With the Galaxy Note 20 launch just a week away, all eyes will be on what upgrades Samsung brings to the table. While the chipset might remain unchanged, there might be a silver lining. While Samsung flagship like the Note series and the S series are powered by Snapdragon chipsets in the US and European markets, they come with Exynos chipset in Asian markets such as India. It often tends to lose out on the performance front against Qualcomm Snapdragon counterparts. However, a new leak suggests some good news in this regard. Samsung Galaxy Note 20 release date, price, news and leaks Upcoming smartphones in India: Specs, launch date, price (Image credit: Samsung/WinFuture) According to a tweet by Anthony, a Youtuber, Samsung Galaxy Note 20 will continue to be powered by the Exynos 990 chipset, but with major improvements in terms of the performance and efficiency. These optimizations should bring it closer to the Snapdragon 865 series. He even suggested that it is almost li
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AKG’s new wireless headphones boast noise cancelling and ‘ambient aware’ features
AKG has revealed four new sets of wireless headphones over at IFA, complete with some smart tech that allows you to balance both listening to your music and keep tabs on sounds from the environment around you.
If you’re in the market for a pair of premium over-ear headphones then the AKG N700NC could be right up your street, featuring adaptive noise cancelling that can be turned on or off at the simple push of a button.
AKG promises these headphones boast top-notch sound – naturally – and ‘perfect calls’ and ‘talk thru’ features to enable you to take phone calls with an impressive level of clarity and no pesky echoes.
The headphones weigh in at 270g, and AKG says they'll let you enjoy 23 hours of music-listening on a single charge.
Then there’s the AKG N200 – a set of in-ear headphones that benefit from magnetic earbuds and a quality fabric cable that (hopefully) shouldn’t be tangle-happy. On the audio front, it promises bolstered sound chops with Apt-x and AAC audio support, and it delivers eight hours of music playback time via Bluetooth.
Another in-ear pair, the AKG Y100 (pictured above) is to be offered alongside the Y500 (below), the latter of which is an on-ear affair. Both are built for durability and benefit from ‘ambient aware’ technology, which can increase your level of environmental awareness at the touch of a button, allowing you to hear real world sounds around you.
The Y100 give you eight hours of Bluetooth wireless playback, and AKG claims that the Y500 musters an impressive 33 hours.
We've rounded up the best truly wireless AirPod alternativesA further nifty touch for the Y500 is that it automatically pauses playback when the headphones are taken off, and when you don them again, the music continues from where you left off.
How much are these going to set you back? AKG isn’t saying at this stage, and there’s no timeframe for a release date yet either, but these details should be announced before long.
IFA 2018 is Europe's biggest tech show. The TechRadar team is in Berlin to bring you all the breaking news and hands-on first impressions of new phones, watches and other tech as they're announced.
Sharp's enormous new TVs upscale images from 4K to 8K in real time
There's no denying that the 8K TVs on display at IFA 2018 look stunning, but sadly there's very little content around right now that will make the most of their abilities. Sharp has recognized that fact, and its second-gen 8K models are all capable of scaling regular 2K and 4K content.
Sharp's algorithm detects the number of pixel points in an image, and upscales them to an 8K grid in real time. The company claims the resulting picture will "display tiny details that convey a stunning realism and deliver a greatly improved viewing experience to the audience".
Great expectationsSharp is thinking big, and its new 8K models are available in three extra-large sizes: 60-inch, 70-inch and 80-inch. The company has noticed an increase in demand for screens over 55 inches over the last two years, and decided to get ahead of the game by only offering its top-end models with cinema-scale dimensions.
The three giant models will be available in Asia later this year and in Europe from 2019. It has yet to announce details for customers in other territories.
Sharp hasn't given any prices either, but its first 8K screen – the 70-inch LV-70X500E – retailed for €12,000 (about $14,000, £11,000, AU$19,000) when it arrived on European shores in April, so we expect the mid-sized model to carry a similar price tag.
IFA 2018 is Europe's biggest tech show. The TechRadar team is in Berlin to bring you all the breaking news and hands-on first impressions of new phones, watches and other tech as they're announced.
What's new from Philips TV at IFA 2018?
Thursday is press day at IFA 2018, where new products are demoed to journalists before the sweaty masses swoop in and cover them in bratwurst-stained fingerprints.
Film makers James Barber and Hollie Hayton spent their press day hanging out with Philips and its new flagship 903 Series OLED.
With Ambilight, a second-generation P5 picture processor and much improved sound thanks to a partnership with British hi-fi brand Bowers & Wilkins, the 903 is packed with features.
But what what did James and Hollie think? Find out in the video above.
For more on Philips TV, check out part two of the Extreme Earth series, where two lucky readers were offered the chance to join Philips on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Arizona desert.
The resulting 90-second 4K video and documentary are spectacular pieces of desert eye-candy that are well worth a watch.
For more from James and Hollie, click here to see what they made of Berlin outside of the IFA show floor.
You can now talk to Google Assistant in two languages at once
If you’re multilingual then you might already have been annoyed by the inability of AI assistants to understand both the languages you speak, but now with select languages Google Assistant can understand.
It's a feature that was announced earlier this year but has only now arrived on the platform.
You can now choose any two languages out of English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and Google Assistant will be able to understand queries spoken in either one of them - though you can't switch language mid-chat.
Previously you’d have to manually change your language settings if you wanted to ask the Assistant something in a different language, which isn’t practical if you’re naturally switching between languages.
This change should make Google Assistant a lot more helpful for multilingual families, or for anyone trying to learn a new language – as long as it’s one of the languages above.
More to comeWant to use languages that aren’t supported as part of this bilingual update? Right now you can’t (not without manually changing your language each time you switch between them) but Google claims that it plans to add more languages in the coming months, so yours might come soon.
And if you’re trilingual there’s promising news there too, as while right now you can only select two languages, Google says it’s working on teaching Google Assistant to process more than two languages at once.
It might take a while though, because this is more than just flipping a switch. Google’s blog post explains that even getting it to understand two languages simultaneously was a multi-year effort, which required getting Assistant to not just identify multiple languages, but understand them, and then optimizing the recognition.
Given how much work this was it might also be a long time before Amazon Echo devices or Siri become multilingual too.
Google Assistant is the smartest assistant, according to a new study
Royole's flexible displays promise a future of foldable phones and smart hats
Ever fancied a phone that you could wrap around your wrist, or build into your clothes? At IFA 2018, Chinese company Royole has shown off its range of fully-flexible displays, including panels built into a ski jacket – and a top hat.
A bendy screen is just one of the components necessary to make a foldable phone or smart coat, and Royole also makes a range of flexible sensors, circuits and other electronic systems to make these products possible.
Shape of the future“While curved displays have been the talk of the tech world this summer, Royole has developed and is now mass-producing the next generation of fully flexible displays,” said Dr Bill Liu, founder and CEO of Royole.
"Our engineers are currently working with over 220 partners worldwide to change the way people interact with technology in their personal environments."
Royole might not be a household name outside China, but with flexible devices like Samsung's long-awaited foldable phone on the horizon, its tech could soon be in high demand.
IFA 2018 is Europe's biggest tech show. The TechRadar team is in Berlin to bring you all the breaking news and hands-on first impressions of new phones, watches and other tech as they're announced. How far are we from the perfect smartphone?
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: Pixelmator ($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Pixelmator is a full-featured but approachable photo and image editor. Loosely based on its desktop cousin, it provides a raft of creative tools, whether you need to make a few tweaks to a favorite photo, or have a burning desire to craft a multi-layered composition comprising images, drawings, text and shapes.
The app doesn’t try to ape desktop editors in terms of interaction. Brush selection, for example, provides a full-screen view with large tappable previews. And although adjustment controls sit within a sidebar, this still feels friendly rather than complex; the last thing Pixelmator wants to do is pack the screen with palettes.
If nothing else, this app also represents astonishing value for money. Pixelmator is the logical next step when Snapseed doesn’t meet your creative demands, and you desire the freedom to begin photographic artwork from a blank canvas, rather than just tweak the odd snap.
Can't figure out which iPad to buy? Watch our guide video below!
Scanbot Pro is a scanner app that uses your iPad’s camera to snap documents. Assuming there’s sufficient contrast, outlines are automatically cropped, whereupon you can rotate, color-adjust, and save the result.
To some extent, this echoes functionality now built into Apple’s Notes app, but there’s an advantage to having a standalone app for scanning. It’s faster and more efficient, for one. But also, this app does more than just scan.
Your documents remain within the app and can be signed and annotated. OCR technology attempts – with some success – to create searchable text from your images, and to extract important details. These are presented as action triggers, for example to kick off a phone call or visit a website. In all, then, probably more useful than a hardware scanner – and rather more convenient to carry around with you too.
Lily invites you to make music from geometric, minimal spinning flowers. You select a color and shape – the former dictating the instrument, and the latter the lily’s petals. Open the flower and you then gain access to a pulsating playback head.
At this point, you get to set notes by dragging bars across horizontal regions. Repeat the process with multiple lilies and you’ll soon have an oddly delicate cacophony serenading your ears. This music can be exported, and you can save your current composition when you want to start a new one.
Lily is a very sweet app. It’s rather too abstract to be as immediate is it would like, but if you fancy a decidedly different and exploratory, playful take on music-making, it’s a joy.
Noted cleverly combines an audio recorder and notepad. The rich text editor is like a simplified Pages, with predefined styles for headings and lists, image support, and a highlighter for drawing a reader’s attention to important bits.
That’s nothing new on iPad, but the way text and audio integrate is. During recordings, tapping the tag button adds an inline ‘#TimeTag’. Tapping this tag later will jump to the relevant point in the recording. This means you can spend more time in meetings and lectures listening, and later return to flesh out brief notes, adding context based on the audio.
Naturally, Noted’s own format is bespoke, but you can share notes with other users via iCloud. Otherwise, you can export audio to M4A format, and everything else to PDF. In all, then, an ideal productivity aid for a wide range of scenarios.
Poison Maps is an app for finding points of interest – POIs – on maps. Hence: Poison Maps. If you were hoping it’d provide insight into finding toxins, you’re out of luck, but for restaurants, hotels, banks, tourist attractions, parking, shops, hospitals and so on, it does the job – millions of such POIs can be found by way of the efficient search function.
This might strike you as unnecessary, given the existence of the entirely free Google Maps, but Poison Maps has some trump cards. First, it has interesting and useful interface components, such as signs that clearly denote the distance to and direction of off-screen POIs.
Beyond static POIs, cycling and transport routes are built-in. Poison Maps also works offline, so should you find yourself in a new town and without a data connection, you’ll still have a fighting chance of finding the things you need.
CARROT Fit is the answer if a more sensible exercise app just isn’t doing it for you. Like CARROT Weather, this fitness tool is helmed by a snarky, sarcastic AI. Here, she comes across like the deranged offspring of HAL 9000 and a personal trainer. To wit, she’ll threaten, ridicule and bribe you, in order to “prevent your body from blimping up.”
The actual exercise bit is, broadly speaking, conventional, in that you partake in recognizable routines. But even there, CARROT Fit has a very distinct character, referring to push-ups as ‘Kowtows to Cthulhu,’ and subtly renaming the seven-minute workout ‘7 Minutes in Hell.’ Still, you’ll likely need some humor when sitting on the floor in a sweaty heap after a few minutes of exercise, and CARROT Fit has that over its straight-laced contemporaries.
Away is an ambitious, multi-layered relaxation aid. It depicts a single scene, focused on a large blossom tree near a stream. Chill-out music begins when you tap the play button, mixed with sounds from the scene.
Tap the settings button to select from three background tracks and adjust the mix. You can also shift the visual scene from sunrise to night time, with each period of day offering new sounds. There’s also a mixing disc that you can use to determine which sounds you’d like to be more prominent, such as leaves in the wind, the babbling stream or twittering birds.
There’s a timer for defined meditation sessions, and if you hanker for more, the app’s developer offers several similar themed multi-scene apps based around wind, rain, and water sounds.
Pause puts relaxation at your fingertip as you use a digit to slowly track a pulsating blob. It gradually fills the screen, whereupon the app urges you to close your eyes and keep mindfully moving your finger. A bell sounds when it’s time to return to the real world.
The app’s creator talks of Tai Chi principles and EEG-technology validation, and it’s easy to be skeptical of such claims, but Pause can be effective. Slow, deliberate movements provide a sense of focus and calm, augmented by ambient audio.
Pause could be more helpful in some ways – it stops if you move too fast, when an audible warning would be better, and you may find using it on iPad unwieldy. With the right setup and frame of mind, however, Pause provides a beautiful, tactile route into mindfulness on your iPad.
Tinyclouds is an adorable weather app. That’s perhaps a slightly odd description to use for something that’s usually utilitarian, but then Carrot Weather (elsewhere in this list) showcases how weather apps can have a character of their own, and Tinyclouds is certainly unique.
Select a location (you can store several within the app) and it provides a big temperature reading at the top of the sidebar, along with a forecast for the rest of the day and an outlook for the coming week. The rest of the screen is an ever-changing isometric city, with cars zipping about, its weather mirroring that of your chosen location.
The app does, admittedly, feel like a sketch – it could do with more detail, and at least a wider range of views. Still, as a simple, great-looking weather app for a docked and charging iPad, it’s well worth a couple of bucks.
White Noise+ is a sound machine designed to reduce distractions by way of ambient noise. Many apps in this space are a bit new age and flowery, and quite a few are, frankly, rubbish. Fortunately, White Noise+ is none of those things, instead providing a thoroughly modern, tactile take on noise generation.
The app’s based around a grid akin to smart drums in GarageBand. Here, you get 16 slots, into which you drag icons that represent different sounds. Those toward the top play more loudly, and those toward the right have more complex loops. Your mixes can be saved, and sleep timers and alarms are available if you want to use White Noise+ for meditation sessions – or for waking you up should you doze off.
You get a handful of sounds to play with for free, but the full set requires a one-off IAP. Given the quality of the app, it’s well worth the outlay.
