit of a surprise, and this is full of them.

It's not often you see a game about the "joy of cultivation", and Prune is unlike anything you've ever played before. Apparently evolving from an experimental tree-generation script, the game has you swipe to shape and grow a plant towards sunlight by tactically cutting off specific branches.

That sounds easy, but the trees, shrubs and weeds in Prune don't hang around. When they're growing at speed and you find yourself faced with poisonous red orbs to avoid, or structures that damage fragile branches, you'll be swiping in a frantic race towards sunlight.

And all it takes is one dodgy swipe from a sausage finger to see your carefully managed plant very suddenly find itself being sliced in two.

A very, very pretty game, this. Monument Valley is based around the weird sort of impossible geometric shapes popularised by artist M. C. Escher, with its colourful maps bending and rotating in ways that appear to defy the laws of nature. You walk on walls, flip them, turn them into floors, avoid crows and marvel at how beautiful it all looks.

It's a short journey, but a joyful one. If you hanker for more when protagonist Ida's quest is complete, further adventures are available via IAP.

If you're not already familiar with Blizzard's Hearthstone then consider this a warning: it gets very, very addictive. A card game from the makers of World of Warcraft, Hearthstone sees you building decks from won or purchased cards to then battle against friends and strangers.

It's a surprisingly complex game that demands meticulous strategy. You can play and enjoy without paying a penny, but there are options to buy booster packs and add-on quests should you want to.

One of the PC "indie" world's big name smashes has arrived on Android, with the existential platform game yours to... enjoy. Or at least attempt to understand. You could call Thomas Was Alone a "platform game" if you wanted to be mean and disrespectful, but it's more about offering an atmospheric and thoughtful journey through an abstract world.

A bit like a piece of art, but let's not get into that debate here. I'm not being paid by the word.

This is the good stuff. So many mobile games make the claim of being console-quality, but Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is a rare title that fully delivers. Like its predecessors, this is a twin-stick shooter, a fight for survival against waves of deadly neon foes.

But as its name alludes to, Dimensions dispenses with flat arenas, instead wrapping play areas around geometric shapes. It's disorienting as a cube in space you're traversing lurches about, and exhilarating as you barely avoid the legions of ships lurking beyond an edge.

With 15 grids and 12 modes, along with an extensive single-player quest, Dimensions easily manages to be the finest game of its kind on mobile.

Of all the attempts to play with the conventions of novels and story-led gaming on mobile, 80 Days is the most fun. It takes place in an 1872 with a decidedly steampunk twist, but where Phileas Fogg remains the same old braggart. As his trusty valet, you must help Fogg make good on a wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. This involves managing/trading belongings and carefully selecting routes.

Mostly, though, interaction comes by way of a pacey, frequently exciting branched narrative, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book on fast-forward.

A late-2015 content update added 150,000 words, two new plots and 30 cities to an adventure that already boasted plenty of replay value — not least when you've experienced the joys of underwater trains and colossal mechanical elephants in India, and wonder what other marvels await discovery in this world of wonders.

Lara Croft games have landed on Android to rather variable results. The original Tomb Raider just doesn't work on touchscreens, and although Lara Croft: Relic Run is enjoyable enough, it's essentially a reskinned Temple Run.

Lara Croft GO is far more ambitious and seriously impressive. It rethinks Tomb Raider in much the same way Hitman GO reimagined the Hitman series.

Croft's adventures become turn-based puzzles, set in a world half-way between board game and gorgeous isometric minimalism. It shouldn't really work, but somehow Lara Croft GO feels like a Tomb Raider game, not least because of the wonderful sense of atmosphere, regular moments of tension, and superb level design.

If you've played Laser Dog's previous efforts, PUK and ALONE…, you'll know what you're in for with HoPiKo. This game takes no prisoners. If it did take them, it'd repeatedly punch them in the face before casually discarding them. HoPiKo, then, is not a game to be messed with. Instead, it feels more like a fight. In each of the dozens of hand-crafted tiny levels, you leap from platform to platform via deft drags and taps, attempting to avoid death.

