Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2: what we want to see

TechRadar - All the latest technology news

Update: A phone listed as the Sony Xperia XZ2 Pro has been benchmarked, suggesting the Premium range might have a new name and revealing some of the specs.

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is one of the most impressive Sony flagships of recent years, thanks largely to its 4K screen and capable camera. Thing is, it’s been out a while now, so talk is inevitably turning to what's next; the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2.

Will it go above 4K? Will it launch soon? And will it have a new design? We don’t have definitive answers to any of those questions yet, but we are starting to hear rumors, which we’ve detailed below.

We’ve also come up with a list of things we hope for from the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2. You’ll find that at the bottom of this article.

Cut to the chase What is it? The next 4K flagship from SonyWhen is it out? Possibly early 2018What will it cost? A lot Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 release date and price

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium was announced at MWC 2017, so there’s a fair chance we’ll see the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 at MWC 2018, which takes place from February 26 to March 1 2018.

However, the XZ Premium didn’t actually go on sale until June 2017, so even if the XZ Premium 2 is announced in February or March you might not be able to buy it until later in 2018.

Further confusing matters is the fact that there was well over a year between the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium and the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, so it’s possible that we won’t see the XZ Premium 2 for a while yet.

Whenever it does launch it’s sure to cost a lot. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium started at $799/£649 (about AU$1,100) SIM-free, and with flagship prices rising the Xperia XZ Premium 2 is likely to cost more if anything.

Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 news and rumors

There’s only been a few Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 leaks so far, but they've revealed a lot. For one thing we've seen renders possibly showing the phone.

The images show two handsets, one of which - the one said to be the XZ Premium 2 - has a large edge-to-edge screen and a mirror-like back.

Apparently this phone would have a fingerprint scanner built into the screen, plus a Snapdragon 845 chipset, 6GB of RAM, a dual-lens rear camera, 128GB of storage and front-facing stereo speakers.

Those specs match another recent leak, which adds that the phone will have a microSD card slot (with a 256GB capacity), a 3,420mAh battery, IP68 water and dust resistance and run Android Oreo - but that it might have a new name, possibly being dubbed the Sony Xperia XZ Pro.

That name has popped up again with an additional digit, as a phone dubbed the Sony Xperia XZ2 Pro has been benchmarked, revealing in the process that it has an 18:9 screen and runs Android 8.1.

A Sony phone has also passed through the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and it looks like it probably won't have a 3.5mm headphone jack - a first for a Sony handset.

We don't know for sure that this is the XZ Premium 2, but it's a handset that's likely launching soon, and one which apparently has a 5.7-inch screen and a 152.79 x 72.42mm body, which would make it smaller in the hand but with a bigger display than the original XZ Premium, suggesting the bezels have been shrunk, just like in the images above.

And that’s not too much of a surprise, as a Sony executive had previously said that the company was working on a range of phones with a completely new design.

In older news, a screenshot of a specs list for a Sony phone with the model number H8541 was posted to Reddit and includes a 5.7-inch 4K display with support for HDR.

If accurate that would make it slightly bigger than the 5.46-inch screen of the Xperia XZ Premium, but that’s in line with the rising size of flagships, and matches the FCC listing.

Interestingly though the list also mentions dimensions of 149 x 74 x 7.5mm, which would make it smaller than the 156 x 77 x 7.9mm Xperia XZ Premium, but also smaller than the dimensions listed by the FCC.

So either one of these is wrong or they're talking about different phones. The FCC is more reliable, but neither source refers to the XZ Premium 2 by name.

A possible specs list for the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2. Credit: Reddit

Another highlight of the specs list above is mention of a 3,420mAh battery, as that’s bigger than the 3,230mAh battery in the original XZ Premium (a phone which already has reasonable life).

However, the rest of the specs are less promising, with a Snapdragon 835 chipset, 4GB of RAM, Android Oreo and IP68-certified dust and water resistance all mentioned, which are the same assortment of specs as its predecessor.

They’re high-end specs, but by the time 2018's flagships launch they won’t be top-end anymore. Of course, it’s entirely possible that this spec list is fake or wrong, especially as some of those specs are different to what we've heard more recently.

What we want to see

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium got 4.5 stars in our review, but the Xperia XZ Premium 2 will have to build on it in significant ways if it wants to impress us. Here are seven things that would help.

1. A new design

Sony's phones have mostly looked like this for years, so it's time for a change

Calling the design of Sony’s Xperia range tired would seem almost generous at this point. Although the materials vary, Sony hasn’t significantly changed the look of its handsets in years, and those big screen bezels are seriously dated in the face of all-screen phones like the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy Note 8.

So we really want to see a new design for the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2, and fortunately it looks likely that we will, since not only has a Sony executive claimed some upcoming phones will have a new design, but a spec sheet lists dimensions which suggest one.

2. A bigger screen

At 5.46 inches the screen on the Sony Xperia XZ Premium isn’t exactly small, but to truly make the most of that 4K resolution it really needs to be bigger, and with rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S8 pushing screen sizes ever higher it would also help the XZ Premium 2 to compete.

It doesn’t need to be enormous, but a move to around 5.8 inches could make all the difference, especially if Sony also shrinks the bezels to keep the overall handset size roughly the same.

3. Fingerprint scanning in the US

The power button of many Sony phones houses a fingerprint scanner, but not in the US

In most of the world Sony flagships have fingerprint scanners, as you’d expect, since that’s a standard feature of high-end phones, but in the US they don’t.

It’s a major omission, and while there’s presumably a reason for it the lack of a scanner could make Sony phones less appealing than biometrically secured rivals.

So we hope the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 will have a fingerprint scanner in all regions, or if that’s not an option then how about a high-tech face scanner like the one on the iPhone X?

4. Less bloat

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is weighed down with a lot of pre-installed apps, many of which duplicate the functions of Google’s suite of apps (which is also present) or just aren’t very useful.

For the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2 we want less bloat, with a clean version of Android. Given that a whole store of apps is only a tap away it’s easy enough to fill in any gaps, so just give us the basics, with no duplicates.

5. A dual-lens camera

The XZ Premium has a good camera, but an extra lens could make it even better

Sony’s flagship phones tend to have quite good cameras and the Xperia XZ Premium is no exception. In our review we praised its impressive slow-motion camera and its ability to capture a lot of detail, but it’s just a single lens snapper and with many rivals moving to dual-lens ones we want to see Sony follow suit.

Dual-lens is more than just a marketing gimmick, as it can unlock new features such as lossless optical zoom, so it could benefit the Xperia XZ Premium 2.

6. More power

The Xperia XZ Premium has a decent amount of power, but early rumors suggest the new model won’t get a chipset or RAM boost, which would be disappointing, not just because it’s reasonable to expect more power from a new model, but because by the time it lands those specs will be looking slightly dated for a high-end phone.

So hopefully that rumor is wrong and the Xperia XZ Premium 2 actually will get a performance upgrade. We’d like to see it pack the upcoming Snapdragon 845 chipset. RAM can stay at 4GB, but we wouldn’t say no to more.

7. A slicker SIM slot

It’s a minor point but in our review of the Xperia XZ Premium we found its SIM card slot to be both fiddly and flimsy, so we’d like to see it reworked for the Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2.

It’s not something most people should have to interact with often, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be decent quality.

Don't need 4K? The Sony Xperia XZ2 is probably on the way too.

more info...

Best movies on Netflix UK (February 2018): 150 films to choose from

Welcome TechRadar's constantly updated best movies on Netflix UK list - our pick of the films you should be streaming on Netflix right now. Netflix has a lot of movies on offer, but if you only have time for quality then you're in the right place. Here you'll find a list of the best Netflix movies you can get in the UK right now and it's constantly updated so you know you're never missing out.

[Update: Netflix has added some brilliant films this week, including the original Cloverfield, Fury, a war film featuring Brad Pitt, Eminem's semi-autobiographical 8 Mile, and The Peanuts Movie, which sees the return of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.]

Netflix has become known for its TV shows (especially its originals) but that doesn't mean you should be discounting the movies on the platform. Many of them are well worth watching and as you'll see from our extensive list, there are plenty to choose from once you've exhausted yourself by TV binge-watching.

To keep things neat, tidy and easy to navigate, we've broken up our movie picks into categories. For each category we've chosen a selection of movies that you shouldn't miss with further recommendations listed at the end of each category.

In all there's over 150 movies to choose from here, all picked because they are, simply, the best films on Netflix to watch right now.

From comedy to indie, to horror and kids, there's a movie category for everyone.

Keep checking back, too. Unlike its TV output that seems to stay on Netflix for longer, its movies tend to appear and disappear quite fast. We keep this best Netflix movies list updated as often as we can, so please bookmark us. Enjoy!

Want to know more about Netflix's take on binging? Here's what we found out when we visited Netflix HQ:

If you are a TV fan, then check out our best shows on Netflix feature.Want to know the WORST Netflix movies? Check out Not On My WatchCheck out what the rivals are up to with the best movies on Amazon Prime Best sci-fi movies: fantastic films to stream on Netflix and Amazon nowBest horror movies: scary films to stream right now

Eminem proved he's got the acting chops to go along with his rapping in this Oscar-winning drama, that's based heavily on his life. Charting the rise of Jimmy "B-Rabbit" Smith, Jr. (Eminem), a budding rapper who lives in a Michigan trailer park, as he attempts to launch his music career. Gaining critical and commercial success when it released, this is one of the best films currently streaming on Netflix.

Netflix surprised everyone when it revealed it had the streaming rights to the third instalment of the loose Cloverfield franchise, the Cloverfield Paradox, and now it has the original film. Each Cloverfield film is different, and the original uses the 'found footage' narrative device to document an attack on New York by a huge alien monster. While the Cloverfield Paradox didn't quite capture the magic of the original, the first film is definitely worth catching while it's on Netflix.

This star-studded war film features Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal and Jason Isaacs, and follows US tank crews in Nazi Germany during the last days of World War II. Based on real experiences by the crews of these machines, Fury is a powerful and moving account, that was very well received by critics and audiences alike.

Charlie Brown and his dog, Snoopy, are iconic cartoon characters, and in this new computer-generated film, which was co-written and co-produced by Charles Schulz's son and grandson, is a brilliant continuation of that legacy, pleasing existing fans and winning over new ones in a tale that sees Charlie Brown try to impress Little Red-Haired Girl. It's the first Peanuts feature film in 35 years, but the wait was worth it.

Shane Black is never someone to play the Hollywood game. Starting off as a hotshot writer - he penned Lethal Weapon at a ridiculously young age - he went into obscurity, only to come back with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and cement his relationship with Robert Downey Jr. This then pushed him into the director chair for Iron Man 3, which was a great choice. Fun, overblown and with a surprising twist - it's delicious fun.

Nobody expected Mad Max: Fury Road to be as good as it was - given it was stuck in development hell for ages - but it's one of the boldest, bravest chase movies ever made. Tom Hardy is superb as the monosyllabic Max. But it's Charlize Theron's Furiosa who steals the show - a true modern day badass. Director George Miller decided to do most of the action in-camera and the results are utterly spectacular.

A biographical war drama directed by Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of conscientious objector Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield). Despite refusing to bear arms through his service during WW2, Doss won the Congressional Medal of Honor and adoration and respect of his peers for his bravery and selflessness in the conflict.

Ridley Scott’s bombastic tale of US soldiers caught behind enemy lines when their helicopter crashes in Somalia is frenetic and relentless. You’ll have as much fun watching it as spotting the young actors who you kind of know but don’t know - including Hugh Dancy, Ioan Gruffudd and Ewen Bremner. It’s a bit jingoistic and the bloodshed is sometimes over the top but it’s a superb watch.

“We need guns. Lots of guns.” Okay, that quote is from the wrong Keanu Reeves movies but does sum up the essence of John Wick. This is a movie packed with more Gun-Fu than is healthy but it’s also great fun. The premise is sight: John Wick (Reeves) is a retired hitman, who comes back to avenge the death of this dog. Yup, you read that right. As action movies go, this is one of the most frenetic. Reeves is perfectly cast in the title role and while the plot is paper thin, the hits to a bigger world when assassins rule the roost are fantastic - and something that’s built on in the sequel.

A masterpiece in both filmmaking and fight choreography, Ang Lee's superb Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tells the tale of a Chinese warrior who steals a sword off of a master swordsman and the cat-and-mouse chase that ensues. Chow Yun-Fat may have been the star of the movie when the was first released, but it is Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi that steal the show. A follow-up was produced by Netflix, which is worth a watch but has none of the charisma of its enigmatic predecessor.

Quentin Tarantino’s bloody brilliant kung-fu opus should have been one big movie. But its distributors got cold feet, which meant we actually got two quite different films. The first is pure Shaw Brothers schlock. A revenge tale that follows Uma Thurman’s Bride looking to kill people on her hit list, for murdering her husband and family on her wedding day and leaving her for dead. The second film is a touch more subdued, but no less brutal - starting with a flashback of the infamous wedding and then furthering The Bride’s mission to ‘kill bill’. If you can, watch them together as it’s an epic movie that should be consumed in one sitting.

After the brilliance of Skyfall there was a lot riding on Spectre to keep the quality levels of Bond high. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that. Spectre is rushed, overblown and full of twists that don’t particularly work. But even at its worst, it’s better than most action movies around at the moment. Daniel Craig is, as ever, brilliant as is Léa Seydoux who has more about her than the usual paper-thin token femme fatale. There’s also a barrage of lovely throwbacks from the Bond of old, including a superb intro that smacks of Live And Let Die.

It may be the fifth Mission: Impossible but it’s definitely one of the best. Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt, the secretive IMF operative who is tasked to save his agency as a rogue one is hell-bent on destroying it. Christopher McQuarrie was a great choice for director and while news that he completely reshot the ending of the movie was a worry, it’s lack of bombast is a perfect balance to a film that’s filled with thrilling set pieces. Also, Rebecca Ferguson is by far the best female lead the franchise has had so far - we’re glad she’s been cast in the next instalment too.

With a script by word genius William Goldman and George Roy Hill at the helm, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is a wonderful watch. Paul Newman and Robert Redford ooze screen chemistry as the titular pair and the soundtrack by Burt Bacharach is lovely on the ears. It's funny too - mixing both buddy movie and Western tropes with fantastic results.

Focused around a turf war between rival street gangs, The Warriors is an achingly cool cult film. It showcases '70s New York in all its filth and fury and while its focus is on gang fighting, the film never comes across as an exploitation flick. This is because it's shot with such style and flourish by director Walter Hill that 37 years on, it's still as pertinent as ever.

Oh, Paul Verhoeven how we’ve missed you. Elle brings back everything the director is famed for - controversy, satire and, well, more controversy. Elle sees the fantastic Isabelle Huppert play a businesswoman who is raped and decides to exact revenge on her rapist, except she doesn’t know who it is. Elle never goes the way you think it’s going to go and, despite the subject matter, is genuinely funny in places. It’s occasionally a tough watch but doesn’t offer the gratuity that some of Verhoeven’s other films are famed for. It’s Hupert here that makes the movie. She is subversive and simply superb.

This is a wholly different Spike Lee movie than what he had made before and that's what makes Inside Man feel so fresh. It's a fast-paced, witty genre movie that sees Lee at his most accessible. Some of Spike Lee's best cinematography can be seen in this movie and while Clive Owen never really gets into his stride, he's still superb as a bank robber. It's Jodie Roberts who steals the show, though - she's utterly mesmerising every time she's on the screen.

Spotlight is that rare beast of a movie: A tense, taught thriller that's based mainly around a newsroom, with nary an explosion or chase in sight. It centres on a team of reporters and editors at the Boston Globe who investigate what they believe is a devastating cover-up by the Catholic Church. A star studded cast propels a fantastic script - Spotlight thoroughly deserved its Best Picture Oscar.

This generated a nice bit of buzz at Sundance and for good reason: Bad Day For The Cut is a grim, gripping Irish thriller about a farmer looking to avenge the death of his mother. First-time Writer/Director Chris Baugh knows how to ratchet up the tension and it certainly knows how to hit some nasty notes. Yes, you’ll probably guess where things are going to go, but it’s still a decent watch.

Personal Shopper is a strange, but captivating movie. It shows off the acting prowess of Kristen Stewart who is superb as an American 'personal shopper' living in Paris who caters to the needs of an infuriating supermodel. And it just so happens, Stewart's character is also a medium who starts to interact with what she believes is her not-long dead brother. Personal Shopper is one movie which doesn't let you really know what it wants to be until the end - and that is what makes it great.

Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg team up with dazzling results for Bridge of Spies. Based on the true tale of a Russian spy sent back to the cold, in exchange for two US prisoners of war, Hanks plays a lawyer brought in to make sure that the exchange takes place. The tension is high but the voices are low. The quiet chats between Hanks and the superb Mark Rylance are astonishing to watch.

A biographical drama from Danny Boyle and Adam Sorkin, Steve Jobs follows the life of the eponymous Apple co-founder (Michael Fassbender) from 1984 to 1998. The performances in the film and its screenplay were widely praised and received recognition at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and the Academy Awards.

American Graffiti is a classic coming-of-age film with a host of stellar Hollywood names behind it including George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, and Ron Howard. Set in early 1960s California, the film tells the separate stories of a group of recent high school graduates and the rock and roll culture that defined them through a series of vignettes.

Mudbound proves that Netflix is getting serious with the movies it is producing. This superb ensemble drama focuses on two brothers (Garret Hedlund and Jason Clarke) back from the second World War and the struggles they face adjusting back to ‘normal’ life. The film pulls no punches when it comes to tackling racism and sexism, both rife in 1940’s Mississippi, but layers these heady issues with a fair amount of levity and brevity. The cast are superb - Better Call Saul’s Jonathan Banks is riveting as always but Jason Mitchell is standout here - but it’s the tight script and wonderful, sweeping direction by Dee Rees that makes this movie truly and Oscar worthy.

It’s rare that Tom Cruise gets upstaged in his movies but that’s what happens in Rain Man. This is because Dustin Hoffman puts in a performance of a lifetime as Charlie’s (Cruise) autistic brother Raymond. In the film we see Hoffman recite dates of airline crashes when he doesn’t want to fly, and this brings the brothers on a road trip after their father passes away. Cruise’s character in unlikeable for the most part but his softening to Hoffman’s Raymond is a beautiful watch - sometimes hilarious, sometimes tender.

Director Adam McKay was known for creating big belly laughs before The Big Short came out. And that’s what makes this movie such a surprise. It is funny in places, but it’s also a super-sharp look and - shock, horror - endlessly entertaining look at those who betted big the the housing bubble in the US would burst in the mid 2000s. Filled with fantastic characters (played by Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell) and a superb script, this is a must see.

Inherent Vice is a fantastic film but one you may want to watch twice to figure out just what is going on. Director PT Anderson - this is his best movie - tries to make sense of Thomas Pynchon's opaque novel, about a stoner detective trying to figure out the disappearance of his ex-lover's lover. Nothing makes sense in the movie. It's covered in a fog of weed and hallucinogens, dripping in Californian sunshine and swathed in seediness. Don't try and unpick it too much and you will be rewarded with a brilliant, beguiling watch.

This shouldn’t have worked. The manic tale of how NWA came to be may well be larger than life but in the wrong hands it could end up being cartoonish. On the whole, Straight Outta Compton manages to avoid this thanks to director F Gary Gray who also created the brilliant Friday. Casting for Compton is inspired. O'Shea Jackson Jr does a great impression of his real-life dad Ice Cube, but it’s Corey Hawkins that steals the show of Dr Dre. Perhaps the weakest link is Paul Giamatti as Jerry Heller but it doesn’t detract from what is one of the more entertaining biopics in recent years.

Dope was a revelation when it was released in 2015. Part coming-of-age drama, part hip-hop homage, the movie is about a group of teenagers who go to a party and end up tangled up in drug dealing. While that sounds all very gritty, the film plays it for laughs more than often, punctuated by moments of drama.

The movie may now be parodied beyond belief but The Breakfast Club is still a fun watch. It’s an ‘80s movie that’s so ‘80s it should come with its own shell suit. The premise is simple: a bunch of kids are put into detention one Saturday, dubbed the Breakfast Club. They’re all a different stereotype - geek, jock, the pretty one, the angry one - and seemingly have nothing in common but it turns out they have everything in common. Yes, it’s cheesy but you can’t help but smile as the kids ‘find themselves’ to the tune of Simple Minds.

This is one of the most affecting movies that you will ever see. Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a factory owner who begins to help his Jewish workers during World War II after he sees them persecuted by the Nazi Germans, the movie is a study in brevity. Steven Spielberg manages to find the human stories in the atrocity of WWII without shying away from the true horror of what happened during the conflict.

A heartfelt and considered look at Martin Luther King Jr's struggle to gain equal voting rights, campaigning in racially-charged Alabama, Selma was one of the finest films of 2014 and was rightly nominated for a Best Picture Oscar as a result. It may have missed out on the top gong, but David Oyelowo's performance as the civil rights leader is a powerful one, with a supporting cast recreating the inspiring story with great respect.

The Virgin Suicides is a woozy homage to movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Don't Look Now. Fractured in its storytelling, dreamlike in its visuals it's an assured debut by Sofia Coppola. Based on the best-selling novel, the movie charts a spate of suicides in a small town and the cast is lead by the mesmerising Kirsten Dunst.

It is still baffling how Slumdog Millionaire was billed as the 'feel good hit of the summer' when it was first released. There is nothing feel good about this rag to riches tale, apart from the very end. It is a sublime watch, though. Director Danny Boyle relishes the colours in India, using them to great effect while there's a frenetic pace to the whole thing. Lovely stuff.

Adapted from Stephen King’s novella, Shawshank Redemption is a film that tissues were invented for. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is sentenced to life in prison for two murders he didn’t commit. There he befriends Red (Morgan Freeman) and embarks on both serving his sentence and trying to clear his name. Heartwarming and gut-wrenching in equal measure, Shawshank is a modern classic.

Captain Phillips is a masterstroke of suspense. Directed by Paul Greengrass - the Bourne franchise king - it's about the true story of a 2009 hijacking of a US container ship. By showing the hijack from both points of view - the captain's and the Somali pirates - the film humanises what is a complicated, horrific hostage situation.

Don’t let the title or, for that matter, the plot put you off, Warrior is a fantastic movie, centred on two brothers who find redemption and solace in the biggest MMA tournament ever held. A superb script and superb performances from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as the brothers and Nick Nolte as the alcoholic father, make this a must see.

This study of the Holocaust is something we haven’t seen before. It’s from the point of view of someone who was forced to burn the bodies in Auschwitz who comes across a boy that, he believes, deserves a proper burial. Son of Saul is a hard watch. It’s about a time that’s filled with despair, but director László Nemes tells the tale so well that it makes for utterly compelling viewing.

Not only did Network spawn one of the greatest lines shouted in a movie - "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" - it also shone a light on US network television and its constant push for higher ratings. The plot is great: longtime anchor Howard Beale finds out that he is about to get fired, so to drive ratings he announces he will commit suicide on air. What ensues is a harsh look at TV that's still prescient today.

Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most divisive directors around and he's not looking to change that with The Neon Demon. Like Only God Forgives and the slightly more accessible Drive, Neon Demon is stylish, blood soaked and, well, cold. It features a fantastic central performance by Elle Fanning and never compromises - this makes for a difficult but ultimately rewarding watch.

All geniuses have to start somewhere and this was where director Richard Linklater made his mark (Slacker got him noticed, Dazed made him one of the best directors around), with a movie that showed off the birth of slacker culture by following the last day of the school year in 1976. It flits between stereotypical characters of the cool one, the jock, the stoner but digs a whole lot deeper than any John Hughes movie. Great stuff.

Anyone who doubts the acting caliber of Tom Hardy needs to watch Bronson immediately. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn who found fame with Drive and the divisive Only God Forgives, Bronson is a fragmented, surreal look at one of the UK’s most famous prisoners, Charles Bronson. Hardy commands the screen as the titular inmate, bulking on the body mass and belting out charisma and chaos in equal measure. It’s not for everyone, thanks to its obscure storytelling, but this is a unique film and one that demands your attention.

Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino at his finest. Endlessly quotable and always a refreshing watch, Tarantino re-invents what a crime movie should be. He does this be interlocking seemingly unrelated stories in a non-linear way, riffing on pop culture and breathing new life into old actors - including John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. This film deserves all the accolades it's garnered over the years. It's just a shame Tarantino has never bettered it.

It may feel a little dated now, but Fight Club was the epitome of male angst when it was first released. It's an angry movie, with work and consumerism in its sights but it's also a brilliant one, thanks to David Fincher's knack of taking the novel and transposing it menacingly to the big screen. Brad Pitt has never been better as Tyler Durden - his role making you want to talk about Fight Club, instantly breaking the first rule.

Okja is a fantastic movie that proves Netflix really does know what it's doing when it comes to commissioning films. Made by Bong Joon Ho, one of the greatest directors around, the film is the strange tale of a little girl and her best friend, a giant animal called Okja. The friendship is threatened when a CEO (a superb Tilda Swinton) wants to take Okja for nefarious means. The whole movie may well be an ode to animal activism but it's such a refreshing movie that you don't mind it preaching to you on occasion. Now you have this on-board Netflix, can you please grab the UK rights for Snowpiercer - another superb Bong Joon Ho movie that never saw the light of day in Britain.

This is a movie that was close to not being made. Just as shooting began, funding was pulled and it means that star Matthew McConaughey may have had to drop out, as he needed to put all the weight on he had lost for playing Ron Woodroof, an electrician diagnosed with Aids. Money was found, though, and we're glad it was as this is a sometimes harrowing but strangely uplifting account of someone who goes to the extra mile to get their hands on an experimental Aids drug that can lessen the effects of the disease. McConaughey is fantastic as the makeshift drug runner while his partner in crime is Jared Leto as Rayon, a trans woman who helps him on his journey. Despite the budget cut, there was Oscar nominations aplenty for the film with it winning Best Makeup. Considering the makeup was done on $250 budget, this is an impress feat.

While sweding didn't quite make it into popular parlance, Be Kind Rewind should be celebrated for showing what it's like to be someone who just wants to make films, no matter what budget they have. And that's the plot of Be Kind: it's about two video store clerks who erase all the footage from the tapes in their store, so go on to try and make the movies with no budget but a whole lot of charisma.

If it didn't suffer from Paul Feig's 'I have no idea how to finish a movie so I'll just let it run out of steam' Funny People would be seen as a classic. Unfortunately it does do that but it also sees Adam Sandler in reflective mood as a comedian facing a terminal illness. Sandler sends up brilliantly an actor who chooses some of the worst roles known to man. Unfortunately, after this movie he also decided to start making the same sort of movies he ridicules in Funny People.

We'll admit it's not perfect but there is a certain charm in Role Models that raises it above most 'adults who never really grew up and now we're laughing at them because of this' fare. Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) get into trouble and are told they have to either go to jail or become mentors/role models for a bunch of kids. What ensues is essentially Rudd, William Scott, a brilliant Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jane Lynch goofing off for a couple of hours. Lovely stuff.

The World's End is the worst of the Cornetto Trilogy but that's only because the other two are the superb Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. The premise is great: Gary King (Simon Pegg) gets his old friends together to relive a pub crawl of their childhood. The only problem is, everyone has grown up into self-respecting adults except him. But none of this matters when the group of lads get themselves into a very strange situation. Full of fantastic sight gags that made Baby Driver the success it was, The World's End doesn't quite hit the high notes it should but it has a lot of fun trying in the process.

What a brilliant film. Pride manages to weave 'message' with entertainment effortlessly, charting the true tale of gay rights activists in the UK that help raise money for a small mining town when the strikes are happening. There's superb performances by all but it's the ever-brilliant George MacKay whose standout.

Looking for a great crime thriller that'll make you laugh? You've found it. Robert De Niro stars as Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter who's offered $100,000 to bring in mob accountant Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin). What starts out as a simple job gets complicated very quickly.

The plot for this one is fantastic. It’s a road movie centred around two teenage bike thieves who go on an adventure after they get word that seven tonnes of cocaine has been shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland. Their plan is to get some of it and sell it for a better life. This is one of the funniest comedies to come out of Ireland for a while. It’s got a distinct Adam & Paul feel but is thankfully a bit lighter. Young Offenders is a coming-of-age story with oodles of charm.

A classic Jim Carey comedy, Ace Ventura Pet Detective follows a PI who specializes in missing animals cases. When the mascot for the Miami dolphins goes missing he's in for the case of his life. Expect a madcap adventure with a lot of energy and laughs.

Richard Linklater's latest is a bedfellow to Dazed and Confused. Instead of the ’80s, though, the '70s is used as a backdrop instead and the focus here is very much what it is like to be a boy growing up into an adult. As with most Linklater movies, not much happens in the movie but the characterisation is so spot on, that it really doesn't matter.

One of the best films you probably missed in 2016, The Nice Guys is cult director Shane Black at his best. Achingly funny and whip-smart, too, the film is about a private eye and a heavy in the '70s and the shenanigans they get up to. While Black went full Hollywood with Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys sees him back where he belongs - among the indie elite.

A cult comedy horror made in the same vein as Shaun of the Dead, Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a whole lot of fun. Hillbillies Tucker and Dale head out to a cabin in the woods for a vacation and, well, all horror breaks loose. With barrels of laughs and buckets of blood, don't expect award-winning performances but it's a lot of fun.

Joe Dante perhaps doesn't get the credit he deserves as a filmmaker. His movies always err on the right side of subversive anarchic fun, and The 'Burbs is no exception. Starring Tom Hanks as part of a neighbourhood watch that have suspicion that the new neighbours that just moved in are killers, the film manages to keep you guessing right up until its fantastic twist. Yes, it's ridiculous, but The 'Burbs is ever watchable and will remind you fondly of the films you used to watch growing up (if you're a child of the '80s that is).

The Coen Brothers have made many a classic movie, but The Big Lebowski is their crowning achievement. The plot is based on a mistake: The Dude (Jeff Bridges) just so happens to have the same name as someone who owes money to the mob. This mistaken identity leads The Dude and his ragtag group of friends deep into the belly of the LA underworld. Endlessly quotable and hugely enjoyable, there is no other film like it.

The Hunt For The Wilderpeople is a fantastic comedy from New Zealand director Taika Waititi. It's a movie about Ricky, a kid who's been passed through the welfare system and his relationship with Uncle Hec - someone who didn't completely agree with having a foster child - and the unexpected whirlwind adventure they have together. Adult themes of loss, hope and love are seen through a child's eyes which makes for some hilarious and sometimes poignant moments. The film was such a success it brought Waititi's talents to the attention of Marvel, who have snapped him up to direct Thor: Ragnarok.

40 Year Old Virgin is pretty much what it says on the tin - a comedy about a man (Steve Carrell) who has yet to understand the joys of sex and whose life is centred on his love for videogames and collectable action figures. Which is nothing like any of the TechRadar team, I can assure you.

One of the finest comedies, featuring one of the finest comedy performances from Bill Murray. One of the finest comedies, featuring one of the finest comedy performances from Bill Murray. One of the finest comedies, featuring one of the finest comedy performances from Bill Murray. One of the finest comedies, featuring one of the finest...

Feel-good fun oozes from this movie, which is loosely based on the life of English ski jumping underdog Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards. While Hugh Jackman is the star power that got this film off the ground, it’s Taron Egerton as the titular character that steals the show. Directed by Dexter Fletcher, he manages to find enough story and sprinkle in some fantasy to create a wonderfully warm watch.

Sing Street’s John Carney plays a familiar tune with his movies: they are essentially musicals that are fine to watch if you're not into musicals. But while Once was great but maudlin and Begin Again was okay and maudlin, Sing Street is fantastic. Centred round a bunch of Irish kids in the 80s who want to start a band, it’s a brilliant and fun movie.

Alexander Payne proves once again that he is one of the best directors around with Nebraska, a film that follows elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) who embarks on a 750-mile journey to Nebraska to cash in the supposed winnings of a sweepstake. Nebraska is full of heart but also home truths when Woody arrives back in his hometown after years away.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the perfect '80s movie. It's got teenagers rebelling, budding romance, a great soundtrack and a huge 'stick it to the man' storyline. It's also got Matthew Broderick at his finest (as Bueller) and some great direction and writing by the legend that is John Hughes. Great stuff.

Clueless is the best teenage-centred movie to come out of the '90s, which is no mean feat considering how many there were in that decade. The exploits of Cher (Alicia Silverstone) at a Beverly Hills high school spawned a whole host of real-life fashion faux pas, as well as a new line of dialogue that was, well, "totally buggin".

There are so many one liners and sight gags in Airplane that it really doesn't matter when a few of them don't work. The film skewers the many disaster movies of the '70s with a spoof so funny that it hasn't really been bettered. The stars of the movie are Leslie Nielsen as Dr Rumack and Lloyd Bridges, chosen not just because of his comedy chops but because he had starred in many of the films that the movie was sending up.

Let The Right One In is a chilling movie set in Sweden. Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist - the screenplay was written by the novelist - it's a romance of sorts about two children who become friends after one is bullied. Oh, and one of those children just happens to be a vampire. It's a more subdued film than the events in the book but all the better for it. It's a film full of atmosphere, fear and, well, romance.

Creep was a mini indie marvel when it came out a few years back. Ultra low budget, it starred Mark Duplass and was base on his story about a videographer who puts an ad on Craiglist which leads to some terrifying home truths. In the sequel, Duplass is back and this time he lures someone to his home by claiming to be a serial killer. What ensues is a tense, brilliant low-fi ride.

Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is an under-appreciated gem. It uses some old-school cinematic techniques to give the movie a classic feel and it really works - having back projection for some of the special effects offers up a really unnerving look at Dracula. Gary Oldman is fantastic as the titular character. The only let down is Keanu Reeves who is utterly miscast. If you can put up with that, though, then what you have is one of the most lavish horror movies ever made.

The Purge is low budget but brilliantly high concept. The idea is that there is one day a year when the world can go a bit crazy murdering and looting and it's all completely legal. This makes for a fantastic adrenaline rush of a movie that's modelled on John Carpenter style 80s heist movies. It's really good fun, as is a number of the sequels.

Gerald's Game is one of Stephen King's leaner novels, with the majority of the action taking place in one room, with one woman (Jessie Burlingame) alone, handcuffed to a bed, after a night of passion goes awry, with just her thoughts, her dead husband, and a number of things that go bump in the night for company. With this in mind, director Mike Flannigan has managed to pull off an adaptation that could have been very one note, by creatively bringing Burlingame's - a fantastic Carla Gugino - thoughts to life. It's a bit too melodramatic at times and does suffer from the King curse of never knowing how to properly end his stories, but there's a lot to like about this Netflix exclusive.

A superb '80s-tinged soundtrack backs this fantastic film that plays on the notions of teen sex and angst by throwing in an STD that when transmitted passes a curse on. The movies manages to be filled to the brim with dread, even if the premise of the movie isn't really explained, and is a superb throwback to zombie movies of old, as well as the foreboding Invasion of the Body Snatcher flicks.

Blair Witch, the kind of remake, quasi sequel to the scare classic The Blair Witch Project was a big surprise when it first announced. Director Adam Wingard had made the film covertly with the title The Woods and then when it premiered at San Diego Comic-Con, they announced its link to the Blair Witch story and the crowd went, well, crazy. The film is a worthy addition to the franchise. It keeps the shaky cam stuff but also adds in some modern day twists such as drones and GPS. It takes a while to get going but once the scares start they are relentless.

This super-smart horror from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard is a movie that tries its hardest to turn the horror genre on its head, with continual knowing nods to movies of the past and a post-modern spin of the well-worn 'cabin in the woods' theme. Don't go into this movie expecting a normal film-watching experience but do expect to have fun watching a highly original script at play.

