The BBC hopes to bring VR to the mainstream with VR Hub

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The BBC hopes to bring VR to the mainstream with VR Hub

The BBC has announced a department for virtual reality experiences called VR Hub, that is going to invest in commissioning high-quality VR experiences. 

In a blog post on the BBC website, team lead Zillah Watson outlined the hope of getting more people into the emerging technology using the BBC’s reach and ability to make world-leading entertainment:

“Our research shows that for as long as the quantity of high-quality content remains low, and the experience remains cumbersome, mainstream audiences won’t use VR. That’s why we’re focusing on a small number of high impact pieces that have broad, mainstream appeal.”

Out of this world experiences

It’s starting the ball rolling with an experience called Home. In Home, you can experience a space walk, perform maintenance work on the International Space Station, and then face a ‘terrifying emergency situation’.

Parallels can obviously be drawn to the RT produced Spacewalk in 360, which has been watched over half a million times on YouTube. Although that was a 360 degree video rather than a VR experience so you’re not able to control the outcome of any events.

If you want some 360 space video action right now, check out the BBC video below – released to accompany the launch of Home – that includes footage from space, with narration from astronaut Helen Sharman about the experience of looking back at our planet from space:

Home has already been shown in film festivals around the world, and has won many awards including a Cannes Lion. This release marks the first time that it has been made available to the public, and the first VR from the BBC available on the HTC Vive.

The BBC has in the past created experiences that were available on the Oculus Rift, Google Daydream, and Samsung Gear VR, but creating experiences that can be downloaded from the Steam Store open up the user-base to include owners of the industry-leading HTC Vive and the Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Getting in on the action

If you’re a VR content creator, the BBC has a page for commissions so you can go and pitch your idea to be made by one of the most prolific television companies in the world. 

Whether this step will create a bigger uptake of VR is yet to be seen, but certainly having mainstream content creators invest in it the way the BBC is doing here will mean for those using the technology the quality of content available is going to improve vastly in the coming years.

For now, if you want to experience Home, it's available to download for free from the Steam and Oculus stores.

Want some more space themed new? Check out: NASA's next Mars rover is under construction

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Best gifts under £100: great Christmas ideas for tech lovers

You don't have to spend a fortune on technology to get an awesome present, as our best gifts under £100 guide proves.

Ok, we admit it. Sometimes we go a bit overboard with our gift suggestions. £1000 laptops and £500 speakers? Who can afford that? Some, but not all.

This round-up addresses that little issue. We’re looking at great Christmas gifts that cost less than £100.

We’re not scraping the barrel with phone cases and touchscreen gloves that most people don’t want, though.

These are the affordable picks we’d be happy to open on Christmas morning. 

Jabra has created a pair of wireless headphones that have an exciting design and strong performance - all for a price that's well under £100, hence their entry in this here guide. 

The Move Wireless are an excellent budget option for couch potatoes and fitness buffs alike. This is because they are lightweight and have a surprising knack for great sound performance, a bit like that friend we all have that belts out a karaoke tune after four pints of the strong stuff. 

From the fun and edgy design to excellent performance, these cans come recommended for anyone interested in wireless on the cheap.

Read our Jabra Move Wireless review

Yes, we know the SNES Classic Mini sold out four seconds after it went on sale. And if you’ve been looking on eBay, you’ll often have to spend well over £100 just to get hold of this £80 retro gadget. 

However, every now and then it pops back into stock at the biggest online retailers. The game over screen isn’t here just yet. 

The SNES Classic Mini is a miniaturised take on Nintendo’s classic 16-bit console, one that uses an HDMI, not the ancient connectors of the original. It has 21 games including many SNES classics: Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart and the otherwise unreleased Star Fox 2. If this can’t solve that 4pm Christmas Day lull, nothing will. 

Read our SNES Classic Mini review

A big divide is opening up in smart home tech. Are you with Google or Alexa? It’s an important question as this will likely affect the sort of smart home tech you can control in the near-future at least. 

For the sake of this gift guide, let’s side with Google and its Home speaker. It also sounds a bit better than Amazon’s latest Echo, and Google gives you slightly better control over your privacy settings.

Google Home acts as a decent wireless speaker and the digital housekeeper. It’ll control other smart home gadgets, let you ask for trivia/info and set reminders and alarms. And a lot more besides. 

Read our Google Home review

Android tablets haven’t quite improved to the extent we hoped back in 2014, but when the Amazon Fire HD 8 costs just £79.99, we don’t really mind. It’s powerful enough to play high-end Android games well, has a solid 800p LCD screen and at 369g is light for a tablet. 

It’s especially useful if you’re an Amazon Prime member, as you’ll have access to the services that form a big part of the tablet’s interface. The Amazon Fire HD 8 software is based on Android, but you might not know that looking at it: Amazon has changed it a lot. 

Even without Prime, you can still download thousands of app, plenty for free, and read Kindle books on this tablet. 

Read our Amazon Fire HD 8 review

For PS4 gamers, a PlayStation Plus is like a pair of socks or load of toiletries that they’ll actually want. Buy a subscription for someone and it’ll simply stack on top of their current sub, so you don’t have to worry if they’re already signed up. 

PlayStation Plus enables online multiplayer in PS3 and PS4 games, and gives the player access to a new selection of “free” games each month. You might want to check if they’ve had PS Plus before and decided it’s not for them, though. 

Xbox gamers will want Xbox Live Gold instead. Same benefits, (roughly) the same price, just for a different platform. 

Read our Sony PlayStation 4 Pro review

You can’t get one of the fancy “new” 3DS or 2DS consoles for under £100, but the old 2DS is still widely available for all the budget buyers out there. The most common current bundle comes with Mario Kart 7, which is worth £30-plus on its own. Bargain. 

The 2DS is the cheap and cheerful model in the 3DS line-up. It feels a bit plasticky, doesn’t have 3D and looks like a techy piece of toast. However, it’s still a great handheld and can play almost all 3DS games. 

Just a few games require one of Nintendo’s “New” 3DS models, Xenoblade Chronicles 3D the most important of the lot. Make sure that’s not their most-wanted title before buying. 

Read our Nintendo 2DS review

The Raspberry Pi 3 is a remarkable piece of technology. True, it may not be the most revolutionary upgrade from the Pi 2, but it builds upon a rich community of support and maintains a level of backwards compatibility to boards and projects created for earlier models of Pi to be used.

The arrival of wireless communications on the board enables IoT projects at a lower price point and helps further the goal of the Raspberry Pi, providing a platform for tinkering and experimentation that's low cost and well supported.

And it's all for cheaper than the price of a video game. Fantastic stuff.

Read our Raspberry Pi 3 review

The Moov Now excels at one, very important thing: it’s a fitness tracker that actually tracks the things that make you fitter.

You get guided workouts for major activities that are well thought-out, or just good, broad tracking for daily activities.

A six month battery life is immense, and if your goal is to spend more time in bed each night and move more each day, this little wearable is an affordable and accurate way to do it.

Read our Moov Now review

If you’re looking for a feature phone and have fond memories of the original 3310 then you may be drawn to the reboot - and you'll likely be happy.

But if you're keeping a keen eye on your finances you can get the same spec (and in some cases better spec) for a lower price tag if you ignore the headline-grabbing "3310" name.

The new Nokia 3310 has the fun nostalgia element, a good design and some much improved features that all combine to form a solid, dependable handset

Read our Nokia 3310 review These are the best gadgets in the world right now

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The best Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals in November 2017

The new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 certainly has a point to prove and it's now available buy. It's never going to be your go-to option if you're on a tight budget, but it's got the screen size and specification smarts to be a competitor to the much lauded iPhone X.

The price fell drastically for Black Friday, but stocks are now very low - it seems that every man and his dog bought one! Check out our price comparison tool below for the best prices. We've picked out five of our favourite deals as well, and we tell you more about this mammoth mobile further down the page.

It might seem a tad unfair, but we can't not mention the Galaxy Note 7 debacle when talking about its successor. Samsung's 2016 aborted project due to overheating and fire risks means that we've had to wait two years for a fully functioning Note-branded phablet from the South Korean tech behemoth. But we can now move forward from that chapter in tech history - the Note 8 is well and truly here!

See also: Galaxy Note S8 deals | iPhone X deals | Mobile phone deals | SIM only deals | Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review

The best Galaxy Note 8 deals in the UK Should I get the Galaxy Note 8 SIM free?

You must be somebody after our own heart. Always looking to see how you can trim a few pounds off your new favourite gadget. As you probably know, you can now pick up cheap SIM only deals for as little as £4 a month, which could make it worth buying a SIM and handset separately.

Well the Galaxy Note 8's RRP is £869. Even if you get the cheapest SIM card (usually around £4 a month for 500MB data), that would still cost almost £1,000 over the two years. You're probably better cranking up the upfront cost in our price comparison chart above, imposing a low maximum for monthlies and finding a cheaper deal in the long run.

To get the best price on your new SIM free Galaxy, you can head to our cheapest unlocked Note 8 deals page.

Wondering what all the fuss is about? Well the fervour for the Note 8 is probably doubled due to the fact that the Note 7 was pulled from shelves soon after release. But it doesn't take more than one look at the Note 8 to see that it justifies the hype.

The huge 6.3-inch ‘Infinity Display,’ is gorgeous to look at, the 6GB RAM innards go like a train and there are two best-in-class rear cameras. It's expensive, but we think the Note 8 is worth it. 

Read TechRadar's full Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review

Now let's break down the best Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals by network...

Best Galaxy Note 8 deals on EE this month Best Galaxy Note 8 deals on O2 this month Best Galaxy Note 8 deals on Vodafone this month Best Galaxy Note 8 deals on Three this month Best Nokia 3310 deal for Cyber Monday:

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TechRadar's free downloads advent calendar starts tomorrow

The holidays are an expensive time, so we’re bringing you a special treat: a full, free Windows program to download every day until Christmas.

Each day, we’ll open a door on our advent calendar to reveal a new app, ready to download and enjoy completely free. From free VPNs to website builders and song downloaders, there's always something brilliant to look forward to.

Check back tomorrow for your first free festive download!

Downloads provided by ASCOMP, Steganos, Ashampoo, Incomedia, Abelssoft, Apowersoft and IObit.

Can't wait? Download some fantastic free software right now

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Adaptive headphones are the new audio trend

Your fingerprints are unique to you, but did you know that your hearing is too? Research shows that each of us has different levels of sensitivity to various frequencies of sound. 

This means you’ll hear music differently to the next person, and will pick up on, or miss, certain notes. So, how do you pick the right headphones for your hearing? 

Step forward, adaptive audio headphones, such as those from Nura (£349 / $399). The Nura sports a unique earbud and over-ear cup design. Bass comes from a driver in the bigger cans, treble is played from the in-ear. As you might expect, this setup is great for sound isolation, too. The headphones use soundwave tech to automatically measure your hearing, then adapt the music to suit – helping you to hear each note perfectly. 

The Audeara A-01s ($499 / £367.27) also aims to deliver perfectly tailored sound. When you first wear the cans, you perform a simple hearing test. The A-01 then uses your hearing profile to adjust the sound signal as it passes through. 

There are more options out there too, including Even’s H2 Bluetooth Wireless Headphones (£299 / $299), which it describes as 'glasses for your ears' and HTC’s USonic Adaptive Audio Earphones (£34.90 / £39.99), which only work with HTC phones, but use the phone’s processing power to customize their sound to you. Get ready to hear your favorite songs sound better than ever!

Pick up a subscription to T3 with 35% off in our Christmas sale!

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Best free iPhone apps 2017

There are now hundreds of thousands of apps available for your iPhone 7 (and others), surprisingly, many of the best are free.

What's the best phone of 2017?

The following list showcases our pick of the best free iPhone apps, and includes iPhone applications for social networking, travel, news, photography, productivity and more. Most of these apps are also compatible with the iPod touch as well.

What's going to be interesting is how the iPhone 8 affects this list of best apps, because the larger screen is going to mean developers have to code their wares differently to cater for the new audience.

But no matter which phone you've got, as long as it's made by Apple )and it's not too old) you'll be able to enjoy these titles that have been crafted by TechRadar's expert app reviewers, who parse through the App Store regularly to see just what's bubbling up... and whether it's worth downloading.

New this week: Meteor

Meteor is an internet speed tester designed for human beings. It eschews complex information – and even advertising – and instead provides you with straightforward, colorful buttons and readouts.

An inviting ‘Start Testing’ button kicks things off, whereupon the app sets about checking your internet connection’s performance, a little meteor animating on-screen as it does so. Once the tests are done, speeds are scored, and are subsequently available from the History tab.

Meteor also attempts to estimate how well your connection would fare with popular apps and games, six of which can be added to an ‘app performance’ bar. These values should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt, but this freebie nonetheless impresses for being a no-nonsense, user-friendly, ad-free way to check internet connectivity.

Sweat Deck reimagines exercise routines as a deck of cards. You assign exercises to certain suits, and lob in a couple of ‘jokers’ for good measure. The app then has you define how many cards/reps you want to try your hand at.

The app’s semi-random nature keeps you on your toes (or hands and back, depending on the exercise). If you draw a three of spades, that might mean three squats; then a nine of diamonds could mean nine push-ups. It’s a novel interface that’s a bit different from other iPhone exercise apps.