Only, death is everywhere and very easy to meet. The five-stage level sets are designed to be completed in mere seconds, but also to break your brain and trouble your fingers. It's just on the right side of hellishly frustrating, meaning you'll stop short of flinging your device at the wall, emerging from your temporary red rage foolishly determined that you can in fact beat the game on your next go.

This is bonkers. Spaceteam uses the Android hardware to the max to build a properly innovative multiplayer-only game, where between two and four players come together to shout exciting space terminology at each other while battling the control panel of an exploding ship. It's very silly, like something that only came out on the Wii in Japan.

Quite possibly one of the best uses of the mobile phone accelerometer tech there's ever been, this, with motion control sending your fishing line down to the depths of the sea while you avoid fish. Then, on the way up, it's how you catch them. That's when it goes ridiculous, as the fisherman chucks them up in the air - and you shoot them to bank the money. Silly, but a must play.

Another mobile classic. Super Hexagon has two controls -- rotate left and rotate right. That's all you need to navigate the endless maze that spins out of the screen, in one of the mobile world's hardest, coolest, best-sounding and most moreish games. We order you to buy it. You literally have to.

The sort of silly maths game you might've played in your head before mobile phones emerged to absorb all our thought processes, Threes! really does take less than 30 seconds to learn.

You bash numbers about until they form multiples of three and disappear. That's it. There are stacks of free clones available, but if you won't spare the price of one massive bar of chocolate to pay for a lovely little game like this that'll amuse you for week, you're part of the problem and deserve to rot in a freemium hell where it costs 50p to do a wee.

The build 'em up phenomenon works brilliantly well on Android, thanks to the creator of the desktop original taking the time to do it justice.

It's a slimmed down interface you see here with on-screen buttons, but the basics are all in and the Survival and Creative modes are ready for play -- as is multiplayer mode over Wi-Fi.

An exciting new genre all of its own when it appeared, Flight Control created the world of the top-down air traffic control simulator. Literally three million times more exciting than it sounds, it's played by swiping 2D aeroplanes into runway landing slots, avoiding collisions and scoring for successful landings. Perfectly suited to touchscreen play.

Since Pac-Man graced arcades in the early 1980s, titles featuring the rotund dot-muncher have typically been split between careful iterations on the original, and mostly duff attempts to shoe-horn the character into other genres. CE DX is ostensibly the former, although the changes made from the original radically transform the game, making it easily the best Pac-Man to date.

Here, the maze is split in two. Eat all the dots from one half and a special object appears on the other; eat that and the original half's dots are refilled in a new configuration.

All the while, dozing ghosts you brush past join a spectral conga that follows your every move. The result is an intoxicating speedrun take on a seminal arcade classic, combined with the even more ancient Snake; somehow, this combination ends up being fresh, exciting and essential.

Seem to remember people thought this was quite good. For the price of a drink you can own one of the largest and most highly-rated video games of all time, to pop in and out of on your mobile phone. On-screen controls are never going to suit a game like this, but they are at least fully customisable - so you can get it how you like it.

Sort of a Minecraft… platform… puzzle 'em up, Terraria players dig and mine and fight their way through randomly generated worlds. Resources make weapons and houses, weapons and houses mean you stay alive, plus there's Wi-Fi multiplayer support that has it nearing parity with the version sold on desktops.

This cult classic from an earlier wave of the big home consoles has been converted beautifully to Android, capturing the slightly odd and amusing adventure perfectly - and with an interface that really works on today's touchscreens. It's an "indie" game from before there were indie games, silly and with some excellent and challenging puzzles.

The strategy titan has a hefty price tag attached to it on Android, but that's OK as the immense challenge it contains is likely to burn for longer than the sun.

The first Baldur's game, this faithful reworking of the 1998 classic also includes several of the PC game's post-release expansion packs, just in case the standard 60-hour marathon quest isn't hardcore enough for you.

Telltale has made a name for itself with story-driven episodic games and The Wolf Among Us is one of its best. Essentially a hard boiled fairy tale, you control the big bad wolf as he hunts a murderer through the mean streets of Fabletown.

Don't let the fairy tale setting fool you, this is a violent, mature game and it's one where your decisions have consequences, impacting not only what the other characters think of you but also who lives and who dies. Episode One is free but the remaining four will set you back a steep £9.59 / $14.99 / around AU$18. Trust us though, you'll want to see how this story ends.