The real horror in the Babadook isn't the monster, ripped from a children's pop-up book that may or may not be terrifying a mother and son, but the slow and steady psychological decline of the mother Amelia, played by a wonderful Essie Davis. The descent and fear she has at the thought of not being able to protect her child is mesmerising as is the rest of the film. Gripping stuff.

Thanks to Netflix's sometimes surprising rights, Under The Shadow has popped on to the service around the same time as the movie's Blu-ray release. We're glad it has. It's a fantastic horror film set in Tehran in the '80s, focusing on a mother and daughter seemingly terrorised by otherworldly beings in an apartment block. The dread in this film is slow release but palpable, making it a terrific, scary watch.

Given Evil Dead II is a quasi sequel/remake of the original Evil Dead, eyebrows were raised when another remake was announced. Thankfully, the movie is actually decent. Director Fede Alvarez plays the movie straight, piling on the gore and the tension, making for some terrifying moments. It feels like Evil Dead too, thanks to both Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi coming on board as producers.

This ultra low budget movie comes from the Duplass Brothers and is one of the most inventive chillers in years. The plot is slight, it focuses on a man who answers a Craiglist ad to film what he thinks is a video for the person’s unborn son. And that’s all we will say about the plot as it twists and turns in on itself, terrifying the viewer repeatedly in the process.

Daniel Radcliffe has done well to rid himself of his Harry Potter persona and it's all thanks to choosing roles in movies such as Women In Black. Based on the celebrated novel of the same name and in turn the stage play, the film is a gothic delight, harking back to the good ol' days when horror was implied rather than rammed down a watcher's throat. Well, until the final act at least. Prepare to feel your spine tingle.

Insidious is a film that proves, if you want mainstream horror done right, then you have to call up director James Wan. He brings a menacing atmosphere to this film about a family that moves into a house that's not what it seems. While it doesn't quite match up to the scares seen in Sinister - another film produced by Jason Blum - Wan does enough to make sure there's plenty of shocks to go around.

While the cast may err on the side of mainstream - Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson and Matthew Fox all star - the plot of Bone Tomahawk does not. Without giving too much away, it's essentially cannibals versus grizzled men of the Wild West. Russell is superb in this tale that is absolutely relentless and all the better for it.

Hush has a brilliant premise. Directed by Mike Flanagan it revolves around a killer who tries to get the best of a girl in the house on her own. So far so 'every horror movie ever made', but the girl who is being stalked happens to be deaf. Yes, the home invasion genre is getting tired, but Hush manages to quietly breathe new life into it.

A forgotten '70s gem of a horror movie, Let's Scare Jessica To Death is all soft focus and maudlin music as we follow the exploits of a woman who has just gotten out of a psychiatric hospital. While staying in a country house to recuperate, she befriends a strange visitor. It's worth watching just for John D Hancock's dreamy direction.

One of the more high-concept horrors on the list, Would You Rather is about a group of seven people who are invited to a millionaire's house to play a game of 'Would You Rather'. The game turns out to be one of the most sadistic around.

While it never quite reaches the perfection its visuals and stellar cast promises, Tomorrowland is a sumptuous watch. A throwback to the old sci-fi adventures of old, the film is based on the Tomorrowland ride at Disney. Cynics would say that the movie is just one big Disney promotion but the movie is better than that. It's a great story that transcends dimensions - just sit back and go with it.

It's been easy to criticise Netflix in the past for not doing enough to promote its new releases – that's why we're here, right? Great titles can arrive with little fanfare, compared to the year-long promo cycle some Hollywood blockbusters can receive. However, it's completely torn up the rulebook with the release of The Cloverfield Paradox this week. Revealed with a debut Superbowl trailer, it released onto the service the very same day, building more hype in a few hours than it would have managed with months of trailer trickle.

So is it worth your time? If you're a fan of the Cloverfield series, surprisingly...maybe not. It's an old script that's been retuned to fit the Cloverfield universe, but barely connects to what's gone before. It is however a competent sci-fi thriller about a research mission gone wrong, with enough jumps and tension to make it worth a watch.

Given it was made in 1985, the effects of Back To The Future still stand up today. Actually, so does everything about the movie. It's a fantastic old-school romp that showcases Michael J Fox as one of the most affable actors around. Spielberg may have only produced the movie but his fingerprints are all over it. Back To The Future is a classic that is endlessly fun and rewatchable.

There is a disturbance in the Force. To be honest we weren’t expecting a Star Wars movie to grace Netflix, given the Mouse House will be doing its own streaming service but Star Wars: The Force Awakens has landed and what a movie it is. Part reboot, part re-imagining, all Star Wars, The Force Awakens breathed new youthful life into the series and is a worthy sequel. The Force Awakens is a big, fun nostalgia blast featuring some of the Star Wars old guard and introducing new characters, Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and - most importantly - BB-8.

The effects may look a tad dated now but The Abyss was SFX filmmaking at its best when it was released in the late '80s. Directed by James Cameron, sandwiched between Aliens and Terminator 2 in his oeuvre, the film is about a diving team looking for a lost nuclear submarine but instead encounter something wholly different. It's a thought-provoking slice of sci-fi that's more thriller than action.

Adapted from Andy Weir's breezy, initially self-published novel of the same name, The Martian is all about Mark Watney (Matt Damon), an astronaut left behind on Mars after he’s presumed dead and the rescue mission that ensues. It’s a great, fun film and without a doubt director Ridley Scott’s best movie in years. It not only looks great but Matt Damon is superb as the shipwrecked Watney, playing more for laughs than action.

The first X-Men was the first in the new wave of superhero movies that proved to the world that you could make an adult movie out of comic-book characters. Director Bryan Singer played on heady themes such as the Holocaust and homosexuality to hook X-Men's metaphors around, which helped ground the characters and make for a great movie. X2 expands on this and is arguably one of the best superhero stories ever made, introducing Stryker (Brian Cox) as the former Army commander who was key to making Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who/what he is.

When news hit that Edgar Wright was no longer helming Ant-Man, there was very good reason to believe that Ant-Man would be terrible - given Wright had been trying to shape the project into something for years. The result, with Peyton Reed on board, though is a fun, speedy heist movie that bears all the hallmarks of previous Marvel movies but does it all on a, ahem, smaller scale.

Director Neill Blomkamp's debut was years in the making. District 9 started out as a short film which showed off Bomkamp's impressive talent with visual effects and subsequently helped him get the movie greentlit. District 9 is a fun, if on the nose, look at the apartheid in South Africa, it just so happens aliens are the ones that are getting the rough treatment. The film is the debut of Sharlto Copley, who is brilliant as the scientist hiding out in the alien slums.

The original Blade was a fun, gory take on Marvel's vampiric superhero. But it's Blade II where the character really started to have bite. Helmed by Guillermo del Toro, the visionary director adds all sorts of weird and wonderful characters into the Blade universe and also introduced Whistler, a true screen badass.

Timur Bekmambetov may be a Hollywood director now, but where his American movies are visually appealing but pretty awful (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the remake to Ben-Hur), Night Watch, which he made in his native Russia, is fantastic. At the time of its release (2004), it was the most successful Russian movie for all time and for good reason. It's a brilliant, sometimes incoherent fantasy that melds Bekmambetov's great style with a story that involves modern day vampires that are split into two factions: the night watch and the day watch. Don't try and understand it, just feast on the surreal, stunning visuals.

Splitting the last book in the series was a mistake as instead of having one fantastic movie, you instead have two good ones. Mockingjay - Part 2 is by far the darkest Hunger Games movie but it's well made and a fitting end to the franchise. While there's not enough Hunger Games style action scenes, the end showdown is worth the wait and elevates the movie above its YA fiction leanings.

The film that pretty much got Rian Johnson the job to helm Star Wars: Episode VIII, Looper is a timey wimey tale that is set in 2074, when time travel has been invented but subsequently banned. This doesn't stop a band of outlaws (called Loopers) using the technology to assassinate people in the past for payment. Yes it's convoluted but it's also a gripping film that doesn't let up until its twist ending.

The Look of Silence is a hard watch. A sequel of sorts to The Act of Killing - which is sadly not on Netflix - it was created by Joshua Oppenheimer and focuses on a man who confronts the men who killed during the 1965 'purge of communists' in Indonesia in the 60s. He confronts them while giving them eye exams - a ruse to get them to speak. It all makes for uneasy but riveting viewing.

Jim Carey has always been an actor that takes things to extremes - whether it's his face gurning or physical comedy. But nothing was quite like what he did in Man On The Moon, the Milos Foreman directed biopic of Andy Kaufman. Mixing exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of Carey that the studios didn't want released, this is one revealing documentary about the things people do to make people laugh.

Full of hubris that you can only get when a documentary crew gets more than they bargained for (see also: The Jinx), Weiner follows the mayoral campaign of Anthony Weiner only for him to be embroiled in a sex scandal as the cameras are still shooting. And the best bit about it is, the documentary was meant to be about Weiner’s comeback after another sex scandal that happened in 2011. It’s a tough but compelling watch.

Director Martin Scorsese may well be known for his Hollywood productions but he has a decent sideline in rock documentaries. The latest to hit Netflix focuses on George Harrison, knitting together archive footage with interviews and home movies. It’s a warm, revealing portrait of arguably the most talented Beatle and one that came out 10 years after his untimely death.

With nuclear war still a threat today (and a growing one at that), a documentary on how atomic warfare came to be was always going to feel prescient but The Bomb feels like more than that. It's a full-on assault on the senses that weaves archive footage together to create a non-linear, experimental piece that's more mosaic than montage, with a message that's pretty clear: we need nuclear disarmament and we need it now. The Bomb toured the film festival circuit with live band The Acid and was even shown at Glastonbury's Shangri-La. While it's no doubt not as potent as it was in a live space, it's still well worth a watch. And if you need a non-Netflix companion piece, then check out Storyville, Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise by Mark Cousins.

"Metal on metal / It's what I crave / The louder the better / I'll turn in my grave."

Like a real-life Spinal Tap, the story of Anvil, the oft-forgotten heavy metal pioneers is as tragic as it is funny and uplifting. A huge influence on the likes of Metallica and metal's megastars, Anvil never got to enjoy the success of their peers, resigned to the axe-wielding history books.

Except...Anvil never went away. Continuing to shred on the toilet circuit, the documentary follows the ageing rockers as they make one last attempt at hitting the big time.

Throw up the horns, but keep a hanky at the ready – Anvil: The Story of Anvil is as good as a rock-doc gets.

This doc about the 1999 Columbine High School massacre is a must watch. It's a frankly frightening look at why the massacre took place and how failings in the US school system and the ease of use guns can be bought in the US were to blame for what happened. Nearly 20 years on, the documentary will still have a profound effect on all who watch it.

The White Helmets is, quite rightly, the winner of Netflix's first-ever Oscar. It was directed by the only British winner of the 2017 Oscars, too. Orlando von Einsiedel directs this stunning look at the day to day operations of the Syrian Civil Defense, volunteers who assist neighbourhoods that have been bombed, helping find survivors amongst the devastation. It may only be 40 minutes long, but the bravery and tragedy you witness will stay with you forever.

Netflix bagged its first Bafta thanks to this stunning documentary. 13th looks at race and the US criminal justice system, showcasing numerous injustices in the way African Americans have been treated in the system. The documentary was made by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who also made the superb Selma.

Some Kind of Monster is a intimate look at one of the most successful heavy metal bands ever, Metallica. This unflinching doc focuses on the band as they hit a crossroads - the departure of their bass player. We see a band that's been together for 20 years talk through their emotions and pain points. By enlisting the help of a therapist, the documentary is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall look at a rock group in group therapy.

One of the most important documentaries of the decade, Blackfish charts the life of killer whale Tilikum, who sadly died recently. Kept in captivity as a 'performance mammal' at SeaWorld, the doc explores the unsightly side of why keeping whales in captivity is a terrible idea. Blackfish had such an impact that SeaWorld decided to phase out its orca shows and rebrand itself. Powerful stuff.

This Netflix exclusive documentary is a heart-wrenching look at one of the greatest singers of all time. While the highlights are definitely seeing Simone sing live - there's a huge amount of never-before-seen archive footage - it's the eye-opening truths about her troubled life that hit home hardest.

Cartel Land works great as a companion piece to Sicario - found in our Best Thriller list. It's a documentary focused on the bloody and brutal battle between drug runners on the US/Mexican border and a vigilante group of civilians who have had enough and fight back. Produced by Kathryn Bigelow, Cartel Land is a despairing watch punctuated by some stunning cinematography and a fantastic score.

A movie about chess shouldn't be this riveting but Bobby Fischer Against The World is a stunning portrait of a man who was one of the best chess players in the world. Featuring interviews from other chess luminaries, such as Garry Kasparov, the documentary looks into the tumultuous life of Fischer who won everything going in the 60s, only to disappear into obscurity for some 20 years.

This documentary may have gained prominence thanks to its DJ Shadow soundtrack, but it's the subject matter that makes Dark Days such a must watch. Shot and directed by Marc Singer, Dark Days shines a light on those who live in underground tunnels under New York. Criminally, this was Singer's only foray into documentary filmmaking but at least he created a classic.

At nearly three hours' long, Hoop Dreams is an exhaustive and very personal look at two teenagers trying to make it big in professional basketball. The two kids in question - William Gates and Arthur Agee - are from poor backgrounds which makes the push to basketball superstardom even more effective. The film won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and for good reason - it's one of the best sports movies ever made.

The Queen Of Versailles is a documentary with a difference. It starts off being about the Siegel family, one of the richest in America, who are building the most expensive house in the US. During filming, however, the Great Recession of 2008 hits and David Siegel's timeshare business is hit badly, leaving the building work halted. As his wealth slowly evaporates, the cameras continue to roll.

Always one for a conspiracy theory - just watch JFK to see how creative his jigsaw-like thinking can get - Olive Stone was the perfect choice to direct Snowden - a film about Edward Snowden, arguably the most prolific leaker the US has ever had. Charting his life from his cut-short army career to his desk job in the NSA, focusing on cyberwarfare, the story humanises a person who already feels like a myth and adds bones to why he decided to go against the US government and uncover a truth that included mass surveillance and more.

It's nowhere near director Danny Boyle's best, but Trance is still a fun ride. It's a film that reunites Boyle with his old writing partner John Hodge - who also recently went on to make T2: Trainspotting with Boyle - and is about an art heist that goes wrong. To understand what happened, a hypnotherapist is hired to try and find a missing painting. The story ends up being hard to understand - but when the visuals are this good, you won't really mind.

The Stephen King renaissance continues with 1922, a movie based on a little-known short story by the horror author taken from his 2010 Full Dark, No Stars compilation. It’s an assured film with a great central performance by Thomas Jane, who plays a farmer in the 1920 who murders his wife, a crime that sparks off a strange string of events. It’s slow burning but when the horror finally creeps in it’s a tough but mesmerising watch.

American Sniper is a taut, tension-filled tale about Chris Kyle, a skilled sniper who 160 people when he was a US Navy Seal. If you can forgive the embellishing of truth to heighten drama and the fact the film offers up a one-sided view of Kyle’s ‘achievements’, American Sniper is one of Clint Eastwood's more assured movies. It’s a troubling movie, though, one that both tries to moralise war and showcase the after effects of being in a war zone.

Ben Affleck's directorial debut is a superb, taut thriller that's based on every parent's worst nightmare - the disappearance of their child. Ben's brother Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan star as two detectives who take on the missing person's case, even though they have little experience in a case of that type. Based in Boston, the film manages to showcase the heart of the city (where the Afflecks are from) as well as tell a tragic tale in the most human way possible.

Kathryn Bigelow is one of the greatest action filmmakers around, so was perfect for helming Zero Dark Thirty. Based on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the movie keeps the terrorist mostly in the background and instead focuses on the people who were key to bringing him to justice. No one would like to see Bin Laden caught more than Jessica Chastain's Maya, an operative who has spent most of her career chasing him. Whatever your take on the War on Terror, this is riveting stuff.

With Twin Peaks: Season 3 currently trying to out weird the world, it's a perfect time to immerse yourself in the delicious nastiness of Blue Velvet once more. The film is a triumph of oddness - based around a seemingly wholesome man (Kyle MacLachlan) who gets embroiled in the underworld thanks to his infatuation with a mysterious women. This is David Lynch at his finest.

Based on the amazing true tale of an FBI informant who infiltrated the highest reaches of the mafia, only to nearly be turned himself, Donnie Brasco is a mob movie like no other. Stellar performances from both Johnny Depp and Al Pacino, this is an assured gangster tale.

David Cronenberg was on a role when Eastern Promises came out. It was his second feature to, well, feature Viggo Mortensen - the first is the peerless A History of Violence - and is about the goings on of the Russian mob in the UK. Mortensen is frightening as a mob member but it is Naomi Watts who steals the show as the midwife who has a dangerous secret to tell.

In what is one of the best performances in a long and varied career Michael Caine is utterly brilliant in Harry Brown - a British Falling Down, where a pensioner goes to extremes to avenge his friend's death and battle the crime, drugs and unrule that have taken over his neighbourhood. It's a stark tale that holds a broken mirror up to the UK's inner city life.

To be a fan of Danny Boyle is to be a fan of movies in general - his style, flits and changes with each film he does, you'd be hard pressed to put a label on what is a Danny Boyle movie. But one thing he has with aplomb is style. 127 Hours is a tense, visceral meditation in loneliness. Based on the true story of Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), a thrill-seeker who finds himself between a rock and a hard place when he gets his arm stuck in a canyon. What ensues is a man who, through sheer strong mindedness and some DIY surgery, tries to find his way out of a terrible situation.

One of the most talked about films at 2016’s Sundance Festival, I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore is the directorial debut of Macon Blair - a face you will know very well if you’ve seen the likes of Blue Ruin and Green Room. Starring the ever-wonderful Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood, the movie is about two people who go on a revenge mission after they both get burgled. The whole thing plays out like 90s Tarantino-esque thriller, complete with bizarre happenings and fantastic central performances.

Tragically, Green Room is now earmarked as one of the final final films of Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin. He is fantastic in this tale about a band being trapped in a club with a group of skinheads after they witness a horrific murder. It starts off slow but once the events happen, the film ratchets up the tension to almost breaking point.

One of the first movies to be made under the Netflix banner, Beasts of No Nation sees Idris Elba on fine form as a commandant fighting in a civil war. But the biggest praise has to go to Abraham Attah's Agu - a boy soldier caught in the fighting. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga - who made the first season of True Detective the masterpiece it was - this is a harrowing but great watch.

Gillian Flynn's twisty novel is perfect fodder for director David Fincher. It's dark, almost without a moral compass and probes into the dark recesses of the human condition. Ben Affleck is superb as Nick Dunne, the grieving husband whose wife has disappeared. But it is Rosamund Pike who deserves all the accolades - her portrayal of 'Amazing' Amy is something of a roller coaster.

Fargo is the perfect Coen Brothers film. Funny enough to make you chuckle, it's also filled with some ridiculously dark moments, most of which involve Steve Buscemi's bumbling hitman and William H Macy as the cowardly corrupt Jerry Lundegaard. The star of the film, however, has to be Frances McDormand's heavily pregnant, inquisitive and just darn tootin' nice detective.

Brian De Palma is a magpie filmmaker. His style apes that of his hero, Alfred Hitchcock, and he loves to make remakes. Blow Out is one of his best. A re-imagining of the seminal '60s film Blow-Up, De Palma moves the action from London to the US and focuses on sound not photography as Travolta stars as a sound effects producer who believes he has caught a real murder on tape.

The ultimate romantic film? Perhaps. It’s definitely one of the best watches you are likely to have. When Harry Met Sally is an all-time classic, brimming with confidence that only comes when you nail the acting, script and direction. Sally is played by Meg Ryan, someone who has been friends with Harry (a pristine Billy Crystal) for years but lost contact. They meet up again, when their lives are a little different, and the rest is history. Rob Reiner does a fantastic, subtle directing job here but top marks go to the script by the late Nora Ephron.

What Dreams May Come was a hard watch when it was first released at the tail end of the '90s but it's even harder now, following the death of Robin Williams. It's about Chris Nielsen (Williams) who dies in a car accident, only to wake up in one of the most beautiful places ever. When his wife commits suicide, though, he decides to try and find her in Hell. It's a beautiful watch - one that's both visually stunning and emotionally so. It's not perfect, but it is worth just to see the towering presence of Robin Williams on film once more.

“Woo-ha!” Or “Hoo-hah!” However you want to say it, Al Pacino coining that wonderful Al Pacino phrase is just one of the many highlights of Scent of a Woman. It’s a fantastic film about a blind army officer and his relationship with his helper Chris O'Donnell. Featuring an early appearance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, O’Donnell’s best role - yes, even better than Robin - and a brilliant central role from Pacino whose acting (and tango) earned him an Oscar, this is unmissable old-school cinema.

Director Damian Chazelle (Whiplash) does it again with La La Land, creating a fantastic musical romance about two creatives trying to make it big in Los Angeles. One is an aspiring actress (the fantastic Emma Stone), while the other (Ryan Gosling) is a jobbing jazz musician hoping for his big break. The song and dance routines are a wonder to watch, but this isn't just a film that relies on gimmickry - it's a well told modern day love story.

Yes, it was made to capitalise on the huge success of Indiana Jones, but this is no rip off. Directed by the brilliant Robert Zemeckis and blessed with two of the most charismatic stars of the 80s Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, the movie is an absolute blast. It’s a film about a romance author who heads to Columbia to find her kidnapped sister, only to find herself face to face with an adventurer Michael Douglas. With equal measure action and comedy, Romancing the Stone is full of the fun only a rock-solid 80s flick can muster.

Me, Earl and the Dying Girl manages to make the most out of a plot that would normally depress the hell out of everyone. Film fanatic Greg (a superb Thomas Mann) is tasked with looking after Rachel (Olivia Cooke) a local girl who has been diagnosed with leukaemia. Instead of playing on the sadness of the situation, Greg makes the most of their time together by spoofing some of his favourite films and making Rachel a movie tribute. It’s sentimental stuff but not sweet enough to rot your teeth.

Charlie Kaufman does it again with Anomalisa, offering up an adult take on relationships using one of the most childlike forms - puppetry. David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh lend their exquisite voices to the movie but it's the animation and the heartbreaking story of a man that experiences something out of the ordinary that shines through.

If you can forgive the ending - there was definitely room for Jack on that raft - Titanic is one of the best, and certainly most epic love stories. The sinking of the Titanic plays second fiddle to the romance of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), two lovers from different social groups that end up on the illustrious liner, the Titanic. Yes, it's overwrought and melodramatic, but it's still one helluva watch.

Wes Anderson’s quirky directing is a perfect fit for Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Fox. Lovingly crafted using stop animation that’s voiced by Anderson alumni, and George Clooney, the film works well as a kids animation, but it’s adults that will get the biggest kicks. Director Anderson is going back to stop animation for his next feature - let’s hope it’s half as good as the fantastic Fantastic Mr Fox.

This is by no means a perfect film but it is a must watch. After the phenomenal success of Monty Python And The Holy Grail, Gilliam and some of the crew embarked on trying to make Lewis Carroll’s poem The Jabberwocky for the big screen. It’s the absurd slathered on to the absurd. Unlike the Holy Grail it’s a proper film and not a series of loose sketches draped around a plot and it has a real epic-ness to it. This is something that Gilliam masters better in the Time Bandits but does an admirable job here. It’s best to see the Jabberwocky not as a Python movie but a Gilliam one, and that is no bad thing.

The BFG is brought to (larger than) life brilliantly by Stephen Spielberg and the acting talents of Mark Rylance. While the film may be a little too slow for younger viewers, it's a mesmerising watch. Full of the scatological humour of the book, but also slathered in beautiful imagery that blends the real world and CG seamlessly. Spielberg has done wonders to bring Roald Dahl's big classic to the big screen.

An animated movie lives or dies by its animation and that's what makes James And The Giant Peach so good. Its unique look is because of Henry Selick, the genius director who also brought Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas alive. His animation is a perfect companion for Roald Dahl's twisted tale.

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who made the greatest Anime around Akira, Steamboy is a superb Victorian-London infused tale about a young inventor who has to do everything he can to make sure his granddad's inventions don't fall into the wrong hands. It looks amazing, but is sometimes let down by its storytelling. It's definitely worth a watch, though, even if it does get a little too silly.

The geniuses that brought us Wallace and Gromit decided not to use their most famous creations for their first feature-length movie. Instead they chose this brilliant, endearing story about the lives of some chickens in a chicken run. Mel Gibson adds his voice for some A-List star power but it's the stop-motion animation that's standout here.

Roald Dahl's greatest book, Matilda, is given a great adaptation, thanks to director and star Danny DeVito. While brilliant at playing one of Matilda's awful parents, it's his direction that's key here - weaving together hyperreal imagery, a faithfulness to the book and the right balance of comedy and unpleasantness.

Unfairly shunned by critics when it was first released, Hook is a fun spin on the Peter Pan mythos. Directed by Steven Spielberg, he brings his child-eyed wonder to the Pan world, shifting the narrative to a grown-up Pan played brilliantly by Robin Williams. His performance is backed by Dustin Hoffman at his funniest as Captain Hook and too many other great performances to mention.

Muppet madness ensues in The Dark Crystal - yet another classic brought to life by the majesty of Jim Henson and his puppet creations. It may not be as loved as Labyrinth but it's still a brilliant children's tale about the search for a crystal that once brought balance to the world.

more info...

HP just announced it will start reselling Apple products

HP has expanded its Device as a Service (DaaS) program – whereby businesses can purchase hardware via a subscription rather than making all the outlay upfront – to offer Apple devices as well as its own.

The new DaaS offering will allow customers to get their hands on Mac computers, as well as iPhones, iPads and other Apple gadgets, from HP, backed with HP’s tech support and managed services.

This is only available in the US at the moment, but HP says it has plans to expand to other countries over the coming year, which will likely include the UK sooner rather than later.

Windows Mixed Reality HMD: Professional Edition

VR as a Service

Furthermore, HP is also bringing its virtual reality solutions into the DaaS scheme, which includes the firm’s Windows Mixed Reality VR headset and the recently revealed HP Z4 Workstation (which can now be configured with Intel Core X processors as well as Xeon CPUs).

And the company is expanding its analytics service to allow customers to monitor the performance of their hardware, and most importantly, detect potential issues before they happen, and proactively correct these problems.

In a press release, HP noted: “The unique data analytics capabilities of HP DaaS are now available on Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices – creating a multi-OS solution that’s designed to boost IT efficiency and improve employee experiences.”

We've highlighted all the best business laptops right here

more info...

Virgin Media announces plans to boost broadband speeds

Virgin Media has revealed plans to significantly boost the speeds of its broadband network across the UK.

The company has said it will be upgrading its network to allow maximum download speeds of 350MBps within the next few weeks.

The news is the latest part of Virgin Media's "Project Lightning" upgrade program, which has seen it increase the top download speeds on its network 15-fold since 2007.

The company says that 70 per cent of its customers currently experience speeds of 100Mbps or more, and that almost 15 million premises are now able to access its gigabit-capable network across the UK & Ireland.

Upgraded

"Ever since Virgin Media launched in 2007, we’ve been a byword for fast speeds and have been delivering the UK’s fastest widely-available broadband to customers across the UK," said Anthony Vollmer, Virgin Media's executive director for connectivity.

"The huge investment we’ve made to grow and upgrade our network is what’s powering our latest speed boost...As we continue to boost speed and grow our gigabit-capable network we are showing once again Virgin Media is going the extra mile for our customers."

The news follows Virgin Media's latest financial results earlier this week, in which the company said it had seen its UK customer base grow to 3.1 million, spurred on by high demand for its six month ‘Freestyle’ contracts, which split the cost of handsets and tariffs.

Check out our list of the best broadband deals in February 2018

more info...

No time to waste now 5G legal challenges are over

It may have been Valentine’s Day but there was no love in the air for Three at the Court of Appeal this week.

Its final attempt to force Ofcom to impose a 30 percent cap on the amount of spectrum a single operator can hold, claiming it would boost competition and stop larger rivals like BT from hoarding airwaves.

Three’s position is understandable, given it is the UK’s smallest mobile operator, but large parts of the industry will greet its failure with relief.

5G mobile industry

Earlier in February, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) determined that Three’s ‘Make The Air Fair’ campaign, which saw giant billboards depicting Ofcom CEO Sharon White as a superhero and urged the public to ask for a spectrum cap, was “misleading”.

The campaign oversimplified what is a complex issue and threatened to unnecessarily derail the 5G process. Spectrum is only one element of 5G after all and if anything, more delays would harm consumers in the long term.

For its part, Three denied its actions had delayed the path to 5G and said it was happy that at least Ofcom had accepted the idea of a spectrum cap in principle, so the hope is that the conditions are right for the UK to fulfil its ambition of being a 5G leader.

The auction of 2.3GHz and 3.4GHz spectrum had already been delayed at Ofcom’s request because of the proposed merger between O2 and Three, which ironically would have resulted in the creation of the UK’s largest mobile operator.

While this could be interpreted as a sensible decision, further postponements are unfathomable to an industry keen to avoid a repeat of the 3G and 4G auctions. The crippling sums paid by operators for 3G licences resulted in a decade of underinvestment, while the 4G auction was delayed by legal squabbles.

Rather than lead the world in 4G, the UK was years late to the party and has only recently caught up.

If the same were to happen with 5G, the government and mobile industry’s ambition of becoming a pioneer in this nascent field would be in jeopardy.

Some operators will launch the first commercial 5G networks in 2019 – a year earlier than previously thought – meaning there is no time to waste.

We already have an early 5G standard and component and network equipment manufacturers are continuing with tests to ensure everything is ready. Device makers will be next and operators need to ensure the first bands of spectrum are there too.

Ofcom should be commended for its decision to press ahead with the spectrum auction regardless of the outcome of Three’s appeal. It argued that this was in the “public interest” and would adjust the terms of the auction depending on the outcome.

If anything, this means the UK is now on a par with its European equivalents. Germany is preparing fir its spectrum auction, while France’s 3.4-3.8GHz sale has also been subject to delay.

But the race to 5G is a global one, and there is no time to lose.

more info...

Best movies on Amazon Prime (February 2018): 100 films to stream on Prime Video

Welcome to our list of the best movies on Amazon Prime Video UK. As we are TechRadar we don’t do things by half, so what you have over the course of this gallery is almost 100 movies that are now available to stream on Amazon Video - the movies and TV streaming section of Amazon Prime.

[Update: There's a good range of films coming to Amazon Prime this week. If you're looking for something a little eccentric there's Colossal starring Anne Hathaway. Comedy fans will enjoy The Big Sick, while if you're a fan of sports dramas Borg Vs McEnroe just landed on Amazon Prime too].

To help you make the best selection, we have put everything into categories so if you are a horror fan, love a bit of romance or want a tense thriller, you will find the perfect movie for you.

Having gone through the entire Amazon Prime Video catalogue in the UK we have to admit that the movie selection is - whisper it - better than what you find on Netflix.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

There are a few gems on here that have only just come off of their cinema run and are already ready to stream. Couple this with a brilliant array of stone-cold classics and you have an impressive and varied list of films.

It's great to see Amazon embrace movies in this way, so dive in and we hope you find something you like!

And if you don't, then maybe our Best Amazon TV shows list is for you.

Here's our Best Amazon Prime Video TV ShowsRival check: These are our best movies on Netflix UKAnd here are the best shows on NetflixWant to know the worst movies on Netflix? The check out Not On My WatchThe best sci-fi movies you can stream right nowThe best horror movies you can scare yourself silly with

Thinking of switching from Amazon Prime to Netflix? Watch our comparison video below.

Loosely based of the real lives of the film's stars, Emily V Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani play an interracial couple that have to deal with Emily becoming ill and how cultural differences affect the couple. The film has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards 2018, but it's already on Amazon Prime ahead of this year's big ceremony.

Fancy something a bit offbeat and wacky to watch today? This Anne Hathaway starring film features an unemployed young writer who finds out she's the reason a giant monster is causing havoc on the other side of the planet. The film also stars Jason Sudeikis and Dan Stevens, and it's ready to watch on Amazon Prime now.

Perhaps one of the most iconic tennis matches of all time has been immortalized in this drama from director Janus Metz Pedersen starring Sverrir Gudnason as Björn Borg and Shia LaBeouf as John McEnroe. This isn't just about the tennis though as the drama follows how the legendary duel at Wimbledon affected the men's lives too.

Kathryn Bigelow is one of the best action directors around, so it’s no surprise that The Hurt Locker won her the Best Director award at the Oscars - the first time a women has won the accolade. What is surprising, though, is just how nuanced the film is. Given it’s about disposing of bombs, the tension is in the quiet moments, rather that when the explosions start.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Set in Boston in the late '70s, Free Fire is a fantastic, inventive film that mostly takes place in a warehouse. Because of the limited scenario, it's thanks to Ben Wheatley's effortless and stylish direction and the superb ensemble cast - and lots and lots of gun play - that Free Fire never becomes boring.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E is by no means a faithful adaption of the TV show of the same name (the characters remain but everything else has changed) but it is a super-stylish crime caper from Guy Ritchie. It looks great, thanks to its '60s setting, and the cast are superb. Henry Cavill (a Brit playing an American CIA agent) finally shows the world the charisma he lacks as Superman, while Armie Hammer (an American playing a Russian) is fantastic as Cavill's KGB opposite. Alicia Vikander (a swede playing a German) shows off her funny side, while Elizabeth Debicki (a french woman playing someone who is not French) is great as the villain of the piece. It's a tad overlong and convoluted but a great, underrated watch.

Before David Ayer was assembling a Suicide Squad and creating one of the most abysmal comic-book movies ever, he made this highly original film that’s shot documentary style and focuses on a couple of cops whose job it is to patrol South Central LA and keep the peace. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña are superb as the pair who risk life and limb to do their job. Given Ayer grew up on streets not dissimilar to what’s being portrayed in the movie, End of Watch is a searing and honest portrayal of an area of America few would dare venture.

Norway isn’t renowned for its disaster movies, but with The Wave and Troll Hunter it is making a decent name for itself. The Wave is about a tsunami that hits the country when a Norwegian fjord collapses. Given the relatively low budget, not much disaster is actually seen. Instead we are let to deal with the individuals who are trying to survive the wave. As disaster movies go, this is one of the more interesting to watch.

Some will see Dead Man as a monochrome meditative masterpiece about death and the journey you go on once things end, others will find it a pretentious load of old twaddle. We are definitely in the former camp. Jim Jarmusch’s oddest film - in a group of frankly odd films - sees Johnny Depp as William Blake, an accountant on the run after murdering a man. The plot is based around a series of people Blake meets and the changes we see in Blake the further he goes on his journey. The film is full of second guesses and open to interpretation but Jarmusch also piles on the humour, especially when things looks as if they are getting a bit too dark.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Once again, Daniel Radcliffe proves he's more than Harry Potter in this off the wall film where he stars alongside Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood). Emotional, humorous and more than a little weird, this film tells the story of Hank (Dano) who has become stranded on a deserted island. Just as he's giving up hope of ever leaving a corpse named Manny (Radcliffe) washes up on shore, befriends him and takes him on a wild adventure.

Nicolas Winding Refn makes it hard for you to love his films. While he won new followers with the sublime Drive, he tries to shake a few of them away with the follow up, Only God Forgives. This monosyllabic slice of machismo and revenge looks amazing but is a tough watch. Its scenes are slow, almost meandering. The dialogue is sparse and curt, and the violence when it comes is sudden and extreme. Give it your time and patience, though, and you’ll be rewarded with an unnerving, slick and sinister movie.

After proving himself as one of the greatest music video directors - making videos for Daft Punk, Bjork and Massive Attack - Michel Gondry also showed himself as a fantastic feature filmmaker, with Eternal Sunshine. The plot is light sci-fi - a couple who have fallen out of love go to get their memories of each other erased. By losing these memories, the former lovers, played beautifully by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet start to remember why they loved each other. Visually, the film is highly original but it’s the romance of the movie that endures.