Streaks Workout wants you to get fit. Such apps are usually associated with iPhone – hardly surprising, seeing as you’re unlikely to go jogging with an iPad strapped to your arm – but for quick sessions of personal training, it fits the bill.
You select from the exercises you’re happy to perform, and choose a workout length – from six minutes (‘quick’) to 30 (‘pain’). The app then randomly sends exercises your way, which are impossible to miss on the large display.
When you’re done with an exercise, you tap the screen to continue, but if you find that a distraction, you can switch from rep counts to timed exercise periods. You can create bespoke custom workouts, too.
During downtime, you can collapse in a heap and flick through saved statistics, mulling that iCloud support means Streaks Workout can follow you to every device, meaning you’ve no excuse to ever stop exercising.
Ventusky is a weather service that started out online, but feels like it was always destined for iPad.
Select a location and the main view enables you to switch the large map between various weather layers, including temperature, precipitation, snow cover, and air pressure. If you’re a weather nerd (and/or British), drag upward and you get an extended forecast to scroll through, along with a ton of graphs and data to bury yourself in.
The one snag is Ventusky lacks Dark Sky’s animated radar, and so you don’t see storms rolling in – just where they will be during a three-hour window. Even so, the wind streaking across your display as tiny white lines helps you understand why conditions are the way they are.
In short, then, this app looks great, is wonderfully tactile, and is pleasingly different from its contemporaries.
Samplebot on the iPhone is primarily about collecting sounds and using them to make a noise (by way of live playback on a pad grid), or turning them into oddball songs via an easy to use built-in sequencer. This is still possible on iPad of course, but with a less portable device, Samplebot’s other abilities transform it into a subtly different app.
Although you can of course still record you tapping pots, pans, glasses, and your own head, Samplebot can also bring in audio from Music, iCloud Drive, or the iOS clipboard, and sample from other apps if you’ve got Audiobus installed.
The end result is a grid pad and sample editor that’s immense fun to play around with, twinned with a sequencer that’s simple, but still powerful enough to sketch out the basics of your next hit record.
Retrospecs is a photo filter app that revels in the history of computing and gaming. Rather than turning any photo or image into a tiny Picasso with a tap, it instead reimagines whatever you load as if it was on the screen of a Game Boy, Apple Mac or C64.
In fact, over 40 systems exist once you pay for the IAP (you can test Retrospecs for free with a small selection), and if that’s not enough, you can fashion your own custom emulations. For properly authentic retro output, you can edit dither modes, add glitch animations, tweak CRT effects and more.
Full support for video combined with some bonkers filters (PETSCII! Teletext!) adds scope for YouTube weirdness. But even if you only grab Retrospecs because you’ve always wondered what your face would look like on a NES, it’s worth the outlay.
Home Design 3D is an ambitious app for home remodeling. Rather than merely give you the chance to map out a floor plan, or slap virtual paint on your walls, Home Design 3D invites you to recreate an entire property – or any dream home – in 3D.
This isn’t an app where you can whip up something amazing in a few minutes. You’ll need to spend time learning how everything works, whether adding walls, carefully positioning furnishings, or walking around the end result in 3D.
It’s complex and time-consuming, and the interface has its share of quirks, but the results can be impressive and genuinely useful. If you’re unsure, you can play around with Home Design 3D for free – but to save anything you create you’ll need to unlock the app with a one-off IAP.
Linia Sketch is an iPad sketching tool that deftly balances elegance and power. Create a new sketch and all of the tools sit at the screen edges. Scribble nearby and they temporarily get out of the way, and you can also invoke full-screen with a tap.
This isn’t an app that cares for realism. Blending with the small selection of pens is minimal, and the end results look digital, but this is a superb app for speed. You can quickly surround a selection and transform it in various ways. And there’s the ZipLine feature, which lets you draw a line and hold for a second to straighten it. It’s then possible to add further lines (to create a polygon, or map out floor plan walls) by tap-holding.
Virtual artists should look elsewhere, but if you’re after an app to jot down quick storyboard ideas or create diagrams, Linia Sketch is ideal.
Monster Park - AR Dino World figures everyone should have their own dinosaur park, and enables you to create one on a table, in a garden, or in a mall when you’re feeling hemmed in by concrete and glass.
Fire things up and a T-rex stomps about and bellows while pteranodons fly overhead. A US$0.99/99p/AU$1.49 IAP adds extra beasts, and the app enables you to augment your prehistoric critters with a virtual jungle.
Alternatively, position the experience at a distance to create a ‘portal’ into an ancient world, with the T-rex terrifyingly poking its head through and threatening you with its massive teeth.
Interaction is limited (tap the ground to make a dinosaur move, tap it repeatedly to unsportingly knock it down, and record any of your escapades), but this is nonetheless an entertaining take on augmented reality for kids of any age.
OmniOutliner 3 is a desktop-quality outlining tool that aims to bring structured writing to the masses.
It’s effectively two apps in one. Essentials is about quickly getting down and organizing ideas hierarchically. It’s quick and easy to add, promote and demote items (including with a physical keyboard, so you don’t have to keep reaching for the screen), and to shift rows around with drag and drop. The built-in search further elevates the app from more basic tools, filtering out non-matching rows so you only see only what’s relevant.
If your needs are greater, you can opt for Pro (US$38.99/£38.99/AU$62.99). This pushes the app towards word processing and spreadsheet territory, adding automation, styling options for document types (lists, book drafts, mathematical and so on) and section navigation from a sidebar. In either incarnation, the app is excellent, and a free two-week trial lets you switch between both versions to see which best suits.
FileBrowser makes it easy to grab documents from just about anywhere, then view and edit them. Think of it like a companion app to Files. Although Apple’s file manager supports iCloud and integrates with the likes of Dropbox, FileBrowser can explore connected Macs and PCs, FTP servers, NAS servers and more.
Setting things up is straightforward, and the app’s tabbed interface makes it a cinch to quickly switch between sources. Unfortunately, tabs aren’t drag-and-drop aware, but sidebar shortcuts are. File viewing works well, and you can annotate PDFs and create/unpack ZIP archives.
It’d be good to see FileBrowser more fully embrace the space available on iPad – an optional two-pane view, for example. The lack of Share sheet support is also a pity. Other than that, it’s a solid option when your file management needs exceed what Files can do.
Typorama is about adding text to your photos – or creating typographic designs from scratch – with a minimum of effort. Select a photo, flat color, or a stock image background, choose an output size, and you’re ready to get started.
Other apps in this space let you select fonts, but Typorama has you select designs. Enter some text, tap a design style, and what you typed is instantly transformed. If you’re not keen on what you see, tap the style again for variations.
You can add multiple type layers, and apply shadows and gradient effects to each one. There’s also a 3D rotation/perspective tool, and a selective eraser. Some features are locked in the free version and you must put up with watermarks, but there are various IAP available, including the ability to unlock everything for $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99.
Toca Life: Office gives your kids a chance to play out what they imagine their working parents get up to all day – albeit in exciting environments likely more colorful and interesting than the real thing.
For young children, there’s plenty of fun to be had simply in moving the little figures about, and poking backgrounds to see what happens. For slightly older kids, exploration can prove rewarding in other ways – there’s a secret exit from the jail, a working copy machine in the office, and a cafe where you can merrily experiment with what’s on the menu.
Neatly, there’s even a recording feature, so kids can get creative and act out a scene, which can then be shared with friends. In all, this is another superb Toca Boca creation that ticks all the right boxes.
Affinity Photo extinguishes any lingering doubt regarding the iPad’s suitability for creative professionals. In short, it’s Serif’s impressive Mac/PC Photoshop rival, carefully reimagined for the touchscreen.
This is pro-level photo/image-editing fare, and you need the hardware to match – at least an iPad Air 2, but preferably an iPad Pro – but with the right kit, you get a huge range of features for image editing, creation and retouching.
The live filters and liquify tools are particularly impressive, responding to edits in real time. Working with a finger or Pencil is pleasingly tactile in a manner desktop equivalents can’t match.
RAW shooting/processing support, the ability to add fonts, layer isolation, and robust Files integration all cement Affinity Photo’s place among the iPad app greats. And if you become an expert, there’s even a ‘Show Touches’ option for making tutorials that other users can follow.
Tayasui Doodle Book is a sketching app that takes a slightly different approach to its contemporaries. You still get a selection of tools, but this app’s more about the virtual paper – a semi-randomized selection of backgrounds that vary from grids and lines to bubble patterns and tiled teddy bear heads.
The idea is that these repeating patterns will inspire you to try new things, such as painting a selection of tiny monsters, or working with lined paper to create a drawing of a cat mucking about in a blind.
The tools are a bit basic (although the watercolor brush is lovely and includes a fun splat effect), but there are other apps for when you want a wide, realistic range of media. Tayasui Doodle Book is great when you just want to get drawing, but don’t know where to start.
Core Animator is an app for creating motion graphics on your iPad. If you’ve ever seen Adobe Animate (formerly Flash), you’ll feel at home. If not, the app might take longer to get to grips with, but you’re helped along by built-in tutorials and Core Animator’s usable, logical interface.
The basics involve adding objects to a canvas and manipulating them at various ‘keyframes’ on the timeline. You can adjust each one’s position, rotation, scale, and opacity, and Core Animator deals with all the frames in between.
It’s worth noting there are no drawing tools, so you must import elements created elsewhere. The app also demands time and patience, but give it both and you can end up with superb results.
Things 3 is a powerful task manager based around to-dos. Its ultimate aim is to ensure you get more done, and this is achieved by a smart and sleek workflow model that makes it simple to collect your thoughts, figure out your day, and plan far into the future.
The app can be as expansive or as simple as you need it to be. You can live in the Today and Upcoming views, working from basic to-dos, or add extra context and nested lists for more complex tasks. With iOS 11, Things 3 adds support for Split View and drag-and-drop, so you can drag links or emails right to a to-do.
This is the kind of app where you quickly wonder how you lived without it. And although it’s pricey when you buy it across iPad, iPhone and Mac, the time you’ll gain ensures it’s good value for money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tado V3+ Smart Thermostat launched to help you breathe healthier air
Tado has just announced a new generation of smart thermostats dubbed the V3+, and they come with a new app and tools to help you improve the quality of your air.
That latter feature is called Air Comfort and it works by providing insights into your home’s air climate along with suggestions on how to improve it.
Examples include when and for how long to open windows and when to air rooms, based on things like air freshness and quality, weather forecasts and pollution.
You’ll be able to access the Air Comfort skill through a new app, designed for the Tado V3+ Smart Thermostat. This also includes the main features offered by the previous Tado Smart Thermostat, such as geofencing, smart schedules, open window detection and weather adaptation, but is now more customizable.
Customize or automateYou can activate only the skills you’re interested in, while the layout is designed to be simple and intuitive. If you want to be more hands-off then you can subscribe to the Auto-Assist skill for £2.99 (roughly $3.90/AU$5.40) per month or £24.99 (around $32/AU$45) per year.
The Tado V3+ itself is available now for £199.99 (approximately $260/AU$360) in the UK, or you can get the Smart Radiator Thermostat Starter Kit V3+ for £119.99 (around $155/AU$215), but neither is currently available in the US or Australia.
These are the best smart thermostats
Premier League live stream: how to watch all the football online from anywhere
No sooner has it come back, and already the Premier League is being cruelly ripped away. Make the most of this weekend's fixtures, because football is going on its international break for a week afterwards. We're here to make sure you've got a way of getting a live stream of this year's Premier League - even all those 3pm Saturday kick-offs are being shown somewhere.
Having comfortably cruised to the title last season, Manchester City will be the team to beat once again in the 2018 Premier League season. Though big-spending Liverpool are looking like they'll provide a fierce challenge at the top of the table with their string of reinforcements.
Bolstered by Brazilian signing Fred, Manchester United will be seeking revenge on their city rivals, while the heavyweight London trio of Tottenham, Chelsea and (despite their shaky start) Arsenal should also be in the title shake-up – the latter two beginning exciting new eras after managerial changes.
At the other end of the table, smart recruitment from newly-promoted Fulham and Wolves may lift them clear of a relegation dogfight, though fellow new-boys Cardiff will need to pull off a shock if they're to avoid an immediate return to the Championship.
Whatever happens, we're here to help you catch all the games via a live stream wherever you are in the world. Football's back and in the words of your favourite player's Twitter account, we go again.
If you're in a country that's not showing your Premier League match of choice, or if you're not by a TV come kick-off time for the big games – don't sweat. With numerous online channels and, crucially, the option of a VPN service, you can tune into those fixtures no matter where you are in the world. And best of all, it's really easy to do:
Subscription services Sky Sports and BT Sport are once again the networks bringing Premier League football to viewers in the UK, with the free-to-air BBC limited to highlights via Match of the Day. Sky continues to dominate the coverage, with the rights to show 126 games in the 2018/19 season, while BT has 42.
If you're looking to stream one of these televised games, a Sky Sports subscription enables you to watch on mobile, tablet and PC via the Sky Go service. For BT Sport subscribers, the BT Sport app or BTSport.com is where you need to go for mobile or PC streaming.
You can also stream live via NOW TV, which offers attractive weekly passes for Sky Sports starting at £7.99 per day.
If you find yourself outside the UK and want to watch one of the televised Premier League games, don't worry about geo-blockers on your account – simply grab a VPN and follow the instructions above to live stream the action.
In the US, NBC has retained the rights to show live Premier League matches, which will see 230 games televised across either NBC SN, USA Network, TELEMUNDO and NBC Universo - yep, the lucky Americans get more live matches than the Brits!
The network will also be showing 150 games solely behind its paywalled NBC Sports Gold service, which is available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, and Roku, if you stump up the extra cash for a subscription.
For those sticking to the main NBC channels but keen to stream on a PC or mobile device, you can tune in watch via another subscription service such as DirectTV, Sling and Fubo - each of which has a free trial.