Large, deep games are still relatively rare on Android, but you can add one more to the list with The Banner Saga. This Viking-inspired tactical RPG gives you control of over 25 different characters across 7 different classes as you battle your way through beautiful hand drawn environments and make decisions both in and out of combat which affect the story.

There's a lot to it, but its turn-based nature means controls are never a problem and you can take it at your own pace.

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Affinity Photo 1.6 comes with a raft of performance tweaks

Serif has released an update to Affinity Photo, its professional photo-editing application. Affinity Photo 1.6 comes with a raft of performance enhancements, more advanced text options, and new 'light' user interface and clever new 'stabilized' brush tool for smoother paint effects.

Serif says Affinity Photo 1.6 is faster, smoother and more powerful before with enhanced panning and zooming, and improved Live Filters performance. Live Filters have long been a selling point of Affinity Photo, enabling photographers to see the effect of a filter directly on the image while making adjustments.

The new brush stabilizer works in 'rope' or 'window' mode. In rope mode it acts as if you're dragging the brush tip at the end of a small rope – it sounds crazy but it's immediately intuitive and smooths brushstrokes really effectively. It should prove useful to digital artists in particular, but also photographers who want to add 'glow' effects to images and object outlines.

New font chooser

For those who need to add text to their images, Affinity Photo 1.6 brings a new font chooser drop-down menu with tabs for All fonts, Recent, Used and Favorites and, amongst other enhancements, new vertical alignment options within text frames.

If you shoot 360-degree images you'll now be able to correct image roll, and Serif says it's improved support for Photoshop plugins, which can be used from within Affinity Photo once your plugin folders have been located and added in its Preferences window.

Mac owners using Apple Photos to organize their image collections can now open images directly in Affinity Photo 1.6 from within the program (while it was originally a Mac-only program, Affinity Photo is now also available in a Windows version).

Another major selling points is that Affinity Photo offers the power of Photoshop, but as a subscription-free purchase. It's also dramatically cheaper than Photoshop ever was when it was available on a 'perpetual' licence, and costs just £48.99/$49.99.

Best image-editing software

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Meet the TechTalk 22: introducing the innovators to watch in 2018

To highlight the brilliant innovation going on in the British tech industry right now, weekly radio programme The TechTalk Show has named the 22 most exciting tech companies in the country, as chosen by a panel of top industry judges.

Show founder and innovation champion Sue Nelson was joined by Rich Walker, managing director of the renowned Shadow Robot Company; Holly Brockwell, award-winning tech journalist and founder of Gadgette.com; and Sarah Luxford, co-founder of Tech London Advocates’ Women in Tech working group.

Focusing on innovation, creativity and potential for future development, the judges were looking for fabulous ideas that are taking tech to places it has never been before. And so, in no particular order, here are the very first TechTalk 22…

Animal Dynamics is a spinout company from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University. They use deep science to understand natural movement in the animal world to develop new products.

What the judges said: “We’re very excited by the team’s approach to understanding evolutionary adaptations in flight, swimming and walking. Companies developing robots and high performance machines will be looking more to nature to inspire their design decisions.”

CheckRecipient use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse historical email data for use in cyber security applications. 

What the judges said: “This next generation email security technology prevents users from accidentally committing one of the key data security breaches. Employee behaviour is currently the weak spot for company security and solutions that can predict or spot real time abnormal behaviour patterns will be in demand.” 

The Smartplug app from Smart Driver Club reads your car’s on-board data and provides features to monitor and improve your driving and check performance.

What the judges said: “A textbook example of how to develop a huge range of features and ensure they’re totally integrated, while making the user experience deceptively simple. A company that knows how to achieve profitable longevity, with a set of must-have features that are cleverly monetised.”  

Slick Revolution’s mission is to create the best electric street transport at a price point accessible to everyone.

What the judges said: “The team has created a sleek, lightweight electric skateboard with a high top speed and long-range capability. This team is designing ever more features and gizmos to target this growing market sector.”

Machines With Vision develops innovative technology that covers every point of a road surface so it can be measured and mapped.