Helmed by two visionary French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Delicatessen is a surreal black comedy that’s based in a strange post apocalypse where food is scarce. The story surrounds a mysterious delicatessen on the bottom floor of a run-down apartment block. Delicatessen is full of larger than life, grotesque characters, a Gilliam-esque feel and some brilliant humour and romance. Jeunet went on to reach global success with Amelie.

Ben Wheatley is a great British director. His films are always off-kilter, so it made sense that he would try to adapt High Rise, an ‘unfilmable’ book by JG Ballard. Tom Hiddleston stars as Laing, the newest occupant of a tower block that’s a microcosm of society as a whole. There’s plenty of drugs, sex and a smattering of murder. As for the plot - try not to understand it too much and just enjoy the rambunctious ride.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s most accessible film is also his best. Ryan Gosling is the silent stunt driver turned getaway driver who ends up getting embroiled in a violent gangland dispute. The film oozes cool, from its garish visuals to its electronic soundtrack and is a feast for the eyes and ears - it’s also punctuated by some stunning, visceral violence.

Todd Solondz is one director that doesn’t mind tackling some of the most controversial, degrading and downright embarrassing situations humans can find themselves in. He continues this theme with Wiener-Dog - a movie dipped in dysfunction that’s split into four parts - each part telling the story of the owner of a wiener-dog. It’ll make you laugh, and some characters from Welcome To The Dollhouse make a welcome return, but you’ll feel uncomfortable throughout.

Jim Jarmusch has always been eclectic in his film choices. Whether it’s meditations on death (Dead Man), Eastern philosophy (Ghost Dog) or, er, vampirism (Only Lovers Left Alive), his take on the storytelling is always unique. In Paterson he has created a heartwarming movie about a day in someone’s life. That someone happens to be called Paterson and lives in Paterson. Adam Driver is great as the central character - his slow burn acting style suits a film that’s almost laid back in its storytelling.

Tobey Maguire plays American chess legend Bobby Fischer in this dramatic biographical film. It follows the true story of the 1972 World Chess Championship when the troubled genius Fischer battled Soviet Grandmaster Boris Spassky, played by Liev Schreiber. Perfect if you're looking for a gripping Cold War drama.

We're sure you've heard of this one. Dial M for Murder is a Hitchcock classic starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly. Milland plays a man who suspects that his wife (Grace Kelly) is having an affair and blackmails an old friend to murder her. What follows is a thrilling crime drama that's a true classic.

Largely overlooked upon its release, The Lost City of Z is in fact a fascinating tale, with Charlie Hunnam playing real-life British explorer Percy Fawcett. At the turn of the 20th century he ventured into the heart of the Amazon, and discovered an unknown, advanced civilisation. It become a great passion, understanding this culture, with Fawcett returning multiple times to demystify a people previously considered "savages", before Fawcett himself mysteriously disappeared. If you're adverse to films starring Robert Pattinson (co-starring here) after his Twilight days, don't let that stop you from giving this wonderful film a go.

Jackie is all about Natalie Portman. Her portrayal of Jackie Kennedy, days after the assassination of her husband and president of the United States John F Kennedy, is a masterclass of acting. She has studied footage of Jackie and got her mannerisms and speech imprint spot on. The film is a stark and intimate look and the former First Lady and is a rollercoaster of emotions. It's endlessly watchable and it's all because of Portman who earned (and subsequently missed out on) a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Martin Scorsese has been in the movie business long enough to do whatever he wants. Silence is his him at his most uncompromising. A difficult sell after the fleeting fun that was Wolf of Wall Street, Silence is a meditative, hard-to-watch movie about pilgrimage. Starring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as two monks who go on a journey to find a place where Christians are put to extremes to prove their love for god. It's a trying movie and one that takes the utmost concentration. It's not quite the masterpiece Scorsese was seeking, given he's been mulling the story for decades but it's a worthy, if meandering watch.

Moonlight is stunning film. Split into three parts, the movie charts the life of Chiron, a black man growing up in Miami. It's heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure and just so happens to be the lowest-ever budgeted movie that has won the Best Picture Oscar. While the acting is superb in all three of the sections - it's the storytelling that really shines and shimmers here. It's captivating, brooding stuff.

It's hard not to write about Manchester By The Sea without stepping into spoiler territory so here's the broad strokes: Casey Affleck stars as a Boston janitor who has to take care of his brother's son after his brother dies. What ensues is a heartbreaking movie. Its backdrop is a snowy Manchester in Massachusetts, something that echoes the characters in the movie. This isn't a film that wraps up neatly in a bow in the end - it's much more closer to fractured, complicated business that is real life.

Lion sounds like a movie that's been manufactured for awards season but it's much cleverer than that. It's based on the true story of Saroo Brierley, a child from India separated from his family when he was just five years old and adopted by a couple from Tasmania. The story follows Saroo in his younger years then flips to him as an adult on the lookout for his real parents. Dev Patel is brilliant as the adult who goes on a journey to find out his true heritage. While it all sounds a little melodramatic, it really isn't - director Garth Davis of Top Of The Lake fame manages to make a movie that's not too overly dramatic but really rather moving.

Some 40 films into his career, you would expect director Ken Loach's talents to be on the wane but I, Daniel Blake may well be his masterpiece. It's a superb study of the class system in the UK, and what happens when someone tries to be a better person despite bureaucracy stopping them from doing just that. Yes, it's political but Loach doesn't play this part of it up - it just naturally seeps through because of the frustrations the film presents. Essential stuff.

The Impossible is what Tom Holland was doing before he became Spider-Man, starring in a true tale about the devastating tsunami in Thailand. He is one of three sons of Naomi Watts and Ewen McGregor's characters and part of a compelling character study of what happens to people with natural disasters strike. Director JA Bayona proved he is a talent to look out for with The Impossible. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which he is helming in 2018, should cement that fact.

Brie Larson stars in this heartfelt study of human endurance. Larson is Ma. She has been imprisoned in a small shed for years, having to bring up her little boy Jack (a great Jacob Tremblay) in isolation. The film follows their story to the bittersweet end. For a film that’s mostly shot within the confines of a small room, director Lenny Abrahamson manages to eek out pathos in the mundane but it’s the acting of the two leads that’s the real reason to watch the heart-rending movie.

Apocalypse Now is a rare gem of a movie. Born out of chaos, where leading actors had to be replaced, medical problems blighted the shoot and Marlon Brando went somewhat off piste, it’s a miracle there was any film at all to show for the shoot, let alone one of the greatest movies ever made. Based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the film follows a soldier’s descent into hell as he tries to track down the elusive Colonel Kurtz, a decorated war veteran who has seemingly gone mad. From the amazing visuals, to the sweeping score, to the acting chops of the main cast, Apocalypse Now is a terrifying masterclass in filmmaking.

John LeCarre’s superb spy novel is given a decent adaptation, thanks to Let Me In director Tomas Alfredson’s measured, careful take on the source material. Gary Oldman is superb as George Smiley, the veteran spy catcher brought out of retirement to find an Russian mole in the ranks of the MI6. Even if you know who the mole is, the way the film unfurls this information is utterly captivating.

A deserved winner of the Best Film Oscar, Spotlight is a searing look at investigative journalism at its finest - trying to uncover the truth of child abuse within the Roman church. The film is a true testament to real journalism and throws shade at online clickbait and its erosion of proper investigative news gathering. Oh.

Another Oscar winner seemingly grown in a petri dish for the sole purpose to win awards, The King's Speech is one man's struggle to get over a speech impediment and subsequent fear of public speech - it just so happens this man is also the king of England. For all its faults, it tugs on the right strings and is very watchable.

The Russian roulette scene may be what most people think of when someone chats about Deer Hunter but the movie has so much more to offer. It shows the horrors of war during and after the Vietnam conflict, shining a light on what a situation like that does to a person and their relationships. It's a gruelling but sometimes beautiful watch.

What started off as a failed TV pilot ended up being one of David Lynch’s most accomplished films. As with any Lynch movie describing the plot won't do Mulholland Drive justice. What starts off as a portrayal of a woman seeking fame in Hollywood ends up being a nightmarish look at the duality of personality and what happens when reality turns into a fever dream.

It’s great to see Viggo Mortensen back as a leading man and Captain Fantastic suits his eclectic sensibilities down to the ground. It’s a film about a family of homeschooled children who have lived off-grid with their eccentric parents. When their mother dies, they come back to civilisation with a bump. Mortensen is superb as the grizzled patriarch and the casting of the kids is spot on. In a film full of surprises, perhaps the most surprising thing about Captain Fantastic is its writer-director Matt Ross. He plays Gavin Belson in Silicon Valley!

Even when Christopher Nolan missteps, he still manages to hide the stumble with a highly orchestrated dance routine. Interstellar is overblown and weighed down by its own importance but, boy, is it an epic watch. Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a farmer and former test pilot who helps on a mission to save the people of Earth, which is ravaged by lack of land resource. The mission involves going to space and entering a wormhole and exploring a new planet that may have the means for sustaining human life. The film falls in on itself as it nears its conclusion but it’s a bold, measured ride into the unknown with some of the best visuals Nolan has created. Just don’t go expecting a masterpiece, however.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

We know you know Gremlins. This is the film that tells the story of a young man who receives a Furby-like creature as a pet and fails to follow every instruction with regards to its care. What results is an army of destructive, evil Gremlins set on destroying a small town at Christmas. It's a festive classic.

Like aliens and whiteboards? Get you a movie that can do both. Arrival was an astonishing science fiction film, released towards the end of 2016, and making its way to Amazon Prime Video before it's even landed on cable or satellite TV in the UK.

Based on the novella 'Stories of Your Life' by Ted Chiang, and directed by Sicario director Denis Villeneuve (whose next task will be the long-awaited sequel to Blade Runner), it's a fantastic film exploring love, loss, communication and the lengths we should all be prepared to go to in order to understand, accept and value the differences between us.

One of the more interesting sci-fi movies of the past decade and a huge reason why director Rian Johnson got the Star Wars: Episode VIII gig. Looper focuses on the timey wimey tale of a bunch of hitmen, whose job it is to send people from the future into the past to kill them. Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are superb in the film, which manages to take complex ideas and boil them down into an entertaining popcorn thriller.

Star Wars alumni John Boyega got his first break on this great UK indie, as did newly instated Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker. Attack The Block is the first movie by Joe Cornish - of Adam and Joe fame - and it’s an absolute corker. Aliens have come to earth to wreak havoc and it’s down to a South London gang to make sure their neighbourhood doesn’t become a disaster zone. Full of warm wit and fantastic humour - not to mention some startling special effects - the movie mashes together a number of genres together and has a whole lot of fun doing it.

They Live sees John Carpenter at his most political and fiendish. On the face of it, it’s a film about a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that, when worn, shows him that aliens have taken over the world’s population and the government is trying to control everyone with subliminal messaging. But it’s all allegory. An allegory that holds strong today, with the current situation in US politics and fake news - that people’s views are being manipulated even if they don’t think they are. Carpenter took a big gamble casting wrestler Roddy Piper in the movie but it pays off.

You wait years for a sci-fi movie that’s influenced by Groundhog Day to come along and then two appear at once. Yes, Source Code has a similar time-repeating plot to Edge of Tomorrow but it’s less bombastic and more thoughtful in its approach. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as the soldier who only has eight minutes to stop a bomber on a busy train, before time resets and he has to do the whole thing again. Duncan Jones does well in the director seat, managing to make a plot device that could grow old rather quick really work.

It’s by no means a perfect movie, but Legend has two fantastic central performances… both played by Tom Hardy. Hardy is both Ronald and Reggie Kray, the notorious twins that ruled half of London’s underworld in the Sixties. Legend is about their rise and subsequent fall, shot through the lens of Reggie’s relationship with Frances Shea, the ever-brilliant Emily Browning. While Legend doesn’t offer anything different to the, er, legend of the Krays it’s still a brutal and occasionally funny watch.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Describe a movie as erotic and it usually conjures up something that's utterly not sexy like 50 Shades of Grey or the Lego Movie. The Handmaiden, though, is erotic and shimmers as a result. Directed by South Korean's finest, Park Chan-wook, the movie is masterful in its suspense and when sex is shown - and it's a lot of the time - it's used to bolster the characters and the story, rather than for pure titillation. The Handmaiden is yet another new release that's headed to Amazon Prime Video - we're not sure why it keeps getting all these 'just released on Blu-ray' movies but we're happy that it's happening.

Nothing is as it seems in Martin Scorsese's chilling Shutter Island. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a marshal who investigates the disappearance of a patient at Boston's Shutter Island Ashecliffe Hospital. The hospital is one renowned for bizarre experiments on its inmates which ups the freaky ante somewhat. Then things get really scary and a lot more obscure when a hurricane cuts the island off from the mainland. This is definitely a film you will want to watch again, probably straight after you watch it the first time.

Stephen Spielberg ratchets up the tension to near breaking point in Munich - a wonderful movies that charts the Black September aftermath. The movie follows the assassin's whose job it was to rid the world of those who created the atrocities that saw a number of Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

It's difficult to talk about Girl On The Train without giving a twisty plot point or two away. So, let's just say that Emma Blunt is great in this tense thriller that does justice to the hugely successful book. The only issue we have is the whole plot has been transposed to an American town. We prefer the distinctly British setting. Other than that, prepared to be both shocked and entertained.

Taylor Sheridan is a man of many talents. Not only has he starred in hit shows such as Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, he's also penned some of the finest thrillers in recent years. First there was the superb Sicario and now Hell Or High Water, for which he was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar. It's easy to see why, this is a taut, tense film about two brothers who turn to bank robbery to help their family. Starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges, the film is a fast-paced modern take on the Western.

Director Atom Egoyan is not one to take the conventional route when telling his tales - and Chloe is no different. Starring Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried and Liam Neeson, it’s about a seemingly normal couple who resort to using a sex worker to test the trust in their relationship. This turns out to be a very bad decision. The film is a remake of the superior French drama Nathalie but it’s a decent thriller that manages to walk the line between gratuity and maturity well.

This is a devastating film. Based on the true events of what is still a recent economic disaster in the US, 99 Homes is about Andrew Garfield’s Dennis Nash, someone whose home faces foreclosure. To make ends meet he starts working for the real estate company - and the villainous Michael Shannon - that caused him and his family to lose his home. It’s a convoluted but brazen look at what can happen to a person when they are on the brink of losing everything.

The original Swedish language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a faithful adaptation of the book of the same name, even if it does sometimes fall into TV movie territory. Noomi Rapace is brilliant as Lisbeth Salander, the alt-hacker who finds herself in the middle of a 40-year-old missing person’s case. It’s a role that pushed into the Hollywood a-list, and for good reason. Another bonus is that this is the subtitled version - the dubbed version is terrible and been hacked in the edit suite.

Andrea Arnold’s second movie was the one that cemented her as one of the UK’s best filmmakers. Fish Tank stars Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender as a teenager and the boyfriend of her mother. An uneasy relationship is struck between them both that goes from bad to worse. This is one of Fassbender’s first starring roles and watching it back, it’s easy to see why he’s such a big star now.

This is most definitely a movie of two halves - in that something significant happens midway through that changes both the pace and tone of the movie considerably. For some, the shift is too much but it really does work. Ryan Gosling plays Luke, a fantastic stunt motorcyclist turned bank robber who’s trying to do the best for his family. Eva Mendes is his estranged partner, while Bradley Cooper crops up as Avery, a good cop that’s trying to make the best out of some terrible situations. Brilliantly acted and expertly told, The Place Beyond The Pines is a powerful movie watching experience.

Richard Ayoade has proved over two feature films that he is a director to watch. While The Double was a fascinating Gilliam-esque comedy thriller, his first movie was much more in keeping with the French New Wave, despite being set in the depths of Wales. It’s set in 1980s Swansea and focuses on the relationship between a teenage loner and a girl who seems to share his passion for doom and gloom. Craig Roberts is fantastic as the loner - a role that won him plaudits and the starring role in Amazon Prime’s fantastic TV show Red Oaks.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as two witch sisters who use their magical powers in a quest to break a curse and find love. A pretty standard romantic comedy elevated by an excellent cast, this is one worth watching if you're in the mood for something light-hearted.

While the first Addams Family was a fun but flawed reboot of the old TV show, Addams Family Values is a subversive gem. Comedy sequels are rarely better than the first movie but what Barry Sonnenfeld did with Values was make it far more twisted than anyone expecting. Whether it's cooking strippers alive (Lurch), various attempts by Wednesday and Pugsley to kill their newly born brethren or the constant references to Morticia and Gomez’s sex life it's a whole lot of ooky fun.

A once-famous actor in the '80s tries to resurrect his career in Mindhorn, a superb pastiche of cop shows of old. Julian Barrett is on top form as the titular Mindhorn, whose desperate attempt to become relevant again means he unwittingly finds himself in a murder investigation on the Richard Thorncroft

As underrated movies go, Goon is pretty much on top of the list. Wrongly brushed aside as another farcical American Pie style movie, because it's got Seann William Scott in it, Goon is much more than that. It's funny, yes, but it's also an affectionate look at the underdog, filled with some pretty big scenes of violence and a number of tender moments too. There's a sequel in the works, which is fantastic news, as Goon is a little-watched gem.

This shouldn't work. Jack Black as a high school teacher teaching kids to play music sounds like it has 'straight to video' written all over it but School of Rock is a whole lot of fun. Director Richard Linklater and writer Mike White take most of the sickly sweet moments out of the movie and leave a fun, riotous movie that is a brilliant showcase of Jack Black's talents. The film has been a big hit since its launch and has recently been turned into a stage production, sans Jack Black though - he's still raking it in through his movies.

This is a superb movie. It's so good that a US remake has already been announced. Toni Erdmann is about an estranged father trying to reconnect with his daughter in a rather bizarre way: by pretending to be her boss's life coach. It's a surreal movie, packed with embarrassing moments and some surprising empathy.

Ted shouldn’t work. It’s a comedy about a man and his childhood toy, which just happens to be alive. That man is the normally dour Mark Whalberg, the toy is voiced by Seth McFarlane and sounds strangely like Peter Griffin in Family Guy. But it does work - it’s occasionally laugh out loud, funny throughout and proves that Whalberg does comedy best when he’s just playing a more earnest version of himself. Unfortunately all of this come untangled in its disappointing sequel, but the original Ted is well worth a watch.

It’s a shame that Chris Morris doesn’t do more stuff as when his new projects come along they always change the game in some way. Four Lions finds humour in one of the most serious subjects: terrorism. For a film shot in 2010, it’s still surprisingly current. It follows docu-style British jihadists who are trying to conjure up a terror plot. The problem is, they’re idiots. Starring, among others, Riz Ahmed, Four Lions is funny, frank and endlessly controversial. But it’s done in such a way that you can’t help but admire the movie.

Wes Anderson's style is so unique that he’s following some of his director heroes - David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick etc - and becoming an adjective. If a film is Wes-like, then it’s filled with childhood wonder, symmetry and quirk. Moonrise Kingdom is packed with all of this and is about two children who escape from a town in the US, only to be tracked down by a search party. It’s a wonderfully innocent movie drenched in melancholy but funny with it. Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Bill Murray all star but its real stars are the children - played by Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward.

It’s a shame that The Thick Of It never hit the big screen. What with Brexit madness and the UK government a mess of contradictions, a movie starring Malcolm Tucker swearing them all into shape is sorely needed. In The Loop is the closest thing we’ve got. It’s a strange movie as it takes strands from The Thick Of It and ports it to the US. This means the film is a hybrid of The Thick of It and the US show Veep. What we do get though is Malcolm Tucker (a never-bettered Peter Capaldi), full of vim and vigor, spinning his way through the choppy waters that is US politics. It’s not perfect, but as satires go it’s one of the most searing.

For a children's story, A Monster Calls is dark stuff. The story is about a small boy whose mother is ill, and father lives away, so he goes to live with his grandmother who he doesn't get on with. The only person he does get on with is a monster that appears at his bedroom window one night. Liam Neeson is great as the voice of the monster but its Lewis MacDougall as Conor, the little boy who has to deal head-on with loss, that's standout here. As is director JA Bayona who has created a beautiful-looking film that's wrought with sadness.

When Gore Verbinski set sail for The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise everyone thought we would never see him make an indie film again but then came Rango. A brilliant, subversive animation, Rango is an LSD-tinged Western where all the characters are animals or lizards. Johnny Depp plays Rango, a chameleon who leaves his family home and ends up in the strange town of Dirt. Brilliantly, nutty stuff.

A surprise 2016 hit that saw a rare mainstream overseas success for Japanese anime, Your Name is a supernatural high-school-romance-come-body-swap disaster movie. Yep – there's a lot going on here, as a teenage boy and girl find themselves inhabiting each other's bodies, slowly unravelling the mystery surrounding their condition – and that of an awful disaster. J J Abrams of Lost and Star Wars fame is said to be looking into making a live-action version, such was the success of the animation – but it'll take something to top the magnificent original.

Will the magic ever dim at Studio Ghibli? The lyrical animation powerhouse delivers yet again with The Red Turtle, the story of a man shipwrecked on a remote island, inhabited just by turtles, crabs and other critters. What appears a simple story slowly peels back to reveal hidden depths, with Studio Ghibli's inimitable attention to detail in animation remaining the industry benchmark.

Everyone loves it when Batman meets the Joker but this movie does it with a twist. The Batman that meets the joker here is Terry McGinnis, a new Batman mentored by an ageing Bruce Wayne. McGinnis is equipped with new-fangled tech to make sure the Joker and his gang don’t end up running the city, but it also takes some old-school advice from Bruce Wayne to save the day.

Based on the controversial Death of Superman storyline, this animated movie is all about Doomsday - the hideous creature that puts an end to Superman. Although it’s faithful to the comic-book series from which it is adapted, it is all a little rushed. But great animation and voice talent - Adam Baldwin is superb as Supes and James Marsters is menacing as Lex Luthor - make this film a must watch, especially if you are annoyed with the treatment of Superman in the recent DC movie universe.

When people argue about the best Batman, Kevin Conroy’s name never comes up. But it really really should. He’s been voice acting as Batman for a number of years and one of the best ways to hear his dark, dulcet tones is by watching Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. This animated movie pitched Batman against another masked vigilante - one that wants to bring Gotham City to justice. If that wasn’t enough, The Joker makes an appearance too. The film is a must for those who grew up on Burton’s Batman and had their faith restored with Chris Nolan’s interpretation. If it wasn’t animated, Mask of the Phantasm would be hailed as one of the best Batman movies. It’s certainly the best Batman animated movie.

This isn’t the film that was advertised but it is still a great children’s movie. When it was promoted back in 2007, you would be forgiven that this is a fantasy epic. While there are those elements, they only make for a section of the movie. The rest is a sad, gripping tale about the relationship between two school friends who deal with the darkness in their lives by creating the imaginary world of Terabithia.

One of the most endearing coming-of-age movies you are likely to see, Son of Rambow is about two children growing up in the ’80s who are obsessed with Rambo. So much, they decide to make their own version of the movie with the help of their friends. What ensues is a fun, inventive film about the magic of childhood friendship and imagination. Directed by music video supremo Garth Jennings, Son of Rambow is a trio of love letters: one to the Eighties, one to home videos and the other to the cartoon violence that was born out of an era where Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Willis ruled the box office.

Lost in Translation is a superb, dreamlike movie that wonderfully captures feeling of alienation and loneliness you can feel in a city you don’t belong in. The city in question is Tokyo, the lonely people are Bill Murray as an ageing actor and Scarlett Johansson as a college graduate left to her own devices by her photographer husband. The chemistry between Murray and Johansson is electric, both endearing and hilarious, as is the soundtrack and the way the film slowly creeps up on you in an wonderful way.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Woody Allen managed to assemble a cracking ensemble for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The film is a fun look at friends Vicky Cristina (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) as they travel to Barcelona and meet a mysterious artist, played by Javier Bardem. It’s all sex and sultriness until his unhinged ex-wife appears. She’s played by Penelope Cruz with such magnetism that you are drawn to her and kind of forget the rest of the characters. It’s not Allen at his best but even his ‘good enough’ films are a cut above most.

There’s a deep, maddening love portrayed in Blue Valentine that is so powerful it ends up being destructive. With that in mind, this isn’t the movie to put on if you don’t want you and your loved one to question your own relationship. It’s a brutal, raw movie that focuses on the relationship between married couple Dean and Cindy, played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams respectively. They are two people in love, pushed apart by circumstance. The story flits back and forth in time, so with each tender moment you get anguish. Powerful stuff.

Todd Haynes is one of the world's most fascinating directors, who loves to mine different eras for inspiration. While he courted the ’70s with Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, it is perhaps the ’50s where he has managed to use the tensions of the era to create superb character dramas. Carol is just that, a romantic tale between two women - Rooney Mara is the clerk that falls in love with Cate Blanchett’s character who is unhappy in a marriage of convenience. The anxieties and problems Haynes highlights in his earlier movie Safe are back with Carol. In this movie, though, everything has been given a more sumptuous sheen.

Thank goodness we live in an era where Terrence Malick is back and making movies on a regular basis. Knight of Cups is as dreamlike and fractured as you have come to expect from the revered director. As with all his movies, it’s clear he shot way more footage and didn’t decide on what film he was making until he hit the edit suite, but that’s part of its charm. Here we see Christian Bale as Rick, a writer who flits between Vegas and LA with six different women. Vegas is perfect Territory for Malick, a desert of neon suits his filmmaking style. While the supporting cast Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and Freida Pinto all add gravitas to the film.

Writer-director John Carney’s debut is a low-budget joy that’s since been turned into a very successful play. The plot is slight: a busker and immigrant spend a week in Dublin falling in love and making music together. But it’s the songs that make the movie. Each one is a gem, sprinkled throughout the movie to give it a musical quality. Carney’s latest Sing Street is well worth a watch, too.

The best way to tell the story of Oasis is to use the band. The group were so enigmatic, so cocksure of themselves that they come across brilliantly on camera. Their interviews are backed by some fantastic archive footage that threads a narrative about a band that solidified the idea of Britpop and proved that the UK still has some rock’n’roll swagger. It’s just a shame that the Gallagher Brothers no longer speak to each other, as they are at their best when they are together.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

This documentary may have gained prominence thanks to its DJ Shadow soundtrack, but it’s the subject matter that makes Dark Days such a must watch. Shot and directed by Marc Singer, Dark Days shines a light on those who live in underground tunnels under New York. Criminally, this was Singer’s only foray into documentary filmmaking but at least he created a classic.

It's a harrowing watch, but Grizzly Man is veteran filmmaker Werner Herzog at his best. Following the (somewhat naive) work of amatuer environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, Herzog examines what sort of man would choose to live, unprotected, among a family of grizzly bears across 13 summers.

At times difficult, Herzog's deeply respectful telling of this unique tale is thought-provoking and wonderfully compiled.

The Amy documentary is a hard watch, one that will have you fighting back tears. The talent on show is blighted by the talent that is thrown away. The doc showcases Amy Winehouse in her early years, using archive footage of the star that shows just how much of a talent she was. There are talking heads with her family - including her husband - as well as good friends of hers.

Jim Jarmusch uses music in his movies to fine effect, so it makes complete sense that he is the one to helm a documentary about The Stooges and their enigmatic frontman, Iggy Pop. The Stooges may not have hit the heights of, say, The Rolling Stones but they’re an important piece of the rock puzzle. This doc does well to uncover what made the band tick, complete with recent talking heads with members of the band.

A-list director Ron Howard took a break from feature-filmmaking to direct this documentary about the most famous band ever. It’s a slick production, meshing old interviews, archive footage and new interviews with the surviving members together to create a vivid look at a band in their pomp to their rather sour end.

Sometimes it’s the smaller stories that pack the most power. That’s certainly the case with Dreams of a Life. This dramatised documentary focuses on Joyce Vincent, someone who died in her bedsit and wasn’t found for three years. It’s a story of isolation, dreams and detective work - as filmmaker Carol Morley joins the dots of Vincent’s life.

Forget the rather disappointing 3D movie and instead focus on this riveting documentary about a French high-wire artist who decides to one day scale one of the towers World Trade Center and walk across to the other one using just a tightrope. It’s utterly absorbing Man on Wire features an in-depth interview with the person that did the stunt, Philippe Petit. The way he tells the story of how he got past security to walk the Twin Towers is as engrossing as any heist movie.

Nick Cave’s unmistakable timber is all over 20,000 Days on Earth, a documentary about Cave’s life so far. As it’s Cave, he takes a rather unique approach to things. Set over a 24-hour period, his real life and a fictional version of his life combine (where celebrities join him on a car journey) to produce a meditation on the process of making music. The best bits are when we see Cave in the studio - watching a music genius at work is mesmerising.

Bob Marley’s music is as strong today as when it was released back in the ‘70s. His politics are as strong as they are now, his protest songs have lost none of their vibrancy. Which is why Marley is such a brilliant watch. It tells the tale of how Marley brought his music to the masses, his love of football and his life living in both London and Jamaica - all of which are brought brilliantly to life by interviews with friends and family and archive footage.

You can rarely go wrong with an action horror starring Keanu Reeves and Constantine is one such movie. Reeves takes up the role of John Constantine, a man who can see half-breed angels and demons who stalk the Earth disguised as humans. Driven to attempt suicide by his visions, Constantine is returned to the land of the living and must use his gift to protect humanity an earn his place in Heaven.

If you enjoyed the recent remake of Stephen King classic IT, then you're probably not against seeing the cinematic adaptions of the rest of his works. The Shining should be at the top of your list. Directed by Stanley Kubrik with Jack Nicholson in the starring role, this is an iconic horror about a man who takes his family to an isolated Colorado hotel in a desperate attempt to cure his writer's block.

If you don't know the film you almost certainly recognize its villain's theme song. Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller about a man-eating giant white shark that's terrorizing the residents of a New England town and the team looking to stop it has become a timeless horror classic.

Director Ben Wheatley adds the right amount of realism and menace to Kill List - a film that is never quite what it seems. On the face of it, it’s a kitchen sink drama about a hitman and his latest assignment to kill three people but as the story unravels so does the hitman’s life (played in earnest by the brilliant Neil Maskell). It flirts at being a family drama, teases you that it’s a crime saga then hits you with the most relentless horror that you’ll be watching the end behind your hands. Great stuff.

South Korea has slowly but surely marked itself out as a country that's producing some fantastic filmmakers. Interestingly, two of the best movies from South Korean directors of recent times have been based on trains - Joon-ho Bong's Snowpiercer (which criminally never got a UK release) and Sang-ho Yeon's Train To Busan.

Train To Busan is a brilliant zombie horror movie. By having most of the action take place on a train, we see what it's like when a zombie epidemic takes hold in close confines, complete with cloying claustrophobia. It's part action movie, part love story, all character study, showing that a situation such as a freaking zombie outbreak can bring out the best and the very worst in people.

Well this was unexpected. The name Hell House LLC doesn't exactly scream 'must watch' but despite its rather Grindhouse-esque title, this is a brilliant slice of horror. The plot is simple: a group of friends who create haunted house experiences for Halloween find a house to convert that's seemingly filled with real-life ghosts. The movie is their footage spliced together, with police reports and the like. The found footage genre is rather stagnant now but Hell House manages to breathe new life into it, mustering up some genuine scares that will have even the most hardened horror fans watching from behind their fingers. Its final scenes don't quite match what went before it (or make much sense) but this is one of the best horror films to come out in years.

Sinister is that rare horror film: it has brains, A-listers and is still really scary. Ethan Hawke is a true crime writer. After finding a box of what he thinks is footage of murders committed by a serial killer, things start to go very bad in his life. Director Scott Derrickson may have recently made the more family friendly Doctor Strange, but with Sinister he proves that he is just as adept at garnering scares as he is guiding the Marvel universe.

Get your free 30-day Amazon Prime trial

Martyrs is a tough, tough movie to watch. You shouldn’t watch it to be entertained, but to be shocked and tested. The first half of the movie is fine. It plays out like any home invasion thriller. Two girls break into the house of a seemingly normal family to get revenge for being kidnapped and tortured when they were younger. The second half of the movies, though, is an onslaught to the senses. It is like nothing you have ever seen, and maybe like nothing you ever want to see again. This is a film for those with a strong stomach. It’s a clever movie that uses extreme blood, gore and torture to hold a mirror up to the perverse nature of ‘torture porn’ movies.

A low-budget chiller that takes place in a small town in Ontario, Canada (bet you can’t guess its name) and follows the exploits of a talk radio team who are reporting on strange goings on in the town. It’s essentially a movie about zombies but distilled through the eyes of a small, yet vocal, group of people. Its budget may well be small but its ambition is big and that’s what makes Pontypool such a fun watch.

This serial killer cat-and-mouse movie is one of the most visceral around. Starring Old Boy’s Min-Sik Choy as the killer, the film is graphic in its content - Its tale of revenge is uncompromising - but is a fantastic watch. It’s also one of the best movies from director Jee-woon Kim who has a platinum line-up of films, including A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life and to a lesser extent his sole US movie, The Last Stand.

One of the cleverest things Wolf Creek did was cast John Jarratt in its lead. Outside of Australia this probably didn’t mean much but Jaratt was the good guy in McLeod’s Daughters. This made his portrayal of serial killer Mick Taylor harder to watch. Wolf Creek is a slow burn of a movie but once Taylor is on the screen, his menace means it’s a must watch - how quickly he changes from helper to hindrance is impressive, as is his gruesome acts of killing.

more info...

The best PS4 Pro deals and bundles in February 2018

If you're looking for a PS4 Pro deal or bundle to dive into the world of 4K gaming, we're here to find you the absolute best price out there. At this time of year, we're seeing some healthy discounts. They're selling fast though, so if you see a deal you like, be sure to bag it before it's too late.

Below you'll find all of the latest and best PS4 Pro prices from the big name stores in our comparison chart. There's not too much difference in price between retail stores this time of year, but we're constantly on the lookout for the latest deals and bundles. Looking to buy in Australia? You'll want to take a look at our AU page.

If you'd prefer a standard PS4, then check out our PS4 bundles page. Don't forget to top up your subscription with one of our discounted PlayStation Plus deals too.

So keep this page bookmarked to stay informed of the latest PS4 Pro bundles when they arrive. If you're looking for more information on the PS4 Pro, take a look at our handy Q&A below the bundles.

PS4 Pro bundle deals (USA) PS4 Pro bundle deals (UK)

Need an extra controller on the cheap? Take a look at the best DualShock 4 deals.

We also have a guide to the best PlayStation VR deals too.

Cheap PlayStation Plus deals

If you're buying a PS4 Pro, you'll probably need a cheap PlayStation Plus deal too. PlayStation Plus (aka PS Plus or PS+) allows you to play PS4 games online, along with access to the Instant Game Collection, a bunch of free games for PS4, PS3 and Vita each month. The default price for a year is £40. We've shopped around for you though and found a range of prices. So check out our guide of you want the best PlayStation Plus deals.

What is the PS4 Pro?

Essentially, the PS4 Pro is an upgrade of the PS4, rather than a 'next-gen' console. The keywords to take in from the PS4 Pro are 4K and HDR. The new machine will allow game developers to include 4K options in their games, so expect the like of Uncharted 4, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Days Gone, Horizon: Zero Dawn and more to look even better on a 4K TV.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range is the other buzzword to be excited about as the PS4 Pro will allow for extra detail to be seen on a range of games and also a wider range of colors not usually displayed by traditional HD TVs.

Will my old PS4 games work on PS4 Pro?

Absolutely. If you're planning on upgrading to a PS4 Pro from an older PS4, all of your games will still work. Not every title will be patched to take advantage of the new 4K/HDR capabilities, but the default upscaling (if you have a 4K TV) will more than likely see some improvement to the visuals and the improved console power may give the frame-rate a boost on some titles.