For the 2018/19 season, live Premier League matches will be shared between cable channels SportsNet and TSN for those looking to watch the action in Canada. TSN offers live streaming to its subscribers via its TSN Go app, and if want to stream the SportsNet fixtures, the channel is available on Chromecast, Xbox One and Apple TV.
Not got cable? Don't be disheartened. Instead, scroll this page upwards and check out how to use a VPN to live stream Premier League coverage from another location.
Good news for Premier League fans down under – free-to-air channel SBS is showing one game every weekend during the 2018/19 season. You'll need its The World Game app, if you want to watch away from the TV.
But for those needing more than just one fixture a week, subscription service Optus Sport can give you a LOT more, having secured rights to show every single Premier League fixture live – yep, all 380 of them. Those braving the unsociable kick-off times can stream Optus Sport coverage via their mobile, PC or tablet, and can also access the service on Fetch TV, Chromecast or Apple TV.
For the first time, those who aren't already signed up to the Optus telecommunications network can take advantage of monthly subscriptions to Optus Sport and watch all these games live. The service is available for AUS$15 per month and can be accessed via Google Play or the App Store.
If you're outside Australia and want to tune in to Optus Sport, you can use one of our favorite VPNs above and watch the coverage from another nation.
The official broadcaster of the 2018/19 Premier League season in New Zealand is subscription service BeIN Sport. Like Optus Sport in Australia, they'll be showing every single game live.
BeIN Sport is available as an upgrade for Sky subscribers who will also be able to stream each match on their PC or mobile device via BeIN Connect. Handily, you can still subscribe to BeIN Connect without a Sky contract, with monthly packages priced at NZ$19.78 per month or N$197.80 per year. A two-week free trial is available for both offerings.
If you've read the rest of this article, you probably know the alternative route by now. You could give a VPN a try as per the instructions above.
Star Sports subscribers in India join those who are able to watch every single game of the Premier League season live. Either the Star Sports Select 1 or 2 channels will be showing each game from the 2018/19 season.
For subscribers wanting to live stream games on the move via a mobile device, the Hotstar app is the platform you need, available via the web, Android, iOS, and Apple TV.
How modern laptops can transform your digital life
When looking to buy a modern laptop, you can be faced with a whole load of jargon and specs that may not mean much to you.
Who cares how many cores its processor has, or how much RAM it packs, when all you really want to know is how it can help you do the things you love?
So, we’re going to look in plain English at how some of the best modern laptops can make working and playing easier than ever.
Quick as a flashYou’ll probably notice that most modern laptops make a big song and dance about the fact that they have an SSD. This is a Solid State Drive that’s used to store Windows 10, along with all your files and apps, and it brings many benefits.
Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs have no moving parts which means they are much faster, so Windows 10 boots up incredibly quickly, and you no longer need to wait around to load up your files and favourite programs. With an SSD, you can start up and shut down your laptop up to 70% faster on average (based on tests run by Principled Technologies) and access the web 52% faster.
They are also quieter and use less power – which means your battery will last longer as well. Laptops with an SSD can last up to 35% longer on battery on average.
Speaking of battery life, modern laptops are now able to go much longer between charges, despite the fact that they are much more powerful than previous devices. This is thanks to clever advances in technology which makes the hardware inside modern laptops more power efficient. The less power they need, the slower the battery drains.
What this means for you is that you get more time doing the things you love without having the search for a plug socket to top up your laptop. So, you can enjoy hours of binge watching Netflix while on the go, or browsing the internet, chatting on social media or even working without being tethered to a desk and charge cable.
Modern laptops are thinner and weigh less than ever before, and this allows you to easily carry them around with ease. It means you never have to worry about leaving your laptop at home, and not only are they thin and light, but they are robust as well, with reinforced bodies and tough glass screens that keep them from being damaged.
It’s not just premium laptops that are thinner and lighter than ever before, either, but more affordable laptops have also benefited from the latest technology that allows laptop makers to fit their hardware into ever slimmer designs.
Windows 10: the perfect fit for modern laptops and modern lifestylesAlong with super-fast SSDs, day-long battery lives and thin and light designs, modern laptops also benefit from running Windows 10.
Windows 10 is Microsoft‘s latest – and best – operating system, and it has been designed from the ground up to suit modern laptops and lifestyles.
So, Windows 10 runs amazingly fast on modern laptops, and it comes packed with some brilliant apps to help you make the most out of your laptop.
The Photos App lets you view, organise and edit your digital memories, as well as easily sharing them with your friends and family around the world. The Maps app lets you discover amazing new places wherever you are, as well as offering voice navigation for when you’re driving, using public transport or walking.
SkyDrive is also built in to Windows 10, which lets you store your files on your laptop and on the internet, allowing you to access and share your files and documents from pretty much any internet-connected device, quickly and easily. There are thousands of brilliant Windows 10 apps that you can install in a flash from the Microsoft Store.
Windows 10 also has a brilliant trick up its sleeve if you have a modern 2-in-1 device, as it can intelligently switch between desktop and tablet modes depending on how you’re using the device. In laptop mode, you get the familiar Windows 10 desktop. However, by using your device as a tablet, Windows 10 turns into tablet mode, giving you a touch-screen friendly interface that makes using your modern 2-in-1 laptop easy, comfortable and fun.
Find out more about how modern laptops can transform your digital life
Looking for a new laptop? Check out the ultimate laptop buyers guide
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US Open live stream: how to watch the tennis online from anywhere
It's been a hot, sweaty, exhausting US Open 2018 so far, as the tennis world is focussed on Flushing Meadows in New York for the fourth and final grand slam of the year. But you don't have to be stateside to enjoy the action. We've compiled this handy guide for watching the US Open on TV or by live stream online, no matter where you are in the world.
On the men's side, it's pretty much been business as usual. Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic have all found safe passage through the early rounds as have the likes of Wawrinka, Del Potro, Isner and Anderson - will one of them be able to challenge the continued dominance of that main trio.
On the women's side, Sloane Stephens is the defending champion in her home country, but Petra Kvitova could be a strong challenger, too. Of course, you can never discount Serena Williams and the six-time US Open winner will be hoping her tennis remains the focus of attention rather than her fashion, after the catsuit controversy at Roland Garros earlier this year.
Whatever happens, it's sure to be an exciting tournament so make sure you're tuned into a live stream of the action by following one of the options below.
Learn how to watch every single Premier League football game live from anywhere Live stream the US Open from anywhere with a VPNAmazon Prime has pulled off a sports coverage coup by securing rights in the UK for the 2018 US Open tennis. That means Amazon Prime members can live stream all the action at no additional cost, with coverage starting at 4pm BST each day. There will also be a highlights available at 7am each morning reviewing the previous day's action.
If you want to stream the tennis from your phone or tablet, the Amazon Prime Video app is available for Android via Google Play and Apple devices via the App Store.
Click here to get Amazon Prime now
Amazon Prime membership costs £79 per year or £7.99 per month, which can be cancelled at any time. The subscription will get you access to Amazon's library of TV shows and films as well as unlimited one-day delivery on Amazon orders from the UK.
Not in the UK but still want to watch the tennis on your Prime account. Then you best option is to download and install a VPN and then log in to a UK IP address.
In the US, coverage from Flushing Meadows comes courtesy of ESPN and ESPN 2. The action kicks off at either 11am or 12pm ET (8am / 9am PT) and runs until it’s over for the day, typically around 11pm ET (8pm PT). Another option for cable customers is the Tennis Channel, which also has rights to the tournament.
For live streaming on the move, subscribers should watch via the ESPN app or WatchESPN.com.
ESPN will have live coverage of the US Open for every day of the tournament, meaning you can watch via your Foxtel subscription. Free-to-air coverage only comes in to play for the tournament's final rounds from September 5.
There's also the option of using a VPN if you're away from home and still want to catch that US Open coverage.
In Canada, it's a similar deal as you've got fairly limited options. The US Open will be covered by TSN and RDS, but again, these are subscription services.
Using a VPN is the way to go if you want to access an account when you're overseas.
In New Zealand you're going to be able to catch all the action on Sky NZ, although again, this is a paid service.
If you want to catch it but are out of New Zealand over the fortnight, you can use a VPN to access the tennis coverage.
Image courtesy of usopen.org
How to watch the Italian Grand Prix: stream F1 live from anywhere
Trying to predict the 2018 Formula One season has become practically pointless. Just when you think Lewis Hamilton has the edge, Sebastian Vettel strikes back with a big GP win. That means every race - including the Italian Grand Prix - is now essential viewing, and you can stream F1 live from absolutely anywhere with our advice in this guide.
So who's going to get the win in Italy? The form book says Lewis Hamilton, as he's taken four of the last six victories at Monza. He clearly feels at home at this course, and there's nothing Hamilton would love more than to bloody Ferrari's nose on the constructor's own turf.
But Vettel has history here, too, and the first of his three wins came ten years ago. While Ferrari hasn't had a victory in its home land of Italy since Fernando Alonso headed to the top of the podium way back in 2010. A victory at the Italian Grand Prix would continue Vettel's momentum as he makes a surge for the Formula 1 Drivers' World Championship.
Hamilton or Vettel? Vettel or Hamilton? We just don't know which way the chicaning 2018 Formula 1 championship is going to turn next at the Italian Grand Prix. But what we do know are the ways in which you can stream F1 live to find out - and it doesn't even matter where in the world you live. You can even do so for free in certain regions!
Images courtesy of Formula1.com
Tamron SP 15-30mm F/2.8 Di VC USD G2 confirmed
Four years after the release of its popular SP 15-30mm F/2.8 Di VC USD optic, Tamron has given wide-angle aficionados a new object of desire with a Mark II update.
The SP 15-30mm F/2.8 Di VC USD G2 (Model A041) becomes the latest optic to be bestowed with the G2 suffix, following the SP 24-70mm F2.8 Di VC USD G2 and SP 70-200mm F2.8 Di VC USD G2 that surfaced last year.
This second-generation lens sticks to the same basic idea as the original, even repeating its 18-element, 13 -group optical configuration. As a 'Di' lens, it's been designed for users of full-frame Nikon and Canon DSLRs, with the main draw being its combination of a wide angle of view and a fast (and constant) maximum aperture.
The additional sweetener of Vibration Compensation has also been improved from the technology in the first version, and it's now claimed to offer up to 4.5 stops of compensation.
Canon users also benefit from a rear-mounted filter holder, which negates the use of massive (and costly) filters in front of the bulbous front element, while users of both Canon and Nikon versions benefit from nine rounded diaphragm blades to help produce more attractive bokeh.
Three separate coatingsWide-angle lenses are particularly susceptible to specific aberrations, but ghosting and flare should be minimized thanks to the application of a newly developed AX (Anti-reflection eXpand) coating. This aims to keep the reflection factor for peripheral areas of the lens the same as he central portion, and it joins the eBand (Extended Bandwidth & Angular-Dependency) and BBAR (Broad-Band Anti-Reflection) Coatings used in the Mark 1 version to form a three-pronged assault on anything that might mar image quality.
Tamron also claims the lens will deliver "simply outstanding" optical performance courtesy of an XGM (eXpanded Glass Molded Aspherical) lens, together with multiple LD (Low Dispersion) elements to combat distortion and lateral chromatic aberration respectively.
Weather-resistant designTamron has specifically crafted the lens to have the same "feel of high quality and operability" as the aforementioned G2 lenses, with a weather-resistant design to prevent dust and moisture creeping in.
Its front element has also been primed with a fluorine coating, which is not only said to help repel dirt, dust and moisture, but promises to do so more effectively than the coating on the previous version.
Tamron reckons the built-in Dual MPU (Micro-Processing Unit) enables "vastly improved AF speed and precision", although whether this is relative to other lenses or the previous version (which employed the same unit) is unclear. Either way, this is once again partnered with a separate processor to handle Vibration Compensation.
The lens arrives just weeks after the company announced the 17-35mm f/2.8-4 Di OSD, a lens that's also been designed for full-frame DSLR users.
While Tamron hasn't yet disclosed a price for the new lens, Nikon users will be able to get their hands on one on September 21, a few weeks ahead of the Canon version, which will arrive on October 12. We'll update this page with pricing information as soon as we have it.
The best wide-angle lens for Canon and Nikon DSLRs
Qualcomm's readying your smartphone for a world without a headphone jack
Qualcomm has announced a new version of its aptX audio platform at IFA 2018, which aims to deliver the same performance and quality of a wired audio connection.
The headphone jack is dying as the rise of wireless continues its march across our devices - Qualcomm says the wired connection is going away - but there’s potentially good news for audiophiles worried about a poorer, wireless audio experience.
AptX Adaptive is the latest version of the firm's wireless sound technology, and Qualcomm claims it provides a robust, hi-res and virtually glitch-free listening experience.
It's not just focused on music playback though, as aptX Adaptive has been tuned to improve audio response for gaming and movies.
Current Bluetooth doesn't address latency issues - which proves problematic when gaming or watching video - and it's an issue you don't get with a wired connection.
What the Adaptive upgrade provides is a wire-like low latency experience which Qualcomm hopes will encourage more users to ditch the wire and adopt wireless headphones.
Dynamically adaptsAptX Adaptive will dynamically adjust wireless audio performance depending on content you are consuming - be it music, video or a game - which takes the hassle of manual adjustment out of the equation.
Qualcomm tells us that aptX Adaptive will be available "on a Snapdragon chip to be named in the future", which we expect to be the Snapdragon 855 which is tipped to launch at the start of December.
That means the first smartphones to boast this new Bluetooth audio technology likely won't arrive until the middle of 2019.
Could new iPhones really drop the 3.5mm headphone jack adapter?
The 3D 'microbatteries' that could power ultra-low energy wearables
Main image: The future of wearables and IoT sensors depends on better batteries. Credit: CC0 Creative Commons
Fitness trackers, smartwatches, clever earpieces and other incredible wearables are the first wave in a new era in electronics. Most are hamstrung by limited battery power, so the next wave – an army of tiny sensors that autonomously transfer data to other devices, better known as the Internet of Things (IoT) – will rely on a revolution in battery technology. Cue 3D microbatteries.