What the judges said: “Clever new technology that allows companies to enhance the road positioning of their driverless cars and autonomous vehicles. This soon-to-be booming sector will need suppliers of associated technology to make self-driving practical and safe.” 

The PASSsystem eliminates time-consuming paperwork and dramatically reduces the risk of medicines mismanagement.

What the judges said: “Healthcare delivery at home is set to explode, with an ageing population requiring health checks and medicines management in a domestic setting. The PASSsystem is driving up quality of care and service compliance.”

Robotical is a fully programmable, WiFi-enabled, customisable and upgradable low-cost walking robot.

What the judges said: “Allows children, makers and educators to interact and programme their own robotic solutions and ensure the next generation can capitalise on robotic technology… Definitely more than a toy.”

Streetbees uses the power of AI and geolocation functionality – it is where market research meets technology.

What the judges said: “We were impressed by Streetbees’ ability to literally collect data from anyone, anywhere in the world. Understanding culture, preferences and buying behaviour at a global level will be the key to success for many companies.”

Elvie is the world’s smallest and smartest pelvic floor exerciser, made from medical-grade silicone.

What the judges said: “A taboo-fighting wearable that goes inside the body, to monitor pelvic floor health and encourage the patient to keep up their exercises. Wearables will become increasingly invisible and will begin to be ‘worn’ inside the body, not just outside.”

SAM Labs are innovation kits for families to teach them coding, engineering and DIY.  

What the judges said: “The team has developed an intelligent chatbot solution and impressive DIY kits for families, making technology accessible in a truly fun way. Games that involve the whole family but can teach programming and technical skills are a win-win.”

Action Artificial Intelligence is an off-the-shelf commercial intelligent chatbot that understand users’ requests to enable humanlike responses.

What the judges said: “Companies that deal directly with customers will need to embrace chatbot technology to remain competitive. This solution gives functionality at a fraction of the cost of in-house development and allows them to respond using everyday natural language.”

Reach Robotics are using monster robots controlled by mobile devices for use with video games.

What the judges said: “Gaming is being embraced by an ever-widening demographic and this is a really exciting company in the gaming sector – a great UK rising star.”

MadeWithGlove is a wearable technology company designing heated gloves for women.  

What the judges said: “A really beneficial wearable, designed and developed for women (for once!) and with a clear focus on practicality. Women will be seeking out truly female-centric products, not those adapted from designs for men and they have the consumer power to shape new markets.”

Roto VR have developed a virtual reality experience seat designed for all head mounted displays.

What the judges said: “Consumers are looking for an even better immersive experience and this takes the experience of virtual reality far beyond the home headset.”

Consequential Robotics is developing the next generation consumer robot, focussing on companionship and enhancing the quality of human life.

What the judges said: “We all wanted to take one of these home! A programmable dog-like robot being developed specifically for therapeutic purposes. An underdeveloped but much-needed product area.”

Active Needle Technology is an ultrasound-guided needle device to enable precision injection targeting for clinicians.

What the judges said: “It’s great to see something that helps healthcare professionals to improve medical outcomes and patient safety, which will be a real focus in the coming years. It’s also reassuring potential needlephobes!”

The Blaze technology company is on a mission to make urban cycling safer, by combining a white light and laser image to beam out of blind spots and junctions.

What the judges said: “The Laserlight projection product has completely changed the way cyclists are seen by other road users. We see the product everywhere and despite imitations, it’s still leading its field and we expect them to lead the category for years to come.”

Generic Robotics is an innovative company developing interactive computer-based simulation combining virtual reality and haptics.

What the judges said: “They are experts in the field of haptics, which is still relatively young but has exciting potential. They are improving the quality of touch interaction with machines, particularly in the medical and dental world.”

Metail offers e-commerce model photography allowing the capture of human body size and shape and 3D garment digitisation. 

What the judges said: “A clever patented technology that allows the user to buy clothes that suit and fit them. The system is also tackling issues about body perception and size. Both retailers and consumers will be looking at technologies that will reduce the number of product returns.” 

Armour Communications is a government-grade encryption for secure communications, including voice, messaging, video and data.