What else can I watch in 4K/HDR on PS4 Pro?

The PS4 Pro is compatible with 4K and HDR, and the content options for both are increasing all the time on services like Amazon Prime Instant Video and Netflix. Sony has already confirmed there will be hundreds of hours of 4K Netflix content at launch. There's a lot of free 4K content on the YouTube app too.

Does the PS4 Pro support 4K Blu-rays?

No. This was a surprise if we're honest, especially as the new Xbox One S console does. It's a bit of a gamble for Sony, but at the same time, 4K Blu-rays are very expensive for now and many consumers look to digital services to provide their 4K movies and TV content.

Do I need a 4K TV to run a PS4 Pro?

No, the PS4 Pro will still work on a regular 1080p TV, you won't get the benefits of upscaling or HDR though. You may see a slim amount of extra detail, or frame-rate boost, but we wouldn't expect a massive leap.

If you are thinking of buying a 4K TV soon, then it's probably a good idea to splash out on the PS4 Pro instead of the regular or new PS4 Slim as it'll future proof you for a while. Be sure to look out for a TV that supports HDR too, in order to take full advantage of the PS4 Pro's capabilities.

Will PlayStation VR be better on the PS4 Pro?

Early reports say yes. The PlayStation VR frame-rate is better on PS4 Pro and the resolution gets a bit of a bump too. PlayStation VR will certainly work on the older PS4s, you don't need a PS4 Pro to get involved there.

Does the PS4 Pro have optical audio support?

Yes! The optical audio output has been removed from the PS4 Slim though, which is a massive shame. PS4 Pro owners though will still be able to use optical connections for their soundbars and sound systems.

What are the best games on PS4 Pro?

We've dived through our back catalog of PS4 games that have received a PS4 Pro update patch to see which ones look the best and have a noticeable difference. Take a look at our extensive feature - The best PS4 Pro games.

more info...

The best free iPhone games on the planet

The days when you had to buy a dedicated gaming rig and spend a load of cash for a quality gaming experience are long gone. Thanks to the iPhone (and iPod touch) and the App Store, you can get an excellent mobile gaming experience for just a few bucks (or quid, for that matter), or even less.

In fact, a lot of the games out there are free. But can you get great games for nothing at all, or is the 'free' section of the App Store just a shoddy excuse to bombard you with in-app purchases?

The answer is, of course, both. The trick is finding the gems amongst the dross, and what follows are our picks of the bunch: our top free iPhone games, presented in no particular order, including both long-time classics and brilliant cutting-edge recent releases. We've even included a VR game for you... aren't you lucky?

New this week: Rainbow Rocket

Rainbow Rocket is a tense arcade test akin to juggling – albeit with rockets fired towards asteroids threatening to obliterate your planet.

The three colored rockets at the foot of the screen are each launched with a tap. The snag: in Rainbow Rocket, you must match each rocket’s color with that of the asteroid it’s fired at, or everything explodes. Presumably, this universe’s creator is an artist.

Initially, this is simple, but the game quickly becomes tricky when you start mixing colors (by swiping one rocket over another), and dealing with giant asteroids that have different colors for their cores and surfaces. Fun stuff – and that’s before you consider the breakneck meteor mode.

Want to learn more about the latest iPhone? Check out our overview of the iPhone X below!

Beat Street is a touchscreen brawler that wears its influences on its sleeve. The pixelated art recalls classic beat ’em ups, and the stop-start gameplay - with occasional unsporting use of baseball bats to bash enemies around the head - smacks of Double Dragon and Streets of Rage.

Yet this isn’t slavish retro fare. The game feels familiar, but its set-up is entertainingly oddball (liberating a city being terrorized by sentient, bipedal, suited rodents), and everything is controlled by a single thumb.

The controls could have spelled the end for Beat Street, but - amazingly - they work brilliantly, enabling deft footwork, punches, kicks, special moves, and the means to smash an evil rat’s face in with a brick. Apart from unnecessary grind-to-unlock levels, Beat Street’s the perfect freebie iPhone brawler.

Duke Dashington Remastered is a fast-paced single-screen platform game featuring dapper explorer Duke Dashington. Suitably, given his moniker, this treasure-hunting gent doesn’t so much walk as dash. Press left or right and he hurtles in that direction until hitting a wall. Prod up and he shoots towards the ceiling.

This turn of speed is handy, given that his adventures take place within four crumbling dungeons. He must escape each room before a ten-second timer runs down, or end up being a kind of buried treasure himself.

Smart level design turns each of the 120 rooms into something akin to a tiny puzzle. And although the entire game can be dashed through in a couple of hours, a time-attack mode gives hardy and dextrous armchair adventurers a reason to return.

Cally’s Caves 4 continues the adventures of worryingly heavily armed pigtailed protagonist Cally, a young girl who spends most of her life leaping about vast worlds of suspended platforms, shooting all manner of bad guys.

For once, her parents haven’t been kidnapped (the plot behind all three previous games in the series) – this time she’s searching for a medallion to cure a curse. But the gameplay remains an engaging mix of console-like running and shooting, with tons of weapons to find (and level-up by blasting things).

But perhaps the best sections feature Bera, Cally’s ‘ninja bear cub’ pal. His razor-sharp claws make short work of enemies, resulting in a nice change of pace as the furry sidekick tears up the place.

Infiniroom is an endless runner set inside a claustrophobic room. The dinky protagonist leaps from wall to wall, going in circles and avoiding electrified boxes that periodically pop-up.

Every now and again, a chunk of surrounding wall turns orange, before vanishing and opening things up a bit. But sometimes space within the room turns red – a warning that it’s about to become wall again, and that you really shouldn’t be there when it does. Lasers and whirling saw blades add further complications.

Each character in the game has a special power, designed to increase their longevity. But make no mistake: this is intense twitch gaming of the Super Hexagon kind.

Managing to survive for a minute requires almost superhuman reactions. Just be aware all those short games add up – Infiniroom might be brutal and frustrating, but it’s also hugely compelling.

Sonic Forces: Speed Battle re-imagines Sega’s long-time mascot’s adventures as a 3D lane-based auto-runner. Which is to say that it’s an awful lot like Sonic Dash and Sonic Dash 2, which you may have already played.

The twist here is in the ‘battle’ bit, which pits you against three other human players. As you belt along the track, avoiding traps, you can grab pick-ups – many of which happen to be weapons.

This transforms the slightly throwaway Sonic Dash format into a tense and competitive on-rails racer closer in nature to Mario Kart.

Naturally, there’s still a load of freemium shenanigans stinking the place up a bit, but even for free there’s plenty of blazing fast fun to be had.

BotHeads looks like a low-rent Badland game, with its colorful backgrounds, and levels full of silhouettes. But BotHeads plays very differently, being more about precision than semi-controlled chaos – even if you’re often pelted along against your will.

Your BotHead has two thrusters to keep it aloft. You travel rightwards, towards periodic checkpoints that allow a few seconds’ breathing space. Levels are full of hazards, from pinball-like bumpers that hurl you off-course to giant saw blades.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but the aim is to get through the entire game in one go. By means of ‘encouragement’, the trails of ex-BotHeads from failed attempts appear in the background of subsequent attempts. It all combines to make for an immediate, compelling blend of styles and ideas that’s perfectly suited to iPhone.

Super Phantom Cat 2 is an eye-searingly colorful side-scrolling platform game. Like its predecessor, this game wants you to delve into every nook and cranny, looking for hidden gold, unearthing secrets, and finding out what makes its vibrant miniature worlds tick.

It’s also a game that never seems content to settle – and we mean that in a good way. It revels in unleashing new superpowers, such as a flower you fire at walls to make climbing vines, or at bricks to increase their fragility. It also wants you to experiment, figuring out how critters who are ostensibly your enemies can be coerced into doing your bidding.

The only downside is the presence of freemium elements (ads and an ‘energy’ system) - although both can be removed with inexpensive IAP if you agree this is one cool cat to hang out with.

Anycrate takes the idea of a gunfight and hurls it headlong into absurdist territory. There’s no ‘20 paces’ nonsense here – instead, the two protagonists are on floating stone platforms, leaping about like maniacs and blasting each other with gigantic bullets.

You can share your device to play against a friend (which is admittedly more suitable with an iPad) or play against the AI.

And given that we’re firmly in arcade territory, it should come as no surprise that there are all sorts of power-ups that affect the game in various ways. Medical kits patch up your tiny soldier, but you’re just as likely to blast a crate that unsportingly sends fiery meteors your opponent’s way.

Given that you only get two buttons (Jump and Shoot), there’s a surprising amount going on in Anycrate, not least when you venture into the co-op mode with a friend, and find yourselves battling to protect a pile of bling from tiny ‘magical’ thieves. No, we weren’t expecting that twist either.

Train Bandit isn’t exactly nuanced. It depicts a showdown on top of a train, where a bandit faces off against an endless stream of foes, all of whom are quick on the draw – and armed to the teeth.

The bandit’s not going to take his impending demise lying down – instead, he’ll take as many of the enemies with him as he can. You therefore tap left and right to dart between carriages, kicking enemies in the face before they shoot you.

Make one wrong move and you’re dead. Misread the type of enemy you’re facing and you’re dead. Pause for a fraction of a second too long and you’re dead. You get the picture. But the great thing about being a bandit in a videogame – you can always be resurrected for another quick go.

Data Wing is a neon-infused story-driven racing adventure. It’s also brilliant - a game you can’t believe someone has released for free, and also devoid of ads and IAP.

It starts off as an unconventional top-down racer, with you steering a little triangular ship, scraping its tail against track edges for extra boost. As you chalk up victories, more level types open up, including side-on challenges where you venture underground to find bling, before using boost pads to clamber back up to an exit.

The floaty world feels like outer-space, but Data Wing actually takes place inside a smartphone, with irrational AI Mother calling the shots. To say more would spoil things, but Data Wing’s story is as clever as the racing bits, and it all adds up to the iPhone’s most essential freebie.

Tappy Cat is a rhythm action game, with you playing as a musical moggie. Your cat sits before a ‘tree guitar’, and notes head out from the middle of the screen along two rails. These must be tapped, held, or tapped along with another note, depending on their color.

This is routine for a rhythm action game, but it’s the execution that makes Tappy Cat delightful. It feels perfectly tuned for iPhone (your thumbs can always reach the notes), and there’s a cat-collection meta-game, rewarding you with new kitties when you totally nail a tune.

The only bum notes are a lives system (a video ad will give you five lives – although there is also a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 endless lives IAP for those who want it), and the way in which a single major blunder ends your latest attempt at musical superstardom of the furry kind.

Flat Pack wraps a two-dimensional platform game around three-dimensional shapes. You control a little flying creature tasked with collecting every side of a cube before finding a level’s exit.

But figuring out where to head isn’t straightforward, because in applying a 2D game world to 3D wall surfaces, you can end up facing a different way when entering a plane from a new direction.

Fortunately, the game has a gentle difficulty curve – death means restarting a level, but not collecting cube parts you’ve already found. And Flat Pack slowly introduces its new ideas, such as enemies defeated by smashing them from below.

Should you find the main game discombobulating, there’s also an augmented reality mode, which has you walk around a puzzle with your iPhone. It’s a weird but effective experience.

Memory Path is a simple memory test that showcases how polish and smart design can transform the most basic of concepts into an essential download.

Across 50 levels, you tap left or right to move along a path toward a goal. The twist is the path disappears shortly after you enter a level. Initially, remembering where to go isn’t tough, but later levels are likely to find your adventurer regularly impaled before you finally succeed.

Levels complete, you’ll feel fully trained for the endless modes. Random shuffles the order in which you tackle levels; and Race Path is all about speed – how far you can get before the road ahead vanishes. Sharp isometric graphics, a gentle soundtrack, and unlockable characters further boost the game’s longevity.

Power Hover: Cruise is three endless runners (well, surfers) for the price of one. It borrows the boss battle levels from the superb, beautiful Power Hover, and expands on them. You get to speed through a booby-trapped pyramid, avoid projectiles blasted your way by an angry machine you’re chasing through a tunnel, and whirl around a track that snakes through the clouds.

This is a gorgeous game, with silky animation and minimal, but vibrant objects and scenery. The audio is excellent, too – the rousing electronic soundtrack urging you on.

There are a couple of snags: games can abruptly end due to difficulty spikes, and the controls initially seem floaty. But we grew to love the inertia, which differentiates Power Hover: Cruise and makes it feel like you’re surfing on air. As for the difficulty, spend time learning the hazards and mastering the game, and you’ll soon be climbing the high score tables.

Finger Smash is more or less whack-a-mole with fruit - and a big ol’ dose of sudden death. You get a minute to dish out tappy destruction, divided up into seconds-long rounds.

In each case, you’re briefly told what to smash, and set about tapping like a maniac. Hit the wrong object, and your game ends with a flaming skull taunting you. (Lasting the full minute is surprisingly tough.)

This is a simple high-score chaser, and so there’s understandably not a lot of depth here. However, there are plenty of nice touches. The visuals have an old-school charm, and the music is suitably energetic.

But also, there’s the way you can swipe through multiple items, the bomb that ominously appears during the final ten seconds, and varied alternate graphics sets if you feel the need to squish space invaders, fast food, or adorable cartoon robots. Great stuff.

Spin Addict is an endless runner set in a landscape of endless industrial cogs and sparks. You control a piece of metal you set spinning with a swipe, subsequently tapping to leap, and swiping downwards to flip the ground beneath you.

In the endless mode, played in portrait, you try to get as far as possible – easier said than done when massive pieces of machinery regularly want to flatten you, and your power must be constantly replenished by grabbing golden targets.

There’s also a 15-level challenge mode, which plays out in landscape. This is more about pathfinding – getting to the end of each course intact, having collected as many gems as possible along the way. However you play, Spin Addict is a wonderful app with a properly premium feel (bar the inevitable ads, which can be removed for $0.99/99p/AU$1.49).

Leap On! is an endless jumper with a sadistic streak – at least as far as its bounding protagonist goes. The two-eyed ball is tied to a central spiked star by a huge piece of elastic. Whenever you hold the screen, the hero moves in a clockwise direction.

The snag is hitting the spiked star spells instant doom – as does touching anything else that’s black. At first, this mostly means jumping on white orbs, and avoiding the odd lurking blob, but before long, the star starts lobbing all manner of ball-killing stuff your way.

You can fight back by grabbing power ups and smashing the white bits of projectiles, while chasing dual high scores – how many white orbs you hit, and your furthest distance from the star. Leap On! is admittedly a bit one note, but the pacy, chaotic gameplay very much appeals in short bursts.

Built for Speed is a top-down racer with chunky old-school graphics, and a drag-and-drop track editor. Make a track and it’s added to the pool the game randomly grabs from during its three-race mini-tours; other users are the opposition, with you racing their ‘ghosts’.

Handling’s simple – you steer left or right. Winning is largely about finding the racing line, not smacking into tires some idiot’s left in the road, and not drifting too much.

Initially, though, the game’s so sedate you wonder whether someone mistook an instruction to make it “very 80s” by having it seem like the cars are driven by octogenarians. But a few upgrades later and everything becomes nicely zippy.

The only real snag is the matchmaking doesn’t always work, pitting you against pimped-out cars you’ve no chance against. Still, even if you take a sound beating, another tour’s only ever a few races a way.

Knight Saves Queen is a turn-based puzzle game, based on a knight leaping about a chess board. He moves in a standard ‘L’, aiming to bump off every adversary on the board, before rescuing the queen.

Initially, he’s only faced by pawns, but soon other pieces enter the fray, forcing you to carefully plan your path. Over time, allies also appear, allowing you to further manipulate the opposition, which takes pieces every chance it gets.

The bite-sized nature of the game combined with the smart puzzle design make it ideal freebie fare for mobile. We do, however, take exception at needing perfect runs on every level set to unlock the next – unless, of course, you buy coins via IAP.

Still, if nothing else, this forces you to properly tackle every puzzle, rather than blaze through with the least amount of effort.

Flick Soccer is all about scoring goals by booting a ball with your finger. It looks very smart, with fairly realistic visuals and nicely arcade-y ball movement. You can unleash pretty amazing shots as you aim for the targets, and occasionally bean a defender.

The game includes several alternate modes, providing a surprising amount of variation on the basic theme. There’s a speed option that involves flicking at furious speed, and the tense sudden-death Specialist, which ends your go after three failed attempts to hit the target.

Rather more esoteric fare also lurks, demanding you repeatedly hit the crossbar, or smash panes of glass a crazy person has installed in the goalmouth.

Like real-world sport on the TV, Flick Soccer is a bit ad-infested. You can, though, remove ads with a one-off $0.99/99p/AU$1.99 IAP, or – ironically – turn them off for ten minutes by watching an ad.

Drop Wizard Tower is a superb mobile take on classic single-screen arcade platform games like Bubble Bobble. Your little wizard has been thrown in jail by the evil Shadow Order, and must ascend a tower over 50 levels to give his enemies a good ‘wanding’ (or something.)

It’s all very cute, with dinky pixelated enemies, varied level design (skiddy ice; disappearing platforms; watery bits in which you move slowly), and fast-paced boss battles against gargantuan foes.

Most importantly, it’s very much designed for mobile. You auto-run left or right, and blast magic when landing on a platform. Said blasts temporarily stun roaming enemies, which can be booted away, becoming a whirling ‘avalanche’ on colliding with cohorts.

The auto-running bit disarms at first – in most similar games, the protagonist stays put unless you keep a direction button held. But once the mechanics click, Drop Wizard Tower cements itself as a little slice of magic on your iPhone.

This blast from the past (of PC gaming) masquerades as a racer, but often feels like you’re hunting prey – albeit while encased in a suit of speeding metal.

The freeform arenas find you in a dystopian future where people and cows blithely amble about while deranged drivers smash each other to bits. Victories arrive from completing enough laps, wrecking all your opponents, or mowing down every living thing in the vicinity.

In the 1990s, this was shocking to the point of Carmageddon being banned in some countries. Today, the lo-fi violence seems oddly quaint. But the game’s tongue-in-cheek humor survives, sitting nicely alongside bouncy physics, madcap sort-of-racing, and deranged cops attempting to crush you into oblivion should you cross their path.

One Tap Rally distills the top-down mobile racer into a one-thumb effort. Press the screen and you accelerate; let go and you slow down. In the nitros mode, you can also swipe upward for an extra burst of speed.

It feels a bit like slot-racing, but the tracks are organic and free-flowing, rather than rigid chunks of plastic. Learning each bend and straight is essential to get around without hitting the sides – important because such collisions rob you of precious seconds.

You’re also not alone – One Tap Rally pits you against the online ghosts of other players. Each time you better your score, you improve your rank on the current track, ready to face tougher opponents. This affords an extra layer of depth to what was already an elegant, playable mobile racer.

Crazy Taxi is a port of a popular and superb Dreamcast/arcade title from 1999. You belt around a videogame take on San Francisco, hurling yourself from massive hills, soaring through the air like only a crazy taxi can, and regularly smashing other traffic out of the way.

Given the ‘taxi’ bit in the title, fares are important. Getting them where they want to go in good time replenishes the clock. Excite them and you’re awarded bonuses. Go ‘crashy’ rather than ‘crazy’ and the fare will take their chances and leap out of your cab, leaving you without their cash.

Crazy Taxi looks crude, but still plays brilliantly, and even the touchscreen controls work very nicely. For free, you must be online to play, however – a sole black mark in an otherwise fantastic port (and one you can remove with IAP).

Yeah Bunny is an enjoyable platform game featuring a speeding rabbit, who blazes along in a cartoon world, collecting carrots, grabbing keys, and trying to not get impaled on the many spikes some irresponsible dolt has left lying about.

It’s an auto-runner, so controls boil down to tapping the screen to jump at the most opportune moments. This nonetheless affords you plenty of control, such as double-jumping in mid-air for extra distance, or wall-jumping like a bunny ninja.

The game looks superb, with plenty of neat touches like the smoke trail behind the rabbit. And although it can be frustrating when the furry hero is spiked yet again, you can always continue your progress by watching an ad or dipping into your reserve of collected carrots.

In Fish & Trip, you command a single smiling fish, happily swimming in the ocean depths. Using your finger, you direct the fish towards eggs and other stragglers, the latter of which join you to gradually form a school. Unfortunately, everything else in the sea is hungry for a fish dinner.

At first, you’ll spot spiky anemones and the occasional sluggish green fish with big teeth. But eventually, you’ll be zig-zagging through claustrophobic seas, trying to find new friends to keep your school alive, and avoiding massive sharks that show up to the theme from Jaws.

It’s all rather simple, and may eventually pall. But in the short term at least, Fish & Trip is one of those wonderful and rare iPhone games pretty much guaranteed to plaster a smile on your face.

Topsoil, like its subject matter of gardening, is something that only really works if you’re willing to put in the investment. And that’s because it’s a puzzler that’s easy to grasp within seconds, but that rewards long-term play, as you slowly master new strategies to lengthen your games.

The board is a four-by-four grid, into which you add plants. Every four moves you can harvest a plant – or group of adjacent plants – which turns the soil. A reckless approach soon leaves you with non-contiguous chunks of land and no chance of removing loads of plants at once.

Even when planning ahead, the game’s inherently random nature can rapidly end a game. But Topsoil’s charm and gradual drip-feeding of new items to plant makes for a leisurely and enduring brain-teaser ideal for filling spare moments.

There’s a lot going on in 3D racer NASCAR Heat Mobile. There’s the racing bit, obviously, which is rather nicely done. You find yourself on an oval of tarmac, attempting to slipstream and weave your way to the checkered flag, avoiding a horrible pile-up along the way. It all looks rather smart, even if vehicle movement is occasionally suspect; the controls are simple and responsive too.

Away from the racing, you can delve into a meta-game of sorts, erecting buildings to generate resources that support your little race team’s efforts. This can be a bit of a distraction, but adds depth to the game.

And while the entire package doesn’t hold a candle to the madcap racing in the likes of Asphalt, it works nicely if you fancy speeding along in a manner that’s a bit more grounded.

rvlvr. is an easy game to dismiss. Despite the pleasant piano soundtrack and clear visuals, it doesn’t seem like anything special. You get a bunch of interlocking circles with dots on, and must select and rotate them so the puzzle matches the image at the top of the screen. Easy!

Only rvlvr. is anything but. Once you’ve blazed through the initial levels, everything becomes a mite more complicated. You end up staring at half a dozen or more rings with dots liberally sprinkled about, realizing one wrong move might wreck everything you’ve to that point worked so hard for.

This mix of progression and challenge, alongside rvlvr’s quiet elegance, will keep it rooted to your home screen. And that you can skip any of the 15,000(!) puzzle combinations is a nice touch, ensuring you won’t remain stuck on a single test you can’t get your head around.

There’s ambition at the heart of Full of Stars, which so easily could have been yet another run-of-the-mill tap-based survival game.

Much of your time is spent in space, tapping screen edges to deftly weave your ship through space debris. When possible, you scoop up stardust to charge up your weapons system and a hyperdrive that blasts you towards your destination at serious speed.

But Full of Stars is also a role-playing game of sorts, finding you immersed in a plot that puts humanity on the brink. Along with your deft arcade skills, you’ll need to manage resources and make vital decisions to ensure your survival.

It can get repetitive, and the arcade sections are sometimes harsh, but Full of Stars is a commendable effort at trying something different – a story-driven journey that demands both arcade and strategic smarts.

Swordigo is a love letter to the classic side-scrolling platform adventures that blessed 16-bit consoles. You leap about platforms, slice up enemies with your trusty sword, and figure out how to solve simple puzzles, which open up new areas of the game and move the plot onwards.

The plot is, admittedly, nothing special – you’re embarking on the kind of perilous quest to keep evil at bay that typically afflicts videogame heroes. But everything else about Swordigo shines.

The virtual controls are surprisingly solid, the environments are pleasingly varied, and the pace ranges from pleasant quiet moments of solitude to intense boss battles you’ll struggle to survive. All in all, then, a fitting tribute to those much-loved titles of old.

It appears we’ve got to the stage where taping up boxes is considered a viable subject for an iOS game. Bizarrely, though, Tape it Up! appeals.

It takes place on an endless scrolling conveyor belt, with your little dispenser leaping from box to box as you swipe. It’s easy to grasp, but tough to survive when everything’s moving at breakneck speed.

Grab enough coins and you unlock rather more esoteric dispensers that give the game a surreal edge. You might end up sealing boxes with milk, while cows moo in the background, or controlling a little console-style dispenser while an exciting-looking shoot ’em up taunts you by playing itself below.

Ah well – everyone knows taping up boxes is more fun than blowing up spaceships, right?

Playing football on your own can be dull – that is, unless you’re the sporty hero of Footy Golf. As ever, scoring is the main aim – and there’s a goal to be found somewhere on each course. But along the way, you can also collect coins someone’s generously left lying around.

The controls are straightforward (aim with a directional arrow and then let rip); much of the challenge comes in trying to maximize your star rating by reaching the goal using the fewest possible kicks. You’ll also have to navigate increasingly complex courses as you move through a city, caverns, a factory, and a scorching desert.

The game’s a bit ad-infested, with a mildly hateful level unlock mechanism that encourages grinding, but played in bite-sized chunks, it’s definitely more ‘match winner’ than ‘own goal’.

You know when a game’s entire App Store description is “an exciting new thumb-sport” that you’re probably not heading for a title with oodles of depth.

And so it proves to be with Jelly Juggle, which is more or less a one-thumb take on Pong that you play by yourself.

Here, a little fish swims in a circle whenever you press the screen, aiming to keep a square jelly in play. If you don’t think that’s hard enough (and, frankly, it is – this game’s like juggling at speed), crabs eventually mosey on in to complicate matters, and new levels open up where you’re juggling multiple jellies.

A simple title, then, but one with immediacy (given how simple it is to grasp) and relentless intensity. Plus, games are short enough that you can probably have several attempts to beat your high score while waiting in a queue at the grocery store.

It’s always the way: there you are, a mage, supplying everything for your town’s increasingly slovenly citizens, when the ruckus from a particularly rowdy party causes a beaker of something potent to fall into your cauldron, blowing up your tower and turning you into a living skeleton. A typical Friday, really.

In Just Bones, the skeleton appears to be in a kind of Groundhog Day scenario, collecting up his various parts across tiny 2D platform game worlds, before flinging himself into a portal and repeating the process somewhere new.

It’s all very silly, but also a novel take on a platform game; and for those who like a challenge, there are some seriously tough speedrun targets to beat.

In this auto-running platformer, titular hero Yobot dodders about cavernous rooms within a robot manufacturing plant. Using his not-very-super powers of jumping and being able to stop a bit, you must help him to the exits, grabbing switches and keys along the way.

The stopping aspect of Yobot Run is complicated by you only having limited stop power – you can’t just sit there for ages, waiting for a moving platform to be just so.

The result is a game where you’re always anxiously searching for a route to the next waypoint, trying to avoid dying on one of the plant’s many hazards.

(Although, frankly, someone needs to have a word with the architect, given the number of spikes the plant has, and the exits being on impossible to reach platforms.)

Although, at its core, this is a fairly standard lane-based survival game (swipe to avoid traffic; don’t crash), Dashy Crashy has loads going on underneath the surface. It’s packed full of neat features, such as pile-ups, a gorgeous day/night cycle, and random events that involve maniacs hurtling along a lane, smashing everything out of their way.

It also cleverly adds value to mobile gaming’s tendency to have you collect things. In Dashy Crashy, you’re periodically awarded vehicles, but these often shake up how you play the game. For example, the cop car can collect massive donuts for bonus points, and an army jeep can call in tanks – just like you wish you could when stuck in slow-moving traffic.

Flinging a plastic disc about isn’t the most thrilling premise for a game, which is why it’s a surprise Frisbee Forever 2 is so good. The game finds a little toy careening along rollercoaster-like pathways, darting inside buildings and tunnels, and soaring high above snow-covered mountains and erupting volcanos.

You simply dart left and right, keeping aloft by collecting stars, and avoiding hazards at all costs – otherwise your Frisbee goes ‘donk’ and falls sadly to the ground. Grab enough bling and you unlock new stages and Frisbees.

This game could have been a grindy disaster, but instead it’s a treat. The visuals are superb – bright and vibrant – and the courses are smartly designed. And even if you fail, Frisbee Forever 2 lobs coins your way, rewarding any effort you put in.

Pixel Craft takes no prisoners. No sooner have you found your feet in your little auto-firing spaceship than hordes of aliens blow you into so much stardust.

Before long, you clock formations and foes, learn to dodge huge arrows fired by a massive space bow, figure out how to avoid kamikaze ships, and discover how to best an opponent that’s apparently ambled in, lost from arcade classic Caterpillar. Then you face a massive boss and get blown up again.

It’s staccato at first, then – even grindy. But Pixel Craft has a sense of fun and urgency that makes it worth sticking with. The aesthetics and controls are impressive, and death always feels fair – to be blamed on your fingers failing you.

But with perseverance comes collected bling and ship upgrades. Then you’re the one dishing out lessons in lasery death!

(At least until you meet the next boss.)

Depending on your way of looking at things, Narcissus is either a weird platform game for one or an amusing 50-level leapy game for two.

The basics are essentially based on the game Canabalt – Narcissus leaps from platform to platform, lest he fall down a gap and go splat. But if you recall your Greek mythology, Narcissus had a reflection; in this game, the reflection is visible on the screen.

The snag is the world in which the two characters jump isn’t a mirror image. For the single player, this makes for a tough challenge, keeping track of two tiny leapers, who often need to jump at different times. With a friend, it’s easier, so long as you don’t hurl your iPhone at a mirror should one of you badly mis-time a jump.

If you’ve played Super Dangerous Dungeons, you’ll be well aware developer Jussi Simpanen knows how to make a cracking platform game. Even so, Heart Star is a disarmingly charming treat.

You aim to guide two friends to a goal in each of the 60 tiny single-screen levels. The chums are typically surrounded by platforms, spikes, and switches – and that’s before you consider the perilous drops into a bottomless void. Also, there’s usually no obvious way for both to reach the goal.

It’s a head-scratcher until you start utilizing Heart Star’s world-swapping. Prod a button to switch character, whereupon the other friend’s platforms vanish. With a combination of brainpower, deft finger-work, and having the friends collaborate – often by one hopping on the other’s head – a solution should present itself, allowing you to continue on your journey.

It’s another vertically-scrolling endless survival game, where you’re pursued by a world-eating evil, but Remedy Rush is novel in subject matter and the way in which it plays.

The basics are familiar: you direct the protagonist by swiping about, aiming to keep ahead of your inevitable demise for as long as possible. But in Remedy Rush, you play as an experimental remedy (such as a cookie or sunglasses) exploring a grid-like infected body.

As you scoot about, toxins are destroyed to open up pathways, and health bursts can be collected to take out any cells and germs that are in your way. Over time, the host gets sicker and the fever more ferocious; when the end comes, you can try again with a new remedy, each one having its own game-altering side-effect.

King Rabbit has some unorthodox enemies. Having kidnapped his rabbit subjects, said foes have dotted them about grid-based worlds they’ve filled with meticulously designed traps.

Mostly, this one is a think-ahead puzzler, with loads of Sokoban-style box sliding. But instead of being purely turn-based fare, King Rabbit adds tense swipe-based arcade sections, with you running from scary creatures armed with rabbit-filleting weaponry.

Really, this isn’t anything you won’t have seen before, but King Rabbit rules through its execution. Visually, everything’s very smart, from the clear, colorful backgrounds to the wonderfully animated hero (and the little jig he does on rescuing a chum). But the puzzles are the real heroes, offering a perfect balance of immediacy and brain-scratching.

This one’s not freaky, nor is it even a racing game - so, sorry for luring you in with that. Instead, Freaky Racing is an endless runner of sorts. With visuals that appear to have lumbered in from 1981, the game has you steer a blocky black car along a vertically scrolling track. The problem is, you haven’t got any brakes – and things speed up really quickly.

Before long, you’re weaving through chicanes, avoiding your doddering racing chums, and trying to avoid going near the road edges, which are apparently made from some kind of material that makes cars instantly explode. Chances are, you won’t last long in Freaky Racing’s strange little world, but it’s a weirdly compelling title that’ll keep you coming back for more.

There’s a bit of cheating going on in Moveless Chess. Although your opponent plays a standard game, you’re some kind of wizard and apparently don’t want the hassle of moving pieces.

Instead, you’ve limited action points, which are used to transform pieces you already have on the board. (So, for example, with three points, you can cunningly change a pawn into a knight.) The aim remains a game-winning checkmate, and, presumably, avoiding the ire of your non-magic opponent.

It’s chess as a puzzler, then, and with a twist that’ll even make veterans of the game stop and think about how to proceed at any given moment.

After all, when you get deep into the game’s challenges, you might find wizarding powers don’t always make for a swift win when you can’t move your pieces.

We’re sort of in Crossy Road territory here, but instead of a chicken hopping along an endless landscape of roads and rivers, Redungeon finds a little knight dumped in a seemingly infinite dungeon full of traps.

Credit to whoever wanted to make the knight suffer, because said traps include endless inventive ways to kill someone, from squelching blobs of goo to massive metal panels that slam together, squashing flat anyone daft enough to get in their way.

As ever, you’re being chased by some kind of unrelenting evil (here depicted by loads of spooky red eyes) and so can’t hang about.

As such, you’ll mostly fail by swiping the wrong way when in a panic, thereby impaling your knight. Still, grab enough bling on your journey and you can upgrade your character (and unlock new ones), giving them a fighting chance – well, at least an extra 30 seconds.

In Icarus – A Star’s Journey, you help a fallen star get back to the heavens. To make each little leap upwards, you drag back and release to catapult the star, like a celestial Angry Bird. Over time, energy is used, your star eventually exploding; to avoid that, you temporarily lurk inside other stars for a quick top up.

Much of the challenge involves successfully navigating hazards – usually spinning shapes you awkwardly ricochet off of – before you burn through your health.

Grab enough orbs along the way and you can lengthen subsequent attempts through leveling up and gaining extra health. If only you could burn through the ads, too, since they obliterate the tranquil vibe – but, inexplicably, there’s no IAP for that.

Given Laser Dog’s tendency to make infuriatingly difficult games, Don’t Grind at first seems like a departure. You control a little cartoon banana, keeping it in the air – and away from massive saw blades – by tapping the screen and swiping to move a bit. It’s like a pleasant keepie-uppie effort – for a few seconds.

After that point, all hell breaks loose, with your worried-looking fruit having to escape a squishy, painful death by avoiding laser guns, rockets, and all manner of other hazards intent on shoving it towards the blades.

Collect enough stars while tapping the screen and you can unlock new victims. If you’re terrible, there are no shortcuts to bolster your collection either – the only IAP is to get rid of the ads. Brutal.

With eye-searing colors and jagged pixels, Tomb of the Mask looks like it’s escaped from a ZX Spectrum, but this fast-paced twitch maze game is very much a modern mobile effort. In a sense, it feels a bit like a speeded-up and flattened Pac-Man 256, with you zooming through a maze, eating dots, and outrunning an all-devouring evil.

But the controls here are key – a flick hurls you in that direction until something makes you stop. Hopefully, that’s a wall. If it’s a spike or an enemy, you’re dead.

The procedurally generated Arcade mode increasingly ramps up the intensity as you strive to reach the end of each tomb, while a stage-based mode pits your flicking finger against 60 deviously designed set challenges.

If you’re a fan of knocking metal balls about, you’re likely frustrated with iPhone pinball. Even an iPhone Plus’s display is a bit too small, resulting in a fiddly experience replete with eye strain. Enter PinOut!, which rethinks pinball in a manner that works perfectly on the smaller screen.