Sweat Deck could do with a way to switch cards other than tapping the screen (shouting perhaps), but you can always use prodding your iPhone as an excuse to rest for a few seconds, having suitably worked up a sweat by that point.

Trips by Lonely Planet is an app for sharing travel experiences – or just reveling in the journeys made by others. It’s a bit like a travel-oriented Instagram mixed with a smattering of travel guide and blog. If you like gorgeous photography and a touch of commentary for context, it’s a must-have install.

New top picks are regularly showcased on the app’s Home tab, and you can favorite those you like, and/or follow the authors. Annoyingly, there’s no search, but you can delve into themed categories, such as ‘cities’ and ‘adventure’. (Think of it more like a magazine than a website and you should be fine.)

When you have an adventure of your own, you can upload your own story. The layout options are a bit basic, but the app is really easy to work with, making for stress-free sharing.

PCalc Lite is a version of leading iOS calculator PCalc, aimed at people who aren’t keen on spending money. In terms of functionality, it’s more stripped back than its paid sibling, but the app’s guts are identical.

What this means is PCalc Lite is undoubtedly the best free traditional calculator for iPhone. It’s fast, responsive, and friendly, and bundles a small set of useful conversions for length, speed, temperature, volume, and weight.

If you want to bolt on something from the paid version, IAPs exist, such as for multi-line support, or extra conversion options.

When iOS 11 arrived, Apple’s built-in calculator proved buggy, leading to people scrabbling around for an alternative. With PCalc Lite installed, that need never happen to you.

Housecraft is an augmented reality (AR) app that wants you to have fun redesigning your home. Waggle your iPhone about in a room with sufficient space and the app rapidly scans the floor. You can then drop virtual chairs, tables, and bookshelves into place – and then move around them using the power of AR.

The app proves to be an interesting mix of useful, elegant and fun. There’s a range of furniture, which can be recolored, resized, and copied – the last of those being useful when you want to add several of an item to a space.

But also, you can go berserk with Housecraft’s bouncy physics, dumping dozens of chairs in place when you’re bored of being productive and just fancy being a bit silly.

Google Maps is an app that’s been a mainstay in this list for years – and it’s easy to see why. Although Apple’s own Maps app has hugely improved since launch, Google Maps retains the lead in almost every way. It’s superb at locating points of interest –whether you’re looking for a distant town or local restaurant – and offers robust public transport suggestions.

Beyond that, it just proves handier than Apple’s app. Street View is great for virtually scoping out a location, looking for landmarks that might prove handy during a drive. You can draw a route to measure the distance between two places.

And best of all, you can download maps to your iPhone, transforming Google Maps into a free sat-nav equivalent that works entirely offline.

Snapseed is a photo editor that marries simplicity and power. At its most basic, it can be a tool for loading a photo, selecting a filter (referred to here as ‘looks’), and exporting the result. But it’s when you delve into the app’s tools and stacks that its true potential becomes clear.

The tools menu, while a bit cluttered, offers a huge range of options for adjusting your photo. You can crop, adjust perspective, edit curves, and add all kinds of filters and effects.

But stacks are arguably Snapseed’s best component. The stack is where your edits live, each of which can be updated at any time.

This offers far more flexibility than editors that ‘burn in’ each change you make. Furthermore, you can save any combination of edits as a custom look – and use stacks to deconstruct pre-loaded ones. Brilliant stuff.

Google Earth simply gives you our planet in the palm of your hand, and encourages you to explore. You can manually rotate and zoom, search for specific locations, or take your chances with the dice icon, to check out somewhere random.

Wherever you end up, Google Earth provides local photography and information, becoming something of a virtual tour guide. Places others have explored nearby are provided as cards, which prove genuinely useful for giving crowdsourced points of interest or recommendations.

This concept reaches its logical conclusion with Voyager – a selection of journeys you can take to some of the world’s most amazing sights, from ancient wonders to modern ones like Kennedy Space Center.

Google Earth’s visual majesty is lessened on the smaller screen, but it’d be churlish to scoff at an app that in an instant provides access to so much of our planet.

Arty initially resembles yet another filter app – and, to be fair, it does have a bunch of filters lurking that can turn a photo sepia, or make it so vibrant that your eyes hurt. But this one’s mostly about its other tools, which have been carefully designed for jobbing artists working with real-world media.

There’s a grid, and various image-tweaking settings to fine-tune a photo for the magic bit, which is comparing your photo with whatever’s lurking under your iPhone’s camera.

So if you’re in the midst of making a lifelike drawing from a reference photo, your iPhone can now be a handy guide to see how you’re getting on, rather than a tool primarily for procrastination.

Sticky AI is all about selfies. Shoot one (or a short video, by holding the shutter button) in the app, and Sticky AI will instantly remove its background – often with a frightening degree of accuracy.

You can then get to work, resizing and rotating your beautiful face, slapping on a text label, mucking about with colors and filters, and then sharing the result to your social networks of choice.

It’s naturally geared a bit towards the self-obsessed, but there’s plenty here to like: the technology’s mightily impressive, for one, but also Sticky AI neatly hangs on to your previous edits, so you can at any time peruse your collection and make a change to a favorite snap.

Lingvist is a language-learning app that claims to be able to teach you at light speed. Naturally, that’s hyperbole, but Lingvist nonetheless has a methodology and interface that gets you going in your chosen language (French, Spanish, German, and Russian are supported) at serious speed.

Mostly, it’s about plugging words into sentences, in a drill-like fashion. Imagine interactive flash cards thrown your way in quick-fire fashion and you’re there. The underlying algorithm tracks words you’re finding tricky, and in-context explanations for things like verbs pop up as and when they’re needed.

Will Lingvist make you fluent in hours? Probably not. But as a refresher, or even a first step in learning a foreign tongue, it’s the best freebie around on iPhone.

Bricks Camera is a novelty camera app that will strike a chord with anyone who has an affinity for plastic building blocks.

The app’s essentially a live filter. Through its camera, the world’s transformed into a universe of brightly colored ‘bricks’, the size of which you can adjust with a swipe. Hold down the shutter and you get a short video rather than a still. Also, if you’re not feeling the vibe in live mode, you can import a photo instead.

Your blocky masterpiece can be saved or shared – unfortunately only with a three-brick-wide watermark. It’s a pity there’s no cheap IAP to be rid of that, but otherwise this is an entertaining – if slightly throwaway – camera freebie.

WLPPR is a wallpaper app that’s apparently not keen on vowels. But what it lacks in letters, it makes up for with beautiful satellite imagery, which you can save to Photos and later apply to your home or lock screens.

Unlike many wallpaper apps, WLPPR has been crafted with care and respect. Every image has a credit but also explanatory copy regarding what you’re looking at. You can bookmark favorites for later, apply a custom blur, and download imagery in standard or ‘parallax’ sizes.

Neatly, there’s a preview mode, too. Tap the eye icon and you can load a realistic-looking home or lock screen to see how your wallpaper would look. Not convinced? Swipe to get the next one.

Note that WLPPR is a freemium app, with IAP for extra photo sets; but for free you get 86 high-quality shots – more than enough for most – and an extra 58 if you’re happy to spam your social media feed one time.

Mood wants to add some visual style to your writing. It’s not about crafting a novel, but fleeting, simple thoughts, which can be assigned a dazzling layout. Think Twitter if you were armed with your own personal graphic designer.

Using the app is very straightforward. You start typing, and Mood reformats your text on the fly. Open the styles draw and you can flick between all kinds of appearances. Once you’re done, your tiny literary masterpiece is rendered to an image, which can be saved to Photos or shared on a social network.

Rather nicely, your creations aren’t transient, either – they’re also saved in the app and can later be edited. And there’s an amusing Easter egg, too – flip your iPhone upside down when in the styles section for some decidedly weirder themes (including an unnerving wall of bacon).

Green Riding Hood subverts a much-loved fairy tale, re-imagining Grandma as a hip yoga teacher, and having the Big Bad Wolf gradually learn how tasty healthy food is. Which might all sound a bit like brainwashing for tiny people if the story bit wasn’t so well designed.

Each little scene in the book is interactive, so you can tap animals to make them exercise, have the wolf angrily lob a bone into the forest, or – our favorite – fashion a cacophony as the animals try to wake a dozing granny with whatever objects they have to hand.

Beyond the book, you get some recipes and stickers for free. If all that takes your fancy, IAPs unlock exercise and dance routines – but, really, just the fairy tale bit alone makes this one very much worth a download.

Today Weather provides a sleek, elegant take on weather forecasting, marrying modern design, usability, and a slew of data.

Set a location and you get current conditions below a supposedly representative photo. (The photo is, frankly, a bit rubbish but can fortunately be disabled.) Scroll to delve into predictions about the coming hours and days, and details about UV index and pressure, the chances of imminent rainfall, air quality, sunrise/sunset times, and what the moon’s up to.

Sadly, these components can’t be rearranged, and anyone who wants a rainfall radar will have to pay for it. But these drawbacks shouldn’t stop you downloading what’s a great freebie weather app.

Also, Hello Weather has a trump card in its data source menu, which lists conditions and temperatures from five different providers. If one regularly seems better than the others, you can switch with a tap. Nice.

ClippyCam is a camera app that makes use of both iPhone cameras. You shoot a still – or hold the shutter to record a short video – and once that’s done use the FaceTime camera to overlay a second photo or video.

At first, you might end up with what looks like a screengrab from Skype, but play around with the various options and you can get a bit more creative. For example, take a snap on holiday and then add a video of your family waving to a loved one; or load a movie poster and unsubtly insert your head into the scene.

Smartly, the app can save your ‘vanilla’ snap alongside your ClippyCam creation, although note the latter has a watermark unless you splash out on a one-off $2.99/£2.99 IAP.

Clarity is all about creating wallpaper for your iPhone’s home and lock screens. The name comes from the app’s ability to create artwork that improves the legibility of the content above it.

Three options are available: Gradient, Blur, and Mask. Gradient has you choose two colors and decide on the direction of the gradient. Blur has you take a photo or picture and assign a blur level. And Mask allows you to overlay a color-to-transparent gradient atop an image.

It would be good to have positioning options for imported images (Clarity just crops as it sees fit), but otherwise this is a great freebie for quickly creating sleek and effective wallpaper for iPhone.

Steller is an app about stories. On first opening the app, you get a scrolling pane of photos to explore, each with a title overlaid. It kind of resembles a minimal virtual bookstore.

Tapping a picture allows you to delve into a story, which is presented as a little flick book. Depending on the author, you might just get a few pages of photos; some also add a little commentary – although text content is typically succinct in Steller stories, because pictures do the talking.

Creating a story yourself is simple, too. Pick a theme, import up to 20 photos and videos, choose a template for each page, and then share with the world. And although your output’s best enjoyed within the Steller app, people can visit your creations in a desktop browser, too.

Infinite Music says it will help you “rediscover your music library”, through “smart remixing and mashups”. What this really means is the app rifles through all the DRM-free music on your iPhone, throws it up in the air, and plays the result.

The theory is that Infinite Music figures out the dynamics of songs and then has everything flow together, potentially forever. And sometimes it works. Often, though, it’s more akin to a hyperactive DJ with no attention span over-excitedly live remixing your music collection.

In short, then, Infinite Music is often more a mad and jolting musical journey than seamless magic, but it’s certainly interesting. And given that it’s free, it’s worth grabbing for a distinctly different take on a music collection that might have become all too familiar.

This app is one for perfectionists who also happen to spend a lot of time on Twitter. Often, people post links to articles, but want to highlight something, and so they take and attach a screen grab. With OneShot for Screenshots, these screen grabs becomes a whole lot more useful.

After you’ve taken a grab, you open the app and load a screenshot. You can then crop it and even highlight the bits you want people to notice. Comments and source URLs can be added before the resulting composition is hurled at Twitter.

The workflow within OneShot is admittedly not that sleek, requiring bouncing between it and other apps. But highlights on screengrabs help get across your point much more than a wall of text.

With 8bit Painter, you can pretend a couple of decades of technology evolution never happened, and create digital images like it’s 1984. On firing up the app, you select a canvas size – from a truly tiny 16 x 16 pixels, all the way up to a comparatively gargantuan 128 x 128. You’re then faced with a grid and a small selection of tools.

There’s nothing especially advanced here – this isn’t Pixaki for iPhone, and it lacks that tool’s layers and animation smarts. But you do get the basics – pencil; flood fill; eraser; color selection – needed for tapping out a tiny artistic masterpiece.

And, importantly, you can pinch-zoom the canvas for adding fine details, and export your image at scaled-up sizes, so it’s not minuscule when viewed elsewhere. For a freebie, this one’s pretty great.

Smartphones are supposed to save you time, but certain actions may require you to dart in and out of several apps, which can be fiddly on an iPhone. The idea behind Workflow is to create triggers that automate a string of actions.

If you’re new to this sort of thing, Workflow does its best to be friendly. The interface primarily comprises big, colorful icons, and the drag-and-drop workflow creation is surprisingly approachable.