What the judges said: “Cyber security is big. This development allows businesses to go to the next level of security through everyday devices such as smartphones and tablets. Armour not only protect the content of communications but can hide the fact that you are communicating at all.”

The Q-Bot is a tiny four-wheeled robot that goes through air vents armed with a 3D scanner, to survey the underside of floorboards and apply insulating foam as required.

What the judges said: “Not very glamorous but a much-needed use of robotics in the construction sector. The industry is ripe for disruption and will be looking at solutions that help house-building or renovation work become quicker, more cost-effective and safe.”

Ai Build are using AI and robotic technologies to make large scale one-off manufacturing easier.

What the judges said: “This team is shifting the focus from small scale 3D printing to large scale affordable 3D manufacture, with huge potential.”

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Top Tech Conferences: The Ultimate B2B tech events and show guide 2017

For information about adding your event to this list and featured listing opportunities please contact mike.moore@futurenet.com.

Love it or loathe it, events and conferences are often where wheelers and dealers in the world of technology meet to decide on the future of the industry.

Ironically, technology itself has accelerate the demise of some massive tech events (like Comdex) but the remaining ones are more focused, alive and bustling than ever before.

Techradar Pro and ITProPortal have joined forces with the tech B2B PR industry to curate a list of national and international technology events, conferences and happenings, focusing on B2B.

Smart City Expo World Congress

November 14th - 16th, Barcelona

Smart City Expo World Congress aims to be the place to collectivise urban power, to increase the strength of cities, to identify business opportunities, to establish partnerships and contribute to enacting common policies. A place to share research, best practices and potential common solutions, achieved through effective collaboration. 

Why Attend? More than 17.000 professional visitors are expected, with over 600 exhibitors, along with high level representatives from more than 650 citiesand over 400 experts and thought leaders. 

Big Data London

November 15-16th, Olympia, London

Big Data LDN (London) is a free to attend two-day conference and exhibition focusing on how to build dynamic, data-driven enterprises. Delegates will learn from pioneers, experts and real-world case studies, discovering new tools and techniques, enabling them to deliver business value from successful data projects. 

Why attend? Big Data LDN is about providing answers by focusing on the practical steps that organisations should take. 

Smart Home Summit 2017

November 15th-16th 2017, Silicon Valley, USA

Smart Home Summit brings together leading decision makers looking to take the smart home from a niche prospect for the tech savvy consumer into a mass market reality through collaboration and partnerships. Download the brochure to find out more about who will attend, topics being covered, speakers and other features taking place.

Why attend? 80% of attendees are Director level or above
 

The Business Show 2017

November 16th-17th, London Olympia

The Business Show is where businesses like yours find the next gear. It's a free business exhibition to attend and offers a wealth of opportunity, advice and information crucial for ongoing business growth within a challenging economy.

The event welcomes businesses from a cross-section of industries, and remains more committed than ever in providing you with everything needed to improve, evolve and expand your business.

Why attend? The two day event attracts more than 25,000 businesses who attend with the primary agenda of improving and expanding their business.

AI Europe

November 20th-21st, London

Artificial Intelligence has been a hot topic for the last few years and the enthusiasm is far from fading. In order to go further and transform the myth of AI into concrete business opportunities, AI EUROPE 2017 proposes you to focus on the three most actionable topics in AI for your company through two days of extensive learning and networking.

Why attend?  Learn from the best and the brightest in AI, including AI visionaries, leading experts, industry innovators and disruptive startups. 

Open Source Monitoring Conference

November 21st-24th, Nuremberg, Germany

The Open Source Monitoring Conference is the world's leading event in the field of open source monitoring solutions.

Why Attend? As the world's leading conference on OS Monitoring, the OSMC has become a valuable event for the open source community. Annually, the OSMC counts more than 300 visitors and has been completely sold out in recent years.

UKISUG CONNECT

November 26th - 28th, Birmingham, UK

Independently run by the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, UKISUG CONNECT will bring together more than 900 SAP professionals and business users, including 500 SAP customers, 65 exhibiting companies and in excess of 200 SAP experts from across the UK & Ireland, to share their past experiences and gain valuable insight from other SAP professionals, software experts and customers.