How do batteries work?Batteries have a negative (cathode), and a positive (anode) electrode made from metal, with a non-conducting electrolyte in between that supports electrically charged atoms, typically lithium ions, traveling between one and the other. When all those atoms are on the positive side, the battery needs recharging, after which the atoms (now with a supply of electrons) then travel the other way.
Given the size limitations of the standard lithium-ion batteries found in almost all portable electronics, from phones and cameras to Bluetooth earphones and wearables, scientists are constantly on the hunt for smaller and more efficient designs.
What is a 3D battery?A 3D battery is a complete redesign of how existing batteries are constructed, in order to make them either more powerful, or smaller. Instead of a layer of anode, the electrolyte, then a layer of cathode, a 3D battery has 3D-shaped anode and cathode that are more like puzzle pieces. Such a design increases the surface area of the cathode and anode, and can either hold more lithium ions, and so offer more power, or be many times smaller than a traditional battery. Effectively, 3D designs increase the energy density of batteries.
What has UCLA done?Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have created a powerful 3D lithium-ion battery no bigger than 100 grains of salt. In their paper High Areal Energy Density 3D Lithium-Ion Microbatteries published in Joule in May of this year, they outlined not only a 3D battery, but a new way of constructing it using the same techniques used to manufacture electronic circuits – that's key, because although better in theory, 3D batteries have so far proved difficult to construct.
The 3D batteries developed by UCLA. Credit: Hur et al/Joule
Instead of layers, the UCLA team's ‘concentric-tube’ design uses 3D anode posts covered by a thin layer of a photo-patternable polymer electrolyte, with the region between the posts filled by the cathode material. The end result had an energy density of 5.2 milliwatt-hours per square centimeter, which is pretty good for a 3D battery. However, even more important for use in tiny devices was its small size: just 0.09 square centimeters. Wow.
How important is this?
3D batteries are a new type of battery architecture. Credit: Hur et al/Joule
More work is needed on components, assembly and packaging, but it could mean 3D microbatteries for IoT applications are easier to manufacture. "For small sensors, you need to re-design the battery to be like a skyscraper in New York instead of a ranch house in California," said Bruce Dunn, professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA and senior author of the report, about the team’s use of cathode posts.
"That's what a 3D battery does, and we can use semiconductor processing and a conformal electrolyte to make one that is compatible with the demands of small internet-connected devices."
The battery that recharges instantly
The IoT will require instantly rechargeable, flexible batteries. Credit: CC0 Creative Commons
The amount of power a battery can store becomes less important if it can be recharged very quickly. Think about Apple AirPods and other 'true wireless' earphones; if they could be recharged in under a minute, would anyone care how long the battery actually lasted? And what if those batteries could be recharged in less than a second?
What has Cornell University done?There are other ways of making 3D batteries that could mean wearables and IoT devices could be recharged almost instantly, as proven by a team at Cornell University, which sought to intertwine the components inside a battery. In place of the standard cathode-electrolyte-anode design, they designed a 3D gyroidal structure with thousands of nanoscale pores filled with all the battery's usual components.
"This is truly a revolutionary battery architecture,” said Ulrich Wiesner, professor of engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “This three-dimensional architecture basically eliminates all losses from dead volume in your device.” He also pointed out that by shrinking everything to the nanoscale, you get orders of magnitude higher power density. "So you can access the energy in much shorter times than what’s usually done with conventional battery architectures."
So how fast will its 3D battery recharge? "By the time you put your cable into the socket, in seconds, perhaps even faster, the battery would be charged," said Wiesner. The team's paper Block Copolymer Derived 3-D Interpenetrating Multifunctional Gyroidal Nanohybrid for Electrical Energy Storage was published in Energy and Environmental Science in May 2018.
The flexible battery for wearablesBoth of these 3D batteries are an attempt to breathe new life into the lithium-ion battery, but some think a whole new kind of battery is needed for flexible (and even stretchable) wearable devices – think smart clothes for fitness pursuits that constantly collect and send data on all kinds of body metrics.
Wearables for the fitness market could eventually have 'mechanical flexibility'. Credit: Garmin
Lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries are one option that's been explored by a team of researchers in Korea, in a paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry. The team demonstrated a new class of battery that uses an all-fibrous cathode–separator and carbon nanotubes to create a metallic foil form factor. As well as exceptional improvements in energy density, that mechanical deformability means the batteries can be crumpled without being affected.
With the IoT growing at an exponential rate, and with the wearable fitness tracker market alone reckoned to be worth $48.2 billion by 2023, there's going to be a massive and growing demand for tiny batteries that boast higher capacity, can be recharged quickly, and can even bend and flex – and more power to whoever can make them commercially viable first.
TechRadar's Next Up series is brought to you in association with Honor
The best upcoming TV shows and movies on Netflix
UPDATE: After 48 years, the great filmmaker Orson Welles' final film is being released at last by Netflix. Find out more about it on the next slide!
Netflix has changed the way we engage with television shows and movies forever, giving us the most convenient way to experience both from the comfort of our living rooms, laptop screens or smartphones.
With a rapidly growing library of shows on the service and a huge lineup of projects in the works, we've put together a list of the best upcoming TV shows and movies on Netflix for 2018 and beyond.
The shows and films on this list have been hand-picked based on how excited we are for them, meaning that it's not intended to be a complete release schedule. Instead, consider it our curated list of the coolest looking Netflix Originals currently in the works.
We've also included upcoming seasons of already established shows which we're really eager to see. So without further ado, these are the best TV shows and movies coming soon to Netflix.
How to become a Netflix masterOrson Welles, the brilliant writer and director of the classic film Citizen Kane, died 33 years ago, but hasn't stopped his long-unfinished final film The Other Side of the Wind from being released at long last. Thanks to Netflix, which stepped in to help fund its completion, we will finally get to see Welles' lost masterpiece 48 years after it was shot. Along with the film, Netflix will also be releasing a companion documentary about the process of finishing Orson's opus, which is sure to be fascinating for film fans. Eerily, Orson's film The Other Side of the Wind is about a Hollywood director (played by the late John Huston) who dies before getting to complete his own final film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind. Also starring a young Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich and Susan Strasberg, The Other Side of the Wind is an incredibly important cinematic event that cinephiles will not want to miss. Watch the trailer below.
Release date: November 2, 2018.
Outlaw King, based on the "untold true story" of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots and the real man referred to by historians as 'Braveheart', is an epic film starring Chris Pine which Netflix hopes will be a major contender come awards season. Directed by David Mackenzie (Hell of High Water), Outlaw King looks set to deliver all the high drama, large-scale battles and questionable Scottish accents we've come to expect from this kind of heavyweight film. Find out more about the film here.
Release date: November 9, 2018
With his fantastic films Blue Ruin and Green Room (two of the most brutal cinematic entries in recently memory), writer/director Jeremy Saulnier established a style that's as harrowing as it is exhilarating. His next film, Hold the Dark, promises to be just as intense as his previous two films and has already been picked up by Netflix for worldwide distribution. When a young boy is killed by wolves, a wildlife naturalist enters the Alaskan wilderness (Jeffrey Wright) is hired by the boy's parents (Alexander Skarsgård and Riley Keough) to find out what happened. Watch the trailer below.
Release date: September 28, 2018
If you were around in the '90s, you probably remember the cute TV series Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart and a talking cat named Salem. What you might not have realised, is that the show was based on an old Archie Comics series. Now that the staggering success of Riverdale has put the Golden Age publisher back on the map, it's time to for Sabrina to return in a darker, more terrifying way. Thankfully, Netflix is doing just that, with the service bringing everyone's favorite witch (and her cat) back to television with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina — a series which promises to embrace the comic's more recent horror stylings. The show's creators have already name-checked the likes of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist when describing the tone they're aiming for, meaning it'll be a far cry from the family-friendly original TV series. Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa will also be in charge of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, so expect some crossover to occur between the two shows. Judging by how dark Riverdale already is, we imagine that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina will go all into some deeply Satanic territory with its exploration of witchcraft and the occult. We can't wait!
Release date: October 26, 2018
1980s saturday morning icon He-Man has seen his share of reboots in recent years, so it stands to reason that his long lost twin sister She-Ra should also try her hand at a modern day comeback! The Netflix Original series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (notice the plural in the title this time around) sports a brand new art-style and is expected to feature a number or new characters along with returning ones. We can't wait to see what She-Ra's arch nemesis Hordak looks like this time around! As for whether He-Man will make a guest appearance, we'll just have to wait and see...
Release date: November 16.
Arguably the hottest actor in martial arts cinema right now thanks to his starring turns in The Raid films, not to mention his supporting turn in the upcoming Mark Wahlberg actioner Mile 22, Iko Uwais has signed with Netflix for a 10-part series that takes place in San Francisco's Chinatown district. Uwais plays an aspiring chef who becomes an assassin tasked with restoring balance among the ancient triads that rule city. In case you need more convincing, Uwais will also act as the lead fight choreographer and stunt co-ordinator on the show, which also stars Byron Mann (Altered Carbon), with John Wirth (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; Falling Skies) acting as showrunner.
Release date: TBA
Director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, Captain Philips, United 93) is no stranger when it comes to recreating real-life tragedies, and with his first Netflix Original film, simply titled Norway, the filmmaker will explore the devastating terrorist plot that left 77 Norwegians dead in 2011. Norway will star Ander Danielsen Lie and Jon Øigarden and is expected to be absolutely harrowing.
Release date: November 2
First published in 1978, the novel Watership Down told an survival story about a group of rabbits that venture out of their warren to find a new home in an attempt to escape tyranny and oppression. An animated version came shortly after, and while it looked like something akin to an old Disney film at first glance, its content would be considered incredibly bleak and disturbing to most children. Now, Netflix and BBC have teamed up to produce a new four-part Watership Down animated series and have already lined up some big names to lend their voices to the project, including John Boyega, James McAvoy, Gemma Arterton, Nicholas Hoult and Sir Ben Kingsley. Expect it to be even darker than the original.
Release date: 2018
Having assembled an amazing cast for his next movie (now known as Velvet Buzzsaw), writer-director Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) looks set to deliver a fantastic Netflix Original film in the future. The film will star Nightcrawler alums Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo, along with John Malkovich, Daveed Diggs, Natalia Dyer, Tom Sturridge, Billy Magnussen and Zawe Ashton. The film has been described as a horror thriller. Sounds intriguing to us!
Release date: TBA
Having made a huge splash with his explosive Indonesian action films The Raid and The Raid 2, Welsh born writer/director Gareth Evans is doing something a little different with his upcoming Netflix Original film Apostle — his first English-language film since his little-seen debut. We don't know much about it, other than it stars Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast) and Michael Sheen (Passengers) and follows a man who attempts to rescue his sister from a religious cult. While it probably won't feature any Silat-based martial arts brawls, it's likely to be just as violent and intense as his previous films.
Release date: 2018
Given that the original Making a Murderer series took over a decade to make, we're not entirely sure when its announced follow-up will actually land on Netflix. We're hoping sooner rather than later, as subjects Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, convicted for the murder of Theresa Halbach on what appears to be extremely unreliable evidence, have already been incarcerated since 2007. We're waiting on more information with bated-breath.
Release date: TBA
Reuniting Hollywood megastars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill for the first time since Superbad, Maniac is expected to be a monster of a hit for Netflix later this year. A remake of the Norwegian dark comedy series of the same name, Maniac sees Hill play an institutionalized man who retreats into a number of fantasy worlds. Need more convincing? Okay, well it's also directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective: Season 1, Beasts of No Nation). In other words, there's no way we're missing this show.
Release date: September 21, 2018
Joel and Ethan Coen, directors of such classics as No Country for Old Men, Fargo and The Big Lebowski, officially step into the streaming arena with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western mini-series that will star James Franco, Liam Neeson and Tim Blake Nelson. It will be the first time that the brothers will write and direct for television, making the upcoming Netflix series a major event for fans.
Release date: 2018
Late last year, we reported that Netflix will make one more season of House of Cards, but without Kevin Spacey, who was dumped from the show due to sexual misconduct allegations. It's a pretty bold move for Netflix to fire the lead star of its flagship series and carry on anyway, but we're very confident that Robin Wright will easily carry the show for its sixth and final season.
Release date: 2018
Exciting news for fans of Martin Scorsese's classic gangster films – the director is bringing The Irishman to Netflix in 2018, and Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel and Al Pacino (working with the filmmaker for the very first time) are all along for the ride. The Irishman follows a mob hitman (De Niro) as he recalls his possible involvement in the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, and is based on the best-selling book by Charles Brandt. If you're a film buff and aren't excited about this, you may need to check your pulse.
Release date: 2018
Best laptop sales in Australia: Cheap laptops to buy in August 2018
If you're looking for a cheap laptop or a mammoth saving on a premium portable computer, you've come to the right place. We've scoured the web for savings – from the usual suspects to the niche deal sites – and rounded up all the genuine and worthwhile specials in one neat place. We've covered everything from budget browsing machines to high-performance powerhouses, so you'll no doubt find something to match your needs.
Best laptops of 2018: our pick of the 15 best notebooks this yearUp the top, we've highlighted a selection of the latest deals that we've sniffed out, so you can reap the rewards of having your finger on the pulse. Below that we've covered some of the more popular laptops that often come up on special, and then included a quick list of the best prices on TechRadar's pick of the latest best laptops.
If you're from the US or the UK, check out our selections of the top laptop deals in the US or in the UK.
Best laptop deals this week
We'll keep on updating the list of deals as and when we find them. Below, you'll find up to date prices on TechRadar's favourite laptop, so keep an eye out for those savings.
The best deals on our favourite laptopsOver the years we've reviewed plenty of laptops and, as a result, we've seen what to avoid and what to jump on when there's savings to be had. We'll keep track of the prices of some of the best we've seen so that you can snatch up a bargain when they do show up. Check out the prices below and see if anything has dropped enough to tickle your fancy.