In PinOut’s neon-infused world, you play against the clock, hitting ramps to send your ball further along what’s apparently the world’s longest pinball table. Rather than losing a ball should it end up behind the flippers, you merely waste vital seconds getting back to where you were. When the clock runs out: game over.

The result is exciting and fresh, and the relatively simple mini-tables are ideal for iPhone. Moreover, the game’s immediacy makes it suitable for all gamers, overcoming pinball’s somewhat inaccessible nature.

One of those games happy to repeatedly punch you in the face, Nekosan is a brutal single-screen platformer. The premise is that the mice have stolen all the stars, and hidden them in a dungeon. It’s up to the heroic Nekosan to retrieve them.

The snag is that, unlike most platform games, Nekosan only affords you control by way of tapping anywhere on the screen. Depending on where the kittie’s positioned, said tappage might fling him into the air, have him leap from a wall, or help him bound on a mid-air switch.

You must therefore figure out how to traverse each puzzle-like level, using perfect timing to ensure the jumping feline isn’t killed. And while you do, suitably, get nine lives, you’ll find they disappear extremely rapidly.

At a glance, Super Cat Tales looks like it’s arrived from a 1980s console. Bright colors, chunky pixels, and leapy gameplay put you in mind of a Mario or Alex Kidd adventure.

But although Super Cat Tales twangs the odd nostalgia gland, the controls make it a thoroughly modern affair. Character movement happens by tapping the left or right screen edge - hold to move or double-tap to dash. While dashing, your moggie will leap from a platform’s edge; and if sliding down a wall, a tap in the opposite direction performs a wall jump.

At first, this feels confusing, as muscle memory fights these unique controls. Before long, though, this smart design dovetails with succinct levels packed with secrets, collectible cats with distinct abilities, and gorgeous aesthetics, to make for one of the best games of its type on mobile.

The Mikey series has evolved with every entry. Initially a speedrun-oriented stripped-back Mario, it then gained swinging by way of grappling hooks, before ditching traditional controls entirely, strapping jet boots to Mikey in a kind of Flappy Bird with class.

With Mikey Jumps, the series has its biggest shift yet. Scrolling levels are dispensed with, in favor of quick-fire single-screen efforts. Now, Mikey auto-runs, and you tap the screen to time jumps so he doesn’t end up impaled on a spike or plummet to his death.

It sounds reductive, but the result is superb. Devoid of cruft and intensely focused, Mikey Jumps is perfect for mobile play, makes nods to previous entries in the series (with hooks and boots peppered about) and has excellent level design that sits just on the right side of infuriatingly tough.

Minimal arcade game Higher Higher! is another of those titles that on paper seems ridiculously simple, but in reality could result in your thumb and brain having a nasty falling out.

A little square scoots back and forth across the screen, changing color whenever it hits the edge and reverses direction. Your aim is to tap a matching colored column when the square passes over it.

The snag is that the square then changes color again; furthermore, the columns all change color when the square hits a screen edge.

To add to your troubles, Higher Higher! regularly speeds up, too, thereby transforming into a high-octane dexterity and reactions test. Combos are the key to the highest scores and, as ever, one mistake spells game over.

Satellina Zero is a somewhat abstract game that borrows from endless runners and rhythm action titles. You play as a white hexagon, sliding left to right to scoop up green hexagons streaming in from the top. You can also tap, which jumps you to the relative horizontal location while simultaneously switching deadly red hexagons to green (and greens to red). It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.

Survival is reliant on observation and quick thinking, where you must constantly ensure whatever hexagons are coming up are the right color, jump across at the perfect moment, and slide to scoop them all up. Last long enough and you unlock new modes and music.

It would have been interesting to see choreographed levels with percentage scores, rather than games comprising semi-randomized waves that always end on a single missed hexagon; nevertheless, Satellina Zero is a fresh, compelling arcade experience.

Blokout is a furious, high-speed color-matching game that punishes you for the slightest hesitation. The initial mode plonks you in front of a three-by-three grid, and you have to swap colored squares, Bejewelled-style, to make complete lines, which then vanish.

The timer is the key to the game. A clock sits in the upper-left of the screen and rapidly counts down, giving you only a few moments to complete a line. If the timer runs dry it's game over; make a line and it resets, giving you another few seconds.

The intensity is therefore always set to maximum, nicely contrasting with the game's friendly, bold colors (which amusingly turn stark black and white the instant you lose); and if you stick around, you'll find further challenges by way of boosters and tougher modes.

There are few arcade games as refined and perfectly considered as Forget-Me-Not – and we're talking across all platforms, not just iPhone.

The game places you in procedurally generated dungeons, tasking you with eating all the flowers, grabbing a key and making for the exit. All the while, you auto-shoot ahead, blasting away at each dungeon's denizens.

What sets the game apart from its contemporaries is its energy, vitality and variety. Multiple modes shake up strategies, and the many different foes that beam in have distinct personalities to keep the gameplay varied.

Some relentlessly home in on you, whereas others are content blowing anything around them to pieces – including the maze. Suitable for one-thumb play in portrait or landscape, Forget-Me-Not is an arcade classic.

Aptly named, given that it has loads of platforms and aims to make you panic, Platform Panic is a high-speed single-screen platform game. Whenever you enter a new screen, you’ve a split second to work out what’s going on before you forge ahead, trying to beat its various traps. As is so often the way on mobile gaming titles, a single slip up spells death.

There’s auto-runner DNA in Platform Panic, since your little character never stops running – although you can change their direction with a swipe and, crucially, leap into the air. Over many games, you’ll figure out how to beat each screen, and then it’s just a question of chaining together a number of successful attempts.

This is easier said than done, mind. Scores of over a dozen are something to be proud of in Platform Panic’s world. Still, games are short enough that when your little cartoon avatar is rudely impaled, there’s always time for another go.

One of the most absurdly generous deals we’ve ever seen on the iPhone, Cally’s Caves 3 is a monstrous platform adventure that’s given away entirely for free. Many dozens of levels across eight zones find the titular Cally searching for her parents, who’ve managed to get kidnapped by an evil genius – for the third time.

Unsurprisingly, Cally’s not overly chuffed with this turn of events, and she also happens to be worryingly heavily armed for a young pigtailed girl. She leaps about, blasting enemies, finding bling, and making for an exit, in tried-and-tested platforming fashion.

This is a tough game. Although you can have endless cracks at any given level, Cally’s Caves 3 is based around checkpoints, forcing you to not just blunder ahead. But smart level design and a brilliant weapon upgrade model keep the frustration to a minimum and ensure this is one of the best games of its type on the iPhone.

Apparently turned off by chess’s commitment to beauty, elegance and balance, the developer of Really Bad Chess set out to break it. You therefore start your first game with a seriously souped-up set of pieces: several queens, and loads of knights. Your hapless computer opponent can only look on while lumbered with a suspicious number of pawns.

One easy win later and you’re full of confidence, but Really Bad Chess keeps switching things up. Rather than the AI getting better or worse, the game changes the balance of your set-up. As you improve, your pieces get worse and the computer’s get better, until you’re the one fending off an overpowered opponent.

It’s a small twist on the chess formula, to be sure, but one that opens up many new ways of playing, whether you’re a grandmaster or a relative novice.

In Maximum Car, you careen along winding roads, smashing your chunky car into other similarly Lego-like vehicles. When possible, you lob missiles about with merry abandon, boost, drift, and generally barrel along like a lunatic. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Burnout or a gleefully violent OutRun.

Your terrorising of other road users (through near misses and blithely driving on the wrong side of the road), rewards you with coins to spend on powering up your ride. Do so and Maximum Car speeds up significantly, veering into absurd and barely controllable territory.

Takedowns (as in, smashing other cars off of the road) are also positively encouraged; destroy the same car over enough races and it’ll be unlocked for purchase.

Along with a tongue-in-cheek commentary track, this is all very silly entertainment – great for quick bursts of adrenaline-fuelled racing, and absolutely not the sort of thing to play before a driving test.

This third entry in the Dots series, Dots & Co, will be familiar to anyone who's played the previous efforts. The aim is to collect a pre-set number of colored dots on each level, which is achieved by dragging out paths through dots of the same color. Manage to draw a square and all dots of the relevant color vanish.

Complications come by way of odd-shaped levels that often leave you with small groups of dots stranded within awkward shapes, and obstacles that need clearing. Cartoon 'companions' help a bit here, blasting away at the board once you've powered them up, and there are also a few special powers to make use of.

It's here the charms of Dots & Co fade slightly – as the game progresses, you can't help but feel you're being given impossible tasks, and that an awful lot of luck is required to beat levels without resorting to buying tokens to spend on powers or extra moves. Despite this, Dots & Co remains a pleasant and engaging time sink.

They don't come much simpler than Kubix, which sums up the aim of the game in what follows the hyphen in its full App Store name: 'Catch the white squares and avoid the black ones'. There is, fortunately, a bit more to it than that. As you're tilting your device to sneak past black squares and scoop up white ones the latter add to an ever-depleting energy reserve.

You'll also regularly see squares with a question mark barging their way into the arena. Catch one when it's white and you'll get a nice surprise, such as all of the squares temporarily turning white. Grab one when it's black and you'll be in for a nasty time, trying to survive in a sea of black squares, or avoid such pixels of evil while piloting a suddenly awkwardly unwieldy white circle.

Two games in one, Big Bang Racing offers a breezy single-player trials experience on trap-filled larger-than-life tracks, and then multiplayer races across similarly crazy courses. The visuals are very smart, with your odd little alien rider imbued with plenty of personality; the controls work well, too, with two pairs of buttons for moving and rotating your bike.

The game's infested with the usual trappings of modern freemium titles – chests; timers; in-game gold; in-app purchases – but, surprisingly, this doesn't make much difference nor really impact negatively on the experience. With a little patience, you can play a few races every day, gradually improving your bike, winning races, and mastering courses.

Collect enough bits and bobs from chests and you can even have a go at creating and sharing your own tracks, using an excellent built-in editor.

Poker and Solitaire have been smashed together before, in the excellent Sage Solitaire, but Politaire tries something new with the combination.

At all points, you can see the next three cards from the draw pile. You then swipe away unwanted cards from your hand with the aim of those remaining and any newcomers forming a poker hand, which then vanishes, automatically bringing in more new cards.

When possible, you want to score 'combos', through multiple hands subsequently occurring with you doing nothing at all. Naturally, this requires a little luck, but there's also plenty of skill here, in terms of managing your cards and figuring out what's coming in the pile.

It sounds confusing, but give it time and it'll dig into your very soul.

For free, you generously get the entire main single-deck game, which rapidly becomes furiously addictive. Splash out for the one-off IAP ($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99) and you unlock double-deck mode and alternate card designs, along with getting rid of occasional ads.

illi is a quaint one-button puzzle platformer that simply requires you to tap the screen to jump from ledge to ledge and collect all the crystals in a stage.

Its beautiful visuals will draw you into its simplistic yet engaging gameplay, while its puzzles will challenge you with bonus requirements and unique tricks. And there's the 60 levels too that are sure to mesmerize and impress as you dodge through this cheeky little title.

Loop Mania is an addictive arcade game that is sure to challenge your reflexes and timing skills. In order to increase your score you need to collect as many dots as possible as your circle races around a circular loop, while avoiding bigger balls on its path.

The trick is to tap the screen to launch your ball onto the others to destroy them for extra points. Just don't tap at the wrong time or your race is over.

Choose your own path and explore the gothic avenues of the Victorian city of Fallen London. Define your destiny and craft your character's fate with each choice you make and quest you complete.

This literary RPG boasts excellent writing that is sure to pull you into its dark yet comedic world as you befriend the locals and choose the path you think you want to go on.

Spellspire rewards you for having a large vocabulary as each dungeon you plunder requires you to come up with as many words as possible to defeat its enemies and reach that elusive treasure at the end.

The money you get from all that looting can then be used to upgrade your spells and weapons to make each word you spell deal even more damage. How many levels can you clear?

As its name implies, Looty Dungeon tests your survival skills as you loot your way through endless dungeons teeming with traps, bosses, and falling floors.

Pick up coins to purchase additional heroes, each with different powers and stats, keeping the game fresh. Hidden dangers can easily put an end to your looting, so tread carefully and carry a big sword - which is just good advice for life really, isn't it?

Well, maybe not a sword. Perhaps a sense of self-confidence... life can sometimes be about metaphors too.

PKTBALL takes ping pong and turns into an endless arcade addiction. Outsmart your opponents to get the best score you can, get money, and unlock lots of colorful playable characters, each with their own court and soundtrack.

Once you've mastered the basics you can challenge your friends in local multiplayer matches or simply smash your way to the top of the leaderboards. This is the kind of game that you'll start playing while making dinner and only look up from when the fire brigade are breaking down your door.

A kingdom of Disney characters can be unlocked in this alternative look at the popular road-crossing game - intelligently titled Disney Crossy Road.

It's a 'magical take' on a game that has been downloaded over 50 million times, and designed to attract a new raft of players.

Cross as many roads as you can and collect coins to purchase even more stars spanning various Disney films, each with their own music and world for all you film fans out there.

And as you can imagine (if you've played the 'normal' Crossy Road before), you'll see how far you can survive with your favorites from Toy Story, Lion King, Zootopia, and many more.

Sparkwave is a simple yet addictive game where you guide a spark of light through an endless path composed of traps, collectibles, and power-ups. You'll need to have fast fingers if you want to stay alive as obstacles will spawn seconds before you rush into them. You can also pick up crystals to unlock new sparks and power-ups which can completely change the way you play.

The classic run-and-gun franchise takes on the tower defense genre in Metal Slug Attack. Missions in this colorful title ultimately come down to destroying your enemy's stronghold using your own deck of troops. You can also play online with others, and go on missions to rescue prisoners, weapons, or items that can aid your campaign.

Tennis Champs Returns is a robust remake to the 1995 Amiga tennis game and brings with it plenty of great additions and mobile-friendly controls. You can move up the ranks in career mode and challenge the computer to increasingly difficult matches. Or, compete with opponents all over the world in quick bouts. Daily challenges and mini games help to keep the interest levels going.

Bring some color into a drab world in Splash Cars, a racing game that lets you drive around literally painting the town red, green, and other colors while avoiding the cops. Pick up gas to keep driving and collect coins to unlock power-ups that make completing each level's paint requirements a whole lot easier.

A beautifully pixelated adventure, Sky Chasers requires you to use your fingers to guide your character along side-scrolling paths collecting coins and completing side-quests for his friends. Your cardboard ship has a limited fuel supply, so you'll occasionally have to stop by checkpoints to refuel and avoid any pesky enemies that add an element of danger to your otherwise peaceful trip. Solve simple puzzles and upgrade your ship as you enjoy its rich colorful worlds.

Rust Bucket turns the concept of a turn-based game into a puzzle-like roguelike that is a blast to play. Each level requires you to navigate your way through a dungeon to reach its goal, but with every step you take, your enemies also move in different patterns. Strategy is key to surviving since you don't want to step in front of an enemy knowing it may kill you in your next turn.

Planet Quest is a rhythm-based arcade game that has you play as an alien who abducts animals to the beat of some catchy music. Time your taps well for perfect abductions, but avoid zapping any flowers since aliens apparently don't like them very much. Over an hour of electronic, techno, and diverse music await your ears as you aim for a better score each time you play.

Searching for his lost grandpa, a little boy gets lost underneath a lighthouse and now must escape from a labyrinth filled with traps and secrets. Each inventive dungeon must be rotated in order to guide the boy to the tunnel leading to the next one. You'll need to prepare yourself for spikes, levers, crumbling platforms, and other challenges that amp up the difficulty as you try to survive Beneath the Lighthouse.

Does Not Commute is a curious puzzler that requires you to drive cars to their destination, but the catch is that previously-solved routes play live as you figure out the next one. A timer is constantly ticking down, so not only will you need to be mindful of the traffic, but you'll also need to be fast and pick up power-ups to extend your commute. Your driving and logic skills are sure to be tested.

Choose from one of five races and classes and take on an expansive world in Order & Chaos 2: Redemption, a robust MMORPG that is made for mobile play. Whether you team up with friends or go it alone, Redemption's plethora of rewarding quests will keep you coming back for more as you explore the beautiful and menacing kingdom of Haradon. Daily quests, challenges, and PvP duels are sure to keep you on your toes no matter how you play.

Collect teddy bears and use them to aid you in making words in the adorable Alphabear. Daily boards and challenges require you to come up with words with the letters that appear on your screen. Each time you do, bears will populate the board and get bigger the more letters you use around them. Make the biggest bear you can and rack in the points and the bragging rights.

Homage to 16-bit platformers of the past, Super Dangerous Dungeons is sure to bring you back in time with its pixelated visuals and SNES-inspired soundtrack. Forty-eight colorful levels that feature classic traps are sure to keep you challenged as you solve puzzles, turn on switches, and find that elusive key to open the door to the next one. Avoid those bottomless pits and dangerous water and you'll be fine.

You know that popular Fallout 4 game we've all been getting excited about? Why not get in the post apocalyptic mood with this Bethesda made spin-off game? Fallout Shelter sees you take control of a Vault from the game series as you try to keep all its dwellers happy whilst protecting them from the horrors of the outside world. It's a funny little way to get excited about the upcoming game whilst also being great in its own right.

You have to give Stranded: Mars One a little time to properly get its hooks into you. At first, it appears to be yet another auto-runner. The blocky retro graphics are cute, but, well, we've seen it all before. But then you notice the smart level design, and the way in which you have to keep your little astronaut's speed up, lest they run out of oxygen. Sliding, jet-packs and wall-jumping are lobbed into the mix as the game flings increasingly complex caverns in your direction. The result ends up akin to an 8-bit Rayman in space — and that's before you've even delved into async multiplayer races!

You can't help but get a sense of having seen it all before when first playing Fallen. Pretty soon, though, you'll be hypnotised by its subtly engaging mix of pachinko and colour-matching, along with a pleasing soundtrack that feels like someone's sneaked Kraftwerk into your iPhone. The game itself is simple: balls drop from the top of the screen and you must rotate your coloured wheel so they hit the right bit. Three errors and you're done. Spin all the way round between hits and you get coins that can be spent on boosting upgrades that occasionally fall from the top of the screen.

This sweet survival game is full of character, as you assist a Victorian gent, out for his evening constitutional. The problem is it's a bit windy, and the gent's hat is in danger of blowing away during a gust - press the screen and he holds it in place. Each step increases your score and also the chances of seeing thoughtful comments from the hatted chap.

Sky Force 2014 celebrates the mobile series's 10th anniversary in style, with this stunning top-down arcade blaster. Your little red ship, as ever, is tasked with weaving its way through hostile enemy territory, annihilating everything in sight. The visuals are spectacular, the level design is smart, and the bosses are huge, spewing bullet-hell in your general direction.

At some point, a total buffoon decreed that racing games should be dull and grey, on grey tracks, with grey controls. Gameloft's Asphalt 8: Airborne dispenses with such foolish notions, along with quite a bit of reality. Here, then, you zoom along at ludicrous speeds, drifting for miles through exciting city courses, occasionally being hurled into the air to perform stunts that absolutely aren't acceptable according to the car manufacturer's warrantee.

Three bushes make a tree! Three gravestones make a church! OK, so logic might not be Triple Town's strong suit, but the match-three gameplay is addictive. Match to build things and trap bears, rapidly run out of space, gaze in wonder at your town and start all over again. The free-to-play version has limited moves that are gradually replenished, but you can unlock unlimited moves via IAP.

Few free games are quite as polished as Hearthstone, but then this is a Blizzard game, so we hardly expected anything less.

There are dozens of card games available for iPhone, but Hearthstone stands out with high production values and easy to learn, difficult to master mechanics, which can keep you playing, improving and collecting cards for months on end. Matches don't generally take too long either so it's great for playing in short bursts.

Think you know stress? You haven't experienced stress until you've played Spaceteam, a cooperative multiplayer game that requires you to all work together as a crew (and bark orders at your friends). Sounds easier than it is; failure to cooperate will probably end with your ship getting sucked into a black hole.

In this game, golf met solitaire and they decided to elope while leaving Mr. Puzzle Game to fill the void. What's left is an entertaining bout of higher-or-lower, draped over a loose framework of golf scores, with a crazed gopher attempting to scupper everything. You get loads of courses for free with Fairway Solitaire Blast and can use IAP to buy more.

The clue's in the title - there's a quest, and it involves quite a lot of punching. There's hidden depth, though - the game might look like a screen-masher, but Punch Quest is all about mastering combos, perfecting your timing, and making good use of special abilities. The in-game currency's also very generous, so if you like the game reward the dev by grabbing some IAP.

Tap! Tap! Swipe! Rub! Argh! That's the way this intoxicating rhythm action game plays out. Groove Coaster Zero is all on rails, and chock full of dizzying roller-coaster-style paths and exciting tunes. All the while, you aim for prodding perfection, chaining hits and other movements as symbols appear on the screen. Simple, stylish and brilliant.

This latest rethink of one of gaming's oldest and most-loved series asks what lies beyond the infamous level 256 glitch. As it turns out, it's endless mazey hell for the yellow dot-muncher. Pac-Man's therefore charged with eating as many dots as possible, avoiding a seemingly infinite number of ghosts, while simultaneously outrunning the all-devouring glitch. Power-ups potentially extend Pac-Man's life, enabling you to gleefully take out lines of ghosts with a laser or obliterate them with a wandering tornado.

Although there's an energy system in Pac-Man 256, it's reasonably generous: one credit for a game with power-ups, and one for the single continue; one credit refreshes every ten minutes, to a maximum of six, and you can always play without power-ups for free. If you don't like that, there's an IAP-based £5.99/$7.99 permanent buy-out.

The endless rally game Cubed Rally Redline is devious. On the surface, it looks simple: move left or right in five clearly-defined lanes, and use the 'emergency time brake' to navigate tricky bits. But the brake needs time to recharge and the road soon becomes chock full of trees, cows, cruise liners and dinosaurs. And you thought your local motorway had problems!

In Smash Cops, you got to be the good guy, bringing down perps, mostly by ramming them into oblivion. Now in Smash Bandits it's your chance to be a dangerous crim, hopping between vehicles and leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. The game also amusingly includes the A-Team van and a gadget known only as the Jibba Jabba. We love it when a plan comes together!

If you're of a certain vintage, you probably spent many hours playing Solitaire on a PC, success being rewarded by cards bouncing around the screen. Sage Solitaire's developer wondered why iOS solitaire games hadn't moved on in the intervening years, and decided to reinvent the genre. Here, then, you get a three-by-three grid and remove cards by using poker hands.

Additional strategy comes through limitations (hands must include cards from two rows; card piles are uneven) and potential aid (two 'trashes', one replenished after each successful hand; a starred multiplier suit). A few rounds in, you realise this game's deeper than it first appears. Beyond that, you'll be hooked. The single £2.29/$2.99 IAP adds extra modes and kills the ads.

more info...

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus release date, news and rumors

Update: Samsung has teased the S9 series' camera in four new videos, plus there are rumors of dual speakers and Animoji-like features, and we also have a clearer idea of the likely price of the S9 Plus.

New Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus release date details have leaked and we can now confirm the official launch date: Sunday, February 25, according to Samsung.

February 25 is when the Samsung Unpacked 2018 launch event takes place in Barcelona at MWC 2018. We'll see the standard Samsung Galaxy S9 there, too.

How will the Galaxy S9 Plus be better than the normal S9? It'll have a bigger screen, more battery life and may include a new dual-lens camera, if you are to believe the newest leaks.

With a better-positioned fingerprint sensor and several new camera tricks in the pipeline, there's reason to get excited about the Galaxy S9 Plus launch. Let's go over the biggest rumors ahead of the launch event.

Cut to the chase What is it? The Galaxy S9's larger siblingWhen is it out? Sunday, February 25 at MWC 2018What will it cost? Likely upwards of $850/£780/AU$1,350 Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus release date and price

Hottest leaks:

February 25 is the confirmed launch eventThe Galaxy S9 is also set to launch on this dateCould cost around £829/$875 (roughly AU$1,100)

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus launch date is February 25, according to an official invite sent to us by the company. That means Samsung Unpacked 2018 is happening one day ahead of MWC 2018.

The invite doesn't shy away from the fact that this is where we'll see the next-generation version of Samsung's flagship phone. There's a giant '9' on the front and it touts the camera as the big feature update.

The timing isn't a big surprise if you've been following along. Samsung's president of mobile DJ Koh previously confirmed the Galaxy S9 launch for a tradeshow in February. There's no bigger stage for phones than MWC.

But what about the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus price? Expect it to be on the plus side, too. Last year's phone launched at $850/£780/AU$1,350. We’d expect the Galaxy S9 Plus will have a similar or higher price given its refinements.

We haven't heard any rumors about the S9 Plus's price, but the standard S9 is rumored to retail at £739, which could translate to an £829/$875 (roughly AU$1,100) price for the S9 Plus.

TechRadar's take: The S9 launch is set for February 25, and we expect the Galaxy S9 Plus to be there, too. It may well cost slightly more than last year's model.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus screen

Hottest leaks:

A fingerprint and water resistant coatingAn in-screen fingerprint scanner

We have no doubt that the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus will have a big, curved Super AMOLED screen. We don’t know exactly what size yet, but it’s likely to stay around the same size as the 6.2-inch Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus.

It may well stick with the same 1,440 x 2,960 resolution too, and will probably have the same 18.5:9 aspect ratio, given Samsung needs time for that new screen shape to bed into the apps market. We've also heard that exact ratio rumored.

And although we haven't seen any shots of the screen on the S9 Plus yet, we have seen renders (below) apparently showing the standard Galaxy S9, which will likely have a similar but smaller display.

This could be the design of the Galaxy S9 and we'd expect the S9 Plus will be similar. Credit: @OnLeaks

As you can see, it looks a lot like the screen on the Galaxy S8. We’ve heard of a few ways in which it might differ though. For one, there’s a chance that a fingerprint scanner will be built into the screen, which would allow Samsung to move it back to the front without increasing the size of the bezels.

This is a rumor that’s been around for a while and was originally aimed at the Galaxy S8, but it didn’t pan out, and some sources reckon we won’t see it before the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, if at all, so don’t count on this feature.

Another possible feature is a glass coating which resists fingerprints, reduces reflections and causes water to bounce off your screen. This hasn’t been specifically linked to the S9 Plus, but Samsung has licensed the tech and plans to use it on smartphones.

TechRadar's take: We doubt the Galaxy S9 Plus will have a fingerprint scanner built into the screen or that there will be many other substantial upgrades to the display.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus design

Hottest leaks:

Smaller bezels than on the S8 PlusA notch at the bottom housing the fingerprint scanner

The closest look we've had at the Galaxy S9 Plus is perhaps a render showing it alongside the standard Galaxy S9.

You can only see the front, but it looks a lot like the Galaxy S8 Plus, complete with the same button layout, but perhaps with slightly smaller bezels.

A couple of Galaxy S9 Plus leaks from Evan Blass on Twitter suggests the phone will in fact have larger bezels. That said, it could just be the lighting of these particular photos.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus could look a lot like the S8. Credit: Android Headlines/Weibo

We've also now had a look at the back, thanks to a render. It's dark, but you can make out a dual-lens camera with a fingerprint scanner below and company branding below that.

This could be the final form of the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. Credit: dbrand

And we've seen a case render, which comes direct from case-maker Olixar.

It shows a familiar design but with a dual-lens camera and with the fingerprint scanner moved below the lens, where it should be easier to reach.

The Galaxy S9 is on the left, while the dual-lens S9 Plus is on the right. Credit: Mobile Fun / Olixar

Since then more case renders have emerged, this time from Poetic, and the design of the phone is exactly the same.

A TechRadar reader also saw the image below on Samsung's own website that may detail what the Galaxy S9 Plus looks like from behind.

We don't think it's an accurate picture of the Galaxy S9 Plus considering how many concept photos are on that web page, but it may give a hint at what the phone will look like on the rear.

Elsewhere, one source has stated the bezels on the standard Galaxy S9 will be even smaller than on the S8, which would make sense, and which would likely also be true of the S9 Plus.

That would mean Samsung could either shrink the body while keeping the screen the same size or make the display bigger without increasing the size of the phone.

That aside, the design is likely to be similar to the S8 Plus, with a glass back and a metal frame, though as noted the fingerprint scanner might move. Probably not into the screen, but possibly to a more central position on the back, or, as one patent shows, built into a notch at the bottom of the screen.

It's also possible that the S9 Plus will use a new material, as Samsung has trademarked 'Metal 12' - a strong and light material that may well be used in future phones, though we suspect it won't be ready for something this small in time to be used for the S9 Plus.

The Galaxy S9 Plus could have a notch at the bottom of the screen. Credit: GalaxyClub / KIPRIS

Another possible design change – though a very unlikely one – is that the Galaxy S9 Plus could go modular, allowing you to attach hardware accessories a bit like Moto Mods. We’ve only heard this from one source though, and it doesn’t sound likely.

The phone might also come in a new color, as Samsung is apparently considering a purple option alongside the colors we've seen before such as Coral Blue.

TechRadar's take: Expect a similar design to the Galaxy S8 Plus but with some refinements. Smaller bezels are likely.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus colors: the shades we expect to see Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus camera

Hottest leaks:

A dual-lens cameraA 3D face scanner1,000fps slow motion shooting

Samsung has now teased its upcoming flagship camera in not one but four short videos.

These hint at numerous features, including slow motion modes, strong low light performance, Animoji-like features (which have been rumored before), an improved flash, live photo or GIF modes, better selfies (perhaps thanks to a wide-angle lens or a bokeh effect) and some sort of social aspect.

Elsewhere, we've heard that Samsung may be working on a camera that can shoot at 1,000fps according to some industry sources, allowing for very high quality slow motion footage - the brand announced a sensor capable of this last year, so the Galaxy S9 seems like the right time to unveil it.

We’ve also heard that the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus will have a dual-lens rear camera, which is no surprise since the Galaxy Note 8 does, but that the standard Galaxy S9 might have just a single-lens camera.

The Galaxy S9 Plus might have a similar camera to the Galaxy Note 8

A leaked photo seemingly showing the standard S9's retail box might give us other camera clues, as it seems to mention an f/1.5-2.4 variable aperture 12MP lens with optical image stabilization.

That would mean the lens can switch between f/1.5 - which lets a lot of light in, ideal for darker scenes, and f/2.4 - which would offer a deeper depth of field for sharper shots when the light is good.

Of course, even if this is accurate it may only apply to the standard S9, but for what it's worth it also mentions 'super slow-mo', which could refer to those 1,000fps speeds mentioned above.

But there could be more to 'super slow-mo' than that, as a more recent leak has detailed some advanced shooting modes.

One would allow the camera to automatically detect movement in the frame and start recording in slow motion when it does - ideal if you know something's about to happen and don't want motionless footage before it kicks off.

Another would let you record at normal speed and tap a button during the recording to temporarily switch to slow-mo, something which you could apparently do up to 20 times in a single video.

Elsewhere, there's suggestion that there might be a 3D sticker mode for the camera.

The only other camera rumor relates to the front-facing camera, which leaker @UniverseIce claims might have a ‘3D sensor’. That might mean a facial recognition system a bit like Face ID on the iPhone X.

TechRadar's take: We'd be surprised if Samsung didn't add a second lens to the rear camera, given that it has for the Note 8. Other changes are likely too and a Face ID competitor is possible. We're not convinced it will have both a dual-lens camera and a variable aperture though.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus battery

Hottest leaks:

A 3,500mAh battery

The latest battery rumor takes the form of a listing and image for the battery itself and shows it to have a 3,500mAh capacity, which would be a reasonable size, but identical to the Galaxy S8 Plus. That's in line with a previous battery leak.

If anything it’s possible that it could be slightly smaller though, especially as the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 has a smaller 3,300mAh unit despite being a bigger phone.

Whatever the size, it's likely to last longer than the battery in the S8 Plus, thanks to a newer, more efficient chipset.

TechRadar's take: A 3,500mAh battery wouldn't surprise us and it's the only real rumor so far, so it's our best guess.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus OS and power

Hottest leaks:

A Snapdragon 845 chipset in the USAn Exynos 9810 elsewhere6GB of RAM

The chip you get in the Galaxy S9 Plus is likely to depend on where in the world you are. In the US you’ll probably get the Snapdragon 845, while in the rest of the world you’ll likely get the Exynos 9810.

The Snapdragon 845 has been announced by Qualcomm so we know some of the details, including the fact that it's an octa-core chip with four cores running at 2.8GHz and four at 1.8GHz.

The fastest of those four cores apparently deliver up to 30% better performance than the fastest cores in the Snapdragon 835.

It looks like the chip might live up to those specs too, as a benchmark seemingly for the Snapdragon 845 version of the Galaxy S9 Plus shows scores roughly 30% higher than those for the Galaxy S8.

Another benchmark, this time for the standard S9 but using the Exynos 9810, also shows strong scores.

We also know about the Exynos 9810, as Samsung has announced it, revealing that it has “3rd-generation custom CPU cores, upgraded GPU, and gigabit LTE modem with industry-first 6CA support.”

Notably it supports download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps (if your network can cope), which is 20% faster than the Galaxy S8.

As for RAM, the most recent leak points to 6GB (along with a choice of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and perhaps even 512GB of storage).

However, earlier rumors pointed to just 4GB (despite the Note 8 having 6GB of the stuff). We’ve also seen a benchmark seemingly for the Galaxy S9 Plus, which again lists 4GB of RAM, although that's very little to work with, as the benchmarks often change in the lead up to launch. Indeed, a more recent benchmark lists 5GB.

The operating system meanwhile will probably be Android Oreo, since that's the latest version of Android. Of course, Samsung will skin the OS as it always does.

TechRadar's take: The Galaxy S9 Plus will almost certainly use the Snapdragon 845 and Exynos 9810 chipsets. We're less sure about the RAM amount - 4GB should be enough, but with some rivals moving higher Samsung won't want to be left behind, so it might well have 6GB of the stuff.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus other features

Hottest leaks:

Stereo speakersA pollution monitorAn improved iris scanner

Samsung is likely to give the S9 Plus an iris scanner, given that the S8 Plus has one, but it could well be improved, with one source saying it will be boosted from 2MP to 3MP, be better at recognizing eyes behind glasses or in poor lighting, and be faster.

We've also heard that the S9 Plus might use 'Intelligent Scan Biometrics', which would combine the iris scanner and facial recognition for better results.

A Samsung patent details a similar system, with an iris camera that could recognize both of your eyes as well as your part of your face for more secure scanning.

Other possible features according to rumors include AKG stereo speakers, with one on the bottom and one in the earpiece, which could mean superior sound to the S8 range, plus you might get Bluetooth AKG headphones in the box, both of which have now been rumored again, while the 3.5mm headphone jack might remain intact.

Another accessory might come in the form of a redesigned Dex that’s a pad rather than a dock. Dex allows you to connect your phone to a larger screen and have a desktop experience. Whether redesigned or not, we wouldn’t expect Dex to be thrown in though – you’ll probably have to pay extra.

We've also seen the Galaxy S9 Plus pass through the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), revealing in the process that it will support all major LTE bands and be built in Vietnam. A leaked image of the Galaxy S9 box also emerged in Vietnam, so this news further suggests that image - and the details attached - might be accurate.

One unlikely rumored feature is a sensor that monitors atmospheric conditions and warns you about environmental pollution. We doubt the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus will include this, but Samsung has published a patent for it.

We've also heard that the S9 Plus might come in a dual-SIM version, though we wouldn't count on seeing it in the US or UK.

TechRadar's take: Don't count on getting a pollution monitor, but stereo speakers and a redesigned Dex are believable.

We might also soon get the foldable Samsung Galaxy X

more info...

This VPN deal from VyprVPN is one of the best we've seen in 2018

VyprVPN has in excess of 700 servers across more than 70 locations with over 200,000 shared IPs available to its users. This VPN offers very fast performance and includes some great extras such as an auto-connect option, a kill switch and added security thanks to VyprDNS.