Why attend? The conference features guest speakers from SAP experts, customers, executives and a wide range of training activities and a wealth of opportunities for SAP users on both the line of business and the IT side to collaborate, learn and network.

Blockchain Summit London

November 28th, London

The Blockchain for business event - Blockchain Summit is a leading one day conference and exhibition dedicated to the impact of Blockchain on industry. 

Why attend?  Blockchain Summit London offers exceptional networking opportunities for attendees to connect with industry leaders and innovators. 

ibtm World

November 28th-30th, Barcelona

ibtm world (formerly EIBTM) is the leading global event for the meetings, incentives, conferences, events and business travel industry, taking place in Barcelona. The event gathers meetings industry professionals for three days of focused business opportunities, thought provoking professional education and networking to drive your business into the future. 

Why attend? ibtm world delivers three inspirational days of business, networking and education to a community of international suppliers and buyers. Join over 15,500 industry professionals and enter a world of business opportunities.

AI Tech World

November 29th, Olympia London

AI is set to transform entire verticals, and at this event you can learn from the innovators who will present their vision for the future of finance, healthcare, retail, insurance, utilities and much more.

Why attend? Hear from visionary leaders from major corporations including HSBC, AIG, Ocado, Lloyds Bank, BT, Virgin and many more. Case study presentations cover all aspects of AI across machine learning, voice and image recognition and NLP.

Black Hat Europe 2017

December 4th-7th, London ExCel

Black Hat provides attendees with the very latest in research, development, and trends in Information Security. Here the brightest professionals and researchers in the industry will come together for a total of four days--two days of deeply technical hands-on Trainings, followed by two days of the latest research and vulnerability disclosures in the Briefings.

Why attend? Network with more than 1,600 InfoSec professionals and evaluate a range of security products and solutions offered by Black Hat sponsors.

Worktech17

December 5th, Hong Kong

Worktech17 Hong Kong is a forum for all those involved in the future of work and the workplace as well as real estate, technology and innovation. Worktech17 Hong Kong will attract some of the biggest and brightest names to debate, discuss, and divulge the latest thinking on the Future of Work and the Workplace.

Why attend? Join senior professionals from real estate, facilities, HR, technology, executive management architecture, design and professional advisers to listen to global thought leaders, further their knowledge and share best practise and expertise.

Citrix Summit

January 8-10 2018, Anaheim, USA

Citrix Summit is the essential business development conference for partners. Partners who attend gain firsthand insight into Citrix strategy for digital business transformation through intensive technical, sales and business training that delivers the tools to strengthen relationships, take advantage of market opportunities and pave the way for new deals.

Why attend? Microsoft' Cloud supremo, Scott Guthrie, will be speaking there.

Consumer Electronics Show 2018

January 9th- 12th 2018, Las Vegas, USA

For 50 years, CES has been the launch pad for new innovation and technology that has changed the world. Held in Las Vegas every year, it is the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies and where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace.

Why attend? More than 3800 of the biggest tech firms exhibiting.

Vibrant Digital Future Summit

January 31st, Business Design Centre, London

The conference for business leaders, innovators and governments developing a brighter digital future in our rapidly changing world -  this event aims to provide deep insights into today’s cutting edge tech trends (particularly AI, IoT and cyber security) impacting business and society over the next few years through a series of expert keynotes and interactive panel discussions. 

Why attend? Hear from experts on how tech such as AI, IoT, TVWS and much more will transform lives sooner than you think.

Open Source Leadership Summit

March 6th-8th, Sonoma Valley, California

Open Source Leadership Summit is coming to Sonoma Valley, March 6-8, 2018. Where open source leaders convene to drive digital transformation and learn how to collaboratively manage the largest shared technology investment of our time. 

Why attend? The Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit is the premier forum where these leaders convene to drive digital transformation with open source technologies and learn how to collaboratively manage the largest shared technology investment of our time. 

ELC + OpenIoT Summit

March 12th-14th, Portland

The Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. For the past 13 years, ELC has had the largest collection of sessions dedicated exclusively to embedded Linux and embedded Linux developers.

Why attend?  OpenIoT Summit delivers the technical knowledge you need to deliver smart connected products and solutions that take advantage of the rapid evolution of IoT technologies. It is the only IoT event focused on the development of open IoT solutions. 