Should that still sound like too much work, dozens of workflows (such as GIF creation, making PDFs, and finding local coffee shops) can be downloaded from the gallery to use as-is or experiment with. Usefully, these are not only available from within Workflow itself, but also can be saved to your Home screen, Today widget, Apple Watch, or Share sheet.

If your friends and family are very much of the opinion that your singing voice resembles a particularly unhappy wounded yak, Vanido might be just the ticket. It’s akin to personal music teacher Yousician, only the instrument you spend time improving is your voice.

Vanido works by way of short vocal exercises that change daily. As you attempt to sing, you get real-time visual feedback, so you can see how accurate your pitch is compared to what’s required. Got a wiggly line? Try to hold a note. A line heading north? Dig deep for those bass notes.

Given enough time, you probably still won’t be troubling the pop charts – but perhaps those around you won’t visibly grimace when you start singing along to your favorites.

We’re in one-trick pony territory with Moodelizer, but it’s quite a trick. The app’s all about adding custom soundtracks to videos while you record them, and all you need is a single finger.

You select a genre, and ‘rehearse’ playback by dragging your finger about the square viewfinder. As you move upwards, the music’s intensity increases; rightwards adjusts variation.

Just messing about with the audio alone is quite fun, but it all properly comes together when making a video.

Now, when you’re shooting yet another clip of your cat being mildly amusing, Moodelizer can add much-needed excitement by way of rousing club music or head-banging guitar riffs. Quite why you can’t import a video to add music to, however, we’ve no idea.

A sister product to the more capable iMovie, Clips finds Apple making a foray into stripped-back video apps. It’s designed for impulsive on-the-fly video capture, with scenes grabbed by holding a big red button.

Recordings can also feature live captions, which work brilliantly. You’re not restricted to footage captured in the moment either – Clips can import existing video and photos. You can also add stickers, emoji, and effects to individual shots, before flinging the result online and impatiently awaiting a call from Hollywood.

The lack of clip transitions is a pity, and Apple’s app feels cluttered compared to some sleeker rivals. But for no outlay, there’s plenty of fun here for fans of video who dislike extensive, time-consuming editing. And the live captions are really great.

There’s no getting around the fact that Emolfi is ridiculous – but it’s also a lot of fun. Self-described as the “first empathic selfie app”, it has you take a photo of your face, whereupon the app’s wizardry attempts to figure out your mood. The app then cuts out the background and adjusts the rest of the image accordingly.

If you’re feeling happy, you might be surrounded by bubbles and sunshine. If you’re angry or scared, you’ll get something that looks like a horror movie, or a massive spider on your face with your eyes animating towards it in worried fashion.

It certainly beats yet another app unconvincingly transforming you into characters from fantasy and comic-book movies.

Prisma is the best-known app for transforming photos into tiny works of painted art, but Pixify takes things further, largely by offering you more control. Although you can just select which artwork you’d like your photo to ape, the Custom tab provides tools to tweak the result through changes to brush size, style amount, image resolution, and style influence.

While ramping up settings can greatly increase rendering time, the results are often worth it – Pixify simply does a better job than Prisma of fashioning a realistic virtual painting. The app also works with video – although results there are a mite more variable.

Output gets a Pixify logo added to it, but the Pro IAP ($0.99/99p/AU$1.99) removes those for good, along with unlocking higher-resolution artwork and longer videos.

There are plenty of ambient noise products on the App Store, designed to help you relax, or to distract you from surrounding hubbub. TaoMix 2 is one of the best, due to its gorgeous interface and the flexibility of the soundscapes you create.

You start off with a blank canvas, to which you drag noises that are represented as neon discs. These can be recolored and resized, and positioned wherever you like on the screen. A circle is then placed to balance the mix, or flicked to meander about, so the various sounds ebb and flow over time.

For free, you get eight sounds, can save custom mixes, and can even import your own recordings. Many dozens of additional sounds are available via various affordable IAP.

Billed as ‘your smart travel guide’, Triposo elevates itself above the competition. First and foremost, it’s comprehensive. Whereas other guides typically concentrate on a few major cities, Triposo drills down into tiny towns and villages as well, helping you get the best out of wherever you happen to be staying.

50,000 destinations worldwide are included, complete with information on bars, restaurants, hotels, tours and attractions.

Beyond that, the app is easy to use, and it optionally works offline, enabling you to download guides on a regional basis. This is perfect for when you’re ambling about somewhere new, without a data connection. And if you’re unsure where to head, Triposo can even build an editable city walk for you too.

If you wonder what your iPhone would be like if graphics technology hadn’t moved on from the age of the C64, Famicam 64 can enlighten you. This camera app uses live filtering to replicate the visuals you might once have seen on a classic games system – or other old-school kit like oscilloscopes.

Filters can have their properties adjusted, and you can add text, retro-oriented stickers, freeform scribbles, and borders to a photo, before sharing the results.

Note that some options are limited in the free version, and output adds a Famicam 64 banner to the bottom of the image. You can get rid of all that with the PLUS IAP ($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99), but in either incarnation, Famicam 64 is a fun, quirky, usable way to do something different with your camera.

If you’re bored with watching the same old movies or relying on rental charts, Popcorn may be just the ticket, as the app instead aims to catch your eye with hand-picked lists. This means you delve into anything from ‘movies starring robots’ to the comparatively oddball ‘most harrowing kids’ movies’ (complete with a gruesome still from Watership Down).

Open a list and you get offered a few cards, which you swipe Tinder-style: left consigns them to oblivion and right adds a film to your watchlist. If you’re not sure about whatever’s on a card, you can have a quick look at a trailer first. It’s a fast, simple, effective means of building a movie watchlist in an unusual way.

Adobe apparently has no interest in bringing full Photoshop to iPhone, but the brand’s focused Photoshop-branded apps offer a smattering of the desktop product’s power in the palm of your hand. Adobe Photoshop Sketch is a drawing and painting tool, designed for anyone who fancies dabbling in natural media.

Select a canvas and you can work with virtual pens, markers, acrylic, ink and watercolor. Acrylic is nicely gloopy, and watercolor can be realistically blended as it bleeds into the ‘paper’. A layers system provides scope for complex art, and stencils enable precision when required.

For free, the app’s hard to beat; and for Creative Cloud subscribers, work can be exported to layered PSD for further refinement in full-fat desktop Photoshop.

With its large display and the Apple Pencil, the iPad seems the natural home for a coloring app like Pigment. But if you fancy doing the odd bit of coloring-in when you need to relax, Pigment’s great to also have installed on the device you always have in your pocket.

Even on the smaller screen, it excels. You get quick access to a set of top-notch coloring tools, and a range of intricate illustrations to work on. Sure, buy a subscription and you gain access to a much bigger range; but for free, you still get an awful lot.

Amusingly, the app also offers options for staying inside the lines. By default, Pigment automatically detects what you’re trying to color and assists accordingly – but you can go fully manual if you wish!

The iPhone version of GarageBand has always been ambitious. Aiming at newcomers and professionals alike, its feature set includes smart instruments that always keep you in key, multitrack recording/editing functionality, a loops player, and superb guitar amps.

But 2017’s major update takes things much further, with new synth Alchemy improving the app’s previously slightly ropey sound set. Smart piano strips have been expanded to all keyboard instruments, helping anyone to play perfect melodies.

And Audio Unit support exists to load third-party synths directly inside of GarageBand, similar to how plug-ins work on desktop music-making apps.

Because of these things, GarageBand is now even more suited to musicians of all skill levels – although be aware on smaller screens that the app can be a touch fiddly, what with there being so much going on.

Although the app is listed as $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 on the App Store, it’s free for anyone who’s activated a compatible device after September 1, 2014.

It’s so easy to click links you plan to get to later, and at the end of the day realize you’re left with dozens of unread tabs. With Instapaper, such problems vanish.

The app is effectively time-shifting for the web. You load articles and it saves them for later. Even better, it strips cruft, leaving only the content in a mobile-optimized view ideal for iPhone. The standard theme is very smart, but can be tweaked, and there’s text-to-speech when you need to delve into your articles eyes-free.

Should you end up with a large archive, articles can be filtered or organized into folders. Want to find something specific? Full-text search has you covered. It’s all great – and none of it costs a penny.

Although creative giant Adobe doesn’t seem keen on bringing its desktop software to iPhone in one piece, we’re nonetheless getting chunks of its power reimagined as smaller, more focused apps. The idea behind Adobe Photoshop Fix is to enable you to rapidly retouch and restore photos on your iPhone – using the power of Photoshop.

Some of the features aren’t anything outside of the ordinary: you get commonplace tools for cropping, rotation, and adjustments. But Photoshop Fix has some serious power within its straightforward interface, too, as evidenced by excellent vignette, defocus, and color tools.

The best bit, though, is Liquify. Using this feature, you can mash a photo to bits or make really subtle changes, depending on the subject matter. And if you’re facing a portrait, you can specifically fiddle with features, in a manner usually associated with high-end PC software.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia is an app for browsing Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia that makes all paper-based equivalents green with envy. It’s the official app by Wikipedia and is easily the best free option, and only rivaled by one paid alternative we’re aware of (the rather fine V for Wikipedia).

Wikipedia gets the basics right: an efficient, readable layout; fast access to your browsing history; a home page full of relevant and potentially new articles. But it’s all the small things that really count.

Save an article for later and it’s also stored offline. Finding the text a bit small? You can resize it in two taps.

Also, if you’ve a fairly new iPhone, 3D Touch is well-supported: home screen quick actions provide speedy access to search and random articles; and when reading in the app, the Peek gesture previews a link, and an upwards swipe displays a button you can tap to save it for later.

If you need some ambient noise around you, White Noise+ proves an excellent app for blocking out distractions. The free version offers a small selection of sounds to soothe your soul – white noise, rain, wind, thunder, and wind chimes.

To create some ambience, you simply drag one or more noise icons to an on-screen grid; the items towards the top play at a higher volume, and those towards the right become more complex in nature. Happen upon an especially pleasing combination and you’re able to save your mix for later use.

The app smartly includes built-in mixes to provide a little inspiration – and to showcase a wider range of sounds that’s available via IAP. A single $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 purchase also removes the ad bar, unlocks a sleep timer, alarm, and dark mode, and allows you to fiddle with the 15 additional sounds – in both the bundled mixes and also your own creations.

But whether you pay or not, the combination of excellent sounds and a modern, usable interface make White Noise+ a best-in-class product on the iPhone.

Many apps attempt to emulate film stock, but most go for an over-saturated, larger-than-life take on old-school photography. By contrast, Filmborn is all about realism, arming you with tools to make you a better photographer.

The icon-heavy interface takes some getting used to; but once you know where everything is, Filmborn quickly replaces the stock camera app – or any other app you had previously favored. Much of this is down to features such as manual controls and a superb blown highlights preview, which covers problematic areas of your potential snap in red.

But it’s the filters that will most wow anyone keen on real-world stock. They’re few in number but extremely realistic, and Filmborn also assists regarding when to use them, thereby adding educational clout.

Beyond that, there’s an editor for making post-capture adjustments, and some pro-oriented features you can unlock using IAP, such as curves and multiple set-up slots. But even in its free incarnation, Filmborn is an essential download.

This music-creation app manages the tricky combination of being broadly approachable to the masses yet providing real scope for advanced composition. Designed to be used on the go, Tize has you lay down drum, melody or audio tracks (the last of those being recordings made using your iPhone’s mic).

The app automatically loops recordings, can align notes to the beat, and gives you options for adjusting tempo, scale, and effects.

Its main differentiator over the competition is speed. Once you crack how it works, you can very rapidly fashion loops comprising several overlaid drum tracks, bass, keyboard arpeggios, and lush chords.

Need some help? Easy Chords will play chords for the current scale when you tap a single note. Want to tweak things? Delve into the piano roll and move individual notes. For free, this is astonishing stuff.

The only limit is the available sounds, but these, naturally, can be expanded via various affordable IAPs.

You might not associate taking medication with a hip and cool iPhone, but technology can be a boon to anyone with such requirements. Round Health offers great pill tracking and dosage notifications – and it doesn’t do any harm that the app also happens to be gorgeous.

It’s split into three sections: in My Medicine, you add medications, and for each you can define a name, strength, individual doses, and schedules based around reminder windows of up to three hours. In Today, you view and log the day’s medication.

Flexible preferences enable you to set up cross-device sync, push notifications, and to export data - and reminding users to refill will be a real help too.

That the app is free is generous, given the job it does – and how well it does it. Also, the system is flexible enough that Round Health might work as a reminders system for other repeating tasks, albeit one in which jobs are labelled as ‘taken’ rather than ‘done’!

Apple’s pre-loaded Clock app has a perfectly serviceable timer – but you only get one countdown at any given moment. MultiTimer, as its name might suggest, gives you multiple timers that you can set going simultaneously.

On launching the app, you’ll find six timers already set up. Each has a different color, name and icon. Tap a timer and it starts, tap again to pause, or double-tap to reset. Easy. Long press and you open the timer’s options, so you can adjust its default time, label, color, icon and sound.

You also have plenty of preferences to delve into, including adjusting the default workspace. Should you want extra workspaces – or a custom layout – grab the $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 MultiTimer Pro IAP.