They own and manage their own VPN servers and VyprVPN even has its own Chameleon technology which uses unmodified OpenVPN 256-bit protocol to scramble metadata to prevent DPI, VPN blocking and throttling.

There's even a NAT Firewall to provide an extra layer of security for your VyprVPN connection and offers additional protection on your router or mobile device and thanks to VyprVPN Cloud, you can control your very own Cloud VPN server.

And to celebrate Chinese new year today (which in China will last more than a few days) VyprVPN is even giving new customers 25% off when they sign up today.

Get VyprVPN Premium for as little as £4.38 per month for the first year, a 25% discount

more info...

How to watch Winter Olympics 2018 : Live stream every sport online from anywhere

The 2018 Winter Olympic Games are underway in PyeongChang, South Korea. Now that the Opening Ceremonies are well behind us and medals are on the line, the competition is heating up, even as the temperature continues to drop. We're already almost a week into the competition.

More than 2,500 athletes from 90 nations are battling it out to take home either gold, silver or bronze. The action is turning the Winter Olympics 2018 into one of the most-watched sports broadcasts of the year. Over one billion viewers are expected to tune into this year's Winter Games, which last until February 25.

Whether you want to stream the Winter Olympics 2018 online, watch it live on your television via cable or watch it mostly without the constant interruption of commercial breaks - we've got you covered. Here's the entire schedule of the Winter Olympics 2018 and the 2018 Winter Olympics medal table.

If you're excited to experience all the drama and excitement at the Games, just be aware that there's a nine-hour time difference between PyeongChang and London, and a 17-hour difference with Los Angeles.

Here is TechRadar's quick and easy guide for how to watch the Winter Olympics 2018 (or PyeongChang 2018 as some call it) online from anywhere in the world!

Youtube and the Olympics committee have put together some compelling short videos on some of the lesser known sports (think Curling or Biathlon). You can watch them straight from Youtube on the official Olympics Youtube channel not to be confused with the Olympics channel.

Sadly some of the videos (e.g. this playlist) are not currently available in the UK which means you might need to use a VPN to access them. See how to do that below.

1. How to watch the 2018 Winter Olympics online

This is the best way to watch the Winter Olympics 2018 online - from absolutely anywhere in the world - without any commercial breaks:

Watch NBC's 2018 Winter Olympics coverage via Youtube TV

2. How to watch the Winter Olympics 2018 in the US in its entirety:

Good news! If you are in the US, that’s straight forward, NBC will broadcast the XXIII Winter Olympics on its website and through its NBC Sports app for free (Android, iOS, Windows, Roku, Chromecast, Xbox, Samsung, Amazon Fire TV).

While you can watch Olympics coverage online through NBC, the network is only offering users full live stream and replay access for 30 minutes. Once this time expires, users will have to enter their cable provider information to keep watching.

3. How to watch the Winter Olympics 2018 in the UK in its entirety:

If you’re in the UK and if you have a TV licence, then BBC iPlayer is where you should go for Winter Olympics 2018 as the official broadcaster for the games; you may be asked to register for free in order to watch it though but it is a doddle and once you do it, you can enjoy it almost anywhere.: on your mobile, your media player, tablet, your web browser, streaming device, gaming console, TV, cable and satellite operators etc.

Just note that the BBC will not cover ALL the events - just a selection of them - and while you can record locally on your PVR, you won't be able to record to the cloud.

However, if you want to get the full Olympian experience, you will need to get a specialist channel like Eurosport, which is the global official broadcaster for the Olympics. You will be able to get all the live action on Eurosport for as little as £3 with 7-day catchup and the ability to record live programs to the cloud to watch whenever you want.

You will need to use the code OLYMPICS50 when signing up and you can cancel after the first month. Otherwise you will be auto-enrolled on a subscription.

During the Winter Olympics, watch all the live action on Eurosport and access 30+ other premium channels for £3 for a month. Get every event live, 7-day catch-up, record live programs to the cloud to watch when you want.

Watch all the events live and catch-up or record events to the cloud for future viewing, only available on Eurosport and TVPlayer for £3 How to watch the Winter Olympics 2018 in VR

The Winter Olympics 2018 are being shown in virtual reality (VR), the first-time ever for the Winter Games. A mix of live and video-on-demand content is available – all you need is a VR headset and an app to tune into the action.

Intel, the Olympic Games' official VR Experience Partner, has partnered with the Olympic Broadcast Services to capture 30 events and more than 50 hours of live coverage of the Olympics.

Users in the US can watch the spectacle through the dedicated NBC Sports VR app, available for iOS, Android and in the Oculus and Microsoft stores.

Users in Europe (except Germany and Italy) can use the Winter Olympics Eurosport VR app, available for iOS and Android.

Outside of these broadcasters, users will find Olympics VR content available through CBC (Canada), Radio Canada (Canada), NHK (Japan), ZDF (Germany), SBS (Korea), CCTV (China), AMX (Latin America) and OCS (global).

As for the headset you'll need, one the following is required to watch the Olympics in VR:

Samsung Gear VRGoogle DaydreamGoogle Cardboard (iOS and Android)Compatible Windows Mixed Reality headsets

NBC has created a schedule of the content it will have available in VR, which you can view at NBCOlympics.com. Events shown in VR include alpine skiing, curling, snowboarding, figure skating and ski jumping.

Stay safe during the Winter Olympics 2018

Photos courtesy of Organising Committee for PyeongChang 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games

more info...

Best iPad apps 2018: download these now

It's the apps that really set iOS apart from other platforms - there are higher quality apps available on the App Store for the iPad than any other tablet. So which ones are worth your cash? And which are the best free apps?

Luckily for you we've tested thousands of the best iPad apps so that you don't have to. So read on for our selection of the best iPad apps - the definitive list of what applications you need to download for your iPad now.

Haven't bought an iPad yet and not sure which is best? We've got them listed on our best iPad ranking - or you can check out the best tablets list to see the full range available now.

If you are looking for games, then head over to Best iPad games - where we showcase the greatest games around for your iOS device. Or if you're using an iPhone X or iPhone 8 head over to our best iPhone apps list. And if you're a professional, you may want to head straight to our top business apps.

New: Bandimal ($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)

Bandimal is a music toy for the rest of us. Actually, its App Store description states it’s a music composer for kids, but ignore that because Bandimal is great fun for everyone.

It offers three slots into which you swipe an animal. A quick tap opens a dotted grid, on to which you assign notes by prodding the dots. These trigger loops when the playhead moves over them, and there are no wrong choices.

There’s a drum track too, along with some basic effects and a speed dial. And as you’re composing, your little menagerie will bop to the beat, with animation that’s so much fun it’s sure to make any cartoonists in the vicinity a touch envious.

You might avoid Bandimal because you’re not a musician. Don’t. This app’s only to be avoided if you hate fun.

Can't figure out which iPad to buy? Watch our guide video below!

Concepts is an advanced vector-based sketching and design app. Every stroke remains editable, and similar flexibility is evident elsewhere, with varied grids (dot; lined; isometric), definable gestures, and an adjustable interface.

With version 5, Concepts’ design revamp transformed the main toolbar into a space-efficient tool wheel, from which Copic swatches pleasingly explode when you switch colors. As such, the app’s a touch alien at first, and can be fiddly if you don’t have a Pencil.

But Concepts soon becomes natural and fluid in use, and it’s apparent the app’s been designed for touch, rather than a developer hammering desktop concepts into your iPad.

If you’re not a professional architect, illustrator or the like it might be overkill, but if you’re unsure, you can get a feel for the app for free. IAPs subsequently allow you to unlock shape guides, SVG and PDF export, infinite layers, and object packs.

Artomaton - The Motion Painter is an ‘artificial intelligence artist’ – recreating photos as sketches and paintings. For free, you get a small selection of media, but pay a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 IAP and you unlock the full range, including the arresting ‘Pointil’ (as in ‘lism’), scribbly crayons, and a lovely sketch/watercolor combo.

Unlike most competing apps, this one has many settings for adjusting properties, such as vignettes, stroke width, hatching angle, and color saturation.

It even works with video, and although it takes some time for Artomaton to draw all of the individual frames (just a 20-second clip will need close to 200), output with ‘Sketch&Water’ has a gorgeous scratchy hand-drawn quality.

For free, then, this is a great download; but grab that paid IAP for something really special.

Yoink is a superb iPad shelf app, providing a place to temporarily store and collate files and content. It supports pretty much anything you can drag and drop on iPad – images; text; URLs; documents – and works in Split View and Slide Over (the latter feeling like Yoink’s most natural set-up). Handily, you can directly import items, too, or send content to Yoink via share sheets.

Yoink excels in the details. When items are dragged off of Yoink, they’re copied or removed, depending on the status of a padlock icon. Groups of items can be collated into stacks, and moved as one.

And because Yoink exists as a Location in the Files app, you can explore and interact with anything you’ve saved to the app without opening Yoink itself.

MindNode 5 is a mind-mapping app. That might sound dull, given that such tools are associated with boring business meetings that involve massive whiteboards... and the hope the ground will swallow you up.

But MindNode 5 is different. It’s sleek and fun to use as you smash out ideas. You can start with a Quick Entry list, which the app then turns into a mind map; or you can manually create and position nodes. For more context, it’s possible to add photos, stickers, and notes to your maps. And for when you do have to get properly businesslike, there’s a vertical layout for organizational charts.

Whatever you’re working on, MindNode 5 is far better than paper equivalents – it’s flexible, sharable, and always comprehensible.

Human Anatomy Atlas 2018 represents a leap forward for iPad education apps and digital textbooks alike. In short, it turns your iPad into an anatomy lab – and augmented reality extends this to nearby flat surfaces.

You can explore your virtual cadaver by region or system. Additionally, you can examine cross-sections, micro-anatomy (eyes; bone layers; touch receptors, and so on), and muscle actions. If you want to learn what makes you tick, it’s fascinating to spin a virtual body beneath your finger, and ‘dissect’ it by removing sections.

But the AR element is a real prize, giving you a captivating, slightly unnerving virtual body to explore. Ideal fodder for medical students, then, but great even for the simply curious. And although it’s pricey for the latter audience, the app’s often on sale, most recently dropping as low as $0.99/£0.99/AU$1.49. Snap it up if you see it cheap.

Zipped largely fixes a major shortcoming of the iOS Files app for iPad – its inability to deal with ZIP archives. The default Files app merely lets you peek inside a ZIP and extract items one at a time, but Zipped is far more capable.

If you need to unpack an archive, that can be done with a couple of taps. The files within are then saved to a user-defined location – either as they are, or within a named folder.

Creating archives is simple, too, and works via drag and drop in Split View or – an often better option – Slide Over. The one snag is Zipped only recognizes specific file formats, although the most common are covered.

Still, the low price makes it worth grabbing even if you only use it to quickly get at files within ZIPs, rather than laboriously extracting them one by one.

Clip Studio Paint Ex for manga brings the popular PC desktop app for digital artists to the iPad. And we mean that almost literally – Clip Studio looks pretty much identical to the desktop release.

In one sense, this isn’t great news – menus, for example, are fiddly to access, but it does mean you get a feature-rich, powerful app. There are loads of brushes and tools, vector capabilities, effect lines and tones for comic art, and onion skinning for animations. It also takes full advantage of Pencil, so pro artists can be freed from the desktop, and work wherever they like.

The app could do with better export and desktop workflow integration, and even some fans might be irked by the subscription model. But Clip Studio’s features and quality mean most will muddle through the former issues and pay for the latter.

Zen Studio is a unique, beautifully conceived painting and coloring app. Instead of giving you a blank canvas for free-form scribbling, Zen Studio opts for a triangular grid. Tap spaces and they fill with your selected color as a note plays. This combination of coloring and ad-hoc melody proves very relaxing – for children and adults alike.

In its free version, this is an entertaining app, but it’s worth grabbing the main $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99 IAP. This lets you save unlimited drawings (rather than just eight), and unlocks white paint, which acts as an eraser on compositions with white backgrounds.

It also provides access to a slew of tutorials. These have you build up a picture by coloring inside stencils, which even a two-year-old should be able to cope with – and then subsequently scrawl over when the stencils disappear.

Percolator is a photo filter app for ‘brewing’ circular mosaics using a custom recipe. The coffee theme is fanciful, but it is admittedly lovely to see your photo explode into a bunch of bubbles that disappear and then reform when major changes are made to the ‘grind’ (circle size and effect) settings.

Mostly, though, we were impressed by Percolator because its effects range from the bizarre to the beautiful. Some have a kind of classical feel, a few look like high-end art posters, and with careful tweaking of ‘brew’ (pattern and blend) and ‘serve’ (effect and texture) settings, you can even approximate painterly effects.

It’s a pity you can’t save your own custom presets, although the app does at least offer some examples to get you started. For the most part, though, Percolator’s a tasty treat.

Dropped is an app designed to take advantage of the drag and drop feature that made its debut in iOS 11. It’s designed as a temporary resting point – commonly referred to in computing terminology as a ‘shelf’ – for various kinds of data, including URLs, photos, videos, text, emails, notes, and PDFs.

The idea is you can dump a bunch of things on Dropped, and figure out what you want to do with them later. Helpfully, the app automatically organizes items into categories (media; text; URLs; files), although you can also scroll through your entire list in the Recents tab.

Search and rename functionality would be helpful, but otherwise Dropped is a very useful app to have if you’re often moving content around on your iPad. It’s usable, straightforward, and works especially well as a Slide Over app.

Prompts is a writing tool designed for anyone having a hard time getting started. Create a new document and the app draws from over 300,000 unique starting lines and prompts. If you’re not keen on what it provides, tap refresh until you get something suitably inspirational.

As you’re typing away, the app then leaves you alone, but you can at any point tap the prompts icon to get a further helping hand. Often, the suggestions are rather obvious, but that doesn’t mean they’re not helpful.

The app also includes a tracking and statistics system, to try and get you writing regularly. On that basis, it’s a useful training aid to keep your writing ‘muscles’ fit and healthy, even if you naturally gravitate towards Scrivener and iA Writer when it’s time to get down to serious writing.

Little Digits is a new spin on finger counting, making use of the iPad’s large screen, and its ability to recognize loads of fingers pressing down at once.

The app’s most basic mode responds to how many fingers are touching the screen. Use a single digit, and the app chirps ONE! while a grinning one-shaped monster jigs about. Add another finger and the one is replaced by a furry two. You get the idea.

Beyond this, the app offers some basic training in number ordering, addition and subtraction, making it a great learning tool for young children.

But the smartest feature may well be multiple language support and recording. This means you can use the app to learn to count in anything from French to Swedish, and record custom prompts if your own language isn’t supported.

Kaleidoscope is a resolutely production-focused app, designed to take advantage of new functionality found in iOS 11 on modern iPads.

The app’s used to quickly compare the contents of files, images, and folders. It makes great use of drag and drop from Apple’s Files app, and uses colored overlays to clearly outline the differences between two text documents or whatever’s lurking inside a pair of folders.

When comparing images, there are various views (such as a basic A/B switch), but Kaleidoscope’s interpretation of a wipe slider is awkward, having two handles that must be separately positioned. And even with text, there’s one shortcoming, in the iOS app lacking the ‘text merge’ capabilities of its macOS cousin.

Still, if you routinely find yourself juggling folders or text documents, Kaleidoscope may prove an essential part of your iOS toolkit.

SoundForest is a creative sound toy that mashes up minimalist animal stickers and song-making.

Across four environments, you drag stickers from a strip at the bottom of the screen onto your canvas. Each one – be it animal, plant, or landmark – makes a sound that rarely recalls reality. A mandrill, for example, blasts forth a raucous slap bass. It’s colorful, entertaining, and encourages discovery and experimentation.

Once you’ve dotted your stickers about, you can fire up your composition. The sun or moon acts as a playback head, and your stickers animate as your oddball musical masterpiece blasts forth.

Pros may be frustrated by the app’s lack of export functionality, but really SoundForest is more for the masses than them – an approachable, fun way to make a noisy music loop, using a vibrant, unique interface.

Toca Life: Farm is an ambitious and rich exploratory title for kids, inviting them to manage a farm and fashion their own stories.

There are four locations: barn, house, field, and store. Each of them is packed full of elements to interact with. For youngsters, there’s plenty of fun to be had just poking around, making noises, and dragging colorful characters about.

Toca Life: Farm encourages older kids to think a little more. They can grow their own ingredients, which can subsequently be made into food. Animals can be fed and cared for, whereupon it’s possible to reap the rewards of eggs from chickens and milk from cows.

There’s no stress - this title is all about moving at your own pace. Importantly, it also eschews advertising and IAP, ensuring your little farmer can’t accidentally spend real-world cash on virtual hay bales.

Procreate is a powerful, feature-rich digital painting and sketching tool. You immediately get a taste for what’s possible by exploring the example art; and the more you poke around, the more you realize the potential on offer.

Procreate isn’t aimed solely at pros, though. Sure, they’ll love its advanced features – a perspective grid; custom brushes; layer masking; curves. The interface, though, is approachable enough for anyone. The thin strip across the top enables fast access to tool and brush menus; at the side is a bar for quickly adjusting your brush’s size and opacity.

The brush selection is immense, whether you’re into abstract doodling with strange textures, digital takes on traditional media, or something fantastical by way of brushes that paint with ‘light’ atop your creation.

In short: just buy this app, because it’s terrific.

Chambers Thesaurus is a thesaurus for your iPad. You might argue that doesn’t sound like the most exciting app in the world – and you’d be right. But if you do any writing on your iPad, it’s pretty much essential.

On macOS, Apple bundles a thesaurus with its Dictionary app, but this is absent on iOS, which merely attempts to correct spellings. Chambers’ offering therefore fills a void – and it does so in a straightforward, unassuming, highly usable manner.

Entries are clearly laid out, and you get a handy search sidebar in landscape. Pages can be bookmarked, and shared, or sent to equally impressive sister app Chambers Dictionary. If you fancy both, grab the bundle to save a few bucks.

Tayasui Memopad is a drawing tool for iPad that places an emphasis on speed. Its no-nonsense approach gives you a blank canvas on which to scribble, and a small but pleasingly diverse set of tools.

You get the usual brushes and pencils, but also more imaginative fare: blocky ‘pixel’ fingerprinting, and a slightly splodgy India ink pen – the latter being part of the one-off IAP pack. There are no layers or objects – everything you add is burned into the page (although you of course get an undo).

But it’s with image management that Tayasui Memopad really shows its stuff: your images are automatically sent to Photos, and your current canvas is copied to the clipboard when you exit the app, ready for pasting elsewhere.

As a drawing app, you might argue Tayasui Memopad is ultimately quite ordinary – if usable; but as a drawing app designed for efficiency, it excels where it counts.

MaxCurve is a professional-quality photo editor, designed for people who want plenty of control over the images they’re working on. Much of the app is based around curves you typically find in high-end editors such as Photoshop.

Adjusting curves is pleasingly tactile, enabling you to make dramatic or subtle adjustments to colors and exposure settings with ease. It makes many of MaxCurve’s iPad contemporaries seem comparatively crude. Smartly, edits are stored as virtual layers, which can be toggled, and there are also tools for cropping and vignettes.

The app feels at home on iPad, which provides enough space to see your photo and tools, without the latter obscuring the former. MaxCurve could probably do with some quick-fix solutions for things like exposure, but then perhaps that’s missing the point of an app more about careful, considered edits rather than speed.

The Brainstormer is designed to spark ideas when you’re working on a story. In its default state, it’s something of a visual oddity, with three wheels that you spin for a random set-up of plot/conflict, theme/setting, and subject/location. Individual wheels can be locked, and you can swap the wheels for a ‘slot machine’ interface if you prefer.

Although that might seem a bit gimmicky, The Brainstormer can be genuinely useful if you need a little nudge to get going. Also, the app is extensible, vastly broadening its scope. You can buy additional wheels via IAP, such as creature and world builders.

You can also directly edit existing wheels, or create your own from scratch. When you’re fresh out of ideas, a couple of bucks for endless new ones could be a bargain buy that sends you on your way to a best-seller.

Textastic is a text editor geared towards markup and coding. It’s an app that takes a no-nonsense approach – very evident the second you sit before its tasteful, minimal interface.

But that doesn’t mean the app’s heavily stripped back. As you work with Textastic, you realize it’s been cleverly optimized to speed your work along. The custom keyboard row is superb, providing fast access to a slew of handy characters.

Not keen on the way code is presented? Quickly flip to the settings, and tweak the fonts or choose an entirely new theme.

As ever, there are limitations to an iPad editor of this kind, most notably local previews when coding web pages. On that basis, you’re probably not going to create a site from scratch with Textastic.

But with its smart editor, useful settings, Split View support, and a built-in file-transfer system, it’s ideal for making quick changes or typing up Markdown notes when on the move – or on the sofa.

Thinkrolls Kings & Queens is a set of logic and physics tests for children disguised as a game.

Like other Thinkrolls titles, it involves rotund protagonists working their way to the bottom of a series of blocky towers. Their way is regularly barred by various elements that must be successfully manipulated to fashion a way onward.

For example, gears and racks might need combining to create a conveyor belt, or a mirror shifted to reflect light and remove a ghost.

It’s all clever stuff, and also broadly stress-free. There are no time limits at all, and multiple profiles can be set up to cater for several kids on a single device.

And although Kings & Queens is intended for kids between five and eight years old, the interface and design is such that younger children should be able to delve into the adventure, too – albeit perhaps with supervision to initially help them understand the trickier challenges.

Plotagraph+ is a photo editor designed to make snaps more animated. The results are essentially cinemagraphs – stills with subtle looping animations, such as a flowing river within a landscape, or waving hair in an otherwise stationary portrait. With Plotagraph+, though, you add movement to any existing single image, rather than working from a series of stills or a video.

After you load a photo, you drag ‘animation’ arrows across areas you’d like to move, and use masks or anchor points to define sections that should remain stationary. Speed and crop tools add a modicum of further control. It’s all very straightforward.

The effect is specialized, mind, and only works well with certain images. You won’t, for example, find Plotagraph+ successfully animate a human face. But it works wonders on flowing elements (smoke; clouds; water; hair), and can with care be used to craft visually arresting madness based around shots of architecture.

CARROT Weather is a weather app helmed by a HAL-like artificial intelligence that hates humans. As you check whether it’ll be sunny at the weekend, or if you’ll be caught in a deluge should you venture outside, CARROT will helpfully call you a ‘meatbag’ and pepper its forecasts with snark.

That probably sounds like a throwaway gimmick, but it’s actually a lot of fun – adding color and personality to a kind of app usually devoid of both. Most importantly, though, CARROT Weather is a really good weather app.

The forecasts are clearly displayed, the interface is superb, and the Today view widget is one of the best around. There’s even an amusing mini-game for finding ‘collectable’ hidden locations.

There are some downsides: the rainfall/cloud maps are weak, and there are no notifications. But if you’re bored of the straight-laced, dull competition, and fancy a weather app that’s informative and entertaining, CARROT Weather’s well worth the outlay.

Waterlogue is all about transforming photos – or any other picture you care to load – into luminous watercolors. You shoot a photo or open one already on your iPad, and then choose from one of 14 pre-set styles. Waterlogue will then rapidly ‘paint’ your photo in a manner that looks pleasingly authentic.

Although the app doesn’t offer the level of control (nor the endless playback) of Oilist, you do get a few settings. Brush size, lightness, and borders can be amended, each change providing a thumbnail preview you can tap to have Waterlogue repaint your image.

Export size is reasonable (at 250dpi, you’d get roughly an 8 x 6-inch/21 x 16cm print), and the app as a whole is approachable enough for everyone, while being just about authentic enough to appeal even to those who dabble in real paint.

Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari is an entertaining digital take on those children’s games where you create weird and wonderful (and occasionally terrifying) creatures by combining different body parts. Here, you get tops and bottoms to swipe between, in order to construct the likes of a ‘zeboceros’ or ‘crocingo’.

Each animal is nicely illustrated and comes with two verses of text, which the app can optionally read aloud. Also, note you don’t have to create strange new animals – you can instead match halves to make normal ones.

Perfect for when your resident tiny person is getting a bit perplexed at seeing a grinning elephant propped up by a spindly pair of flamingo legs.

With Hyp, you’re essentially in digital lava lamp territory. Drag about your iPad’s display, and you’re treated to an ethereal – if somewhat neon – light show that mutates and evolves as you experiment. Ramp up the volume and a soothing responsive soundtrack plays, sucking you further into the chill-out zone.

For the outlay, that alone would do the job, but double-tap and Hyp offers more. You can snap a shot of the current pattern, adjust the speed and complexity of the animation, or prod a randomizer to shake up what you’re seeing and hearing.

We’d love to see an autoplay option too, so Hyp could be played indefinitely with the iPad in a stand; otherwise, this is a simple, smart, engaging slice of digital ambience.

Affinity Photo is the kind of app that should extinguish any lingering doubt regarding the iPad’s suitability as a platform for creative professionals. In essence, the app brings the entirety of Serif’s desktop Photoshop rival (also called Affinity Photo) to Apple’s tablet, and carefully reimagines the interface for touch.

You’ll need at least an iPad Air 2 to run the app, but an iPad Pro for best performance. Then also armed with a digit and/or Apple Pencil, you can delve into a huge range of features for pro-level image editing, creation and retouching.

The live filters and liquify tools are particularly impressive, responding in real-time as you work on adjustments, and make for a surprisingly tactile editing experience. But really pretty much everything’s great here for anyone who wants properly high-end photo editing on their iPad.

Although Addy doesn’t really offer anything new, this is an app that does an awful lot right. It manages to make adding text to images fun, along with providing a no-nonsense interface that marries usability and power.

Load a photo and you can add art, text, and effects, before sharing it. ‘Art’ comprises slogans, shapes, and clip art. This can be recolored and resized, and you can add shadows and adjust opacity. Text is similarly easily added, and there are straightforward spacing and alignment options for tidying typography.

Finally, the effects comprise filters and overlays, the latter being eye-catching but limited in terms of application (you can adjust opacity but not, say, rotation). Still, as a package, Addy’s easy to love, given the speed at which you can work and the quality of the end result.

If you’re only occasionally adding text to an image you might be fine with a free app, but the ease of use and quality results make Addy worth a fiver for everyone else.

There are full-on screenwriting tools for iPad, such as Final Draft, but Untitled is more like a smart notepad – an app for a first draft until you feel ready for, um, Final Draft.

You jot down ideas, and don’t worry about formatting – because the app deals with that. In some cases, it does so automatically – write “Inside TechRadar HQ at midday” and Untitled will convert it to “INT: TECHRADAR HQ – MIDDAY” in the full preview (which can be exported to PDF or HTML).

For dialogue, place the character’s name above whatever they’re saying and Untitled correctly lays everything out.

Some other formatting needs you to remember the odd character - ‘>’ before a transition and ‘.’ before a shot. But that’s not too heavy on the brain, leaving you plenty of headspace to craft your Hollywood breakthrough.

On the Mac, PDF Expert 6 is a friendly, efficient, usable PDF editor. If anything, the app’s often even better on iPad.

You can grab PDFs from iCloud or Dropbox. Pages can be rearranged by drag-and-drop, and you can add or extract pages with a few taps. Adding pages from another document sadly remains beyond the app, but you can merge two PDFs in its file manager.

As a reader, PDF Expert 6 fares well, ably dealing with large PDFs, and the text-to-speech mode can read documents at a speed of your choosing. Similarly, the app makes short work of annotations, document signing, and outline editing.

Buy the ‘Edit PDF’ IAP ($9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99 on top of the original price) and you can directly update text, redact passages, and replace images. You’re obviously a little limited by a document’s existing fonts and layout, but this functionality is great if you spot a glaring error while checking a vital PDF on your iPad.

With visible pixels essentially eradicated from modern mobile device screens, it’s amusing to see retro-style pixel art stubbornly clinging on.

But chunky pixels are a pleasing aesthetic, evoking nostalgia, and you know thought’s gone into the placement of every dot. Pixaki is an iPad pixel art ‘studio’, ideal for illustrators, games designers, and animators.

At its most minimal, the interface shows your canvas and some tool icons: pencil; eraser; fill; shapes; select; color picker. But there are also slide-in panels for layers/palettes, and the frame-based animation system.

Bar a slightly awkward selection/move process, workflow is sleek and efficient (not least with the superb fill tool, which optionally works non-contiguously across multiple layers), and the app has robust, flexible import and export options.

Perhaps most importantly, Pixaki’s just really nice to use – more so than crafting similar art on a PC or Mac, and although pricey it’s worth the money for anyone serious about pixel art.

The iPad may not be an ideal device for shooting photos, but its large screen makes it pretty great for editing them. And Mextures is perhaps the finest app around for anyone wanting to infuse their digital snaps with character by way of textures, grunge, and gradients.

The editing process is entirely non-destructive, with you building up effects by adding layers. In each case, textures, blend modes and rotation of scanned objects can be adjusted to suit, and you can experiment without fear of edits being ‘burned in’.

Particularly interesting combinations can be saved as ‘formulas’ and shared with the Mextures community – or you can speed along your own editing by downloading one of the many formulas that already exist.

There are quite a few dictionary apps on iPad, and most of them don’t tend to stray much from paper-based tomes, save adding a search function. LookUp has a more colorful way of thinking, primarily with its entry screen. This features rows of illustrated cards, each of which houses an interesting word you can discover more about with a tap.

The app is elsewhere a mite more conventional – you can type in a word to confirm a spelling, and access its meaning, etymology, and Wikipedia entry.

The app’s lack of speed and customization means it likely won’t be a writer’s first port of call when working – but it is an interesting app for anyone fascinated by language, allowing you to explore words and their histories in rather more relaxed circumstances.

First impressions of Oilist might lead you to think it’s yet another filter app. And to some extent it is, given that Oilist enables you to feed it a photo and end up with something resembling an oil painting.

However, Oilist also has much in common with generative creativity apps, since it keeps painting over and over, to mesmerizing effect. Additionally, it’s not an app where you select a preset and then sit back and wait – instead, while Oilist is painting, you can adjust settings, and even splatter the virtual canvas with ‘chaos’ paint if the mood takes you.

This is all entertaining in and of itself, but Oilist also has practical benefits – at any point, you can snap the in-progress painting, and the resulting high-res image can be exported for sharing online or even printing on a canvas.

There are so many amazing music-making apps on iPad that it’s hard to choose between them. With Audiobus 3, you sort of don’t have to, because it acts as a kind of behind-the-scenes plumbing.

Virtual cabling might not sound sexy, but it hugely boosts creative potential. You can send live audio or MIDI data between apps and through effects, mix the various channels, and then send the entire output to the likes of GarageBand.

Much of these features are new to Audiobus 3, and this latest update also adds Audio Unit support, enabling you to open some synths and effects directly in the app.

With support for over 900 iOS products in all, Audiobus 3 is an essential buy for anyone serious about creating music on an iPad.

Young children love wooden puzzles, where you plug a load of letters into letter-shaped holes (with a little luck, ones that actually fit). The thing is, those puzzles never change, whereas Endless Alphabet has over a hundred words to play with.

On selecting a word, a horde of colorful monsters sprints across the screen, scattering the letters, which must then be dragged back into place. As you do so, the letters entertainingly grumble and animate. Once the entire word’s complete, a short cut-scene plays to explain what it means.

From start to finish, Endless Alphabet is an excellent and joyful production. The interface is intuitive enough for young toddlers to grasp, and the app’s tactile nature works wonderfully on the iPad’s large display.

The ‘pro’ bit in Redshift Pro’s name is rather important, because this astronomy app is very much geared at the enthusiast. It dispenses with the gimmickry seen in some competing apps, and is instead packed with a ton of features, including an explorable planetarium, an observation planner and sky diary, 3D models of the planetary bodies, simulations, and even the means to control a telescope.

Although more workmanlike than pretty, the app does the business when you’re zooming through the heavens, on a 3D journey to a body of choice, or just lazily browsing whatever you’d be staring at in the night sky if your ceiling wasn’t in the way.

And if it all feels a bit rich, the developer has you covered with the slightly cut down – but still impressive – Redshift, for half the outlay.

Generally speaking, music apps echo real-world instruments, as evidenced by the piano keyboards found in the likes of GarageBand. KRFT is different – along with creating loops and riffs (either by bashing out a tune on a grid of pads, or tapping out notes on a piano roll), you also create the play surface itself.

Designing your instrument in KRFT is all based around shapes and icons – diamonds trigger loops, dials adjust sound properties, and squares can be set to trigger several loops at once.

Admittedly, staring at a blank canvas can intimidate, because you must consider composition and instrument construction as one. But KRFT bundles several inspirational demos to show what it can do – and they’re so much fun they might be worth the entry fee on their own.

Billing itself as a kind of 3D sketchbook, isolad is designed for people who want to quickly draw isometric artwork. Its toolset is simple – you get a line tool for connecting magnetic dots, a shape fill tool, undo, panning and zooming.

That might sound reductive, but isolad’s straightforward nature means anyone can have a crack at doodling the next Monument Valley, and you end up focusing more on what you’re creating rather than being deluged by a load of tools you’ll never use.

Future updates promise the addition of selections and layers, but for now isolad’s elegant simplicity is enough to make it a winning app.

The idea behind Printed is to transform your photos into vintage printed art. You load a photo (or choose from one of the demo images), press a filter, and are suddenly faced with something that could have fallen out of a 50-year-old book, or been posted on a wall many decades ago.

But Printed is more than a tap-and-forget filter app: beyond the filter selection are tools for adjusting dot pitch, brightness, borders, and color saturation.

There are some shortcomings: changes to settings are initially displayed as a thumbnail you tap to approve, which only then gets rendered at full-size (whereupon it may look different from how you thought it would); and landscape orientation appears to have been an afterthought.

But on a large iPad display, the actual filters – which are excellent – are shown off to their fullest, in all their retro dotty glory.

If you’re the kind of person who likes spinning virtual decks, you’ll tell right away with djay Pro that you have in your hands something special. On the iPad – and especially on an iPad Pro – the app has room to breathe, lining up all kinds of features for being creative when playing other people’s music.

You get four-deck mixing, a sampler, varied waveform layouts, and useful DJ tools like cue points and beat-matching. There are also 70 keyboard shortcuts for quickly getting at important features, such as matching keys and adjusting levels.

For a newcomer, it’s perhaps overkill, and the similarly impressive djay 2 is cheaper. But if you’ve got the cash, djay Pro is a best-in-class app suitable for everyone – right up to jobbing DJs.

Even iPads with the largest amount of storage can’t cope with a great deal of on-board video. Infuse Pro is designed to access your collection, without any of it needing to be on your device.

The app connects to local drives and cloud services, and plays a wide range of file types, including MOV, MKV and VIDEO_TS. If the files are named sensibly, Infuse downloads cover art and can optionally grab soft subtitles. The interface throughout is superb.

On iPad, you also get full support for Split View and picture-in-picture, so you can pretend to work while watching your favorite shows. And if you continue on another device – this universal app is compatible with iPhone and Apple TV – cloud sync lets you pick up where you left off.

Reasoning that sketchbooks aren’t complicated, and so nor should your iPad be, Linea offers a friendly approach to digital sketching. The main interface puts all of the app’s tools within easy reach – colors on the left, and layers and brushes on the right. Scribble nearby and they get out of the way, or you can invoke full-screen with a tap.

There’s Pencil support, but no pressure sensing by other means. Also, although some of the pens offer blend modes, the end result still looks quite digital rather than realistic. Even so, Linea’s straightforwardness and smart design tends to make it a joy to use, even if the app lacks the range of some of its contemporaries.

If you find iMovie isn’t quite doing it for you from a video editing standpoint, take a look at LumaFusion. This multitrack editor is designed with the more demanding user in mind, and is packed full of features to keep you editing at your iPad rather than nipping to a Mac or PC.