IFGS 2018

March 18th-20th, London Guildhall

FinTech is taking over London in 2018 as the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) convenes for two days on Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th of March, at the Guildhall and across the City’s Square Mile.

Why attend? Taking inspiration from the expansion of FinTech globally, the summit will welcome the world's leading lights, from innovators, institutions and investors to policy makers, regulators and international trade bodies.

CSW Arctic/Europe 2018

March 20th-24th, Sweden

This conference will bring the latest developments in crowdsourcing to centre stage, focusing around trending topics such as Finance, ICO’s & Green Bonds, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation & CrowdGaming, and Agriculture & Farming in the Sharing Economy.

Why attend? European and other international business leaders and changemakers will gather in Luleå & Vuollerim during the 5-day conference to share how crowdsourcing is shaping their industries and is transforming organisations today

Women of Silicon Valley

March 21st-22nd, San Francisco

Join 800+ tech leaders and professionals from the biggest names and hottest startups to learn from industry pioneers and boost your skills! Speakers include Arianna Huffington, Estée Lauder, Amazon, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Google, Sony Playstation, Facebook & many more! 

 Why attend? Be inspired by industry leaders, join a vibrant and talented community, grow your professional and personal skills.

CeBIT 2018

March 20th-24th, Hannover, Germany

CeBIT is THE platform for experts and top decision-makers from all areas of digital business along the B2B value chain. The global market is present here – make sure you are, too! CeBIT is one of the world’s most important investment platforms for digital business processes. No other place can boast as many IT decision-makers and managers at the same time – or with such a strong focus on SMEs.

Why attend? The largest event for IT Decision Makers

Open Networking Summit

March 26th-29th, Los Angeles

ONS brings together business and technical leaders across enterprise, cloud and service providers to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of open networking and orchestration. 

Why attend?  ONS is the best forum for companies to strengthen their brand, establish thought leadership, connect with both end customers and partners, showcase innovative products and drive the transformation in the emerging open source networking industry. 

infoShare

May 22nd-23rd, Gdansk, Poland

infoShare is where you can share your story and make your ideas happen. Here you will find knowledge and inspiration, form meaningful relations and create a truly innovative technological society.

Why attend? The biggest technology conference in central eastern Europe brings together thought leaders in the IT industry with a packed programme of speakers and sessions.

Diversity in Technology 2018

May 24th, London

Join the UK’s very first conference to have a holistic discussion about how we can increase diversity and equal opportunity in the fastest growing sector of our economy. Take a deep dive into the fundamentals of attracting, hiring, developing and retaining diverse talent. 

Why attend? Be part of the global movement committed to changing the diversity landscape in tech and make sure that you are reaping the rewards of advancing inclusion and driving workforce evolution.

Open Source Summit Japan & Automotive Linux Summit 

June 20th-22nd, Tokyo

Automotive Linux Summit connects the developer community driving the innovation in automotive Linux together with the vendors and users providing and using the code in order to drive the future of embedded devices in the automotive arena.  

Why attend? The leading conference for technologists and open source industry leaders to collaborate and share information, learn about the latest in open source technologies and find out how to gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions.

Women of Silicon Roundabout 2018

June 26th-27th, London

Join 3000 tech leaders and professionals at the UK’s vibrant centrepiece for women in tech. Speakers include Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho CBE, Baroness Joanna Shields, Microsoft, Monzo Bank, Facebook, GoCompare.com, eBay & many more!

Why attend? Hear from the best speakers in the industry, enhance your entire skills portfolio and celebrate gender diversity in the world’s fastest growing industry.

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The Super affordable Nokia 2 with a two-day battery life comes to the UAE

The Nokia 2 was recently announced and it’s set to land in the UAE on the 24th of November. Although it sits at the bottom of the new HMD Global-built Nokia range, it has a surprisingly big battery and could have more going for it than just a low price of AED 349.

The Nokia 2 has a 4,100mAh juice pack, which is bigger than the batteries in most phones at any price. The massive Samsung Galaxy Note 8 for example has just a 3,300mAh one, and HMD Global claims the Nokia 2's battery will allow for up to two days of life on a single charge.