An app rooted in a deeply personal story, Notes on Blindness VR is a VR experience based on the notes of John Hull, who went blind in 1983. Each of the six chapters explores a specific memory, moment and location, utilizing surround audio alongside Hull’s spoken notes, and glittery visuals akin to echolocation.

Purely as a documentary watched on a standard iPhone display, Notes on Blindness VR is well worth experiencing, as Hull adjusts to his new life and experiences – objects ‘disappearing’ as their related sounds fade, and how rain makes the world beautiful because for Hull rainfall gives objects form.

But the full VR experience (assuming you’re also using headphones) takes things further; you gain greater insight into Hull’s life as your own senses are taken over, leaving you with flickers of light but a world of sound.

MuseCam dispenses with the gimmickry seen in many iPhone camera apps, instead concentrating on manual control over shutter, ISO, white balance and focus. There's no means to use a volume button for the shutter, nor RAW support, but otherwise it's a solid camera.

The app is also an editor. You select a Camera Roll item, add film-inspired filter presets, and make further adjustments. Again, this feels like serious fare, but MuseCam wisely provides enough tools for pro-oriented iPhone photographers while remaining accessible enough for newcomers.

Interestingly, edits made on Camera Roll items remain accessible in MuseCam regardless of whether you export your final work, meaning you can later return to and update in-progress projects.

All in all, MuseCam feels refined and mature. That it's free (bar the option of splashing out on additional presets by way of IAP) and also ad-free is remarkable.
 

It’s safe to say that the original promotional video for Bohemian Rhapsody – which popularized the medium – is on the weird side, but it doesn’t compare to The Bohemian Rhapsody Experience.

This experiment by Google aims to send you on a journey through Freddie Mercury’s subconscious mind, and recreate the sensation of being on stage with the band.

With VR glasses strapping your iPhone to your face, the experience is at once deeply strange and excitingly varied. Wherever you look, something’s happening, whether on stage with a distinctly stylized animated take on the band, and then looking behind you to see the crowd, or standing before a rock face, watching singing creatures in the distance, only to peer down and see a stomach-churning chasm below.

Smartly, the app also works as a standard 360-degree video, which might not have the same immersive clout, but remains impressive all the same. 

Google and Apple may be rivals, but that doesn't stop them building on each other's work, as evidenced in Motion Stills, an app which takes the idea of Live Photos and runs with it.

Putting your Live Photos through Motion Stills adds Google's stabilization technology to them, reducing the amount of visible camera shake, but that's just the beginning.

You can also transform them into GIFs which can be shared in messaging apps, or even combine your Motion Stills into longer movies, and do cool things like invert the direction of the action to make your subject look like it’s dancing.

If you like the idea - but not the reality - of Live Photos then Motion Stills is the app for you, and you're not limited to using it for new images - you can also fix up any Live Photos you've already taken.

If you lack the patience for working with full-on stop motion apps, but nonetheless fancy yourself as a mini-Aardman, Loop by Seedling is just the ticket.

You shoot frames using your camera, and can handily overlay your previous photo in semi-transparent form, to ensure everything is properly lined up.

Once you're done, you can play your photos as an animation, where tools are available to adjust the frame rate, add a filter, and mess about with grid collages, creating a Warhol-like animated GIF to share.

The interface is a bit opaque – quite a lot of controls need to be 'discovered' before you become comfortable with using this app.

But once you know where everything is, Loop becomes a smart and efficient way to create charming miniature animations; amusingly, it also works within Messages, so you can reply to friends with a tiny movie should you consider the written word passé.

VPNs have become commonplace in a world where countries routinely block internet access to key content. In some cases, you may merely be blocked from accessing media libraries; elsewhere, even news and social media may be beyond reach. The idea behind Opera VPN is to enable anyone to access otherwise inaccessible online content, entirely for free.

Set-up takes only a minute or so, and the VPN itself is toggled in the Opera VPN app. You get a small selection of regions to choose from, after which point your iPhone effectively thinks it's in whatever country you selected.

During use, Opera VPN typically feels snappy, rivaling paid VPNs we've used elsewhere. Although it won't unlock all overseas services (Netflix, notably, is wise to VPNs these days), it's at the very least a good first place to try if you find you can't get at a particular corner of the internet.

From the brains behind game-like language-learning app Duolingo comes Tinycards. The aim is to enable people to memorize anything by way of friendly flashcard sets.

Duolingo itself offers a number of sets based around language, history and geography. Smartly, though, anyone can create and publish a set, which has led to hundreds of decks about all kinds of subjects, from renaissance art to retro computing.

The memorizing bit is based around minutes-long drills. You’re presented with cards and details to memorize, which the app then challenges you on, by way of typing in answers or answering multiple choice questions.

Some early teething problems with typos and abbreviations (for example, stating ‘USA’ was incorrect because ‘United States of America’ was the answer) have been dealt with by way of a handy ‘I was right’ button. Just don’t press it when you don’t really know the answer, OK?

With Google having extended its tendrils into almost every aspect of online life, Google Trips is the company’s effort to help you explore the real world more easily.

Tell the app where you want to go and it’ll serve up a selection of things to do, itineraries for day trips, food and drink recommendations, and more.

This being a Google app, some of the smart bits are somewhat reliant on you being ensconced in the Google ecosystem – reservations need to be sucked in from Gmail, for example.

However, with offline access for any downloaded location, Trips in tandem with Maps (which can also work offline) is an excellent app to have handy while on your holiday, and with the included ‘need to know’ section (emergency numbers; hospitals; health centers) could even be a life-saver.

Following in the footsteps of MSQRD, FaceRig enables you to embody a virtual character by controlling it with your face.

Everything happens entirely automatically – you just select a character and background, gurn into the camera, watch a seemingly sentient floating hamburger mirror your very expression, and have a little sit down to think about the terrifying advance of technology.

For those not freaked out by the hamburger to the point that they hurl their iPhones into the sea, FaceRig provides plenty of characters, unlocked using tokens earned through regular use or bought using IAP.

You can also snap and share photos of your virtual visage, or record entire videos where you pretend you’ve turned into a sentient goggles-wearing raccoon, an angry dragon or a slightly irritated-looking turkey.

One-time darling of the digital check-in crowd, Foursquare in 2014 reworked its app to focus entirely on local search. Although this irked fans who'd been there since the beginning, it's hard to criticize the app we've been left with.

On iPhone, you start with a search field, beneath which sits a handy list of relatively local places of interest. Tap an item and you gain access to a photo gallery, basic details, and a slew of reviews.

In the main, Foursquare is quite obsessed with food, drink and nightlife, but the 'fun' and 'more' categories house plenty of additional places to visit, from gig venues and cinemas to rather more sedate options like parks and historic sites.

Filters and 'tastes' options within the app's settings enable you to further hone down recommended choices, and anything you fancy reminding yourself of on a more permanent basis can be added to a custom list.

Although most fans want to cheer on their soccer team by hollering from the stands or, second best, yelling at a TV in a pub, that's not always possible. When you're otherwise busy, Onefootball is a great means of keeping track of your favorites.

The app's a cinch to set up. Choose your teams, allow Onefootball to send notifications, and then let the app work its magic. On match days, you'll be notified of every goal, which, depending on your team's fortunes, may make you thrill at or dread hearing the notification sound.

If you at any point need a little more detail, venture into the app and you'll discover everything from live tickers to customized news feeds.

If you like the idea of editing home movies but are a modern-day being with no time or attention span, try Quik. The app automates the entire process, enabling you to create beautiful videos with a few taps and show off to your friends without needing talent - surely the epitome of today's #hashtag generation.

All you need do is select some videos and photos, and choose a style. Quik then edits them into a great-looking video you can share with friends and family. But if your inner filmmaker hankers for a little more control, you can adjust the style, music, format and pace, along with trimming clips, reordering items, and adding titles to get the effect you desire.

Cementing its friendly nature, Quik offers a little pairs minigame for you to mess about with while the app renders your masterpiece. And there's even a weekly 'For You' video Quik compiles without you lifting a finger.

We've seen quite a few apps that try to turn your photos into art, but none manage it with quite the same raw ability as Prisma. The app is almost disarmingly simple to use: shoot or select a photo, crop your image, and choose an art style (options range from classic paintings through to comic book doodling).

The app within a few seconds then transforms your photo into a miniature Picasso or Munch, and it's instantly better than most of us could ever hope to achieve with Photoshop.

On trying Prisma with a range of imagery, we found it almost never comes up with a duff result thanks to some insanely smart processing. But if you find the effects a bit jarring, a slide of your finger can soften your chosen filter prior to sharing your masterpiece online.

Our only criticism is the app's fairly low-res output, making Prisma pics only suitable for screen use - but it's a real must-have.

The camera sitting inside your iPhone is pretty amazing. In fact, plenty of people think it's too amazing, the clarity and purity of digital shots having lost the 'character' found in photography of old. Retrica brings a sense of creativity and randomness to iPhone snaps - and more besides.

Filters are Retrica's main trick. You can manually select one from a list (which can be managed, for faster access to favorites) or try your luck by stabbing the shuffle button. A selected filter's strength can be adjusted, but there's sadly no quick 'filter off' switch.

The filters, though, are varied and interesting, and you can optionally add a blur and vignette. It's also possible to apply Retrica filters to shots taken elsewhere, if you prefer taking 'clean' pics and messing around with them later.

Retrica also plays with time. You can take multi-shots, your photos subsequently being stitched together on a grid (there are well over a dozen options to choose from), or played in sequence as an exportable GIF.

Alternatively, hold the shutter and the app starts recording video, using your chosen filter. For five dollarpounds, we'd have written a glowing review about Retrica, but for free this is an astonishing gift - a superb and unmissable creative camera app.

If you used to sit there at school, doodling flick-animation masterpieces in the corner of your jotter, Animatic is the iPhone equivalent. You use simple tools to scribble on a small canvas, and then build your animation frame-by-frame.

The app uses a basic onion-skin approach, meaning you can see the previous few frames faintly behind the current one, ensuring whatever you draw doesn't lurch all over the place. Once you're done, you can adjust the animation speed of your creation and export it to video or GIF.

Given that you're scribbling with what amounts to the iPhone equivalent of felt pens, you won't be crafting the next Pixar movie here. But Animatic is fun, a great way to get into animation, and a useful sketchpad for those already dabbling. The app also includes a bunch of demos, showcasing what's possible with a little time, effort and imagination.

Plenty of apps claim they can get you making music in seconds, but Figure really means it. The app's heritage helps, as it comes from Propellerhead Software, creators of the legendary Reason and ReBirth.

In Figure, though, working on loops and beats is stripped right back from what you'd find in those complex PC apps; instead, you tap out drums, and slide your finger around to fashion monster bass and playful leads.

Sounds can be tweaked or swapped out entirely at any point. Once you're done, finished tracks can be uploaded and shared online. For serious musicians, there's even Audiobus support.

There's a tendency for weather apps to either bombard you with facts or try to be too clever with design Hello Weather, by contrast, simply wants to get you all the weather information you need, but nothing you don't.

This focused approach doesn't mean Hello Weather is an ugly app. On the contrary, it's very smart, with a clean layout and readable graphs. Mostly, though, we're fond of Hello Weather because it eschews complexity without limiting the information on offer.

The single-page view is split in three, covering current conditions, the next few hours, and the week's forecast. If you need more detail, a swipe provides access to things like sunrise/sunset times for the current day, or written forecasts for the coming week.

The app doesn't quite check off our entire wish-list - the lack of a rainfall radar (or at least a precipitation prediction graph for the coming hour) is a pity. But as a free no-fuss weather app, Hello Weather is hard to beat.

The idea behind Cheatsheet is to provide fast access to tiny chunks of information you never remember but really need to: your hotel room, your car's number plate, Wi-Fi passwords, or, if you're feeling suitably retro, the Konami code.

Set-up is pleasingly straightforward. Using the app, you add 'cheats' by selecting an icon and then typing your info nugget. When you've got yourself a number of 'cheats', they can be reordered as you see fit. Once you're done, the entire lot can be displayed on the Today widget or an Apple Watch.

Cheatsheet saves some features for a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 'pro' upgrade - a custom keyboard, an action extension, some of the icons, and iCloud sync. But the free version is nonetheless useful and generous, along with making really good use of the Today view on your phone.

With the vast range of movies available at any given time, keeping track of what you'd like to see and what you've watched already isn't easy. TodoMovies 4 aims to simplify the process and aid discovery.

The app starts off with the discovery bit, having you check out lists that range from Academy Award nominees to those with the 'greatest gun fights of all time'. Beyond this, you can browse by genre, explore upcoming films and what's on in theatres, or perform a search for something specific.

Selecting a film loads artwork, and most have a trailer. Tap the big '+' to add the current film to your To Watch list, which can be searched or browsed (alphabetically, by date added, or by release date).

Watched films can be removed or sent to your Watched list, whereupon they can be rated. This mix of focus and friendliness - along with some very smart design - makes this app a no-brainer download for movie buffs.

Snapseed is an extremely versatile photo editor for iPhone. You choose from a number of tools and filters, and proceed to pinch and swipe your way to a transformed image. You get all the basics — cropping, rotation, healing brushes, and the like — but the filters are where you can get really creative. There are blurs, photographic effects, and more extreme options like 'grunge' and 'grainy film', which can add plenty of atmosphere to your photographs.