Saying that we're very happy with Dell's XPS 13 is a huge understatement. The slim profile, revolutionary design and small frame bely its powerful performance and gorgeous 13-inch screen. Typically you'd have to weigh up portability and performance, but the XPS 13 has managed to strike a fine balance between the two. With Intel's latest Kaby Lake processors plus lighting, quick storage and memory, the XPS 13's starting price is certainly an impressive one. We're so chuffed with it that it's still one of our favourite Ultrabook, and has taken the top spot as the best Windows laptop and the best overall laptop.
Read the full review: Dell XPS 13
Asus has nailed it with the overhauled ZenBook Flip S 2-in-1. Adding top of the line processing power, plenty of memory and a speedy PCle solid state drive available in some of the models, this laptop shows off a beautiful new design to perfection, giving you the ability to use it as a laptop or a tablet. While it costs a pretty penny as compared to some of the competition out there, it would be our top recommendation if money isn't a factor.
Read the full review: Asus ZenBook Flip S UX370
While this may not be a great leap from the previous generation of MacBook Pros with Touch Bar, the 2018 model is definitely the best Apple has produced to date. The Cupertino firm has ramped up performance for the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2018, more so than the bigger 15-inch model as well. A thin OLED display at the top end of the keyboard can be customised to for various functions, and also offer Touch ID for secure logins. And although it retains Apple's signature design, it doesn't come cheap, but you can argue with the choice if you're a diehard Apple fan.
Read the full review: Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar 13-inch (2018)
Our earlier choice of gaming laptop, the Asus ROG Zephyrus GX501 has been knocked off its perch by MSI's GS65 Stealth. With cutting edge components, including an 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8750H processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, it makes the top spot in gaming laptops. It's also cheaper than the ROG Zephyrus GX501. And it doesn't look like a hunky gaming laptop either; with subtle design tweaks, the GS65 Stealth can pass off as a work or study laptop without anyone being none the wiser.
Read the full review: MSI GS65 Stealth
Dell's XPS 15 laptops were already some of the best you could buy, but this beautifully redesigned 15-inch 2-in-1 competes with the Dell XPS 13 in every respect, with the convenience of becoming a tablet when needed. It's one of the most aesthetically pleasing devices in its category and also boast plenty of power. Under the hood is a new Intel Kaby Lake G-series processor featuring 'discreet-class' Radeon graphics – meaning with the power comes a bit more noise.
Read the full review: Dell XPS 15 2-in-1
If you're after some more further info on the best laptops, check out some of our other dedicated articles:
The best laptops of 2018 in AustraliaBest gaming laptops of 2018The best ultrabooks of 2018Best business laptops of 2018Best 2-in-1 laptops of 2018Watch the video below for the top 7 things to consider when buying a laptop.
Apple Watch 4 release date, price, news and leaks
Set your smartwatch for the Apple Watch 4 launch date, because Apple has officially sent out invites to its iPhone XS launch event for Wednesday, September 12.
Apple Watch 4 rumors indicate we're in for a larger screen, bigger battery, and the chance of an official sleep tracking app, given all of Apple's digital health initiatives.
Those are some (quite literally) big changes for the new Apple Watch 2018 compared to the Apple Watch 3 that tops our current best smartwatch list.
We've gotten our first look at the Apple Watch Series 4, with an official-looking photo that has leaked less than two weeks before the big announcement.
Below we've put together all of the leaks, rumors and speculation about the Apple Watch 4 we've seen so far, plus a list of things we'd like to see Apple implement in its next-generation wearable.
Samsung Galaxy Watch vs Apple Watch 4 rumors: how will it compare? Cut to the chase What is Apple Watch 4? The next generation Apple smartwatchWhen is Apple Watch 4 out? September 12 announcement, with estimated September 21 or September 28 release dateWhat will it cost? Probably upwards of $329 / £329 / AU$459 Newest Apple Watch 4 leakThe first official-looking Apple Watch 4 gives us an idea of the biggest highlight thanks to 9to5Mac: a larger screen within what looks like the same case sizes (42mm and 38mm).
If you look at any existing Apple Watch, you'll notice a lot of needless bezel around the perimeter, where the screen stops and a larger black border remains. Apple appears to have gotten rid of this and given us more screen real estate.
The Apple Watch 4 (Photo Credit: 9to5Mac)
As the example photo suggests, this leaves room for more information, including a bunch of complications squeezed onto a new Apple Watch 4 watch face.
In fact, as prior rumors have suggested, the Apple Watch 4 is supposed to have a 15% larger screen. And this is likely without changing the dimensions much (if at all).
Apple Watch 4 release date
Apple Watch 4 will almost certainly be announced at the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus launch event on Wednesday, September 12.
There are clear signs it's coming, including hints in Apple's iOS 12 beta. Its software references four new Apple Watch models (likely two sizes and LTE/non-LTE models).
There's also evidence for its imminent arrival in the form of an EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) listing for six unknown Apple Watch models. These are probably the Apple Watch 4 (especially as they're said to be running watchOS 5), and we wouldn't expect them to appear on the EEC until close to launch.
An Apple Watch 4 release date in September makes a lot of sense. Apple announced the third iteration of its smartwatch on September 12, 2017 (it came out September 22), and the Apple Watch 2 was released a year earlier in September 2016.
Want to get more specific: Apple likes to launch new product on Fridays, so expect pre-orders on Friday, September 14, and an actual release date in stores on either Friday, September 21 or Friday September 28. It may depend on when the iPhone XS is ready to launch in stores.
Apple Watch 4 priceThere’s no word on the Apple Watch Series 4's price, but it’s likely to be around the same as the Apple Watch 3 currently is, meaning a starting price of around £329 / $329 / AU$459 for the smaller 38mm version.
That said, the Apple Watch 3 actually had a lower launch price than the Apple Watch 2, so with all the extra tech likely to be found in the Apple Watch 4 the price could equally increase or decrease a little.
Bear in mind that the price we've mentioned above is just the starting cost. If you choose the larger 42mm band or opt for LTE connectivity, the Apple Watch 3 gets more expensive, as does choosing a pricier case or strap material. All of that is likely to remain true for the Apple Watch 4.
Apple Watch 4 design and display
Apple Watch 3
A trusted analyst that has previous history of predicting Apple products suggests the Apple Watch 4 is set to undergo a big design overhaul, and now we've heard the same from a trusted Apple source too.
So far every generation of the Apple Watch has come in either 38mm or 42mm screen sizes, but KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says he believes the Apple Watch 4 will have a 15% larger display. That has since been backed up by a report from trusted Apple reporter Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.
Kuo also reported in July 2018 that the screen will have a 1.57-inch screen while the larger variant will be 1.78 inches. The Apple Watch 3 comes with either a 1.31-inch or 1.54-inch display.
A concept artist also put together the below diagram to show how the added screen dimensions may look on the final product.
A similar story about the screen comes from a source that believes the Apple Watch 4 will have an edge-to-edge display, which would be larger than the one on the Apple Watch 3. It also claims you'll be able to keep using your existing bands, so we expect the body of the watch to be very similar to the Apple Watch 3.
The Watch 3 has a lot of bezel space around the outside of the display, so we're expecting the company has slimmed this down to fit in the extra screen real estate.
That said, Kuo's first report does suggest the company will be including a larger battery inside the Apple Watch 4 that will likely mean the body of the watch will have to be at least a touch bigger to squeeze in the larger cell.
Kuo also notes that the design of the Apple Watch 4 is set to be "more trendy", but exactly what the analyst means by this isn't particularly clear yet so we'll have to wait for picture leaks to know more about the look.
Before Kuo's comments, we had seen a patent for a self-adjusting watch strap. This would involve a mechanism that expands and contracts the strap as needed, so that the fit remains comfortable and not too loose at all times, which could also help ensure the sensors on the watch get accurate readings.
It's unlikely to happen on the Apple Watch 4, but we've also seen an Apple patent for a circular smartwatch screen.
And back in 2016 we saw another patent filed by the company for a round smartwatch, so we may see that circular design on some future generations of the wearable.
Apple Watch 4 features and specOne leak suggests Apple will use faster, more versatile circuit boards for its antenna. That's again according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who speculates it'll mean a more stable LTE signal and better heat and moisture resistance.
Rumors for watchOS 5 (learn more about that below) originally suggested the upgrades to the OS will be using the LTE signal much more regularly, so it makes sense if the company plans to update it to a faster antenna.
However, WWDC 2018 (where watchOS 5 was unveiled) didn't show off any new features to do with connectivity, so it may be we have to wait until the Apple Watch 4 to hear about that.
One change that we can predict is the chipset, with a new Apple S4 one likely to be included, though we don’t yet know how much difference that will make.
As for new features on the Apple Watch 4, it looks like you may able to unlock your watch by just looking at it. Apple patents show that the Apple Watch 4 may bring a Face ID camera to make the wearable more secure.
That'd mean you'd just be able to look at your watch to unlock it and avoid having to enter an annoying PIN number to be able to use certain functionalities. Additionally, it would make it a whole lot easier to make quick FaceTime calls from your wrist
Apple Watch 4 fitnessOne report from late in 2017 suggests the Watch 4 could get an upgraded heart rate tracker that could embrace EKG technology for the first time.
EKGs, also known as ECGs or electrocardiograms, are more advanced than a standard heart rate monitor and provide more in depth information, by using currents of electricity to analyze your heart's behavior.
The rumor comes from Bloomberg (who spoke to people familiar with Apple Watch 4 plans) but the site also spoke to a cardiologist at the University of California who said the feature isn't intended for those who don't experience heart-related issues.
The cardiologist went as far to say if you’re a "healthy person", “there’s no reason to follow ECG” activity.
There's also an older patent for a wearable that can measure your respiration rate, which could well be a feature on the Apple Watch 4, but considering we've yet to see any further leaks about the feature it may be something included on a future wearable like the Watch 5.
You can expect the return of fitness features we've seen on the Apple Watch 3 including the top-end heart rate monitor and GPS technology as well as the ability to track your swimming with the waterproof design.
Apple Watch 4 OS and batteryIt’s almost guaranteed the Apple Watch 4 will run the newly announced watchOS 5 software, which is going to feature upgrades to fitness features, the Siri watch face and much more. You can learn all about the new watchOS 5 features right here.
One report has said the new software will bring something called StreamKit, which would allow for a Spotify app on Apple Watch. That would be a big deal for those who don't use Apple Music - but we didn't hear about that at WWDC during the watchOS 5 reveal.
It may be StreamKit is coming later - perhaps alongside the Apple Watch 4 - or we may have to wait until watchOS 6 to hear about it.
StreamKit is rumored to be a framework that's set up behind the scenes to allow cellular versions of the Apple Watch to receive push notifications from apps. That would mean you'd be able to get Facebook or Twitter messages directly to your wrist, and it's another step toward having a fully functioning phone replacement.
Another report (from 9To5Mac) found a suggestion in some watchOS 4.3.1 beta code that the company may be ready to allow for third-party watch faces in the next version of the Watch software.
If that's the case, it means lots more developers will be able to make watch faces for the Apple Watch and hopefully there will be far more innovation and experimentation than what we've seen in the past. That said, it wasn't announced during WWDC so this is yet to be confirmed.
What watchOS 5 tells us about the Apple Watch 4 What we want to seeWhile exact details about the Apple Watch 4 remain a mystery for now, the things we want from it aren’t enigmatic at all. In fact, they’re right underneath these words.
1. Android compatibility
We know this is hugely unlikely to happen, but wouldn’t it be great? It would also help the Apple Watch match Android Wear in one of the few areas where it doesn’t already, since Android Wear offers limited compatibility with iOS devices.
It’s understandable that Apple would want to keep its Watch working only with other Apple devices, since doing so keeps people in its ecosystem – you’re not going to switch to an Android phone if you already have an Apple Watch.
But that could also put off anyone who doesn’t want to make a long-term commitment to Apple, and it completely rules out anyone who currently uses an Android phone from having one of the best smartwatches on the market.
2. Even better battery lifeThe Apple Watch 3 actually has quite good battery life, at least by smartwatch standards, easily lasting at least two days if you don’t use LTE.
But that still leaves plenty of room for improvement. Many fitness trackers last around a week or longer and of course a conventional watch will go for years.
It’s not realistic to expect the Apple Watch 4 to do the same, but any gains would be appreciated and help make it feel like less of a downgrade from your analog watch in that area.
Improvements could also make sleep tracking more viable, since currently you’re likely to plug your Watch in overnight.
3. More fitness features
The Apple Watch has become more and more a health and fitness device over the years and that’s now one of its main selling points, but there’s still room for improvement here.
Much of this will be handled by apps and software updates, but we’d like to see more health and fitness skills from the actual Apple Watch 4 hardware too, such as sensors that can track your respiration rate and blood oxygen levels.
4. Better SiriOne of our few complaints in our Apple Watch 3 review was about the patchiness of Siri. When it works it’s great, but sometimes commands won’t be heard or interpreted properly and that sort of thing can put people off using it at all, since when it does fail you’d usually be quicker doing the thing by hand.
So we’d like Siri on the Apple Watch 4 to work better. That’s probably largely a software or connectivity hurdle, which could mean any improvements will reach older models too.
Another option would be for Apple to improve the microphone so Siri can hear us better, but that's not really the main issue we faced on the Apple Watch 3.
5. Improved performanceApple upgraded the chipset in the Apple Watch 3 but it’s still not quite as speedy as we’d like, especially when it comes to loading apps, which often isn’t instantaneous.
Much of the time the Apple Watch’s whole purpose is to be a faster, simpler alternative to getting out your phone, but if you’re waiting for apps to load it’s arguably not.
So we hope the chipset in the Apple Watch 4 – likely to be called the Apple S4 – will offer the sort of smooth performance we get with an iPhone 8 or iPhone X.
6. A circular option
On the scale of things that are going to happen this ranks way above Android compatibility but below most other things.