The main timeline provides you with three tracks for photos, videos, titles and graphics, and you get another three audio tracks for complex audio mixes involving narration and sound effects. Should you wish to take things further, LumaFusion includes a slew of effects and clip manipulation tools seemingly brought over from the developer’s own – and similarly impressive – LumaFX.

Occasionally, the app perhaps lacks some of the elegance iMovie enjoys, and LumaFusion is certainly a more involved product than Apple’s. But if you want fully-fledged video editing on your iPad, it’s hard to think of a better option.

On iPhone, Hipstamatic lets you switch between a virtual retro camera and a sleek modern camera app. On iPad, it all goes a bit weird, with the former option giving you a camera floating in space, and the latter making you wonder why you’d use a tablet for taking snaps.

But Hipstamatic nonetheless gets a recommendation on the basis of other things it does. Load an image from your Camera Roll, and you can delve into Hipstamatic’s editor. If you’re in a hurry, select a predefined style – Vintage; Cinematic; Blogger – and export.

Should you fancy a bit more fine-tuning, you can experiment with lenses, film, and flashes. And plenty of other adjustments are available, too, such as cropping, vignettes, curves, and a really nice depth of field effect.

Wikipedia is, in reality, a massive web of articles, but when browsing, it looks more like a sea of links. WikiLinks rethinks exploring Wikipedia through the use of spider diagrams, providing a clever visual overview of the relationship between subjects.

On iPhone, you switch between views, but the app makes use of the iPad’s larger display by splitting it in two. On the left is your mind map, which grows as you tap on new articles. On the right is your current selection to peruse.

As a reader, WikiLinks is less remarkable – article sections irritatingly begin life collapsed, and it all feels a bit cluttered. But when using Wikipedia for research, no other app is so helpful in enabling you to see the links between the site’s many pages.

If your iPad’s sitting around doing nothing while you work on a Mac or PC, Duet Display can turn it into a handy second screen for your desktop or notebook.

You fire up the app on your iPad and a companion app on your computer, and connect the two devices using a cable – like it’s 2005 or something. Minimalist fetishists might grumble, but a wired connection means there’s almost no lag – even when using Duet Display’s highest detail settings and frame rates.

With macOS Sierra, you also get one extra goodie: a virtual Touch Bar. So you needn’t splash out on a brand-new MacBook Pro to check out Apple’s latest interface innovation – you can use Duet Display instead.

Carl Burton’s Islands: Non-Places is listed in the App Store as a game, but don’t believe a word of it. Really, this ten-scene artistic endeavor is a surreal, mesmerizing semi-interactive animated film.

Each ‘non-place’ is somewhere you’d usually ignore or stay only on a very temporary basis, but here, the mundane is subverted through unusual and unexpected juxtapositions.

You’ll find yourself staring at a luggage carousel, before the bags begin a lazy Mexican wave. Elsewhere, palm trees ride mall escalators, while a run-of-the-mill seating area is suddenly flooded, a warning siren slicing its way through inane background chatter.

The result is frequently disorientating, but Islands also has the capacity to surprise, and is often oddly beautiful.

There are plenty of apps out there that attempt to transform images into something that might once have appeared on the screen of an ancient piece of computer hardware, but none match Retrospecs.

You either take a photo or load an image from your iPad and then select a preset. You get everything from the chunky character-oriented Commodore PET, through to relatively powerful fare such as the detailed 16-bit graphics of the SNES and Atari ST.

From an authenticity standpoint, Retrospecs wins out, but the app also affords plenty of tweaking potential. You can switch modes for those machines that offered multiple resolutions, choose alternate dither patterns, and adjust contrast, vibrancy, and other settings. Best of all, you can use any of the existing presets as the basis for your own unique slice of retro-filter joy.

It’s concert time for the motley crew of Toca Band, in this toy designed to help kids explore music creatively. (And, um, adults who might get sucked in a bit.)

It’s all very simple: drag weird cartoon characters (each of which plays their own instrument) to spots on the stage, and they automatically jam along with the only song that Toca Band appears to know. Lob a musician at the star and they start a unique solo improv with a modicum of user control.

Toca Band is a very sweet app, which even toddlers should be able to grasp. A word of warning, though: that Toca Band riff will quickly become an earworm you’ll be hard pressed to remove.

iA Writer provides a writing environment suitably focused for iPad, but that also makes nods to the desktop.

The main screen is smartly designed, with a custom keyboard bar offering Markdown and navigation buttons; if you’re using a mechanical keyboard, standard shortcuts are supported.

Further focus comes by way of a typewriter mode (auto-scrolling to the area you’re editing) and graying out lines other than the one you’re working on.

Elsewhere, you get an optional live character count, iCloud sync, and a robust Markdown preview. We’d like to see a split-screen mode for the last of those (as per the Mac version), but otherwise iA Writer’s a solid, effective and affordable minimal writing app for iPad.

We're not sure what makes this edition of the famous mockney chef's recipe book 'ultimate', bar that word being very clearly written on the icon.

Still, Jamie Oliver's Ultimate Recipes is certainly a very tasty app. The 600 recipes should satisfy any given mood, whether you're after a sickeningly healthy salad or fancy binging on ALL THE SUGAR until your teeth scream for mercy.

Smartly, every recipe offers step-by-step photos, so you can see how badly you’re going wrong at any point. And when you've nearly burned down the kitchen, given up and ordered a pizza, you can watch the two hours of videos that reportedly tell you how to "become a real kitchen ninja".

Note: this doesn't involve wearing lots of black and hurling sharp objects at walls, sadly.

Music-creation apps can overwhelm, even when trying to be friendly. Lily neatly takes a rather more playful – if slightly twee – stab at having you make tunes.

You start by selecting a color and shape. The former dictates an instrument and the latter the number of leaves on your lily. Tap + to open the flower, and then the flower itself to access a pulsating playback head.

You then tap spaces to lay down notes, which can be shifted entire octaves by prodding adjacent vertical lines. Repeat the process with more lilies and you'll soon have an oddly delicate cacophony serenading your ears.

Lily's a very sweet app. It's perhaps a touch too abstract to be as immediate as it wants to be, but all becomes clear with a little play. We do wish songs could be saved (although you can export a recording) – the lives of these lilies are all too fleeting.

So, you’ve picked up an iPad synth to compose music, play live, or bound about like a maniac, pretending you're on stage at Glastonbury. Fortunately, Poison-202 is ideal for all such sets of circumstances.

The moody black and red graphic design is very 1990s, but it's Poison-202's sounds that hurl you back to the halcyon days of electronic music. Aficionados of The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Orbital will be overjoyed at the familiar (and brilliant) sounds you can conjure up simply by selecting presets and prodding a few keys.

And if you're not satisfied by the creator's (frankly awesome) sound design smarts (in which case, we glare at you with the menace of a thousand Keith Flints), all manner of sliders and dials enable you to create your own wall-wobbling bass and ear-searing leads.

There are iPad synths that have more ambition, and many are more authentic to classic hardware; but few are more fun.

For free, Ferrite Recording Studio provides the means to record the odd bit of audio, bookmark important bits, and mash together a few such recordings into something resembling a podcast. But pay the $19.99/£14.99 IAP and this app gives desktop podcast-creation products a run for their money.

Using the smartly designed interface, you can import clips and sounds from various sources, craft multi-track edits that make full use of slicing, fading, ducking, and silence stripping, and add professional effects to give vocals that bit of extra punch.

On an iPhone, this is an impressive app, but on iPad, the extra screen space you get makes for significantly faster editing of your audio and a far superior user experience compared to the cramped screen.

Rather than be all things to all people, Zen Brush 2 is a painting app with a sense of focus, emulating the feel of an East Asian ink brush. It's therefore suited to flowing, semi-abstract artistic effort with your finger to offer a digital take on calligraphy.

On iPhone’s teeny screen this app feels a little redundant, but it comes alive on the iPad's larger display, especially if you have a stylus. The selection of tools is intentionally limited to keep you focused, but you can still swap between a red and black brush, experiment with alternate brush sizes or dryness values and swap out the underlying canvas.

There is a sense of give and take about Zen Brush 2's level of realism: strokes are applied wonderfully, but inks don't interact with each other nor the paper beneath. Still, the strong sense of character gives artwork created in Zen Brush 2 a unique feel and it's a relaxing, almost meditative, app to spend time with.

There are loads of great painting apps for illustrators and artists, but Amaziograph tries something a bit different, introducing you to a world of tessellation and symmetries. This makes for an app that has plenty of potential for professional use, but also one that anyone can enjoy.

To begin, you select a style. The simplest is a split-screen mirror, but there are also kaleidoscope-like options, and those that create tiled, repeating patterns. It's then a question of scribbling on the canvas, and watching a pattern form before your eyes.

The toolset is quite basic (with a bafflingly overthought color palette selector), but Amaziograph chalks up a big win when it comes to flexibility.

At any point, you can adjust the settings of the current grid, or choose a different symmetry/tessellation type. This propels the app far beyond 'toy' territory, opening up avenues for creativity regardless of your level of artistic prowess.

As a combination clock and weather app, Living Earth works well across all iOS devices, but use it with an iPad in a stand and you've got something that'll make other clocks in the immediate vicinity green with envy.

As you might expect, your first job with the app is to define the cities you'd like to keep track of. At any point, you can then switch between them, updating the main clock and weather forecasts accordingly. Tap the weather and you can access an extended forecast for the week; tap the location and you get the current times and weather for your defined locations.

But it's the Earth that gets pride of place, taking up the bulk of the screen. It shows clouds by default, although weather geeks can instead choose colors denoting temperature, wind speed or humidity values. Then with a little swipe the globe rotates, neatly showing heavily populated locations during night time as lattices of artificial man-made light.

Whether you need a few minutes of peace or help to fall asleep after hours of stress, Flowing offers meditative splashy reflection. Choose from six scenes, plonk headphones on and then just sit and listen to gorgeous 3D audio recordings of streams, waterfalls and rivers.

Should you feel the need, noodle about with the parallax photo - although that’s frankly the least interesting bit of the app.

There is room for screen interaction though - the slider button gives you access to a mixer, to trigger ambient soundtracks by composer David Bawiec, and add birdsong and rain; while the Flowing icon houses guided meditations by Lua Lisa.

There’s also a timer, so you can fall asleep to a gently meandering brook without it then burbling away all night. In all, even if you don’t make use of every feature, Flowing is an effective, polished relaxation aid.

Animation can be painstaking, whether doing it for your career or just for fun. Fortunately, Stop Motion Studio Pro streamlines the process, providing a sleek and efficient app for your next animated masterpiece.

It caters to various kinds of animation: you can use your iPad’s camera to capture a scene, import images or videos (which are broken down into stills), or use a remote app installed on an iPhone. Although most people will export raw footage to the likes of iMovie, Stop Motion Pro shoots for a full animation suite by including audio and title capabilities.

There are some snags. Moving frames requires an awkward copy/paste/delete workaround. Also, drawing tools are clumsy, making the app’s claim of being capable of rotoscoping a tad suspect. But as an affordable and broadly usable app for crafting animation, it fits the bill.

Scanners for iPad have come a long way from their roots as souped-up camera apps, and Scanbot 6 is making a play to be the only one on your iPad - by doing way more than just scanning.

The basics are ably dealt with - the app automatically locates documents in front of your iPad’s camera (assuming there’s contrast with the desk underneath), and you can crop, rotate, color-adjust, and save the result.

Buy the Pro IAP, though, and Scanbot becomes far more capable. It’ll run OCR text recognition on any document, and attempt (with a reasonable degree of success) to extract details for single-tap ’actions’, such as triggering a phone call or visiting a website, based on what it finds.

There are annotation and PDF signing tools, and the means to reorder pages in multi-page documents. So rather than being a tap-and-done scanner, this app keeps helping once the scans are done, making it an essential purchase for the office-oriented. (We do miss the smiling robot icon, though – the new one is so dull.)

Another example of a book designed for kids that adults will sneak a peek at when no-one's watching, Namoo teaches about the wonders of plant life. Eschewing the kind of realistic photography or illustration you typically see in such virtual tomes, Namoo is wildly stylized, using an arresting low-poly art style for its interactive 3D simulations.

Each of these is married with succinct text, giving your brain something to chew on as you ping the components of a plant's cells (which emit pleasingly playful - if obviously not terribly realistic - sounds and musical notes) or explore the life cycle of an apple.

On the desktop, Scrivener is widely acclaimed as the writer's tool of choice. The feature-rich app provides all kinds of ways to write, even incorporating research documents directly into projects. Everything's always within reach, and your work can constantly be rethought, reorganised, and reworked.

On iPad, Scrivener is, astonishingly, almost identical to its desktop cousin. Bar some simplification regarding view and export options, it's essentially the same app. You get a powerful 'binder' sidebar for organizing notes and documents, while the main view area enables you to write and structure text, or to work with index cards on a cork board.

There's even an internal 'Split View', for simultaneously smashing out a screenplay while peering at research. With Dropbox sync to access existing projects, Scrivener is a no-brainer for existing users; and for newcomers, it's the most capable rich text/scriptwriting app on iPad.

At the last count, there were something like eleven billion sketching apps for iPad, and so you need something pretty special to stand out. Concepts shoots for a more professional audience - architects, designers, illustrators, and the like - but in doing so presents a far more flexible product than most.

When scribbling on the infinite canvas, you're drawing vector strokes, which can be individually selected and adjusted. The tools area is customizable and colors are selected using a Copic color wheel.

Pay the pro IAP and you unlock all kinds of features, including precision tools and shape guides, endless layers, and the means to export your work as high-res imagery, SVG, DXF or PSD. In use, whether using a finger or stylus, Concepts is elegant and usable but powerful.

So for free, this is an excellent tool for wannabe scribblers, and for the price of a couple of coffees, a high-end digital sketchbook suitable for professionals. Sounds like a bargain either way to us.

Your eyes might pop at the price tag of this iPad synth, but the hardware reissue of this amazing Moog was priced at a wallet-smashing $10,000. By contrast, the Model 15 iPad app seems quite the bargain. To our ears, it's also the best standalone iOS synth on mobile, and gives anything on the desktop a run for its money.

For people used to messing around with modular synths and plugging in patch leads, they'll be in heaven. But this isn't retro-central: you can switch the piano keyboard for Animoog's gestural equivalent; newcomers can work through straightforward tutorials about how to build new sounds from scratch; and those who want to dive right in can select from and experiment with loads of diverse, superb-sounding presets.

There are plenty of apps that enable you to add comic-like filters and the odd speech balloon to your photos, but Comic Life 3 goes the whole hog regarding comic creation. You select from pre-defined templates or basic page layouts, and can then begin working on a Marvel-worrying masterpiece.

Importing images is straightforward, and you get plenty of control over sound effects and speech balloons. For people who are perhaps taking things a bit too seriously (or actual comic creators, who can use this app for quick mock-ups), there's a bundled script editor as well.

Oddly, Comic Life 3's filters aren't that impressive, not making your photos look especially hand-drawn. But otherwise the app is an excellent means of crafting stories on an iPad, and you can export your work in a range of formats to share with friends - and Stan Lee.

It's been a long time coming, but finally Tweetbot gets a full-fledged modern-day update for iPad. And it's a good one, too. While the official Twitter app's turned into a 'blown-up iPhone app' monstrosity on Apple's tablet, Tweetbot makes use of the extra space by way of a handy extra column in which you can stash mentions, lists, and various other bits and bobs.

Elsewhere, this latest release might lack a few toys Twitter selfishly keeps for itself, but it wins out in terms of multitasking support, granular mute settings, superb usability, and an interesting Activity view if you're the kind of Twitter user desperate to know who's retweeting all your tiny missives.

This music app is inspired by layered composition techniques used in some classical music. You tap out notes on a piano roll, and can then have up to four playheads simultaneously interpret your notes, each using unique speeds, directions and transpositions. For the amateur, Fugue Machine is intuitive and mesmerising, not least because of how easy it is to create something that sounds gorgeous.

For pros, it's a must-have, not least due to MIDI output support for driving external software. It took us mere seconds to have Fugue Machine working with Animoog's voices, and the result ruined our productivity for an entire morning.

(Unless you count composing beautiful music when you should be doing something else as 'being productive'. In which case, we salute you.)

There's a miniature revolution taking place in digital comics. Echoing the music industry some years ago, more publishers are cottoning on to readers very much liking DRM-free content. With that in mind, you now need a decent iPad reader for your PDFs and CBRs, rather than whatever iffy reading experience is welded to a storefront.

Chunky is the best comic-reader on iPad. The interface is simple but customisable. If you want rid of transitions, they're gone. Tinted pages can be brightened. And smart upscaling makes low-res comics look good.

Paying the one-off 'pro' IAP enables you to connect to Mac or Windows shared folders or FTP. Downloading comics then takes seconds, and the app will happily bring over folders full of images and convert them on-the-fly into readable digital publications.

You're probably dead inside if you sit down with Metamorphabet and it doesn't raise a smile — doubly so if you use it alongside a tiny human. The app takes you through all the letters of the alphabet, which contort and animate into all kinds of shapes. It suitably starts with A, which when prodded grows antlers, transforms into an arch, and then goes for an amble. It's adorable.

The app's surreal, playful nature never lets up, and any doubts you might have regarding certain scenes — such as floaty clouds representing 'daydream' in a manner that doesn't really work — evaporate when you see tiny fingers and thumbs carefully pawing at the iPad's glass while young eyes remain utterly transfixed.

Pop music is about getting what you expect. Ambient music has always felt subtly different, almost like anything could happen. With generative audio, this line of thinking became reality. Scape gives you a combined album/playground in this nascent genre, from the minds of Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.

Each track is formed by way of adding musical elements to a canvas, which then interact in sometimes unforeseen ways. Described as music that "thinks for itself", Scape becomes a pleasing, fresh and infinitely replayable slice of chillout bliss. And if you're feeling particularly lazy, you can sit back and listen to an album composed by the app's creators.

Illustration tools are typically complex. Sit someone in front of Adobe Photoshop and they'll figure out enough of it in fairly short order. Adobe Illustrator? No chance. Assembly attempts to get around such roadblocks by turning graphic design into the modern-day touchscreen equivalent of working with felt shapes — albeit very powerful felt shapes that can shift beneath your fingers.

At the foot of the screen are loads of design elements, and you drag them to the canvas. Using menus and gestures, shapes can be resized, coloured, duplicated and transformed. Given enough time and imagination, you can create abstract masterpieces, cartoonish geometric robots, and beautiful flowing landscapes.

It's intuitive enough for anyone, but we suspect pro designers will enjoy Assembly too, perhaps even using it for sketching out ideas. And when you're done, you can output your creations to PNG or SVG.

The lofty boast with RealBeat is that you can use the app to make music with everything. The remarkable thing is, you really can. The app has eight slots for samples, waiting for input from your iPad's mic.

You can record snippets of any audio you fancy: your voice; a spoon smacking a saucepan; a pet, confused at you holding your iPad right in front of its face. These samples can then be arranged into loops and songs using a familiar drum-machine-style sequencer and pattern editor.

Completed masterpieces can be exported using Audio Copy and iTunes File Sharing, and the app also integrates with Audiobus.

On the desktop, Panic's Transmit is a perfectly decent FTP client. But when it was first released for iPad, Transmit felt rather more like the future. It was smart and elegant, utilising all of the then-new iOS features, such as Share sheets.

Even today, its interface seems a step beyond its contemporaries — the vibrant icons and dark lists look gorgeous and modern. Most importantly, the app remains very usable, with an excellent drag-and-drop model, smart previews, and support for a huge range of services, including local shared Mac folders.

Calling Editorial a text editor does it a disservice. That's not to say Editorial isn't any good as a text editor, because it very much is. You get top-notch Markdown editing, with an inline preview, and also a TaskPaper mode for plain text to-do lists.

But what really sets Editorial apart is the sheer wealth of customisation options. You get themes and custom snippets, but also workflows, which can automate hugely complex tasks. You get the sense some of these arrived from the frustrations at how slow it is to perform certain actions on an iPad; but a few hours with Editorial and you'll wish the app was available for your Mac or PC too.

Previously known as iDraw, Graphic is now part of the Autodesk stable. Visually, it looks an awful lot like Adobe Illustrator, and it brings some suitably high-end vector-drawing smarts to Apple's tablet.

All the tools and features you'd expect are present and correct; and while it's admittedly a bit slower and fiddlier to construct complex imagery on an iPad than a PC, Graphic is great to have handy when you're on the move. Smartly, the app boasts plentiful export functions, to continue your work elsewhere, and will sync with its iPhone and Mac cousins across iCloud.

One of the curious things about the iPad is the absence of major Adobe apps from the App Store. The creative giant instead seems content with smaller, simpler 'satellite' apps, assuming users will continue to rely on the desktop for in-depth work. Pixelmator thumbs its nose to such thinking, reworking the majority of its desktop cousin (itself a kind of streamlined Photoshop) for the iPad.

Given the low price tag, this is an astonishingly powerful app, offering brushes, layers, gorgeous filters, levels editing, and more. You need to invest some time to get the most out of Pixelmator, but do so and the app will forever weld itself to your Home screen.

There are plenty of apps that provide the means to turn photos into messages and poster-style artwork. Elsewhere in this list we mention the excellent Retype, for example. But if you hanker after more control, Fontmania is a good bet.

This isn't the most complex or feature-rich app of its kind, but it is extremely pleasing to use. On selecting your photo, you can add a filter. Then it's down to business with typography. The 'Art' section houses frames, dividers, shapes and pre-made 'artworks'. The 'Text' section is for typing out whatever you like, and you can choose from a range of fonts.

Really, it's the interface that makes Fontmania. The simple sidebar is clear and non-intrusive, providing quick access to tools like Color and Shadow. All items added to the canvas can be manipulated using standard iOS gestures, avoiding the awkwardness sometimes seen within this sort of app.

Perhaps best of all, though, Fontmania is a pay-once product. Download and you get access to everything, rather than suddenly discovering a drop shadow or extra font will require digging into your wallet again.

iPad video editors tend to have a bunch of effects and filters lurking within, but with VideoGrade you can go full-on Hollywood. On launch, the app helpfully rifles through your albums, making it easy to find your videos. Load one and you get access to a whopping 13 colour-grading and repair tools.

Despite the evident power VideoGrade offers, the interface is remarkably straightforward. Select a tool (such as Vibrance, Brightness or Tint), choose a setting, and drag to make a change. Drag up before moving your finger left or right to make subtler adjustments.

Smartly, any tool already used gets a little green dash beneath, and you can go back and change or remove edits at any point.

All filters are applied live to the currently shown frame, and you can also tap a button to view a preview of how your entire exported video will look. Want to compare your edit with the original video? Horizontal and vertical split-views are available at the tap of a button. Usefully, favorite filter combinations can be stored and reused, and videos can be queued rather than laboriously rendered individually.

Korg Gadget bills itself as the "ultimate mobile synth collection on your iPad" and it's hard to argue. You get well over a dozen varied synths, ranging from drum machines through to ear-splitting electro monsters, and an intuitive piano roll for laying down notes.

A scene/loop arranger enables you to craft entire compositions in the app, which can then be shared via the Soundcloud-powered GadgetCloud or sent to Dropbox. This is a more expensive app than most, but if you're a keen electronic-music-oriented songwriter with an iPad, it's hard to find a product that's better value.

There are quite a few apps for virtual stargazing, but Sky Guide is the best of them on iPad. Like its rivals, the app allows you to search the heavens in real-time, providing details of constellations and satellites in your field of view (or, if you fancy, on the other side of the world).

Indoors, it transforms into a kind of reference guide, offering further insight into distant heavenly bodies, and the means to view the sky at different points in history. What sets Sky Guide apart, though, is an effortless elegance. It's simply the nicest app of its kind to use, with a polish and refinement that cements its essential nature.

Every now and again, you get an app that ticks all the boxes: it's beautiful, audacious, productive, and nudges the platform forwards. This perfectly sums up Coda, a full-fledged website editor for iPad.

The app's graphic design borrows from the similarly impressive Transmit for iOS, all muted greys and vibrant icons. It's a style we wish Apple would steal. When it comes to editing, you can work remotely or pull down files locally; in either case, you end up working in a coding view with the clout you'd expect from a desktop product, rather than something on mobile.

Naturally, Coda is a fairly niche tool, but it's essential for anyone who regularly edits websites and wants the ability to do so when away from the office.

When you're told you can control the forces of nature with your fingertips that probably puts you more in mind of a game than a book. And, in a sense, Earth Primer does gamify learning about our planet. You get a series of engaging and interactive explanatory pages, and a free-for-all sandbox that cleverly only unlocks its full riches when you've read the rest of the book.

Although ultimately designed for children, it's a treat for all ages, likely to plaster a grin across the face of anyone from 9 to 90 when a volcano erupts from their fingertips.

For most guitarists, sound is the most important thing of all. It's all very well having a massive rig of pedals and amps, but only if what you get out of it blows away anyone who's listening. For our money, BIAS FX is definitely the best-sounding guitar amp and effects processor on the iPad, with a rich and engaging collection of gear.

Fortunately, given the price-tag, BIAS FX doesn't skimp on set-up opportunities either. A splitter enables complex dual-signal paths; and sharing functionality enables you to upload your creations and check out what others have done with the app.

You might argue that Google Maps is far better suited to a smartphone, but we reckon the king of mapping apps deserves a place on your iPad, too. Apple's own Maps app has improved, but Google still outsmarts its rival when it comes to public transport, finding local businesses, saving chunks of maps offline, and virtual tourism by way of Street View.

Google's 'OS within an OS' also affords a certain amount of cross-device sync when it comes to searches. We don't, however, recommend you strap your cellular iPad to your steering wheel and use Google Maps as a sat-nav replacement, unless you want to come across as some kind of nutcase.

Adult colouring books are all the rage, proponents claiming bringing colour to intricate abstract shapes helps reduce stress - at least until you realise you've got pen on your shirt and ground oil pastels into the sofa.

You'd think the process of colouring would be ideal for iPad, but most relevant apps are awful, some even forcing tap-to-fill. That is to colouring what using a motorbike is to running a marathon - a big cheat. Pigment is an exception, marrying a love for colouring with serious digital smarts.

On selecting an illustration, there's a range of palettes and tools to explore. You can use pencils and markers, adjusting opacity and brush sizes, and work with subtle gradients. Colouring can be 'freestyle', or you can tap to select an area and ensure you don't go over the lines while furiously scribbling. With a finger, Pigment works well, but it's better with a stylus; with an iPad Pro and a Pencil, you'll lob your real books in the bin.

The one niggle: printing and accessing the larger library requires a subscription in-app purchase. It's a pity there's no one-off payment for individual books, but you do get plenty of free illustrations, and so it's hard to grumble.

Podcasts are mostly associated with small portable devices - after all, the very name is a mash-up of 'iPod' and 'broadcast'. But that doesn't mean you should ignore your favourite shows when armed with an iPad rather than an iPhone.

We're big fans of Overcast on Apple's smaller devices, but the app makes good use of the iPad's extra screen space, with a smart two-column display. On the left, episodes are listed, and the current podcast loads into the larger space on the right.

The big plusses with Overcast, though, remain playback and podcast management. It's the one podcast app we've used that retains plenty of clarity when playback is sped up; and there are clever effects for removing dead air and boosting vocals in podcasts with lower production values.

Playlists can be straightforward in nature, or quite intricate, automatically boosting favourites to the top of the list, and excluding specific episodes. And if you do mostly use an iPhone for listening, Overcast automatically syncs your podcasts and progress, so you can always pick up where you left off.

On opening Toca Nature, you find yourself staring at a slab of land floating in the void. After selecting relevant icons, a drag of a finger is all it takes to raise mountains or dig deep gullies for rivers and lakes.

Finishing touches to your tiny landscape can then be made by tapping to plant trees. Wait for a bit and a little ecosystem takes shape, deers darting about glades, and fish swimming in the water. Using the magnifying glass, you can zoom into and explore this little world and feed its various inhabitants.

Although designed primarily for kids, Toca Nature is a genuinely enjoyable experience whatever your age.

The one big negative is that it starts from scratch every time — some save states would be nice, so each family member could have their own space to tend to and explore. Still, blank canvases keep everything fresh, and building a tiny nature reserve never really gets old.

The fairly large screen of the iPad means you can access desktop-style websites, rather than ones hacked down for iPhone. That sounds great until you realise most of them want to fire adverts into your face until you beg for mercy.

Old people will wisely suggest 'RSS', and then they'll explain that means you can subscribe to sites and get their content piped into an app.

Reeder 3 is a great RSS reader for iPad. It's fast, efficient, caches content for offline use and — importantly — bundles a Readability view. This downloads entire articles for RSS feeds that otherwise would only show synopses.

Like on the iPhone, Reeder's perhaps a bit gesture-happy, but it somehow feels more usable on the iPad's larger display. And we're happy to see the app continue to improve its feature set, including Split View and iPad Pro support, font options for the article viewer, and the means to sync across Instapaper content.

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).

The vast majority of iPads in Apple's line-up don't have a massive amount of storage, and that becomes a problem when you want to keep videos on the device. Air Video HD gets around the problem by streaming video files from any Mac or PC running the free server software. All content is live-encoded as necessary, ensuring it will play on your iPad, and there's full support for offline viewing, soft subtitles, and AirPlay to an Apple TV.

Perhaps the best bit about the software is how usable it is. The app's simple to set up and has a streamlined, modern interface - for example, a single tap downloads a file for local storage. You don't even need to be on the same network as your server either - Air Video HD lets you access your content over the web. Just watch your data downloads if you're on 3G!

Apple's own Calendar app is fiddly and irritating, and so the existence of Fantastical is very welcome. In a single screen, you get a week view, a month calendar and a scrolling list of events. There's also support for reminders, and all data syncs with iCloud, making Fantastical compatible with Calendar (formerly iCal) for macOS.

The best bit, though, is Fantastical's natural-language input, where you can type an event and watch it build as you add details, such as times and locations. On iPad, we do question the layout a little - a large amount of space is given over to a month calendar view. Still, in portrait or, better, Split View, Fantastical 2 is transformative.

You're not going to make the next Hollywood hit on your iPad, but iMovie's more than capable of dealing with home movies. The interface resembles its desktop cousin and is easy to get to grips with.

Clips can be browsed, arranged and cut, and you can then add titles, transitions and music. For the added professional touch, there are 'trailer templates' to base your movie on, rather than starting from scratch.

And should your iPad be powerful enough, this app will happily work with and export footage all the way up to 4K, which will likely make anyone who used to sit in front of huge video workstations a decade or two ago wide-eyed with astonishment.

Touch Press somewhat cornered the market in amazing iOS books with The Elements, but Journeys of Invention takes things a step further. In partnership with the Science Museum, it leads you through many of science's greatest discoveries, weaving them into a compelling mesh of stories.

Many objects can be explored in detail, and some are more fully interactive, such as the Enigma machine, which you can use to share coded messages with friends.

What's especially great is that none of this feels gimmicky. Instead, this app points towards the future of books, strong content being married to useful and engaging interactivity.

It's not like Microsoft Word really needs introduction. Unless you've been living under a rock that itself is under a pretty sizeable rock, you'll have heard of Microsoft's hugely popular word processor. What you might not realize, though, is how good it is on iPad.

Fire up the app and you're greeted with a selection of handy templates, although you can of course instead use a blank canvas. You then work with something approximating the desktop version of Word, but that's been carefully optimized for tablets. Your brain keeps arguing it shouldn't exist, but it does — although things are a bit fiddly on an iPad mini.

Wisely, saved documents can be stored locally rather than you being forced to use Microsoft's cloud, and they can be shared via email. (A PDF option exists for recipients without Office, although it's oddly hidden behind the share button in the document toolbar, under 'Send Attachment', which may as well have been called 'beware of the leopard'.)

Something else that's also missing: full iPad Pro 12.9 support in the free version. On a smaller iPad, you merely need a Microsoft account to gain access to most features. Some advanced stuff — section breaks; columns; tracking changes; insertion of WordArt — requires an Office 365 account, but that won't limit most users.

Presumably, Microsoft thinks iPad Pro owners have money to burn, though, because for free they just get a viewer. Bah.

There are loads of note-taking apps for the iPad, but Notability hits that sweet spot of being usable and feature-rich. Using the app's various tools, you can scribble on a virtual canvas, using your finger or a stylus. Should you want precision copy, you can drag out text boxes to type into. It's also possible to import documents.

One of the smartest features, though, is audio recording. This enables you to record a lecture or meeting, and the app will later play back your notes live alongside the audio, helping you see everything in context. Naturally, the app has plenty of back-up and export options, too, so you can send whatever you create to other apps and devices.

Apple's Photos app has editing capabilities, but they're not terribly exciting — especially when compared to Snapseed. Here, you select from a number of 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.

Soulver is more or less the love child of a spreadsheet and the kind of calculations you do on the back of an envelope. You write figures in context, and Souvler extracts the maths bits and tots up totals; each line's results can be used as a token in subsequent lines, enabling live updating of complex calculations. Drafts can be saved, exported to HTML, and also synced via Dropbox or iCloud.

Initially, the app feels a bit alien, given that people have been used to digital versions of desktop calculators since the dawn of home computing. But scribbling down sums in Soulver soon becomes second nature.

We're big fans of the Foldify apps, which enable people to fashion and customise little 3D characters on an iPad, before printing them out and making them for real. This mix of digital painting, sharing (models can be browsed, uploaded and rated) and crafting a physical object is exciting in a world where people spend so much time glued to virtual content on screens.

But it's Foldify Dinosaurs that makes this list because, well, dinosaurs. Who wouldn't be thrilled at the prospect of making a magenta T-Rex with a natty moustache? Should that person exist, we don't want to meet them.

When someone talks about bringing back the sounds of the 1980s, your head might fill with Human League and Depeche Mode, but if you played games, you'll instead think of Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway, chip-tune pioneers whose music graced the C64, leveraging the power of the MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID (Sound Interface Device) chip.

SidTracker64 is a niche but wonderfully designed iPad app that's a complete production package for creating SID tunes. It's unashamedly retro in terms of sound, but boasts a modern design, with powerful editing and export functionality. If you're only into raw chip-tune noises, Audiobus and Inter-App Audio are supported; but if you're an old-hand, you'll be delighted at the bundled copy of Hubbard's Commando, ready for you to remix.

more info...

How to watch George Groves vs Chris Eubank Jr: Live stream the fight online

This Saturday sees one of the most exciting boxing matches of the year as George Groves takes on Chris Eubank Jr.

The event, set to start at 7pm (UK time) at the Manchester Arena, is part of the World Boxing Super Series, will see the WBA & IBO Super Middleweight titles decided in what is sure to be a blockbuster night.

WBA champion Groves will be highly fancied for the fight, with the 29-year-old in fine form in recent times, but he will face a tough challenge from his 28-year-old challenger, whose father was a multiple champion in the 1980's and 1990's. And with both fighters having laid waste to previous rivals in spectacular fashion, the fight is guaranteed to be explosive.

The main attraction for both fighters is George Groves' world title, but also on offer is a place in the World Boxing Super Series final, where the winner will take home the Muhammad Ali Trophy.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to get tickets for the match, don’t worry - there is still a way to keep up with the action online.

Here is our quick and easy guide for how to watch Groves vs Eubank Jr live online from anywhere in the world. Whether you're in the US, Canada, India, Italy or absolutely anywhere else with an internet connection, we'll help you tune in for the event.

1. How to watch George Groves v Chris Eubank Jr in the UK:

If you’re in the UK, the fight is being made available on a pay-per-view offering through the ITV Box Office service, with coverage starting at 7pm.