The vast majority of effects are tweakable, mostly by dragging up and down on the canvas to select a parameter and then horizontally to adjust its strength. Brilliantly, the app also records applied effects as separate layers, each of which remains fully editable until you decide to save your image and work on something else.

It's no secret that Apple Maps doesn't have the best reputation, although it has got better in recent times.

Fortunately, Google Maps is a free download, and a far better solution than the old Google Maps app as well, thanks to the inclusion of turn-by-turn navigation and - in some cities - public transport directions. Handily, it can also save chunks of maps for offline use - great when you're heading somewhere with poor connectivity.

It's an easy way to supercharge your iPhone's mapping capabilities and one of the first apps you should grab for the iPhone 7.

If you live in or visit one of the supported cities (which include London, Paris, Berlin and New York), Citymapper is an essential download, assuming you want to find your way around more easily.

It'll zero in on your location and then intelligently get you from A to B, providing all kinds of travel options and routing, and, where relevant, live times for transit.

Sometimes with apps, it's the seemingly little things that make a big difference. With Overcast, for example, you get a perfectly decent podcast app that does everything you'd expect: podcast subscriptions; playback via downloads or streaming; a robust search for new shows.

But where Overcast excels is in attempting to save you time and improve your listening experience. Effects (which can be assigned per-podcast) provide the smartest playback speed-up we've heard, voice boost for improving the clarity of talky shows, and smart speed.

The last of those attempts to shorten silences. You won't use that setting for comedy shows, but it's superb for lengthy tech podcasts. As of version 2.0, Overcast is free, and betters all the other iOS podcast apps that also lack a price tag. (Should you wish to support the app, though, there's an entirely optional recurring patronage IAP.)

Now you've downloaded Overcast, check out our list of the best podcasts

Although Apple introduced iCloud Keychain in iOS 7, designed to securely store passwords and payment information, 1Password is a more powerful system. Along with integrating with Safari, it can be used to hold identities, secure notes, network information and app licence details. It's also cross-platform, meaning it will work with Windows and Android.

And since 1Password is a standalone app, accessing and editing your information is fast and efficient. The core app is free – the company primarily makes its money on the desktop. However, you’ll need a monthly subscription or to pay a one-off $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99 IAP to access advanced features (multiple vaults, Apple Watch support, tagging, and custom fields).

It's interesting to watch the evolution of an app. Starting out on iPad, Paper was something of a design industry darling, offering a beautiful and stylish, if ultimately slightly limited, digital notebook of sorts.

Then it went free, the developer positioning Paper as the perfect app to use with its Pencil stylus.

But the latest update not only brings the app to iPhone it also radically reimagines and expands it. Alongside existing sketch tools, you now get notes and the means to add photos, transforming Paper from nice-to-have to essential.

Back in 2009, Jorge Colombo did some deft iPhone finger painting using Brushes, and the result became a New Yorker cover.

It was a turning point for iOS and suitably handy ammunition for tech bores who'd been drearily banging on about the fact an iPhone could never be used for proper work. The app sadly stagnated, but was made open source and returned as Brushes Redux.

Now free, it's still a first-rate art app, with a simple layers system, straightforward controls, and a magnificent brush editor that starts you off with a random creation and enables you to mess about with all manner of properties, from density to jitter.

We keep hearing about how important coding will be to the future of everything. That's all very well, unless code makes about as much sense to you as the most exotic of foreign languages.

The idea behind Lrn is to gently ease you in. Through friendly copy and simple quizzes, you gradually gain confidence across a range of languages.

For free, you get courses on HTML and CSS, along with introductions to JavaScript, Ruby and Python. You can complete any course for $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49; but even if you don't pay anything at all, you'll get a lot out of this app if you've an interest in coding but don't know where to start.

The science of sleep is something few people delve into. But you know some days that you wake up and feel awful, even if you think you've had a decent night's sleep. Sleep Cycle might be able to tell you why. It analyses you while you sleep, using sound or motion, and provides detailed statistics when you wake.

Additionally, it'll constantly figure out what phase of sleep you're in, attempting to wake you at the best possible time, in a gentle, pleasing manner.

That probably all sounds a bit woo-woo, but here's the thing: this app actually works, from the graphing bits through to helping you feel refreshed and relaxed on waking up.

Developer Pixite is best known for its eye-popping filter apps, and so Assembly was quite the surprise. The app is all about building vector art from shapes.

Individual components are dropped on to the canvas, and can then be grouped or have styles applied. It feels a bit like the iPhone equivalent of playing with felt shapes, but you soon realise that surprisingly complex compositions are possible, not least when you view the 'inspirations' tab or start messing about with the 'remix' projects.

For free, you get loads of stuff to play with, but inexpensive IAP unlocks all kinds of bundles with new themed shape sets to explore.

It's interesting to see how far the App Store has come. Time was, Apple banned apps that gave you the chance to build prototypes. Now, Marvel is welcomed by Apple, and is entirely free.

Using the app, you can build on photographed sketches, Photoshop documents, or on-screen scribbles. Buttons can be added, and screens can be stitched together.

Once you're done, your prototype can be shared. If you're not sure where to start, check out existing prototypes made by the Marvel community.

The Weather Underground app (or 'Wunderground' to your iPhone, which sounds like an oddly dark Disney film) is one of those products that flings in everything but the kitchen sink yet somehow remains usable.

Whatever your particular interest in the weather, you're covered, through a slew of 'tiles' (which can be moved or disabled to suit) on a huge scrolling page.

At the top, you get a nicely designed tile detailing current conditions and showing a local map. Tick and cross buttons lurk, asking for input regarding the app's accuracy. During testing, we almost always tapped the tick — reassuring.

Scroll, though, and you find yourself immersed in the kind of weather geekery that will send meteorological nuts into rapture. There are rainfall and temperature graphs for the next day and hour, along with simpler forecasts for the week.

You get details on humidity, pressure and dew point. Sunrise, sunset and moon timings are presented as stylish animations. You can investigate local and global webcams and photos, and then head to the web if not satisfied with that deluge of data.

Weather Underground is funded by non-intrusive ads (which you can disable annually for $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 if you feel the need), and is easily our favourite free iPhone weather app; in fact, it even rivals the best paid fare on the platform.

On the iPad, Novation Launchpad is one of the best music apps suitable for absolutely anyone. You get a bunch of pads, and tap them to trigger audio loops, which always sound great regardless of the combinations used. This isn't making music per se, but you can get up a good head of steam while imagining yourself as a futuristic combination of electronic musician, DJ and mix genius.

On iPhone, it shouldn't really work, the smaller screen not being as suited to tapping away at dozens of pads. But smart design from Novation proves otherwise. 48 trigger pads are placed front and centre, and are just big enough to accurately hit unless you've the most sausagey of sausage thumbs.

Effects lurk at the foot of the screen — tap one and a performance space slides in, covering half the screen, ready for you to stutter and filter your masterpiece.

As on the iPad, you can also record a live mix, which can be played back, shared and exported. This is a really great feature, adding optional permanence to your tapping exploits.

We're big fans of iMovie. Apple's video editor for iPhone is usable and powerful. In our lazier moments, we also really like Replay, which takes a bunch of videos and edits them on your behalf. But there are times when you hanker for a middle ground, and that's where Splice fits in.

Getting started is simple — select some videos and photos to import (from your Camera Roll, or online sources like Facebook and Google Photos), along with, optionally, a soundtrack. Name your project, choose an orientation, and the app lays out your clips. These can be reordered by drag and drop, and transitions can be adjusted with a couple of taps.

If you want to delve deeper, individual clips can be trimmed and cut, and you can apply effects. Several filters are included, as is a speed setting, and the means to overlay text.

These tools perhaps won't worry the Spielbergs of this world, but a few minutes in Splice can transform a few random iPhone clips into something quite special — and all without a price-tag or even any advertising.

The nature of social media is it's all about the 'now'. With Timehop, you get the chance to revisit moments from this day, based around your online history.

The service connects to whatever accounts you allow it to, and then shows you what was happening in your world. It's a simple concept that's perfect for iPhone.

The world's biggest social network brings a tightly honed experience to the iPhone and iPod touch, but nonetheless still enables you to access your contacts, feeds and other important information. This sense of focus makes it in many ways superior to using Facebook in a desktop browser.

If you pick up an iPhone 7, Facebook will likely be one of the first apps you'll want to download.

AKA 'Stalk My Contacts', but Find My Friends does have practical uses: if you're meeting a bunch of iPhone-owning friends and want to know where they're at, for example, or for when wanting to check where your spouse is on the road, to see if it's time to put the dinner in the oven/pretend to look busy when they walk through the door. (Or maybe that's just what freelance tech writers do.)

It's all opt-in, so you won't be able to track your friends / be tracked without explicit consent, so you can rest easy once you start using it.

Plenty of apps exist for transferring content between your computer and your device, but Dropbox is free and easier to use than most of its contemporaries.

And even now that Apple's provided easier access to iCloud Drive, Dropbox remains a useful install, largely on the basis of its widespread support (both in terms of platforms and also iOS apps). The Dropbox app itself works nicely, too, able to preview a large number of file types, and integrating well with iOS for sending documents to and from the various iPhone apps you have installed.

Love Dropbox? Then check out our article Essential tips for every Dropbox user.

Google's own YouTube app works much as you'd expect, enabling you to search and watch an almost limitless number of cats playing pianos, people moaning about stuff to their web-cams, and more besides.

Despite Google's adherence to its own distinct design language, YouTube tends to be a good iOS citizen, supporting AirPlay. It also naturally integrates well with your Google Play account, providing access to purchased films, which can be watched or flung at your telly if you've the relevant hardware.

A great many Today view widgets seem quite gimmicky, but Vidgets provides a great mix of monitoring and utility.

The standalone app enables you to add and organise the likes of world clocks, network indicators, and widgets outlining remaining space on your device. These are then immediately available in Notification Center.

Although you get the sense eBay's designers can't get through a month without redesigning their app, it's always far superior to using the online auction site in a browser.

eBay for iOS works nicely on the iPhone, with browsing proving fast and efficient. Speedy sorting and filtering options also make it a cinch to get to listings for whatever it is you fancy buying.

Shazam is an app that feels like magic when you first use it. It's deceptively simple—hold your iPhone near to a music source, and wait while the app listens and tells you what track is playing.

But the sheer technology behind this simplicity is mind-boggling, and while Shazam doesn't always guess right, it's worth a download.

The revamped keyboard in modern incarnations of iOS is far better than what we had before, not least because of the predictive word bar, but SwiftKey takes things a step further.

Rather than laboriously tapping out individual keys, you just glide your finger across them. This can make for some comical typos initially, but SwiftKey soon speeds up iPhone text entry.

For the most part, Yousician Guitar feels quite a lot like Guitar Hero, only you use a real guitar and the app is cunningly teaching you how to play it.

Things start with the absolute basics, but before you know it, you're strumming and picking with the best of them. The app's free, although with limited daily play time. Subscriptions enable you to learn more rapidly.

For the paranoid souls out there (or the unlucky ones who've had their devices pilfered), Find My iPhone is a must-have download.

Assuming you've a 2010 or later iOS device, you can set up a free account and locate your devices within seconds. (Note that older devices can also be added to Find My iPhone - you just need a recent one to get things going.)

Google Translate is a bit like an insanely portable and entirely free gaggle of translation staff. When online, you can translate written or photographed text between dozens of languages, or speak into your device and listen to translations.

And for English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (and back), the app will attempt to live-translate (even when offline) any text in front of the camera.

Skyscanner's a great website, which enables you to punch in airports and find out the cheapest way of getting from A to B.

The Skyscanner app is the same, but it's on your device and with a spiffy AI. Well worth a download, even if only to check flights for an upcoming holiday.

The thinking behind Slack is to free teams from the drudgery of email. It's essentially a real-time messaging system, where people have group conversations based around user-defined hashtags, or send private messages to one-another.

Support for inline images, videos and Twitter-like summaries boost pasted content, and the app integrates with cloud storage from the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.

It's worth noting that while Slack is clearly aimed at businesses, it works perfectly well as a means of communication for groups of friends who aren't thrilled about storing their personal insights and details on Facebook.

The prospect of Nike+ but better and for free might sound unlikely, but that's what RunKeeper provides. Previously split into 'pro' and 'free' versions, the developer now generously includes all the features in one free app.

That means you can spend no money, yet use your iPhone's GPS capabilities to track your jogging and cycling routes, and examine mapping and details of your pace and calories burned.

Activities can be shared online, and treadmill runs and other exercise details can be entered manually.

Over two million definitions, synonyms and antonyms are available in the palm of your hand with this free, offline dictionary and thesaurus.

The app is fast and efficient, includes phonetic and audio pronunciation of words, and its interface seems perfectly suited to the iPhone.

XE Currency is a fine example of an app that does what it needs to, without fuss. You configure a list of currencies, and it shows current conversion rates.

Double-tap a currency to set its base rate or to define values for custom conversions.

Don't bother buying a DAB radio - just install TuneIn Radio instead and plug your device into a set of speakers.