Apple seems happy with the design of the Watch and hasn’t substantially changed it in the various versions it’s launched so far, so we don’t expect a redesign any time soon, let alone a completely different screen shape.
But having a circle as an option would be nice. Conventional watches often have a circular face, as do many Android Wear ones, so to appeal to more buyers it would make some sense to offer the choice.
The issue is it would mean reworking the interface a bit, which Apple probably doesn't want to do.
7. Heart rate insightsThe heart rate monitor in the Apple Watch 3 is fairly impressive, as it can keep a record of things like your heart rate ranges when working out, your heart rate variability and your daily resting heart rate, as well as your beats per minute, but it doesn’t do much with the information.
It would be good if the Apple Watch 4 – or a software update on previous models – added insights into what these stats actually mean and how you can affect them, because that would turn some graphs into genuinely usable information.
Given WatchOS 4 already brings the ability to poke you to be more active at times that are helpful to you, using this heart rate data to help you get fitter (by suggesting slightly longer walks, or congratulating you on lowering your resting heart rate with reasons it's happened) would be excellent.
Already have an Apple Watch? Why not grab some of the best Apple Watch apps?Check out our Apple Watch 3 review below:
iPhone 9 release date, price, news and leaks
The iPhone 9 release date will be announced by Apple on September 12, and even if the phone doesn't go by that name, we know we'll get an all-screen iPhone closer to the iPhone 8 price. At least, that's how all of the iPhone 9 rumors are stacking up.
It's shaping up to have a 6.1-inch screen with an iPhone X-like all-screen (notched) design. The only downside is that it's thought to exchange the OLED for an LCD.
Average users may not notice the difference outside of side-by-side comparisons. They will notice the expected iPhone 9 price difference and its wider, more fun color options compared to the other new iPhone sizes.
Yes, we expect as many as three new flagship phones, in the form of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus. But anyone holding out for a more affordable device from Apple should look no further than the iPhone 9.
Update: The iPhone 9 may end up being 'affordable' (for an iPhone at least), but the latest iPhone 9 leaks point towards a large, 6.1-inch display and the same power under the hood as the rumored iPhone XS and XS Plus. That's good news.
Apple may opt to keep with its current incremental naming system for this handset, and instead of calling it the iPhone 9 it may be called the iPhone 8S instead. If Apple does go for iPhone 8S, it would suggest the handset will only have minor upgrades over the iPhone 8.
You'll find everything we know so far about the iPhone 9 (or the iPhone 8S if that's what Apple opts for) below, and we're constantly updating this page with the very latest on the new iPhone.
There are another two iPhones rumored: iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus Cut to the chase What is iPhone 9? A cheaper upgrade we're dubbing 'iPhone 9'When is iPhone 9 out? September 12 announcement; September 21 or 28 release dateWhat will iPhone 9 cost? Estimated to be iPhone 8-like pricing iPhone 9 release dateThe iPhone 9 will be announced on Wednesday, September 12, which happens to be the same date that the iPhone X launched a year ago. Tim Cook will hold it up in the same venue too: The Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, the company's headquarters.
But when will the actual iPhone 9 release date occur? Pre-orders are likely two days later, on Friday, September 14 (it's always a Friday), and Apple likes to launch its phone one to two weeks later (also on a Friday). That puts us at Friday, September 21 or Friday September 28.
But all of that depends on inventory, and sometimes newer technology (or hot new colors) cause Apple to stagger launch dates (iPhone 5S and iPhone X are two great examples). The LCD-equipped iPhone 9 may face the same delays into October, while the iPhone XS could be launched first.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 missed out, so will the iPhone 9 get a dual camera?
iPhone 9 priceWhen the iPhone 9 does arrive it's sure to be expensive - this is an 'affordable' iPhone, not a budget iPhone - though the final price tag may be less than you might expect.
The main price rumor we've heard comes from renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who claims the iPhone 9 could cost $600-$700 (around £450-£530, AU$810-AU$950), which would potentially make it cheaper than (or the same price as )the iPhone 8.
Or register your interest in the iPhone 9 at Carphone Warehouse (UK only)
That's also lower than an earlier price rumor of $700-$800 (around £500-£570, AU$870-AU$990) from the same source.
Whatever the case, it should be priced far below the iPhone X, and likely well below the iPhone XI - if such a phone launches.
The cost might further be kept down slightly if Apple decides not to bundle a 3.5mm headphone adaptor with it, as one analyst reckons might happen. But that just means you'll have to buy one separately if you have normal wired headphones.
Apple may also be looking to make its iPhone range more accessible, and with no sign of the iPhone SE 2 any time soon, it may fall to the new iPhone to provide a more attractive entry point to the Cupertino based firm's smartphone line.
iPhone SE 2 release date, news, price and leaks iPhone 9, iPhone 8S or something else?What's more certain is that Apple will probably go back to the drawing board when it comes to naming.
While iPhone 9 is the next logical step for Apple's stock handset, there's a chance we'll see it drop the numerical part of the name and go for a cleaner 'new iPhone' moniker.
We've already seen it do this with the iPad, and its Mac and Macbook lines are also devoid of numbers, so aligning the iPhone range with the rest of its portfolio makes sense.
There are also rumors that Apple may use the 'S' addition for the iPhone XI and iPhone X Plus (e.g. iPhone XS and XS Plus) - so keep an eye out for a potential iPhone 8S as well.
New iPhone 2018: everything you need to know on the latest iPhone leaks iPhone 9 news and leaksThe iPhone 9 is expected to be a sequel to the iPhone 8 - and perhaps called the iPhone 8S if it features only incremental upgrades over its predecessor.
Early iPhone 9 rumors suggest it will, and one of the leaks includes a render video, showing how the phone might look.
As you can see in the video below, it looks a lot like the iPhone X, but with a single-lens camera. The source adds that it has a 6.1-inch OLED screen.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo also reckons Apple will launch a 6.1-inch handset with lesser specs than other 2018 iPhone models.
This phone will supposedly have an aluminum (rather than stainless steel) frame and according to Kuo will have an LCD (rather than OLED) screen, but could have just a 0.5mm bezel.
It's also said to have a single-lens camera and innards that are more reminiscent of the iPhone 8 than the iPhone X, as the chart below details.
This could be Apple's 2018 iPhone lineup. (Credit: KGI Research/MacRumors)
Kuo also notes that the resolution of the 6.1-inch model (which we'll call the iPhone 9) could be lower, at 320-330 pixels per inch (ppi), while the iPhone XI could have a screen of 458ppi or more, and that it could have 3GB of RAM while the other upcoming models might have 4GB.
Most surprisingly, he says that it may not have 3D Touch, a feature every iPhone since the iPhone SE has had. The last piece of information we've had from Kuo refers to the color choices for the iPhone 9.
While the iPhone 9 may fall into an 'affordable' price bracket (for an iPhone at least), it looks like you may get a lot of screen with most rumors now pointing towards a 6.1-inch display.
Credit: 9To5Mac - a concept of what the new iPhone 9 and iPhone XI colors may look like
Kuo believes the 6.1-inch iPhone will come in normal Apple colors like white, grey and red as well as bolder looks of blue and orange. Kuo also believes the larger and more expensive iPhone XI will come in white, black and gold.
For the iPhone 9 we've also seen schematics that possibly show the phone, which you can see below. Alongside them dimensions of 147.12 x 71.52mm were revealed.
This could be the shape of the iPhone 9. Credit: Forbes / Ghostek
While the design looks to be broadly similar to that of the iPhone XI, it looks like the iPhone 9 might have thicker screen surrounds, as reputable leaker Ice universe has shared an image of tempered film for the three upcoming phones, showing that the mid-size one (the cheaper model that we're calling the iPhone 9) has exactly that.
This isn't the only talk of a 6.1-inch iPhone 9 either. Prior to all this we'd heard rumors of a 6.1-inch LCD phone elsewhere, with the source - who's supposedly privy to Apple's product designs - adding that it might have a metal back.
That would be an odd move when Apple switched to glass for all of 2017's models, a switch which also allowed for wireless charging, so if the iPhone 9 really does have a metal back you might not be able to charge it wirelessly.
Further image leaks claim to show the 6.1-inch iPhone 9 in real life, and they appear to follow the render leaks we've previous seen, with a single, large rear camera and a LED flash below it.
However, while most rumors point to a 6.1-inch screen, one of the most recent rumors is that it will actually be 6.0 inches, and that it will have a single-lens rear camera and a TrueDepth front-facing one.
That's something we've heard before, as unnamed supply chain sources have supposedly said that a lower price handset will include Face ID, though they also said it might have an OLED screen, which recent rumors dispute.
Further confusing matters, while most sources reckon that Apple will launch three new iPhones in 2018 and that two of them will be OLED-packed iPhone X successors, one source claims that two (a 5.7 to 5.8-inch one and a 6.0 to 6.1-inch one) will be LCD, while only one will be OLED.
It looks like the iPhone 9 screen won't be the best around then, but an ace it may have up its sleeve is Apple's latest power. An analyst has claimed that the iPhone 9 will get the yet unannounced Apple A12 chipset, as well as the higher-end iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Plus.
That would be great news for prospective buyers, with the iPhone 9 potentially offering a sizable screen and a serious amount of power under the hood.
We've also heard reports that Apple might include a fast charger in the box with the iPhone 9 and any other 2018 iPhone models, letting you juice it up quickly, though given that this is likely to be a cheaper handset than the iPhone XI the company might reserve this for its flagship.
In more minor news we've also heard that the iPhone 9 might use an Intel modem. With current iPhone models there's a split between Intel and Qualcomm ones, but Apple is rumored to be relying purely on Intel in 2018.
And an Apple patent suggests that the company is working on a single-lens camera that can sense depth like a dual-lens one, making it ideal for Portrait Mode. We wouldn't expect to see this on the iPhone 9, but it's possible, and could give it iPhone X-like camera skills with one less lens and likely at a lower cost.
What we'd like to seeBefore we knew any rumors about the iPhone 9, we put together the list below on what we'd like to see from the new handset.
What once was a hardware staple for the iPhone is well on its way out. If you buy an iPhone X, you'll get a glimpse into Apple's home button-less future, which is now, well, its present.
After some adjustment time, most will forget about the trusty button's absence in the iPhone X, but it'd be a nice send-off if Apple kept the home button for one last appearance in the iPhone 9.
As well as losing the home button, the iPhone X also lost Touch ID - something we weren't all that happy about.
While Face ID works well, there are still occasions where a fingerprint scanner would be more useful. We don't mind if Apple pops it on the rear, but what we'd really love to see if its embedded in the display itself. Yum.
Apple is ahead of most smartphone manufacturers in that it includes a set of earbuds in each and every box. But once the headphone jack disappeared in the iPhone 7, you could either listen to music with the Lightning-connected EarPods or charge the phone, but not both.
While it's unlikely, it'd be a dream come true if the iPhone 9 came with AirPods included in the box. Apple's easy-to-lose but beloved wireless headphones would be a huge selling point for the next iPhone.
This way, you can enjoy some tunes wirelessly while your phone is charging.
Apple's investment in wireless charging is young, though it's essential enough that we'd be pleased to see it show up in the iPhone 9.
Moving from the iPhone 7 to the 8, enabling the wire-free charging feature required Apple to make the phone's back all-glass, as to allow the charging signal pass through the device.
Keeping this feature hints that the iPhone 9 might not look all that different from what's available today, and will likely be just as easy to break.
Apple reportedly lacked the resources to put AMOLED displays in any phone except its new iPhone X. Give the supply chain about six to eight months to calibrate and Apple should see about using the impressive display tech in the iPhone 9.
It’s a bit baffling for the company to dodge including a AMOLED display in the iPhone 8, only to reserve it for the high-end iPhone X.
We'd like to see the richer colors and deep blacks that only this type of screen can provide to come to the next iPhone, namely the iPhone 9.
The iPhone 9 will feature a set of dual rear-facing cameras – that much is almost certain. However, as it has done in the past few years, Apple will only include it in the plus-sized model, the iPhone 9 Plus.
It'd be an awesome move for the company to give this feature to those who don't want to shell out plus-sized dollars, but still want all of the bells and whistles associated with Apple’s nifty feature.
Adjusting portrait lighting and shooting photos with depth is great to have on your phone as a DSLR replacement. And as Apple continues to pour its efforts into these competitive features, it’d be wise to homogenize the results from its broad range of devices moving forward.
Check out our iPhone X review below:
iPhone X review: finally, the reboot we've been waiting for
iOS 12 release date, news and features
The iOS 12 release date will be announced on September 12 and, based on that, we have a very good on when the final software will come to your iPhone and iPad.
What's new? When will you be able to get iOS 12? New features like Memoji, Group Notifications, and better overall performance will likely launch September 18.
Of course, you can get the iOS 12 beta right now and it's already better than iOS 11. It also gives us preliminary insight into iPhone XS and Apple Watch 4.
Good news: Apple is already up to iOS 12 developer beta 9 and we've tested features like the Measure app, Siri Shortcuts, and created a Memoji of ourselves. Our older iPhones are also faster, while Grouped Notifications make the UI easier to navigate.
Bad news: Group FaceTime was delayed, and it won't launch as part of the software on (or around) September 18. Expect it in iOS 12.1, maybe sometimes in October.
Apple is making its mobile operating system reliable and competitive with Google's Android Pie. That much is obvious.
Here's what we know about iOS 12 based for your older iPhone and iPhone XS.
Update: Here are our first impressions of the iOS 12 beta after going hands-on!
See also: the 25 new iOS 12 features that Apple didn’t tell us about iOS 12 release date June 4 – Developer beta launched (to paid Apple Developers)June 25 – iOS 12 public beta launched (it's free)Tuesday, September 18 (or close to it) – the final iOS 12 software (still free)You can now test it early, as there are three iOS 12 release dates: one for developers, one for public beta testers, and one final version coming soon for everyone else.
The developer beta is available now and gets more frequent refreshes. But it's early software and you must be a registered Apple developer. That costs money: $99 for the annual membership. It's for people who like to tinker with software weekly, and so far Apple is on iOS 12 developer beta 11.