Costing £16.95 to order, the ITV has partnered with TVPlayer to provide the live stream online. TVPlayer is a free, legal, online streaming service based in the UK which offers hundreds of channels - and you don't even need to sign in to watch the event

Access to the ITV Box Office Groves v Eubank Jr event for TVPlayer can only be purchased through the TVPlayer website, and includes access to the live broadcast stream and on demand catch up following the fight.

Official site: Groves vs Eubank Jr at TVPlayer.com

The broadcast is limited to a maximum of two streams per account, but can be watched online or via your smart devices. This includes Apple TV, iPhone & iPad, Android mobile and tablet devices, Windows 10 phone and Surface devices, Amazon Fire, Xbox One, EE TV, Samsung Tizen 2016 & Roku.

2. How to watch George Groves v Chris Eubank Jr worldwide:

How to watch Groves v Eubank Jr outside the UK

If you live outside the UK, you'll need to seek an alternative solution. That's because TVPlayer is a UK-only service and is not allowing anyone outside the UK to buy the fight. However, with ITV Box Office being the only English language broadcaster, the only way you can buy the fight, in English, outside the UK is by using a VPN.

Step 1: Download and install a VPN

If you don't live in the UK, the best and easiest to watch Groves v Eubank Jr online in your country for free is to download and install a VPN. We've tested all of the major VPN services and we rate ExpressVPN as the absolute best. It's compatible with all of your devices, supports most streaming services and ranks amongst the fastest. You can even install it on devices like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Xbox and PlayStation. Check out ExpressVPN here.

Step 2: Connect to the a UK server location

Simply open the VPN app, hit 'choose location' and select the UK to watch Groves v Eubank Jr via TVPlayer. Note that you will still need to buy a pay-per-view access to it.

Step 3: Log on to TVPlayer.com to view the fight
TVPlayer.com is the only online service offering a live stream of the fight and you can log on to the official page here.

Where can I watch Groves v Eubank Jr using a VPN?

A VPN will enable you to watch the fight from literally anywhere in the world. So that obviously includes: US, UK, Israel, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Denmark, India, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Belgium, Romania, Mexico, France, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Ireland, Poland, Kenya, Hungary, South Africa, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan, Egypt and more!

The best VPN services of 2018

more info...

How to watch NBA All-Star game: live stream match online from anywhere

This weekend sees the NBA All-Star game, as the best basketball players in the world match up in what should be a spectacular show.

The climax to the NBA All-Star Weekend, the 67th NBA All-Star game takes place at the Staples Center in Los Angeles this Sunday, February 18th as the Eastern and Western Conference teams go head to head.

Along with the game instead, there will also be a skills challenge, a three-point contest, and a slam dunk competition as the world's top players take part in an extravaganza of skill.

However if you're looking to watch the game online, you may struggle, as the game is the sole property of TNT in the USA. But don't worry - wherever you are in the world, there's a way to watch the game online, or via your television using cable.

Whether you want to stream the NBA All-Star game online, watch it live on your television via cable or watch it, mostly without having to put up with any commercial breaks - we've got you covered.

Here is our quick and easy guide for how to watch the NBA All-Star game online from anywhere in the world, without any commercial breaks! Whether you're in the US, Canada, India, Italy or absolutely anywhere else with an internet connection, we'll help you tune in for the big game.

The best VPN services of 2018

How to watch the NBA All-Star game online

This is the best way to watch the NBA All-Star game online - from absolutely anywhere in the world - without any commercial breaks:

How to watch the NBA All-Star game in the US

1. Watch on TNT

Good news - if you are in the US, this will be straight forward, as the game is being broadcast by TNT for the 16th year in a row.

TNT has its own online live stream where you can catch all the action. However after the first ten minutes, you will need to sign in with your US cable provider - whoever that may be.

However if you don't have a US cable account, you'll need to seek an alternative solution - using an another content provider, alongside a VPN.

2. Go to TV.youtube.com
Several online US-based TV streaming services offer TNT as part of their bundles and a few of them offer trials and the best one is YoutubeTV, an official Google product.

The service costs $35 a month, but you can also trial it for 30 days; the ability to record to the cloud and hold up to six accounts per household (and 3 simultaneous streams per membership) are its most alluring selling points. You can watch it on most devices and there are no fees for canceling.

However, you will need a US IP address in order to access all of the above and if you are outside the US, you will need to get an IP address located there by using a VPN.

How to watch the NBA All-Star game in the UK

If you’re outside the US, it may be a bit trickier to get a stream of the NBA All-Star game, but it is possible using Sling TV, a VPN and a PayPal account.

Sling TV is another subscription-based service which offers live and on-demand programming - including the NBA All-Star game. Although typically geoblocked outside of the US, Sling TV can be unlocked using a VPN - more on that below.

Once you have set up your account (which can be a 7-day free trial) and established your Sling TV account using a VPN, you will be able to watch the NBA All-Star game in its entirety.

1. Download and install a VPN If you don't have easy access (and you don't live in the UK or the US) to watch the NBA All-Star game online in your country, the best way to watch it for free is to download and install a VPN. We've tested all of the major VPN services and we rate ExpressVPN as the absolute best. It's compatible with all of your devices, supports most streaming services and ranks amongst the fastest. You can even install it on devices like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Xbox and PlayStation. Check out ExpressVPN here

2. Connect to the appropriate server location

Simply open the VPN app, hit 'choose location' and select the appropriate location - it doesn't matter which one and it's super easy to do.

Then choose US to watch the NBA All-Star game via TNT.

3. Where can I watch the NBA All-Star game using a VPN?

A VPN will enable you to watch the NBA All-Star game from literally anywhere in the world. So that obviously includes: US, UK, Israel, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Denmark, India, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Belgium, Romania, Mexico, France, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Ireland, Poland, Kenya, Hungary, South Africa, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan, Egypt and more!

Photos courtesy of NBA.com

more info...

How to watch Beltran v Moses: Live stream the boxing fight online from anywhere

Tonight sees one of 2018's biggest boxing match-ups as Raymundo Beltran takes on Paulus Moses.

The fight for the vacant WBO lightweight world title takes place in the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno, Nevada, in what should be a tremendous bout as the world's top two fighters go head-to-head.

Mexican Beltran, currently the number one-ranked WBO fighter, will be looking to extend an excellent recent run of form that has seen him win four of his last five fights via knockout.

Beltran is also fighting for something slightly different from a world title, however, as a victory to become world champion would essentially secure a green card to remain in the US with his family.

However he will face a tough task, as the Namibian Moses looks to make a big impression on his North American debut.

If you're looking to watch tonight's fight, don’t worry - there is still a way to keep up with the action online.

Here is our quick and easy guide for how to watch the big fight online from anywhere in the world - without any commercial breaks. Whether you're in the US, Canada, India, Italy or absolutely anywhere else with an internet connection, we'll help you tune in for the event.

The best VPN services of 2018

How to watch Beltran v Moses online

1. How to stream Beltran v Moses in the US online

If you’re in the US, the fight is being shown live on ESPN, with the action starting at 9pm EST on ESPN and also streaming live on the ESPN App from 7pm EST.

To watch online, you'll need to be signed up to the channel's WatchESPN streaming service, which provides a portal to catch all the action.

WatchESPN requires a video subscription from an affiliated provider. A list of affiliated streaming services can be found here.

2. Go to TV.youtube.com
Several online US-based TV streaming services offer ESPN as part of their bundles and a few of them offer trials and the best one is YoutubeTV, an official Google product.

However, you will need a US IP address in order to access all of the above and if you are outside the US, you will need to get an IP address located there by using a VPN.

2. How to watch Beltran v Moses outside the US

If you live outside the US, you'll need to seek an alternative solution - using a VPN.

a. Download and install a VPN

If you don't live in the US, the best and easiest to watch Beltran v Moses online in your country for free is to download and install a VPN. We've tested all of the major VPN services and we rate ExpressVPN as the absolute best. It's compatible with all of your devices, supports most streaming services and ranks amongst the fastest. You can even install it on devices like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Xbox and PlayStation. Check out ExpressVPN here.

b. Connect to the appropriate server location

Simply open the VPN app, hit 'choose location' and select the UK to watch Beltran v Moses via TVPlayer. Note that you will still need to buy a pay-per-view access to it.

c. Where can I watch Beltran v Moses using a VPN?

All photos courtesy of BoxingScene.com.

more info...

Why startups and research can make the UK a 5G leader

Despite the changes in Whitehall over the past few years, a desire by the government for the UK to be a 5G leader has remained constant.

Rhetoric from government ministers has been supported with consultations and funding to find new applications and services as well as frameworks that support research and the 5G ecosystem, which it is hoped will allow startups to flourish.

It is estimated by the government’s Future Connectivity Challenge Group that a strong national position in 5G could add £173 billion to the British economy from 2020-30, so it’s no wonder there is enthusiasm.

Testbeds have popped up in parts of the UK and it is generally accepted that 5G will deliver faster speeds, low latency and high capacity, powering all manner of devices from mobile phones to industrial appliances.

Thanks to advances in research, the first commercial networks are set to go live in 2019 – one year earlier than previously predicted – but perhaps not in the UK.

So if we cut through they hype - and some of it has been deliberately generated to attract the interest of businesses – can the UK really take a leading role?

Can Uk be a 5G leader?

The astronomical costs of the 3G spectrum licences and legal delays to the 4G auction stopped the UK from being a leader for the past two generations, but Mansoor Hanif, director of converged networks at BT, believes the UK is in a good place.

EE was the first UK operator to launch 4G back in 2012, using existing 1800MHz spectrum instead of waiting for the auction, and is now the UK's largest LTE operator in terms of coverage and subscribers. It was bought by BT in 2015 for £12.5 billion.

“I arrived in 2011 [at EE] and we were backwards, we were the 54th country in the world to launch 4G,” he told a Westminster eForum.

“We’re now back in the top five in terms of subscriptions, for the first time since the GSM days.”

To take a lead in 5G development, he wants the UK to make the most of its research capabilities, noting that BT and EE have been working with the three main university projects at Kings College London (KCL), the University of Bristol and the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey.

“We have some assets that we need to make the most of, such as AI research,” he said, noting that British universities are the biggest investors in UK tech. “We need to apply that to our networks.

“5G is different. With the separation of software and hardware, there is more space for startups.”

Hanif said the government’s decision to build an LTE-powered Emergency Services Network (ESN), which EE is delivering, is one of the first times it has put itself ahead of the curve. But he reiterated calls from the industry to make it easier to deploy network infrastructure if it wanted to avoid a repeat of slow 4G rollout.

“If we start 5G today [like we did with 4G], it will take until 2025 to achieve national coverage,” he added.

Ultimately Hanif believes the UK will be a 5G leader and that it’s not absolutely necessary for a country to be first to be considered the true leader. Indeed, it might be better to wait until the true benefits are more obvious and be a rapid follower.

“If we want to be first, we need to make sure the technology is cost-effective,” he explained.

Barriers to entry

His view was shared by Caroline Gabriel, co-founder of Rethink Technology Research who has been following the industry since the days of the 3G auction debacle.

She said it was more important to get the business model and the structure right first, rather than launch expensive new networks that cannot pay for themselves. Faster mobile broadband speeds, she argued, wouldn’t open up new revenues streams but new, innovative services devised by the operators and starters that would do this.

“Does it matter [to be first]?” she asked. “I don’t think so. You don’t need to be first. Unless you’re [Japanese operator] NTT DoCoMo, you won’t be generating shareholder value.”

Although the issue of possible delays to the 5G auction spectrum has been averted, uncertainty of cost, revenue, spectrum and standardisation remain significant barriers. And that’s before you consider the fact that 4G has a lot of life left in it.

Fortunately, Gabriel argued, the UK’s research into 5G was advanced and several operators believe that if next generation networks do nothing but reduce costs it would have been worth it.

If anything, the main issue to be decided was if 5G network operators would be utilities or service providers because the evidence suggests it is impossible to be both. A telco that decided to be a utility could provide a platform for third parties to thrive and deliver the revenue opportunities for everyone in the 5G ecosystem.

“A regulatory environment that gives flexibility and allows smaller providers to compete with huge operators would be beneficial,” she said.

“I’m personally of the opinion that [there will be a] utility model and there will be a few players in infrastructure and these will support far larger numbers of service providers.”

“I think in terms of nuts and bolts, there will be more opportunity for [all other types of companies.]," agreed Hanif. "That’s what we’re trying to get – an ecosystem.

“It doesn’t really matter if you’re a big player or a small player, it’s never been such a level playing field because of the changes that are coming. It doesn’t really matter what size you are.”

Role of startups

If it is this ecosystem of large operators, academic research and startups that will make the UK a 5G leader, then someone needs to bring them altogether.

Dritan Kaleshi, lead technologist and 5G Fellow at the government-funded Digital Catapult is working to help do just that.

“We sit in a very impartial technology neutral way across an entire ecosystem,” he said of the Digital Catapult. “We focus on how these technologies will bring transformation across the UK.”

Technology choice, cost of deployment and regulatory frameworks are but three challenges the UK faces, but demand generation and the creation of new business models is an opportunity for smaller firms.

A UK 5G ecosystem report will be published in April and early findings have discovered 57 different industry projects covering all areas such as security and AI.

“We need to look at demand-driven innovation,” he argued. “It’s not just about technology, its about what it enables.

“This is one of the biggest challenges and in this space, SMBs have a huge role. There is huge innovation coming through the software-isation of the network. They will be able to bring new innovations to the markets much quicker.”

World stage

When 5G is being deployed at the Winter Olympics and operators in other countries are talking about 2019 launches, it can be easy to conclude that the UK has no chance of becoming a leader in next generation networks.

But the general consensus is that with favourable regulation from government and support for researchers and startups, the UK can genuinely be a 5G pioneer.

So are we really that far behind the curve?

“No,” according to Howard Benn, head of standards and industrial affairs at Samsung UK. “The working systems in South Korea are the same as the ones we’ve trialled here in the UK. We don’t have the manufacturing base but we have the software skills, although we have lost some of the radio capabilities.

"On a trial basis, we’re on par with many parts of the world and we’re ahead of many places in Europe.”

more info...

Love PC gaming? Here's how you could win a new phone at the PC Gamer Weekender

The PC Gamer Weekender 2018 is set to open its doors on February 17, and if you're a master at some of the biggest PC games you may be in with a chance of winning yourself a brand new phone.

Head to the show's 16 seat tournament gaming area to play in Rocket League, Hearthstone and League of Legends tournaments for a chance to win yourself a new phone.

There are nine Moto G5S Plus handsets up for grabs as well as a Moto X4 for winners of the competition on each day. That's 20 chances of winning yourself a brand new phone.

All you'll have to do is head along to the PC Gamer Weekender on either February 17 or 18 at the Olympia in London, sign up on the day and sit down to play in a tournament for your chance to win.

You'll need to head down early though, as sign ups start at 10AM (subject to availability) with the last call for competitors at 11:30AM on each day.

You can see the full details for the PC Gamer Weekender tournament schedule so you can put together your battle plan for how you can blow away the competition.

more info...

Samsung Galaxy S9 release date, price, news and rumors

Update: Samsung has teased the camera skills of the Galaxy S9 in four short videos, plus we now have a better idea of how much it might cost and a benchmark points to a whole lot of power. There's also growing evidence of dual speakers and an Animoji-like feature.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 launch is February 25 and will be the biggest of 2018 so far, with the eyes of the world firmly placed on the South Korean firm as it introduces its retort to Apple's iPhone X, which arrived towards the end of 2017.

The invites for the event have gone out, and we know we'll be seeing the S9 at Samsung's official launch event at MWC 2018 at the end of February.

There's no question that this is when we'll see the refined sequel to last year's Samsung Galaxy S8, with the invite clearly teasing the number nine, and we already have a good idea of what this Android smartphone looks like.

The thing is, the S9 isn't looking like a phone to redefine the space. All the rumors, leaks and speculation to date point towards an iterative update. For those hoping for a game-changing device in the Galaxy portfolio, you may have to wait until 2019.

It won't just be the S9 though, with rumors heavily hinting at the larger Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus set to arrive alongside - following the trend of launching dual flagships phones that the firm started back in 2015 with the Galaxy S6.

Register your interest in the Galaxy S9 at Mobile Phones Direct (UK only)Register your interest in the Galaxy S9 at Mobiles.co.uk (UK only)Register your interest in the Galaxy S9 at Carphone Warehouse (UK only)

What the Samsung Galaxy S9 could look like (right) (Credit: Evan Blass)

Plus size: Everything we know about the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus

Don't want to read about the Galaxy S9? Watch our rumor round-up video instead.

Samsung Galaxy S9 release date

Hottest leaks:

Galaxy S9 launch date: confirmed for February 25Galaxy S9 pre-order date: rumored for March 1Galaxy S9 release date: rumored for mid-March

The Samsung Galaxy S9 launch date is locked down for Sunday, February 25 in Barcelona.

We know that, because Samsung has sent us an invite to its Unpacked event on that date, teasing the number nine in the process.

The Samsung Galaxy S9 invite teases the number nine and an improved camera

This makes the Galaxy S9 launch earlier than 2017's S8 announcement, which happened after MWC, in March.

The pre-order date is rumored to be March 1, while the Samsung Galaxy S9 release date is tipped to be mid-March according to our sources close to the S9.

TechRadar's take: The Galaxy S9 launch date is now locked in, and while the pre-order and release dates aren't confirmed, the rumored timings make sense, but are certainly subject to change.

Samsung Galaxy S9 price

What we can safely predict is that the Samsung Galaxy S9 price is sure to be steep, as the Galaxy S8 launched at $720, £689, AU$1,199.

The Galaxy S9 price will, at the very least, mirror that launch price of the S8, but there's always a chance it could cost even more.

One industry insider has told TechRadar the price for the S9 will be starting at £789 in the UK. There's no word on if the price will be higher than the S8 in other markets, but it would be a bit unfair to charge more just in the UK.

TechRadar's take: We expect the Galaxy S9 to inherit the same launch price as its predecessor or it'll cost quite a bit more.

Samsung Galaxy S9 screen

Hottest leaks:

An in-screen scannerA water-repellent coatingA 5.8-inch QHD+ screen

The Bell reports unnamed industry sources saying that Samsung has been hard at work on the display panels for the Galaxy S9 since late March 2017. If true, that’s apparently about six months earlier than usual.

As for the form the screen will take, it's rumored (and likely) to retain the Galaxy S8's 18.5:9 aspect ratio.

There's also a good chance the display will be the same size as the Galaxy S8, coming in at 5.8 inches, despite some rumors to the contrary. It's also sure to be curved and continue Samsung's trend of using Super AMOLED, which delivers vibrant visuals and good contrast.

An image seemingly showing the Galaxy S9's retail box has also leaked, listing a 5.8-inch QHD+ Super AMOLED screen.

Rumors of an in-screen fingerprint scanner abound, like the new Qualcomm Fingerprint Sensor can sit below quite thick displays, but we don't anticipate this coming to the S9.

Synaptics has announced an in-screen scanner and mentioned not just OLED but also "infinity display" (which is what Samsung calls the S8's screen) and that it's being used on a phone made by a top five manufacturer - but we don't see it being Samsung.

That's backed up by one tipster who claims an in-screen scanner isn't in the cards, as does another recent report, so don't count on that feature just yet.

Aside from that, in late 2016 Samsung licensed a new glass coating technology that makes water bounce off your smartphone screen. Samsung plans to include this tech in an upcoming phone, so it may mean the Galaxy S9 is much easier to use in the rain.

Watch the video below to see how the new glass coating technology works

TechRadar's take: The screen is likely to be a similar size to the S8's and will probably retain that phone's 18.5:9 aspect ratio, since that's the new popular form. Don't count on an in-screen scanner though.

Samsung Galaxy S9 design

Hottest leaks:

Smaller bezelsA repositioned fingerprint scanner

One of the most recent design leaks comes in the form of a render found on a skin-maker's site, showing both the front and the back of the Samsung Galaxy S9.

You can make out details such as a single-lens camera with a fingerprint scanner below and an almost bezel-free screen, along with 'Samsung' and 'Galaxy S9' branding on the back.

This matches other renders aside from the S9 branding on the back. Credit: dbrand

We've also seen a short video, seemingly showing the Samsung Galaxy S9 from the front and back, albeit with the screen off.

This all matches up with an earlier render video and rendered images supposedly showing the Samsung Galaxy S9, which show a device that looks very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S8, albeit with the fingerprint scanner moved beneath the camera lens (but not in-screen as some rumors have suggested).

Trusted leaker Evleaks has previously shared renders of the phone showing off the design we've seen above, and you can see those below.

The front and back both look to use curved glass, the bezels are small and there's both a 3.5mm headphone port and what's presumably a Bixby button. We've also seen another leak that suggests the phone will keep its 3.5mm headphone jack, unlike the iPhone range.

While you can't tell from these images, the bezels might actually be smaller than on the Galaxy S8, as a source claims the S9 will have around a 90% screen-to-body ratio, up from roughly 84% on the Galaxy S8.

In fact, a leaked image complete with dimensions backs that up, as it suggests that the Galaxy S9 will be marginally shorter than the S8, but will otherwise look similar, albeit with the scanner moved beneath the camera lens, just like in the images above.

This could be what the Samsung Galaxy S9 will look like. Credit: Weibo

Elsewhere, Samsung has trademarked a new material called 'Metal 12' which is light and strong, so there's a chance this could be used in the S9, but it probably needs more development, so we doubt it.

We've also heard that the Galaxy S9 could have a modular design, with magnets on the back letting you attach hardware accessories (which could take the form of battery packs, zoom lenses or any number of other things), a bit like Motorola's Moto Mods.

Why the Samsung Galaxy S9 desperately needs an in-screen fingerprint scanner

Only one source has mentioned this possibility so far, so we'd take it with a huge pinch of salt as we've not seen it in any renders or pictures so dar.

And a minor design tweak could come in the form of a new color for the Galaxy S9, with the phone supposedly landing in purple. We also know the S9 Plus is set to launch in Coral Blue, so we'll probably see the same for the Galaxy S9.

Recently, we've seen yet another leak of renders claiming to show the phone, which seem believable given what we've heard this far.

TechRadar's take: We'd expect a similar design to the S8, but likely with smaller bezels and a repositioned fingerprint scanner. In other words, exactly what we're seeing in most leaked images.

Samsung Galaxy S9 camera

Hottest leaks:

Samsung: "The Camera. Reimagined"A single-lens camera with variable apertureSuper slow motion videoMobile HDR video recording

The Galaxy S9 camera is going to be a key feature of Samsung's phone this year, and not because of a dual-lens camera or higher megapixels.

Instead, we're expecting to see a variable aperture, super slow motion video and the possibility of the world's first phone with HDR video capture.

The MWC 2018 launch event invite heavily teases the Samsung Galaxy S9 camera by including the words "The Camera. Reimagined."

This could mean that the Galaxy S9 camera may beat the top-of-the-line Google Pixel 2 camera if it includes a variable aperture or becomes adds the world's first camera that can capture Mobile HDR video.

Samsung Galaxy S9 camera rumors point to a 12MP Dual Pixel lens with optical image stabilization and a variable f/1.5-2.4 aperture. That means it would be able to switch between f/1.5 (great for low light shots) and f/2.4 (ideal when the lighting is better and you want more of the photo to be in focus).

This rumor comes from a leaked image of the Galaxy S9's box, which also lists it as being 'super speed', having an 8MP front-facing camera and supporting 'super slow-mo'.

This could be the retail box for the Samsung Galaxy S9. Credit: Reddit

That last point is something we've heard rumored before, as industry sources claim Samsung is working on a rear camera that can shoot at 1,000 frames per second, which would be better than anything on the market in a phone right now.

More recently we've heard additional details of what exactly 'super slow-mo' might mean, with sources claiming that the S9's camera will be able to tell when motion starts and automatically begin recording slow motion footage when that happens.

There would also apparently be a mode where you can record at normal speed and then tap a button to switch to slow-mo at specific points.

Samsung has also unleashed four teaser videos highlighting the S9's camera. While they don't confirm anything, the first three hint that it might have clever slow motion skills as detailed above, work well in low light and support an Animoji-like feature.

The fourth video shows far more, hinting at many of the same things, as well as an improved flash, live photo abilities, improved selfies - perhaps thanks to a bokeh effect or a wide-angle lens, and even social components.

We've also heard more generally that the Galaxy S9 will have an upgraded camera system. Phone screens can display HDR video, but capturing it on a phone is currently impossible.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 845 mobile chipset, however, is supposed to change all of that, and we expect this chip to be inside the Galaxy S9 in the US.

One thing we're pretty sure of: the cameras on the S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus will be different. The sketch above echoes that sentiment, as do some case renders.

This cut-out could either house a dual-lens camera or a single-lens and scanner. Credit: Techtastic/Weibo

Either way, Samsung might offer a new way for you to unlock your phone, with leaker @UniverseIce claiming that the Galaxy S9 will have a '3D sensor front camera'.

They don't explain what they mean by that, but it sounds a lot like the iPhone X's Face ID system which allows you to use facial recognition to unlock the phone. And the 3D part suggests that like Apple's solution it won't be fooled by a picture.

More rumors have been found in the Note 8 Oreo source material on this - though it's unclear whether this will be for the S9 or just the S9 Plus.

We wouldn't count on this feature as the information has been limited, but we wouldn't rule it out either.

And Samsung might also borrow Apple's Animoji feature, with one report saying you'll be able to map your face onto 3D emoji.

TechRadar's take: New camera modes and features are likely and a 3D face scanner is possible, as is a variable aperture camera, but most evidence suggests the Galaxy S9 won't have a dual-lens camera.

Samsung Galaxy S9 battery

Hottest leaks:

A 3,000mAh batteryMore power efficiency

The latest battery rumor comes in the form of a picture of a replacement unit on sale already for the phone, and it has a 3,000mAh capacity - the same as the Galaxy S8.

This lines up with a certificate supposedly originating from Brazil's telecom regulator Anatel, which also shows the Galaxy S9's battery as being 3,000mAh.

That's disappointing news, especially since an earlier report suggests Samsung will now use substrate-like PCB tech that will allow the Exynos chipset manufacturer to include a bigger battery without increasing the size of the processor.

However, whatever the size, efficiency improvements in the new chipsets should help the battery last longer.

Wireless charging is all but a given too, since the Galaxy S8 already sports it, and a photo supposedly showing the retail box (above) lists wireless charging.

TechRadar's take: Samsung is probably likely to be cautious about packing too big a battery into the phone given what happened with the Note 7, but a slight size increase is possible.

Samsung Galaxy S9 OS and power

Hottest leaks:

Snapdragon 845 or Exynos 9810 chipsetJust 4GB of RAM

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 845, which will likely be powering US versions of the Samsung Galaxy S9.

It's an octa-core chip with four cores running at 2.8GHz and four at 1.8GHz, with the fastest cores delivering up to 30% better performance than the fastest cores in the Snapdragon 835. AI processing and graphics performance have also been improved, while power use has been reduced.

The chipset also allows cameras to record 4K Ultra HD video at 60fps.

Outside of the US, buyers are likely to get Samsung's own Exynos 9810.

It includes an LTE modem which supports theoretical download speeds of 1.2Gbps - faster than any other phone, meaning you could potentially download an HD movie within just 10 seconds.

However, it seems unlikely that we'll get 6GB of RAM inside, which is what many smartphone brands (especially Asian ones) are doing - with Samsung apparently set to stick with the much-more-sensible 4GB spec instead.

That's a claim that's been echoed by a recent benchmark for the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, but the benchmark is questionable.

While it lists the Exynos 9810 chipset, which is likely to be used, along with Android Oreo, the actual scores achieved by the phone in the benchmark are far lower than we'd expect from a Samsung flagship, so the listing could be fake.

More recently though we've see a benchmark for the standard S9, again packing the Exynos 9810, and this has far more believable scores - along with 4GB of RAM.

We've also heard talk of 4GB of RAM yet again, with another source saying that while the S9 Plus might have 6GB, the standard S9 will have just 4GB, alongside 64GB or 128GB of storage. And that 4GB claim has also appeared on a leaked box photo, above.

TechRadar's take: As unlikely as just 4GB of RAM might seem most of the evidence seems to be pointing in that direction. What we can be more sure of is that you'll get either a Snapdragon 845 or Exynos 9810 chipset (depending on where you are) and that the phone will run Android Oreo.

Check out our review of the Samsung Galaxy S8 below.

Samsung Galaxy S9 other features

Hottest leaks:

An improved iris scannerStereo speakers

Samsung will likely improve the iris scanner ifor the Galaxy S9, with rumors suggesting it will be boosted to 3MP (from 2MP on the S8) and better able to recognize your eyes, even if you wear glasses or the lighting is poor. It will also apparently be faster than on the S8.

We've also heard that it could leverage 'Intelligent Scan Biometrics' to combine both iris scanning and facial recognition, along with the ability to work better in poor lighting.

A recent patent has detailed a similar system, with an iris camera that would recognize both of your eyes and part of your face.

The Galaxy S9's iris scanner could get an upgrade. Credit: LetsGoDigital/WIPO

The Samsung Galaxy S9 might also have good sound, as there are rumors of it both having AKG stereo speakers and a free set of Bluetooth AKG headphones. Both of those things have now also been listed on an image seemingly showing the phone's box.

And talk of stereo speakers has popped up again more recently, with rumors that the Galaxy S9 will have both a bottom-firing speaker and one built into the earpiece.

The Galaxy S9 has also now passed through the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and in the process we've learned that it will support all major LTE bands and that it will be manufactured in Vietnam - that latter point is interesting because the leaked box image pictured above was first shared in Vietnam, so this further suggests it might be accurate.

We've also seen a Samsung patent for a sensor which would analyze atmospheric conditions and alert you to how much pollution there was in the air.

Plus, one source has also claimed the Dex docking station we saw debut alongside the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus will get an update that will make it work more like a charging pad and allow you to type on the screen too. It means you won't need to use a keyboard and mouse when connecting your phone up to a monitor.

And there's evidence that the Galaxy S9 could have a dual-SIM slot, as there's mention of one at the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), though that model might be limited to parts of Asia.

TechRadar's take: With the exception of a pollution monitor all of these features are believable, and the iris scanner upgrades seem especially likely.

Samsung Galaxy S9: what we want to see

The Samsung Galaxy S8 is still the new shiny, but we've had a brainstorm about the improvements we'd like to see on the Galaxy S9.

1. A foldable screen

Rumors of the Samsung Galaxy X - a phone with a foldable display - have been building for the past few years.

A Samsung executive has told the media that the company doesn't plan to launch a fully foldable phone until at least 2019, but plans may change in the coming months.

For Samsung to build the first truly foldable phone and sell it in 2018 would be a major boost to the South Korean company, and may change the way we use our phones forever.

Samsung Galaxy X - the story of Samsung's foldable phone 2. A smaller version

Samsung doesn't offer an Android alternative to the iPhone SE. Instead the company has the Galaxy S8 and Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus for the mid-sized and larger phone lovers out there.

We'd like to see Samsung embrace a smaller display on the Galaxy S9, or offer up a third version that includes a smaller screen instead.

3. A fingerprint sensor under the screen

It's clear Samsung wanted to move the fingerprint sensor under the screen for the Galaxy S8, but didn't have enough time to make it work.

Instead Samsung included a touch-sensitive home button under the display, which is useful, but we'd like to see the company go the full way and include a fingerprint sensor below the screen.

4. A lower price

Samsung has had to increase the price for the Galaxy S8, making it one of the most expensive flagship phones on the market.

If you're buying it as part of a two-year deal it's not as expensive as you'd expect, but we'd like to see Samsung reduce the price for next year's phone if at all possible.

5. Dual-lens camera

Rumors for the Galaxy S8 suggested Samsung was working on a dual-lens shooter like the iPhone 7 Plus or the LG G6 but it never came to fruition.

Considering the camera improvements on the Galaxy S8 seem to be rather limited it would be great for Samsung to push the camera tech in the phone to a dual-lens setup on the Galaxy S9.

Given that the Galaxy Note 8 has now launched with just such a snapper, this is looking likely.

Everything we know so far about the Samsung Galaxy Note 9

more info...

Google Images changes make it better for image creators, worse for everyone else

Google has made a significant change to its Google Images search engine, in a bid to prevent people from downloading and copying copyrighted images.

When you now search for an image, you won’t see the ‘View image’ button. This used to allow people to view just the image on its own, and allow them to download the image without visiting the site.

This caused concern from the people who created and published those images, as not only were their images viewed and downloaded without people having to visit the site, potentially robbing them of an audience, but it also meant the images were viewed out of context, and without any information on usage rights or who to credit if you re-use the image.

Getting those clicks

As the Google search team said on Twitter, while the View Image button is gone, the ‘Visit’ button remains, hopefully encouraging people to visit the website before downloading the image.

However, you can still right-click the image and select ‘Open image in new tab’ and download it that way. Still, it’s hoped that this move will make people more aware of where their images come from.

As the Google search team explains, “Having a single button that takes people to actionable information about the image is good for users, web publishers and copyright holders”, while also revealing that these changes have come about in part due to a settlement earlier this week with Getty Images.

Getty Images filed a competition law complaint against Google with the European Commission in 2016, which accused Google of “creating captivating galleries of high-resolution, copyrighted content. Because image consumption is immediate, once an image is displayed in high-resolution, large format, there is little impetus to view the image on the original source site.”

Google and Getty Images have now embarked on a multiyear global licencing partnership to solve this issue. While this change will be welcomed by many image creators, it may prove frustrating for day-to-day users who are searching for images for legitimate purposes.

The ‘Search by image’ button has also been removed, making it harder to search for similar images, however, reverse image search still works.

Google is adding Stories to search results

more info...

Seven more Android Wear watches are set to get the Oreo update

Android Oreo is on its way to Android Wear watches across the globe as we heard late last year, but now we've had word of seven new watches that will also be getting the update.

The new watches include the Casio Pro TREK Smart WSD-F20, Casio WSD-F10 Smart Outdoor Watch, Huawei Watch 2, Ticwatch S, Ticwatch E, Polar M600 and the ZTE Quartz.

An exact timing for when the Android Oreo update will land on each of these watches is unclear, as this is just confirmation from Google that the manufacturers are adding the new features to each watch.

Those features aren't groundbreaking - it's some improvements to the battery life and added customization options (such as being able to change the vibration levels), as well as support for extra languages.

Even more watches

We know for certain the Huawei Watch 2 has already begun receiving the update in some markets. Some of those who are getting the update outside of the US and UK are also finding that the upgrade is bricking the Android Pay feature.

A Reddit thread shows lots of users losing the feature, but Google says that Android Pay should never have been live for those outside of the US and UK. Whether Huawei will later push Android Pay to other markets in a future update remains to be seen.

The Android Oreo update has already been confirmed for the watches below, and is beginning to rollout to devices now too.

Watches confirmed for the update include the Fossil Q Venture, LG Watch Sport, Louis Vuitton Tambour, Michael Kors Sofie, Montblanc Summit, Hugo BOSS BOSS Touch, Movado Connect, Tommy Hilfiger 24/7 You, Guess Connect, Gc Connect, Fossil Q Founder 2.0, Fossil Q Marshal, Fossil Q Wander, Michael Kors Access Bradshaw, Michael Kors Access Dylan, TAG Heuer Tag Connected Modular 45, Diesel Full Guard, Emporio Armani Connected, Fossil Q Explorist, Michael Kors Access Grayson, Fossil Q Control, LG Watch Style, MIsfit Vapor and the Nixon Mission.

Best Android Wear watch 2018: our list of the top Google OS smartwatches

more info...

Tweeter Bird

Search This Blog

Samsung Galaxy Note 20’s chipset might not be that bad after all

Sony Xperia XZ Premium 2: what we want to see

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The best Android games of 2018

The best Sky Q 4K movies and TV to watch

Samsung Galaxy Note 20’s chipset might not be that bad after all