TuneIn Radio has a great interface for accessing over 100,000 digital stations; it also has AirPlay support, and you can use it as an alarm clock.

TED is brain food. The app provides access to talks by insanely clever people, opening your mind to new and radical ideas.

You can also save your favourite talks locally, for even easier access, or ask the app to inspire you, based on your mood and available time.

The App Store has so many to-do apps that it's in severe danger of tipping over, due to the sheer weight of digital checkboxes, but Wunderlist is one of the very few that really stands out.

The interface is very usable, and the app's ability to seamlessly sync across devices and platforms makes it a great download.

"But Gmail works in Apple Mail," you might say. And this is true, but it doesn't work terribly well. For the best of Gmail, Google's own offering is unsurprisingly the app to opt for.

The Gmail app provides a full experience, enabling you to search, thread, star and label items to your heart's content - and is far better when your connection is patchy.

We're told the 'S' in Vert S stands for 'speed'. This is down to the app being an efficient incarnation of the well-regarded Vert unit converter.

The older app had you browse huge category lists to pick what you need, but Vert S is keener on immediacy. There's a search, but the app's core is a Favorites page, where commonly used conversions are stored.

Tap one and you enter a basic calculator, enabling you to convert between your two chosen units, which can be quickly switched by tapping the Vert button. (Note that currencies are behind an IAP paywall — $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 for 'Vert Pro' — but conversions for other units are free.)

Apple's Music Memos is all about getting music ideas down — fast. You launch the app, hit record, play your guitar or piano, and your riff is safely recorded, rather than vanishing from your head the moment you see something vaguely interesting outside.

Smartly, the app provides additional toys to experiment with. There's a tuner, and during playback, you can add automated electronic bass and drumming. The virtual instruments attempt to match tempo and energy with whatever you recorded (and with some success, although more complex inputs can confuse this feature to an amusing degree).

Music Memos also tries to transcribe the chords being played; its accuracy is questionable beyond the basics, but not bad as a trigger when you later want to learn how to play your own spark of inspiration.

Usefully, you can fling recordings at GarageBand and Logic (bass and drums going along for the ride as separate tracks).

Less usefully, you can sing into the app, and still add bass, drums and chord transcription, for some kind of madcap tech-based cacophony of awfulness that we felt entirely compelled to try in the name of a thorough review. Expect our effort to (not) trouble the charts shortly.

You've got to hand it to NASA: in naming its app 'NASA App', you're well prepared for a product bereft of elegance, and so it proves to be. This is a clunky app, with ugly graphic design, and that's heavily reliant on you being online to download its content.

Oh, but what content! It's the wealth of eye-popping imagery and exhaustive commentary that will keep anyone with an interest in space glued to their iPhone, devouring items by the dozen. The 'Images' section is particularly lovely, with a huge range of photos.

There are pictures of star clusters that look unreal, moody shots of planets and moons, and snaps of engineers doing clever things. These can all be rated, run as a slideshow, shared, or saved locally.

Elsewhere, you get a ton of informative and educational videos, guides to missions, news, and, slightly weirdly, access to NASA's Twitter feed. And if you fancy turning your brain off for a bit, there's a live feed from the ISS, the blue marble that is Earth slowly rolling underneath.

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Nokia 8 just got updated to Android Oreo, adding speed and new features

Following a beta last month, the finished version of Android Oreo has now landed on the Nokia 8, bringing with it a number of improvements and new features.

The update, which we’ve had confirmation is live in the UK, will presumably be coming to the rest of the world soon if it hasn’t already, and highlights include a new picture-in-picture mode, which lets you watch a video while using another app.

That’s a feature you’ll find on most handsets rocking Android Oreo, but there’s also some stuff exclusive to Nokia handsets, such as ‘Dual-Sight’, which uses the front and back cameras simultaneously when shooting video, so you can stream your reaction to events on social media.

Fast and free of bloat

The Nokia 8 should also now power up faster and its battery might last longer, thanks to a feature that limits the background activity of the apps you use least.

And speaking of apps, there’s no bloat here, with no unnecessary apps added as part of the Android Oreo update. But what you do get is over 60 new emoji, plus new designs for the existing ones.

There’s also good news if you have a Nokia 6 or other Nokia handset, as you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer for Android Oreo, with HMD Global – the company behind recent Nokia phones – claiming that Oreo is coming to other Nokia handsets soon.

We're already dreaming of Android P

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The best VPN for Kodi in 2017

For those not familiar with Kodi, it’s one of the most popular media players around thanks to its excellent interface, not to mention the fact that it’s free and open source – and boasts some impressive capabilities when it comes to add-ons which support various streaming services.

Some of those add-ons are perfectly legal, and others – not so much. Naturally, here at TechRadar, we don’t endorse any form of piracy or illegally viewing copyrighted material.

How to choose the best VPN service for Kodi

As ever when it comes to streaming content – particularly if it’s HD – you want one of the best VPNs which gives you fast download speeds to avoid those dreaded pauses while the ‘buffering’ icon hogs the screen. A large web of server locations also helps as you’ll have more options to find the fastest connection possible.

And as always, you’ll want good levels of security and a ‘zero logs’ privacy policy. An intuitive dedicated client is highly desirable as there might be some initial tweaking and fiddling required. Those who prefer viewing on the go should look out for mobile device support, and preferably native clients for iOS/Android.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at our five top VPN services for Kodi.

Check out the best VPN services of 2017 and visit thebestvpnfor.me to get the best VPN deals on the market

[57% Off] IPVanish (Official Promotion) - Get up to 57% Off TechRadar's #1 Rated VPN Service  with IPVanish's top-tier network delivering some of the fastest speeds in our tests. Zero logs gives you total privacy. 

IPVanish provides superb performance levels complemented with a wide range of server locations. In testing, our download speeds improved by around 15% compared to our normal rates.

The service offers native clients for Windows and Mac, along with Android and iOS, plus it has setup instructions for other platforms. The native Windows client, in particular, is a sterling effort with an intuitive interface and a bundle of advanced features (although on the downside, we found it could potentially be susceptible to more network issues than rival VPN software).

IPVanish has a strict no logs policy and all the necessary security in place for a smooth and carefree VPN experience. If there’s one thing that somewhat spoils the fun, it’s the cost of the service as it’s a bit on the pricey side. There is no free trial available, but the three plans include a 7-day money-back guarantee. The 1-year subscription is the best and most affordable option. The packages available are:

[$4.87 a month] 1-year - $58.49[$6.74 a month] 3-month - $20.24[$7.50 a month] 1-month - $7.50

Streaming content requires a fast connection and it doesn’t get much better than VyprVPN in this respect. Our performance tests revealed that this provider offers superb download speeds – twice as fast as the rates we get with the VPN turned off, in fact. Add the firm’s widespread server coverage and you have a service tailored for HD and 4K content.

There are easy-to-use clients for all relevant platforms and devices, supported by strong security aspects. Along with the expected range of protocols and encryption, the provider’s own Chameleon technology aims to defeat VPN blocking and throttling for a faster connection. A kill switch, NAT Firewall, and VyprVPN’s own DNS solution complete the efforts on the security front. On top of that, there is no logging of traffic or online activities, but there is some logging occurring in the form of recording connection times and IP addresses.

Would-be users have a free 3-day trial at their disposal, which is particularly useful as VyprVPN doesn’t allow refunds. Commercial plans are based on monthly and annual billing, with the monthly plans carrying an expensive price tag. Your best bet is the Premium plan with annual billing as it includes all the bells and whistles (like the Chameleon protocol) for a reasonable price. The packages available are:

Basic: $9.95 monthly or $5.00 per month billed annuallyPremium: $12.95 monthly or $6.67 per month billed annually

NordVPN offers an impressive level of overall server coverage, being one of the largest VPN networks around. Its performance is far from shabby, too, providing consistently fast connections throughout much of that expansive network. 

This provider also has user-friendly applications for all major operating systems. These are packed with useful features, along with plenty of beef on the security front. There’s Double VPN (double encryption) for maximum privacy, Onion over VPN, a CyberSec feature for blocking intrusive adverts and malicious online threats, an automatic kill switch, and more besides.

NordVPN has a ‘no logs’ policy, but it’s unclear whether session logs are maintained or not, so some logging of this nature may go on.

There is a free 3-day trial to take this VPN for a test spin, but it’s rather hidden away on the website – find it here. With the monthly billing being rather pricey, the cheap 2-year subscription provides the best value for your money. The packages available are:

[$11.95 a month] 1-month[$5.75 a month] 1-year - $69.00[$3.29 a month] 2-years - $79.00

This Singapore-based VPN proved to be consistent in our testing. The service delivered fast and reliable connections even over long distances with almost no difference compared to our regular download speeds. Ivacy's desktop clients are novice-friendly, but also offer more than enough settings to tweak for more advanced users. Unfortunately, the mobile apps are a different story, being overly basic and rarely updated.

There are no logs kept here, and the service handles privacy and security quite well. Still, you may want to pay attention to the 7-day refund policy as there are some conditions attached to it. Namely, it doesn't apply if you've used Bitcoin or Paymentwall to pay for the service, or if you have used more than 7GB of bandwidth, or connected more than 30 times.

Ivacy offers three subscriptions that could use a bit more variety, although they all have a 7-day money-back guarantee. The 2-year plan is really cheap, and the packages available are:

[$9.95 a month] 1-month[$7.49 a month] 6-months - $44.95[$2.04 a month] 2-years - $49.95Download Ivacy here

Hide.me has the smallest server selection of any VPN on this list, but makes up for it with great performance – in our tests, it actually increased download speeds by just a touch compared to our normal rates.

The service provides clients for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and there are setup instructions for other platforms. The Windows client is compact and quite simple to use, and with just one click you can connect to the fastest server currently available. There is a strict no logging policy in place, too.

The service offers a 2GB per month free plan which is more than enough to properly test things out. If you want unlimited data, then you’ll need the Premium plan, but it’s rather expensive. Otherwise, the only other option is the Plus package which has certain restrictions (75GB data allowance, no port forwarding, a miserly one simultaneous connection, and other limitations). The packages available are:

Free - costs nothingPlus - $4.99 a monthPremium - $9.99 a monthDownload Hide.me here

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Your new work colleague could soon be Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa

Amazon is bringing its digital assistant Alexa into the office environment, with the company on the verge of revealing Alexa for Business.

As TechCrunch reports, over at re:Invent 2017 – the big AWS event which finishes tomorrow – Amazon is expected to reveal a new business platform which allows companies to build their own skills (and use pre-loaded skills) to make life easier for employees.

The vision is for Amazon’s smart speakers (Echo and Dot) to bring their voice-controlled chops to offices everywhere, allowing folks to easily take care of tasks like calendar management, pulling up sales data, booking conference rooms, or indeed adjusting the temperature (or turning on the lights) in those rooms.

Security features are also likely to be part of the puzzle, as you’d imagine in a business setting, and that could tie in with Alexa’s recently granted ability to recognize individual voices.

We will likely hear more about Alexa for Business later today over at Amazon’s big conference, as previously mentioned.

Cortana coexistence?

We’re not sure how Microsoft will receive this news, given that the workplace is traditionally the software giant’s domain with its twin pillars of Windows and Office – and Cortana, the firm’s own digital assistant, tied in with all that.

That said, these digital assistants may be able to happily coexist in the workplace (alongside others), as we’ve discussed before when news broke this summer that Microsoft and Amazon are working to get Alexa and Cortana talking to each other.

The end result could be an office where all these various assistants work together, directing a user request to the particular digital assistant best equipped to deal with it.

It’s certainly clear, though, that Alexa and her ilk are going to play an increasingly large part in the smooth running of businesses at a nuts-and-bolts level in the near future.

We’ve picked out the best business laptops right here

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The best iPhone 7 deals in November 2017

Forget those iPhone 8 deals. Laugh in the face of iPhone X deals. iPhone 7 deals are down to an all time low - you can now get Apple's fantastic 2016 flagship phone for less than £700 over the two year contract.

Black Friday came early to the iPhone 7, with this £22.99 per month deal on EE the first volley of fire in the deals season battleground. It's a tariff that's almost as cheap as some of the best iPhone 6S deals currently on the market, and hundreds of pounds cheaper than the iPhone X and 8.

As well as the above deal, on this page you'll find all of the best iPhone 7 deals you can get right now. Whether you're looking for unlimited data, a free phone or any other type of tariff, you can use our comparison chart below to choose the cheapest option out there. Scroll down to find the best deal for you. And don't forget that you'll get a tenner off the handset cost if you get your iPhone 7 from Mobiles.co.uk - you just need to enter 10OFF as a discount code when you get to the checkout.

See also: iPhone X deals | iPhone 8 deals | iPhone 7 Plus deals | iPhone 7 SIM free / Unlocked | Samsung Galaxy S8 deals | Best mobile phone deals | Best SIM only deals

The 5 best iPhone 7 deals in the UK today

At the top of our guide you'll see what we've chosen as this month's best value iPhone 7 deals in the UK (if you're down under, head over to our best Australian iPhone 7 deals). These are chosen purely on the basis of value - unlike some other sites we don't manipulate the order of these deals for commercial gain! Then we pick out the best deals on the four major networks, those being EE, O2, Three and Vodafone.