The iOS 12 public beta is the one most people will want to test out, and it's also now available to download. It launched on June 25 and is completely free. It's also likely to be less problematic than the developer beta. Expect more stable updates every two to three weeks. The downside? Apple's public betas are always one step behind what the developers have access to.
Both versions of the iOS 12 beta will be unfinished software, so we advise you to proceed with caution before deciding to install iOS 12 beta on your primary device. For example, the iOS 12 beta 1 was great for us, but we had minor reset problems with iOS 12 beta 2. Waiting for the final iOS 12 version is a safer choice if you rely on your iPhone daily.
The release date for a stable iOS 12 version should be in mid-September, alongside new iPhones XS and iPhone XS Plus. No guarantees, but that's how it seems to work every year. History has told us that it's the Tuesday after the iPhone 9 and iPhone XS launch event, so on or around September 18 seems likely.
iOS 12 reliability Apple's looking to put the problematic iOS 11 behind itOlder iPhones will be 40% to 70% faster at certain tasksiOS 12 will focus on reliability and performance with this update, and support all of the same iPhones and iPads that iOS 11 worked with.
Apple called out the iPhone 6 Plus, specifically, saying iOS 12 makes this phone 40% faster at launching apps, 70% faster at launching the camera app, and 50% faster at displaying the keyboard. Keyboard typing and other routine features on older iPhones can slow down with every new iOS update, and Apple is looking to change these pain points with iOS 12.
This makes your existing iPhone and iPad more reliable, and your older devices can be used by family members or be sold now that they'll be more function with iOS 12. They don't have to sit in a draw because they're too slow.
Here's a concrete example already: for us, the public beta has been reliable enough to download. There's the occasional iPhone reset or hangups, but we actually found it to be more reliable than the problematic iOS 11 in some instances. So far, so good.
iOS 12 hints at Apple Watch 4Apple is readying an Apple Watch 4, at least according to an iOS 12 developer beta 2 update that references Watch4,1, Watch4,2, Watch4,3 and Watch4,4.
That indicates two sizes and both LTE and non-LTE versions of the smartwatch. It's just like we saw from the Apple Watch 3, originally referenced as Watch3,1 to 3,4.
Apple Watch 4 rumors indicate a 15% larger screen (by reducing the bezel) and a larger battery, hopefully for sleep tracking and an always-on display.
(Photo Credit: 9to5Mac)
We've seen the first official-looking Apple Watch 4 photo leak (above), ahead of the big September 12 launch event, and sure enough, the larger screen is the highlight.
iOS 12 doesn't confirm these new features for the iPhone compatible smartwatch, but it does appear as if Apple actively tweaking its software for new Watch hardware.
iOS 12 is 200% less annoying on iPhone XHere are two irksome features we hated about iOS 11 on the iPhone X that iOS 12 is going to fix. The final software is going to feel 200% less annoying when it launches.
Closing app windows in iOS 12 is now easier thanks to the fact that all you have to do is slide up on an open app to dismiss it from the multitasking menu. iOS 11 had us press down on the app until red close icons appeared over top of each app, and then to tap those little red icons to dismiss the app. That was unpleasant.
Second, whenever we picked up our phone, we'd always pressed the volume up and power button accidentally, which is the new 'take a screenshot' button combination. Apple has disabled this action whenever the phone screen is off. Our iOS 12 Photos app is no longer going to be filled with errant screenshots on the daily.
iOS 12 compatibility Compatible with iPhone 5S, iPad mini2 and iPad Air and newer11 iPhones, 10 iPads, 1 iPod touch – the broadest iOS update yetiOS 12 will run on all devices that have its 64-bit chipset, which was first introduced in 2013. It'll work on the iPhone 5S and newer, while the iPad Air and iPad mini 2 are the oldest iPads that are compatible with iOS 12.
That's means this update is supporting 11 different iPhones, 10 different iPads and the sole iPod touch 6th generation still clinging to life. It’s the broadest support for a software update Apple has ever offered, and this is one of the biggest advantages Apple has over Android phones.
ARKit 2 and multiplayer gaming ARKit 2 allows for 'shared experiences' (multiplayer potential)LEGO, Fender, Adobe and Pixar are all working on AR with AppleiOS 12 cements Apple as a leader in augmented reality (AR) with the arrival of groundbreaking multiplayer capabilities it calls Shared Experiences in ARKit 2.
These multi-user virtual environments are coming to ARKit, allowing for multiplayer gaming and experiences through iPhones and iPads. iOS 12 is going to create a more collaborative (and competitive) way of experiencing AR.
LEGO demoed a four-player game, pledging that it was in when it came to Apple's “creative play possibilities.” Players were involved in building up an AR town. It was like The Sims was reimagined for the future.
ARKit 2 opens up AR to hundreds of millions of users, according to Apple, and that makes iOS 12 the broadest AR platform in the world. We got a taste of AR last year, but multi-user virtual environments bring more advanced tools and gameplay.
iOS 12 pinpoints 911 calls in the USYou won't have to worry about reciting your exact location when calling 911 in the US thanks to iOS 12. It'll pinpoint your whereabouts during emergency calls.
Apple says it'll "automatically and securely" share your iPhone location with first responders, but only with them and only during such emergencies. It's an effort to reduce response time, yet maintain your privacy.
New 'Measure' app and USDZ file format New USDZ file type dedicated at augmented realityMeasure app for iOS 12 to replace your measuring tape'Measure' is getting its own AR app. It uses the iPhone's and iPad's advanced sensors to measure objects in front of you, including suitcases, as shown in the first iOS 12 demo. All it takes it just tap-and-drag along the edges of the object on the screen.
It can also automatically detect the approximate dimensions of a photo – we can imagine that will help when you go to buy a photo frame, but can't find the old-fashioned tape measure. iOS 12 to the rescue.
For AR developers, Apple has created a new file type called 'USDZ.' The company worked on USDZ with Pixar, and Adobe is supporting it, too. The file format can be shared across FIles, Mail, Messages and Safari. This is an important step forward for developers working on AR apps.
Camera app changesApple didn't announce big camera changes at its WWDC 2018 keynote, but later said that the default camera app will get tweaked with iOS 12.
The Portrait Lighting mode on newer iPhones with a dual-lens camera will look more natural. The software will be able to define crisper edges by more effectively separating a person from a background scene. Apple is also allowing third-party apps to use the software to separate the foreground and background.
It'll be the end of an era for our how to scan a QR code from your iPhone and iPad guide. The default camera in iOS 12 makes QR code reading automatic.
And while not part of the camera app, RAW photos can be imported and managed on an iPhone and iPad, with the bonus ability of editing RAW photos on an iPad Pro.
Photos app is now smarter with iOS 12 Betters search and a new 'For you' tabSuggestions on who to share photo collections withShare back suggestions nudge friends to send their photosThe Photos app is expanding search in an effort to compete with Google Photos. It recognizes photos by event and indexes them accordingly. Apple says it takes into account over four million events, citing the Aspen Ideas Festival as a niche example.
This lets you search by event without any thankless manual tagging. Searching by event joins other smart suggestions, including filtering by people, places, and relative dates (searching via Siri works with all of these and is quiet handy).
The iOS 12 Photos search capabilities have also been broadened to let you use multiple search terms at once. Seeking "dog, animal" should weed out all of your gourmet hotdog results (this is a real problem we just tested on iOS 11).
A new tab 'For you' is coming to the iOS 12 Photos app, filled with personalized suggestions on how to improve and share your pictures. Sharing has gotten smarter, letting you share at full-resolution and suggesting who to share these photos with.
Share back suggestions is a neat feature that lets you send photos to a friend, and it uses machine learning to poke them to send photos they took to you. iOS 12’s photos sharing uses iMessage's end-to-end encryption.
iPad switches to iPhone-like gesturesIt's confusing owning both an iPad and a new iPhone X right now because returning to the home screen and opening Control Center are executed by different gestures.
The iPad takes cues from the iPhone X with the iOS 12 update: swipe up from the bottom to return home and check Control Center by pulling down from the top right-hand corner.
This may be a prelude to the iPad Pro 2018 that's rumored to include Apple's True Depth camera for Face ID, Animoji and Memoji.
Siri Shortcuts can find your lost keys, more Siri Shortcuts allows you to assign phrases to tasks'I lost my keys' can ring your Tile tracker to find keys'Heading home' sends ETA notification to roommate, sets thermostat and fan, and brings up the fastest route through Apple MapsGallery and library full of pre-configured Siri ShortcutsSiri is getting smarter. It‘ll know that “I lost my keys” means to ring your Tile tracker. Tile is a handy gadget, but getting to the app is a pain, and having Siri integrated is a game-changer for both Tile and our peace of mind.
Siri is going to be filled with shortcuts, so much so that Apple is creating a shortcuts app for iOS 12. It’ll suggest coffee orders from the place you always order from and message contacts to tell them you're running late, and there's also Kayak-based flight information you can call up via voice. By pressing the add to Siri button, you can then say “Travel plans” and Siri will read back information such as your hotel address.
Right now, the IFTTT-like Siri Shortcuts app is in beta testing via Apple's TestFlight app and meant for selected third parties. It's one of the few features that hasn't made it to the iOS 12 beta for developers or for the public yet.
Siri translates new languages, learns motorsport scores Siri can now translate over 40 language pairsMotorsports scores, schedules and stats knowledgeFood and celebrity facts knowledge expanded uponPassword search not part of Siri's duties in iOS 12Try asking Siri to translate something into Spanish. It works, and with iOS 12 it'll be even more robust with over 40 language pairs to aid your international travels.
We really hope Siri will be able to translate foreign words into English (that's not possible with iOS 11 at this time when asking Siri what 'hola' means in English).
Siri will also learn the language or motorsports, per se. Asking for Formula One and NASCAR information will have Siri recite live standings, schedule, roster and stat info.
Food knowledge and celebrity facts are also part the Siri update. Right now, asking "How healthy is fish" gives a smatter of search results and requires opening up Siri. In the future, a specific answers about food will come from the USDA database, citing calories, vitamins, and how healthy the food is overall.
Password hunting is now within Siri's grasp, letting you search any saved passwords, according to Apple. This applies to both apps and websites.
Apple News, Stocks, Voice Memos and CarPlay Apple News: new Browse tab and sidebar navigationStocks: robust chart design and stock news integrationVoice memos: easier menus, iCloud support, on iPad (finally)CarPlay: third-party app support, like Google News and WazeApps are indeed getting updates with iOS 12, starting with Apple News. There’s a new Browse tab and a sidebar for better navigation. Stocks is finally being rebuilt with a helpful news design, complete with charts and Apple news headline integrated into into stocks. The top stories will be business news curated by Apple News editors.
Voice Memos is coming to iPad (as well as macOS), and it’ll get iCloud support, long overdue changes. Now you won't have to AirDrop conversations between devices in order to listen back. It'll also be easier to assign names to voice clips thanks to an overhauled Voice Memos redesign.
Apple Books is the new name for iBooks, allowing you to pick up reading where you left off and a new store interface to browse buy ebooks and audio books.
CarPlay is going to support third-party applications, with Waze and Google Maps appearing on-screen. Apple didn’t call out the Google-owned apps by name, but they were there on the screen. This was a major highlight of iOS 12.
Apple is expanding its Do Not Disturb capabilities with a cleaner 'Do Not Disturb During Bedtime' mode. It'll silence not just the notification delivery sounds, but also the visual notifications clutter that can distract you when you're trying to sleep.
The lockscreen remains clear until you unlock your iPhone in the morning. You can allow certain apps to break through, just like with DND mode right now. Apple refers to these as critical alerts, and they're opt-in.
Do Not Disturb options aren't one-size-fits all, either. It can now automatically end in an hour, at the end of the day, when you leave a certain location, or at the end of a meeting in your calendar. iOS 12 even makes the DND moon icon in Control Center have 3D Touch support to act as a shortcut to all of these options.
Instant Tuning is an iOS 12 feature you'll love if you've ever gotten a notification from an app you always seem to dismiss (HQ trivia, breaking news alerts, etc), but don't have time to turn off future notifications in the many submenus of Settings. Apple is allowing you to control individual app notification profiles right from the lockscreen, without making you leave what you're doing.
Deliver Quietly is an option within Instant Tuning, and it'll allow you to choose to have notifications delivered silently Notification Center by default so you’re not interrupted by alerts on the lockscreen. It's a nice in between option.
Siri can help clean up your messy lockscreen with notification delivery suggestions based on how you interact with notifications. Siri will understand which notifications it should deliver prominently and which ones to send to Notification Center. It's like IOS 12's version of 'clean up your desktop' system nudges.
Screen time is Apple's take on limiting your iPhone use – how much time you're spending on apps, which apps you use the most, and which apps are sending you the most notifications.
To give you a little extra help, Apple has created app limits. You can set your own limit, with a notification letting you know when time is almost up. A 'Time is up' message will display when you've reached your self-imposed-Siri-assisted limit.
Parents can create limits for kids with Allowances, time-of-day-based downtime controls, and category controls. Education and essential message apps can also be green lit thanks to an always-allowed settings.
The best part? Setting limits for your kids uses Family Sharing, so you can manage it all remotely from your parental device – no need to get hold of your 12-year-old kid's phone to execute on these new iOS 12 controls.
Thinking of buying the iPhone X? Watch our overview video below:
iOS 12 grouped notifications Grouped notification on iOS 12 to clean up individual notifications messSmartly grouped by app, topic, thread. Tap in to look at a particular groupCan clear a whole group of notifications with a single swipeGrouped notifications are coming to iOS 12. This is a small, but important update (maybe the most important iOS 12 update) announced at the Apple WWDC keynote.
It binds together notifications by message threads and topics, making it easier to see everything at a glance. Right now, individual notifications in the morning are a big pain to check as they pile up.