It remains to be seen whether that will be true or not, but the otherwise modest specs of the Nokia 2 should help, as it has just a 5.0-inch 720 x 1280 screen, a 1.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 212 chipset, 1GB of RAM, an 8MP rear camera, a 5MP front-facing one, 8GB of storage and a microSD card slot.

The power does concern us though. Performance of the more powerful Nokia 3 didn't exactly impress, and with less RAM and an entry-level chipset in the Nokia 2 we wonder how well it will perform on screen.

The Nokia 2 is set to slot below the Nokia 3 in the range Priced to move

That’s the trade-off when it comes to entry-level devices, but with the UAE price set to AED 349, it is at least priced accordingly.

And there are some notable points beyond the battery life. It’s clad in aluminum for one, giving it a potentially higher-end look than some budget phones, and it runs a stock version of Android Nougat, with Android Oreo confirmed to be arriving on the Nokia 2 at a later date.

The release date is set for 24th November and the Nokia 2 will launch in Pewter/Black, Pewter/White and Copper/Black colours.

The Nokia 9 could also be coming soon

more info...

Dubai Motor Show 2017

The Dubai International Motor Show brings together an exciting four day event for car enthusiasts showcasing the latest/greatest from the auto industry.

The first ever Dubai Motor Show was inaugurated in 1989 and the show has gone from strength to strength over the decades. It's open to the general crowd and showcases the latest cars, supercars and motorbikes.

A big part of the event this year focuses on future car technology and next generation wares from automated/driverless cars, connected and electric cars, zero-emissions, flying cars, parking assistance and more.

The official Dubai International Motor Show 2017 dates are November 14 through November 18. A single day entry ticket costs AED 50 but there are multiple options for groups and families.

In a nutshell What is it? The biggest car exhibition in the Middle EastWhen is it? Dubai Motor Show 2017 dates are November 14 to November 18Where is it being held? At the Dubai World trade CentreHow much does it cost? Tickets start at AED 50What's on show? Everything from cars to supercars, bikes What are some of the activities at Dubai International Motor Show 2017

BOULEVARD OF DREAMS

The Boulevard of Dreams will present visitors with a unique opportunity to get up close to some of the fastest and glamorous cars in the world, including the world’s first handmade Titanium supercar – the Vulcano Titanium, from Italian manufacturer ICONA.

RACE TO WIN

Experience the best driving dynamics and motor racing simulation at Dubai International Motor Show. The Motor Racing Simulator challenge is for kids under-16 and adults. 

CLASSIC CAR AUCTION

About 20 classic cars, some of which will be present at the show during the online auction, will go under the hammer in the fast-paced sale organized by Copart. This takes place on Friday November 17th at 6:00 PM

Which car manufacturers are present at the Dubai Motor Show 2017

Here are some of the car companies that will be exhibiting at the show.

Alfa RomeoAston MartinAudiBentleyBMWBrabusFerrariLamborghiniLincolnMaseratiMcLarenMercedes-BenzMini CooperPorscheRolls-RoyceToyota

We will be posting galleries for many of the exhibitors from the show. Come back to this page to see the latest from your favorite car maker.

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Amazon's Australian launch could be imminent, as more products are added to site

Well, it’s looking more and more likely that Amazon's full Australian launch will happen in time for Black Friday (or maybe even Click Frenzy if they’re particularly speedy) — something which will undoubtedly be ringing alarm bells for the country’s existing retailers.

A post on the /r/Australia subreddit by Reddit user repairsalmostcomplet brings attention to a number of products that were uploaded to the site earlier on in November, none of which are ebooks — the sole product type available from the Australian version of Amazon previously.

While the products are still listed as ‘currently unavailable’, some of them are distinctly Australian, such as powerboards with Australian outlets, and could be an indicator that the online retail giant is live-testing its site for an imminent launch.

Currently, the range of available items seems to be limited to electronic products such as cables and adapters, although this is very likely to only represent a small sample of the products Amazon intends to sell in Australia, for the sake of trialling the site.

Until it's officially here, here's how to safely buy tech from Amazon for use in Australia

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