Now let's break down the best iPhone 7 deals by network...

Best iPhone 7 deals on EE this month Best iPhone 7 deals on O2 this month Best iPhone 7 deals on Vodafone this month Best iPhone 7 deals on Three this month

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The best iPhone 6 deals in November 2017

It may be three years old (doesn't time fly!) and attention is now much more focused on the new iPhone X, but the iPhone 6 is an excellent alternative to costly iPhone 8 deals. So if your contract is up, you're ready to upgrade, want an Apple handset but also want to keep your spending down, then the iPhone 6 is well worth a look.

And you need look no further, because we've done all the research for you! We've rounded up the UK's best contract deals for Apple's iPhone 6. The good news is that the price of the iPhone 6 has fallen through the floor. Now with plenty of deals under £20 a month, there's never been a better time to pick up this still-fantastic phone.

With the deals you can grab in our comparison chart below, you can fill your boots with unlimited texts and minutes, as well as a healthy slug of data. Buy buy BUY!

More options: iPhone 6 unlocked / SIM-free | iPhone 7 deals | iPhone 6S deals | iPhone 6 Plus deals | iPhone deals | Best mobile phone deals

The UK's top 5 best iPhone 6 deals

It may be three years old, but the iPhone 6 has aged admirably. And the mature age also means the prices are fantastic. We've sorted through the finest iPhone 6 deals from EE, O2, Vodafone and Three to narrow down the best five plans available today.

Unlike more recent entries in the iPhone ouevre, Apple made a genuine leap forward from the iPhone 5S with its successor. The iPhone 6 remains one of the best phones Apple has ever created or, indeed, ever created by any manufacturer. At the time of release, its faster CPU, better graphics and slicker interface really made it seem worth the high price - so now it's a bonafide bargain!

Read TechRadar's full iPhone 6 review

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The best iPhone 6S deals in November 2017

It doesn't take a genius to work out why you've landed on this page, dear reader. You fancy a new iPhone, but the prices you've seen for the iPhone 8 have given you a fright and got you searching around for something a little cheaper. Grabbing an iPhone 6S deal is the obvious solution.

For a while that was only half true, after iPhone 7 deals took a massive price tumble and pulled the rug from under the best 6S prices. But we've just seen the first sub-£20 a month tariff on Apple's 2015 flagship phone once again making it a great budget option if you don't want to spend the earth on your new iPhone.

If you want more than the minimum of data, then check out our comparison chart below, or head straight down to our pick of the best tariffs on the web.

The 6S may not be the newest (or best) iPhone any longer, but it still features all of the excellence of one of Apple's best-selling phones – the iPhone 6 – with added features like improved battery life and 3D touch, where you can press a bit harder on the screen to get a different response.

See also: iPhone 8 deals | iPhone 7 deals | iPhone deals | iPhone SE deals | Best mobile phone deals | iPhone 6S review

The top 5 best iPhone 6S deals in the UK this month:

We've gone all Top of the Pops to show you our favourite five iPhone 6S deals on the market right now - we'll give you a clue...they're much cheaper than the iPhone X! Read about all of the best iPhone 6S deals here, including tariffs on EE, O2, Vodafone and Three.

It may be very similar to its predecessor, but there's no denying that the iPhone 6s makes a fantastic alternative to the much more pricey iPhone 7.  3D Touch is a genuine innovation, and the phone works fluidly at nearly every task. Simply splendid.

Read TechRadar's full iPhone 6S review

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NASA's next Mars rover is under construction

It's been five years since the last NASA rover blasted off to Mars. Curiosity went to the Red Planet equipped with tools and instruments that were cutting edge, but five years is a long time in technology. It's now possible to cram a lot more into less space.

So NASA is working on a new mission - named Mars 2020 - that will feature a rover. Superficially, it resembles its predecessor - it has six wheels, a long arm for examining objects and a mast camera peering out over the landscape. In fact, about 85 percent of the robot is the same.

"The fact that so much of the hardware has already been designed—or even already exists—is a major advantage for this mission," said Jim Watzin, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "It saves us money, time and most of all, reduces risk."

But there are a few crucial differences. The new robot has seven new instruments, totally redesigned wheels and much more autonomy than its forebear. It'll be capable of drilling out rock cores, sealing them into little capsules and then dropping them on the surface for collection by a future mission.

To explore strange new worlds

The rover also has a rather different mission: it's going to be looking for signs of ancient life. An x-ray spectrometer will be able to examine rocks as small as a grain of salt, while a ground-penetrating radar will hunt for water and ice below the surface. 

It even has an ultraviolet laser capable of spotting rings of carbon atoms. A second laser will be able to vaporise rocks and soil, while its camera hardware has also been substantially upgraded. 

What hasn't yet been decided is exactly where it'll land. There are three potential sites - recently narrowed down from a longlist of eight. One is an ancient lakebed, another is a possible hot springs, and a third is where warm waters may once have sloshed up against surface rocks. The final decision will be made in a year or two.

"Whether life ever existed beyond Earth is one of the grand questions humans seek to answer," said Ken Farley of JPL, Mars 2020's project scientist. "What we learn from the samples collected during this mission has the potential to address whether we're alone in the universe."

Flight's lightbulb moment is nearly here: electric hybrid planes are on the way

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What do you buy the person who has everything? How about a magazine about their favourite hobby? Future is providing some of the greatest magazines at 20% off. 

Although we don't have a TechRadar magazine, that's because our fellow Future titles have got the world of print covered, so we're over-the-moon to offer up a brilliant offer for some of their key offerings.

From the amazing Total Film, a film magazine for the more discerning movie fan right through to the fantastic How It Works, we've got great tech mags for you. 

And if you call it an early Christmas present for yourself , who are we to judge?  

Fabulous magazine subscription Black Friday offers

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Lego's new app uses an iPhone to breathe dragon fire over real-life bricks

Lego has released an Apple ARKit-powered app - called Lego AR-Studio - that brings your Lego sets to life using augmented reality. 

What that means is that after you’ve built certain Lego sets, you’ll be able to point an iOS device (running iOS 11) at the wonderful collection of bricks, and a fire-breathing dragon will magically appear on screen and set fire to your building. 

The app will allow you to interact with the action on-screen so you’re not just a passive participant, and you can even record the scene using the in-app camera function. 

A whole world of Lego

The app is free to download and use, but of course you’ll have to pay to buy the Lego sets, and any repairs to your Apple device that may be required after allowing your child to do Ninjago moves with it. 

The app can populate the world that you start creating, meaning you go from having a single building in real life to a whole city in the app, bringing a new dimension instantly to your builds.

The lego sets included at launch are:

LEGO City 60047 Police StationLEGO City 60052 Train SetLEGO City 60110 Fire StationLEGO NINJAGO 70593 Green NRG DragonThe LEGO NINJAGO Movie 70632 Cole’s MechThe LEGO NINJAGO Movie 70618 Destiny’s Bounty

This isn’t the first time that Lego has had a foray into AR; as long ago as 2009 it was using AR in its stores so that you could see what the set would look like in your hands once put together. You can see a video of the in-store AR below:

As this is just the launch of the app, it’s fairly safe to assume that more sets, and more AR experiences, will be added over time. 

With a Harry Potter AR game on the way too, it’s interesting to see another Warner Brothers IP getting the augmented treatment, showing that the studio clearly is putting its money into this emerging technology. 

Like Lego? It's worth checking out: Best toys 2017: smart toys for kids of all ages

Via Brickfanatics
and Engadget

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The best telephoto lenses for Canon and Nikon DSLRs in 2017

Telephoto lenses are great at making distant objects fill your frame, but they can be equally useful for capturing closer subjects. With long focal lengths comes a shorter depth of field and creamier background bokeh blur, which is just the ticket for isolating a nearby object of interest.

Telephoto zooms can be picked up at relatively low prices and often have a decent zoom range like 70-300mm. However, you'll need to up your budget to get something with a wide aperture that stays constant throughout the lens's focal range – this gives you much more flexibility when you're shooting in low light and generally means better image quality too.

Fast, near-silent autofocus systems are worth paying for because they make the lens smoother to use, while fancy glass elements reduce aberrations like distortion and color fringing, and weather sealing protects your lens in bad weather. Optical image stabilisation is practically a must-have when using telephoto lenses, and you do without it at your peril.

The maximum focal length of the lenses in this roundup is 300mm, and this is fine for most sports and some wildlife photography. If you need more magnification than this, though, you're into super-telephoto photography, which you'll find in a separate guide.

Most consumer DSLRs have APS-C size sensors, but these will still work fine with telephotos designed for full frame cameras APS-C versus full frame

DSLR sensors come in two sizes. Most use APS-C size sensors roughly half the size of the full frame cameras by professionals, and this has an impact on the effective focal length and magnification of the lens.

So if you've got a 70-300mm telephoto, that effectively becomes a 105-450mm lens on an APS-C format DSLR. That's rule number 1.

Rule number 2 is that some lenses are designed solely for APS-C cameras. You can't use them on a full-frame model (well you can with Nikon DSLRs, but only in an APS-C 'crop' mode which defeats the object). 

With some lens types, like wide-angle zooms, you have to get a lens made for your camera's sensor size, but with telephotos it's a lot simpler. Almost all of those we recommend are designed for full frame cameras so they'll work on APS-C models too. This is ideal because it means you can keep your lens if you upgrade to a bigger camera later. There are a couple of lenses designed only for APS-C cameras - these are marked EF-S on Canon lenses, DX on Nikon, DC on Sigma and Di II on Tamron. 

Best wide-angle lenses

Canon lens names start with 'EF', 'EF-S' and 'EF-M', and this tells you which camera models they're designed for. EF lenses are designed for full frame Canon DSLRs, but they also work perfectly well on smaller APS-C Canons too. All but one of the lenses in our list are full frame, so they'll work on any Canon DSLR.

'EF-S' lenses, however, are designed solely for the smaller APS-C DSLRs in the Canon range from the EOS 7D Mark II downwards – they can't be used on full-frame Canon DSLRs. Only one of the lenses in our list is an EF-S lens, and that's the EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM. It's a good value lens for an APS-C Canon DSLR, but it's no use later on if you upgrade to a full frame model.

'EF-M' lenses are designed solely for Canon's EOS M mirrorless cameras. You can't use them on any of the Canon DSLRs, so we don't include them in this list.

It's easy to see why our winner is a firm favourite amongst pro shooters. The design features top-grade fluorite glass and five UD (Ultra-low Dispersion) elements, a virtually circular eight-blade diaphragm, and a dual-mode Image Stabilizer giving a four-stop advantage. An ultrasonic ring-type autofocus system provides super-fast focussing, even under dull lighting conditions. Everything's wrapped up in a tough, weather-sealed magnesium alloy shell sporting control rings and switches which all operate flawlessly. Image quality is razor-sharp throughout the zoom range, even at f/2.8, while distortions, vignetting and colour fringing are all very well controlled.

Can't quite stretch to our winner? Tamron's direct rival is very nearly as good, yet noticeably easier on your pocket. Four LD (Low Dispersion) and one XLD (Extra Low Dispersion) elements maximise image quality, as do multi-layer coatings and a nine-blade diaphragm. The magnesium alloy construction feels robust and is fully weather sealed. Extra attractions include a focus limiter switch and impressively fast, near-silent USD autofocus. There's also Tamron's high-performing four-stop Vibration Correction system, which helps ensure terrific sharpness throughout the zoom range, even at maximum aperture. Overall, a really excellent lens at a competitive price.

This lens comes in two flavours, and we've gone for the stabilised version which also comes with weather sealing, though costs around twice the price of its sibling. Despite this, it still makes it exceptionally good value considering this is an L-series (Luxury) lens with premium quality optics. The constant f/4 maximum aperture may be a stop smaller than our top two choices, but it helps keep weight down to just 760g. Impressive, given the reassuringly rugged build quality. The ring-type USM autofocus system is very fast and whisper quiet, whilst image quality is just as impressive thanks to spectacular sharpness and contrast, along with minimal distortion and fringing.

If you'd rather have a bit more reach than a constant aperture, this 'Super Performance' Tamron really stands out from the budget crowd with its high-end feature set. There's an impressive ring-type autofocus motor which is fast and whisper quiet, as well as an advanced four-stop VC (Vibration Compensation) system that's a match for Canon's latest IS offerings. At 765g, it's quite chunky and weighty for this class of lens, but feels solid and handling is refined. Image quality doesn't disappoint either, as sharpness and contrast are very good throughout the zoom range. Colour fringing is also well controlled, even into the corners of images.

Like the second place Tamron SP 70-200mm, this is another lens that's gunning for the winning Canon optic, but ultimately it loses out to Tamron's superior build quality and weather sealing. Optical performance is almost as strong though, with five Low Dispersion elements and Sigma's Super Multi-Layer Coating to reduce ghosting and flare. It makes for respectable centre sharpness throughout most of the zoom range, but the Tamron lens edges ahead on corner sharpness and handles fringing and distortion marginally better. However, this Sigma still offers outstanding value thanks to its fast, super-smooth autofocus system and four-stop, dual-mode image stabiliser.

Most people buy their first telephoto lens to compliment an 18-55mm kit optic, and with its 55mm minimum focal length, this is an ideal second lens for an APS-C Canon. It won't be a burden either, tipping the scales at a featherweight 375g, despite packing a 3.5-stop image stabiliser and a modern 'STM' (Stepping Motor) autofocus system with full-time manual override. Autofocusing is silent and works very well for both stills and video shooting, with the latter benefitting from smooth focus transitions. Image quality is good throughout the entire zoom range, improved by a new optical layout with more elements than the preceding version of this lens.

It's not just distant objects that this Sigma can get you closer to, as it's also designed for close-up work, with a 95cm minimum focus distance and a 0.5x magnification factor in Macro mode. Other attractions include three SLD (Special Low Dispersion) lens elements to minimise chromatic aberrations, however you don't get optical stabilisation and the internal autofocus motor is fairly basic. There's little to complain about with image quality though, as sharpness is high, whilst distortion and fringing are low. The only noticeable issue is a lack of contrast in images taken under dull lighting, but the rock-bottom price easily compensates.

It may be last on our list, but that's not because this big beast falls short on image quality. Sharpness is excellent throughout the entire zoom range, even at f/2.8, and impressively for a zoom kens, distortions and fringing are absolutely minimal. Inside is Sigma's dual-mode image stabiliser for static and panning shooting. The lens is even compatible with an optional USB dock which lets you customise focus range limiting, autofocus speed and stabilisation attributes. Bulletproof build and weather seals further help justify the serious price, but they do contribute to the lens' massive 3.39kg bulk, and this can make prolonged handheld shooting a pain.

The best digital cameras in 2017

Like Canon lenses, those designed for Nikons fall into two groups – most are designed for full frame Nikons and will also work on the smaller format APS-C models in the range, from the D500 down. But a few are designed solely for the smaller format, and these have 'DX' in the name.

You can use these DX lenses on a full frame Nikon, but the camera has to switch to a 'DX crop' mode that uses a smaller, APS-C size area of the sensor. This means you lose a lot of the sensor's native resolution, so that a Nikon D810 has 36 million pixels in its regular full frame mode, but this shrinks to just over 15 megapixels in DX crop mode. So although you can use smaller DX lenses on a full frame Nikon, it's a makeshift solution.

AF performance is first class and there's a sophisticated VR system which works a treat and features both normal and active modes, plus automatic panning detection. The quality continues on the outside, with a tough, weather-sealed magnesium barrel and wonderfully refined handling. But it's the lens' image quality that ensures it comes out on top. Sharpness and contrast are excellent throughout the zoom range and at differing apertures, whilst the rounded nine-blade diaphragm maintains pleasant bokeh. We loved the older AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II, but this new version is simply stunning.  

Can't quite stretch to our winner? Tamron's direct rival is very nearly as good, yet noticeably easier on your pocket. Four LD (Low Dispersion) and one XLD (Extra Low Dispersion) elements maximise image quality, as do multi-layer coatings and a nine-blade diaphragm. The magnesium alloy construction feels robust and is fully weather sealed. Extra attractions include a focus limiter switch and impressively fast, near-silent USD autofocus. There's also Tamron's high-performing four-stop Vibration Correction system, which helps ensure terrific sharpness throughout the zoom range, even at maximum aperture. Overall, a really excellent lens at a competitive price.

Like the second place Tamron SP 70-200mm, this is another lens that's gunning for the winning Nikon optic, but ultimately it loses out to Tamron's superior build quality and weather sealing. Optical performance is almost as strong though, with five Low Dispersion elements and Sigma's Super Multi-Layer Coating to reduce ghosting and flare. It makes for respectable centre sharpness throughout most of the zoom range, but the Tamron lens edges ahead on corner sharpness and handles fringing and distortion marginally better. However, this Sigma still offers outstanding value thanks to its fast, super-smooth autofocus system and four-stop, dual-mode image stabiliser.

This lens may be an f-stop slower than our top trio, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It means it's more compact and lightweight, improving comfort for long periods of handheld shooting. You won't need to worry much about camera shake, either, thanks to a particularly well implemented VR (Vibration Reduction) system that also features automatic panning detection. The lens isn't weather-sealed, but it does at least get a rubber ring on the mounting plate. Three ED (Extra-low Dispersion) elements and one HRI (High Refractive Index) element, along with Nano-Crystal coatings, help deliver very good sharpness and contrast within negligible ghosting and flare.

Okay, so it's still not exactly cheap, but this lens does offer top quality build and plenty of high-tech finery for a relatively modest outlay. The ring-type ultrasonic autofocus system is super-fast, practically silent and comes complete with full-time manual override. You also get an impressive four-stop VR system with an Active setting designed for use when shooting from a vibrating platform like a car or helicopter. Focusing is fully internal, so the front element neither moves nor rotates during focusing. It all topped off with pin-sharp image quality and excellent contrast courtesy of two ED elements which also keep colour fringing to a minimum.

Nikon's 70-300mm optic packs unbeatable punch for the money, but this Tamron alternative is almost as good thanks to its high-end feature set, quality optics and solid build. There's an impressive ring-type autofocus motor which is fast and whisper quiet, as well as an advanced four-stop VC (Vibration Compensation) system that's a match for Canon's latest IS offerings. At 765g, it's quite chunky and weighty for this class of lens, but feels solid with refined handling. Image quality doesn't disappoint either, as sharpness and contrast are very good throughout the zoom range. Colour fringing is also well controlled, even into the corners of images.

Despite being the cheapest Nikon lens in our shortlist, it still sports Nikon's latest-generation Vibration Reduction system which gives a four-stop advantage in avoiding camera shake. There is some evidence of cost-cutting though, like the conventional autofocus motor that lacks the full-time manual override facility of ring-type ultrasonic systems. Even so, handling feels assured and, despite this being a budget lens, it still feels reassuringly robust. Image equality is another pleasant surprise, with very good sharpness throughout the zoom range and low levels of colour fringing. Our only slight criticism is the fairly large zoom range does seem to push distortions up a bit.

It's not just distant objects that this Sigma can get you closer to, as it's also designed for close-up work, with a 95cm minimum focus distance and a 0.5x magnification factor in Macro mode. Other attractions include three SLD (Special Low Dispersion) lens elements to minimise chromatic aberrations, however you don't get optical stabilisation and the internal autofocus motor is fairly basic. There's little to complain about with image quality though, as sharpness is high, whilst distortion and fringing are low. The only noticeable issue is a lack of contrast in images taken under dull lighting, but the rock-bottom price easily compensates.

Nikon is the latest manufacturer to jump on the stepping motor bandwagon: it’s used for autofocus in this AF-P (Pulse) lens. It’s available with or without VR (Vibration Reduction); the edition without stabilisation is a little cheaper to buy. Both are fully compatible with D3300/D3400, D5300/D5500/D5600 and D500 bodies, but completely incompatible with many older Nikon cameras like the D7000, where autofocus and even manual focusing are unavailable. If you want to switch off VR, it relies on a camera menu to disable this, though it can’t be done in some ‘compatible’ Nikon cameras, even after a firmware update. In our tests, the non-VR version of the lens proved slightly sharper than the VR edition. However, the four-stop stabiliser is particularly effective in hand-held shooting, with the VR lens yielding more consistently sharp images.

Best entry-level DSLRs in India: What to look for and which to buy in 2017

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Enhanced features and performance come to Capture One 11

Phase One has overhauled its raw conversion and image-editing software, with Capture Pro 11 offering a range of new tools as well as promising to be significantly faster and offering a smoother user experience. 

Highlights include improvements to layers, with all adjustment tools in Capture One now compatible with layers, while images can now be annotated in the software (including handwritten notes and drawings). 

Masking tools have also been improved, with new options introduced for refining and feathering a mask after it's been created, and it's now possible to adjust the opacity of a layer to control the strength of local adjustments.

More streamlined workflow

You can add annotations and graphics as overlays to images before exporting them as PSD files as separate layers. Crops can also be respected or added as a path when exporting to PSD files, allowing the full image to be used later for retouching if required. An individual watermark can be included as a separate layer in an exported PSD file to allow greater control during later editing.   

Performance has been optimized, with improved color handling thanks to re-engineered color tools helping to ensure optimal layered color adjustments. Color readouts can now be viewed in LAB mode, while improved performance in Catalogs should make for an overall better experience. There's also raw support for over 400 camera models.

Capture One 11 is available now for both Mac and Windows, and can be downloaded at the Phase One store. A single-user subscription is $20/€20 per month for a 12-month plan, or $180/€180 paid annually. UK and Australia pricing is still to be confirmed. A fully-functional version of Capture One 11 is available for a free 30-day trial. 

The best photo editing software you can buy 

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Looks like Huawei is nearing the release of its own Daydream VR headset

Back at the launch of Google Daydream in late 2016 we heard that a variety of partners, including LG and Huawei, will be making headsets for the platform, and it now seems the latter's headset is finally nearing a release.

Part of the new Daydream VR headset from Huawei has just passed through the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and is referred to as a "virtual reality handle". It seems to actually be more of a controller that will work in a similar way to the one included on the Daydream View.

The features include a way to answer phone calls as well as a trigger and directional pad for gaming or when you start up other media. We didn't get a look at the headset itself, but it's clear this controller will have to be used alongside a Daydream VR viewfinder.

Launching soon?

The fact it has headed through the FCC suggests Huawei is finally nearing a release date for its headset too.

Exactly when that will be is unclear right now, but we wouldn't expect Huawei to push it into the tail end of this year, so it may instead be ready to reveal the headset at CES or MWC next year.

We've already seen Huawei release a VR headset in its home country of China, called the Huawei VR, but this will be the first time we'll see the company make a Daydream.

Everything you need to know about Google Daydream

Via Phone Arena

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Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 could have a 5.7-inch 4K screen and slimline design

Whether it’s called the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 or the Xperia XZ2 Premium, Sony is likely to launch a new 4K phone next year, but beyond just having a sharp screen there’s now evidence that it could sport a new design.

A screenshot posted to Reddit details an unreleased Sony handset with the model number H8541, and the specs make it sound a lot like a successor to the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, notably because of its 5.7-inch 4K HDR screen.

That’s bigger than the 5.46-inch screen on the original XZ Premium, yet the dimensions listed here are smaller, at 149 x 74 x 7.5mm (while the XZ Premium is 156 x 77 x 7.9mm).

That suggests the bezels may have been significantly shrunk, which would likely mean a quite different design to most current Sony handsets. And that adds up with earlier information, as a Sony executive had previously claimed that a range of phones with a completely new design was in the works.

This reads a lot like an Xperia XZ Premium 2 specs list. Credit: Reddit

Not much change on the inside

However, other than the larger screen and smaller body there doesn’t seem to be much to get excited about here if these specs are right, as apparently the Xperia XZ Premium 2 – or whatever it is – will have a Snapdragon 835 chipset, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 3,420mAh battery and run Android Oreo, all of which is true of the Xperia XZ Premium too, other than the battery, which is slightly smaller at 3,230mAh.

That makes this specs list slightly questionable, especially as it could very easily have been faked, but on the other hand Sony doesn’t tend to push for the best possible specs in the way rivals like Samsung do.

Whatever the case, if the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 is on the way then we might see it at MWC 2018 early next year, as its predecessor was unveiled at MWC 2017.

The Sony Xperia XZ2 is likely in the works as well

Via Phone Arena

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Vega’s performance disappoints as AMD loses ground to Nvidia in GPU market

AMD may be forging forwards and taking turf in the battle of the processors with Ryzen, but the GPU arena is a very different kettle of pixels, with the firm’s new Vega tech floundering here, and Nvidia taking a greater share of the graphics card market according to new figures.

The add-in graphics board report for Q3 of this year comes from Jon Peddie Research, taking a snapshot of the discrete GPU market (i.e. separate graphics cards, with integrated graphics not included), and finding that Nvidia now holds a share of 72.8%, up 2.6% year-on-year, and up a little bit more at 3.1% compared to the previous quarter.

AMD’s graphics card share has dropped to 27.2%, basically the remainder of the market, with a corresponding shift in the other direction compared to Nvidia. Last quarter AMD held a 30.3% market share, so the new Vega GPUs, which officially launched back in August, have seemingly failed to make a positive impact.

Initial stock and pricing issues with AMD’s Radeon RX Vega cards may not have helped the company’s cause, mind you.

At this point, it’s too early to call an entire generation of graphics cards a failure, but this obviously won’t be welcome news over at AMD towers.

In the interests of balance, a recent hardware report based on Firefox users showed that AMD actually edges out Nvidia when you take into account integrated as well as discrete graphics (although Intel is the clear champ in the former department). There are reasons for this, though, which we discussed earlier this month.

Gaming growth

On an overall level, Jon Peddie noted that the GPU market had an ‘outstanding’ third quarter this year, with 21.5% growth year-on-year, and 29.1% growth compared to the previous quarter.

Most of this growth was driven by PC gamers buying graphics cards according to the analyst firm, with the impact of esports having a measurable influence.

In other words, as more people play titles like Overwatch – which is encouraging the scouting of the massed ranks of the player base to look for potential pro gamers to join the big teams – folks are upgrading their GPUs to become more competitive.

Via: Techspot

These are the best graphics cards you can buy right now

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