Animoji is expanded, not just with new masks, but with tongue detection (as seen on stage) and wink detection (not announced, but confirmed for iOS 12 afterward). Ghost Koala, Tiger and T-Rex will be joining the cast of Animoji masks.
Memoji is a thing, too. It's a customizable mask that can look like you – or the real you, according to Apple. It still resides in Messages. You can select hairstyles, eye color and accessories like earrings and sunglasses. Like Animoji, this is an iPhone X only feature due to requiring Apple's True Depth front-facing camera.
Group FaceTime (now launching later) Group FaceTime for up to 32 people with dynamic UICan use Animoji and Memoji in FaceTimeWon't launch with the final software on day oneGroup FaceTime is coming to iOS 12 with up to 32 participants, and you go directly from a group chat to a group FaceTime in the Messages app.
Update: Apple has delayed the launch of iOS 12 Group Notifications, indicating in the latest iOS 12 beta release notes that it'll come out this 'fall'. To us, that sounds like an iOS 12.1 launch – like Apple Pay, Apple Cash, AirPlay 2 and other features didn't make it live on day one in previous operating system updates.
People can drop in and drop out at any time. The interface is filled with tiles that can expand, and 'the roster' along the bottom for everyone else in the Group FaceTime chat. When people start to speak, their window gets bigger, even if they're in the bottom roster of participants. It works on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and you can even answer on the Apple Watch and HomePod with just audio.
Animoji is coming to FaceTime and Group FaceTime. You'll of course need to update to iOS 12 and an iPhone X to make that magic happen.
That's a wrap for new iOS 12 features at Apple's WWDC. The two biggest highlights were Grouped notifications and Group FaceTime with Memoji. We'll test out the iOS 12 beta and report back when it becomes available to the public.
Previous reporting...
Apple's iOS 12 update for your existing iPhone and iPad will be announced today at 10am PT at the company's WWDC 2018 keynote. We're here reporting on it live.
You'll be able to test it early, too, as there will likely be three iOS 12 release dates: one for developers, one for beta testers, and one final version for everyone else.
None of this should surprise you by now. Apple launches its software updates at the same time every year. It'll run through all the iOS 12 changes in about 24 minutes, according to past Apple keynote history.
What should surprise you are the features. iOS 12 has become a big mystery, with Apple reportedly pulling back front-facing features in order to fix iOS 11 problems.
Don't worry, you can still anticipate at least some groundbreaking ideas and design adjustments due to the launch of iPhone X last year and theoretical iPhone X2 and iPhone 9 release date later in 2018.
Apple has a chance to make meaningful changes as it adapts to all-screen displays. Here's our list of what we expect from iOS 12, according to rumors and leaks.
Cut to the chase What is iOS 12? Apple's next big iPhone and iPad software update When is the iOS 12 release date? Announcement next week, June 4 with a subsequent beta, September launch How much will iOS 12 cost? Nothing. iOS 12 will remain free. iOS 12 release date and beta schedule iOS 12 to fix what was wrong with iOS 11"iOS 12 just works," may be Apple's big message about its next iPhone update, as it's reportedly focusing on reliability and shelving many exciting features.
It's okay to be torn about this news if you were looking forward to iOS 12 with a fresh face. Then again, it's hard to argue with experiencing fewer bug-filled random resets on your iPhone.
Apple's iOS 12 plans are going to be a godsend if you've been experiencing issues with iOS 11 – even the iOS 11.4 update has new, ongoing problems. It's been bad PR for Apple.
Which features won't be in iOS 12?
Apple was reportedly planned, but delayed:
Those may have to wait until iOS 13, if you are to believe the rumors about the Apple teams new mission. It's all in an effort to make iOS 12 stabilization impeccable.
iOS 12 and macOS cross-platform appsApple is thought to be bringing first and third-party iOS apps to your Mac, making one of the biggest iOS 12 features for your computer instead of your phone.
It's a long-overdue upgrade. We've always asked: Why can't you control your smart home with the Home app via that all-powerful iMac Pro? You can't do it today. It's a ridiculous notion.
Apple is rumored to be allowing developers to expand their app ecosystem to the forthcoming macOS 10.14 update. Apple's own apps, like Home, are also said to be finally making the jump, according to recent reports.
Don't get too excited. This feature may also be saved for iOS 13 and macOS 11.5 in 2019, says a new report. It's supposedly being worked on, but how quickly it comes to the table may leaving you waiting for a while.
We're giving this one a good shot at being at WWDC on our speculation scale – we're at least expecting Apple to lay the groundwork for such a feature in 2018.
More Animoji (in more places)Animoji – whether you demanded it or vehemently opposed it, Apple is due to bring more Animoji to iOS 12 for use with the iPhone X Face ID camera. iOS 11.3 just gave us four new Animoji faces to play with, but why stop there?
The navigation of these animated character masks should get easier, too, according to Bloomberg. That's important, because to get better use, they need to break out of their Apple Messages confines, where Animoji are currently buried.
Apple's Animoji character may make two jumps in 2018. First, the natural jump to FaceTime for video chats behind a virtual panda, robot, and poop mask.
Second to what may be a new iPad Pro 2018 with a TrueDepth camera for Face ID and Animoji. We've seen evidence of an updated iPad recently, beyond the cheap new iPad 2018. But we don't foresee new iPad Pros until later this year.
Way better autocorrectMaybe we could have lumped this iOS 12 change under fixes, but it deserves its own mention. Everyone wants better autocorrect from the built-in iOS keyboard.
Currently, it can be downright terrible. Why? It may be due to Apple's commendable stance on privacy, with all of the smarts happening on the device itself or masked so that individuals aren't identifiable.
Apple says it's not mining your data like you may find on some Android phones. But we also want a smarter keyboard that doesn't autocap and autocorrect randomly.
iOS 12 is Apple's perfect opportunity to balance differential privacy with our typings needs. With the focus on reliability this should be near the very top of the list.
Flexible Face IDFace ID isn't better than Touch ID. There. We said it. It's a neat party trick and makes the iPhone X feel like it's from the future, but we're typing our passcode multiple times a day whenever Face ID fails. That's unacceptable.
iOS 12 will fix Face ID so that it works when your device in landscape orientation, rather than only in portrait, according to Macotakara's supply chain source. This change should go a long way to fixing our biggest Face ID problems.
We'd also like to see a "try again" button when Face ID fails the first time. Having to put the iPhone X to sleep and wake it up again just to re-engage Face ID is annoying and design nonsense. Apps that use Face ID for passwords, like our banking app, have this "try again" feature. Expect to see this in iOS 12.
The better Face ID is with the iOS 12 update, the sooner we'll forget that we miss the Touch ID fingerprint sensor that's likely to have had its last hurrah in the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.
More iOS 12 features we want to seeWhile nothing is known for sure about iOS 12 yet we have a clear idea of some of the things we want to see, such as the following.
System-wide password managerWe'd also like to see a system-wide password manager built into iOS 12, not just username and password saving in Safari. That's not helpful if you apps on iOS.
With Face Unlock and Touch ID securing our phones, there's little fear in relying on a password manager on mobile devices. And remembering passwords to so many different apps seems like a wasteful second layer of security.
Always-on display hints?Look out for tiny always-on display hints in iOS 12, as Apple could easily squeeze this useful feature into the iPhone X2 OLED screen in September. The software may have hidden hooks for an always-on screen in the iOS 12 beta code.
OLED essentially 'turns off' black parts of the screen in an effort not display the bare minimum without eating up battery life. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9, the Google Pixel 2 and even the rumored LG G7 have shown off this idea to great effect.
Apple does have a raise-to-wake feature that's been a big hit among new iPhones. But a true always-on display would help differentiate the iPhone X2 OLED from the rumored iPhone 9 LCD.
New iOS 12 wallpaperEvery new version of iOS seems to get new wallpaper, and we expect iOS 12 to be no different in 2018. It should allow Apple to further exhibit its iPhone X OLED screen.
Specifically, we could see more dynamic wallpapers from Apple. iOS 12 needs more moving backgrounds besides a bunch of moving bubbles in various colors.
New iOS 12 concept videos show the iconic Earth wallpaper spinning, for example. Right now, that's a flat image, and that doesn't put OLEDs to full use at all.
Grouped notificationsiOS 12 may finally bring a fix to having so many notifications in chronological order. Every morning, our iPhone is littered with so many ungrouped alerts.
Grouping notifications together would make life easier, as long as it's not differently than what we had in iOS 9 with lots of spacing between important alerts. Android Oreo does this nicely, and iOS 12 could easily lift this feature.
We've seen iOS 12 concepts include grouped notifications and also small notification icons on the lockscreen for things like weather and activity ring progress. That would take up less space and provide data at a glance right under the time and date.
Group FaceTimeSpeaking of grouped things, we're keen on opening up the FaceTime party to more than just 1:1 chats. iOS 12 should welcome group FaceTime to iPhones and iPads.
We've had 1:1 video chats long enough
Conference call software, from Hangouts to Skype, can already do this, so it's natural to expect Apple to open up FaceTime to groups eventually. iOS 12 may be it.
Sound familiar? This was supposed to already be a feature in the current version of iOS, but it didn't actually happen last year. Either that rumor was wrong or was shelved until iOS 12. We'll find out more in June.
Camera controls in the camera appFile this under: Why is this still a problem? Apple's camera app is very barebones compared to its competitions, to the point that you can't change video resolutions within the camera app. It has to be done through Settings > Photo & Camera > Record Video. All of this requires exiting the camera app. That's very unhelpful.
We'd also like to see other settings become easier to use. Android phones do a good job at letting you switch between the rear- and front-facing camera with a swipe up or down on the screen, and the white Timer numbers (3s, 10s) can be hard to see in landscape mode when you're focusing on a subject that's white.
While some app redesigned have been shelved for iOS 13, we're hoping these small tweaks make it into the iOS 12 beta this month.
Having iOS 11 problems? Here's how to fix them
iPhone XS release date, price, news and rumors
The iPhone XS is the name of Apple's new iPhone for 2018, and the photo (below) is our first look at it in two different sizes, according to a convincing new leak.
The photo in question depicts the 5.8-inch iPhone XS and 6.5-inch iPhone XS Plus, according to an exclusive report from 9to5Mac, and both have OLED screens.
Update: In addition to the iPhone XS news, we've given the release date and price section an overhaul based on new rumors and existing speculation. Read on.
iPhone XS (top) and iPhone XS Plus (bottom), both in gold (Photo Credit: 9to5Mac)
The new leak comes less than two weeks before Apple is expected to announce its new smartphones at the Steve Jobs Theater on Wednesday, September 12.
We're anticipating three new iPhones: the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Plus, and a 'cheaper' 6.1-inch iPhone with an LCD screen. That last one may simply be called 'iPhone'.
Previously, iPhone rumors called these phones the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Plus, and the cheaper iPhone 9. That's all going to change if the newest report is correct.
iPhone XS release date Wednesday, September 12 – iPhone XS launch event dateFriday, September 14 – iPhone XS pre-order (estimated)Friday, September 21 or 28 – (likely) iPhone XS release dateThe iPhone XS will almost certainly be announced on September 12 and we'll get our first glimpse of it at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park in San Jose, California – that's where the iPhone X was launched last year on the same exact date.
This launch event date means the actual iPhone XS release date is likely to be Friday September 21 or Friday September 28. Apple typically launches new iPhones on a Friday, one to two weeks after CEO Tim Cook unveils everything on stage.
Here's another date: September 14. That's when, at midnight in your country, you can expect iPhone XS preorders to open. This thing will sell out fast, and we predict the iPhone XS will be a big seller. In the US it'll be at 3am Eastern, because Apple launches preorders at midnight Pacific, its home time zone.
Keep in mind that the iPhone X came out on November 3. This is going to cause some people, especially in the US, a problem when trying to upgrade on a year-long plan. However, Apple and carriers may have a solution on September 12, with incentivized iPhone trade-in options.
iPhone XS price iPhone XS price estimate: $1,000 (£1,000, AU$1,579)iPhone XS Plus price estimate $1,199 (£1,199, AU$1,714)Cheapest iPhone 2018 may cost $699 (£699, AU$1,079)The iPhone XS price may be $999 (£999, AU$1,579), inheriting the iPhone X 64GB price tag, while the iPhone XS Plus will undoubtedly be more. Apple likes to tack on $100, so this could be the first iPhone that costs $1,199 (£1,199, AU$1,714) or more. The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 goes all the way up to $1,250 (£1,099 / AU$1,799 / AED 4,599) for the 512GB version, so Apple may see this and think 'why not?'
There have been rumors that not all iPhone 2018 models will ship in September – the cheaper LCD 6.1-inch iPhone may slip to October. The price of this LCD iPhone is said to be around the price of the iPhone 8, which launched at $699 (£699, AU$1,079).
New iPhone XS color: gold iPhone XS and XS Plus in gold (new), black and white6.1-inch iPhone LCD in white, black, red, blue and orangeThe iPhone XS photo depicts two phones, and both appear to be in the new gold color that's been rumored for several weeks. We're expecting the new iPhones to have three color options: gold, white, and black.
Photo Credit: MacRumors
We've actually seen a gold iPhone in 2018, but that was an iPhone X that Apple is said to have canceled at some point prior to the iPhone launch last year. It showed up in some government regulatory filings, so we have a good idea of what a gold iPhone XS will look like.
Besides the Plus size and the fresh color choice, you won't instantly notice other differences between the iPhone XS and the current iPhone X. It's expected to have an identical stainless steel frame, while the cheaper iPhone for 2018 may have a aluminum frame, like the current iPhone 8, and it may come it as many as five colors: white, black, red, blue and orange.
iPhone XS size and design iPhone XS may be the same width and height as the iPhone XiPhone XS Plus may match (or be smaller than) the iPhone 8 PlusBoth phones may be thicker due to camera upgradesGet ready to use your iPhone with two hands again, because the iPhone XS Plus is going to be a monster phone with a 6.5-inch screen. But it won't be too big.
Apple has shaved away the needless bezel at the top and bottom (and axed the home button) in the upgrade to the iPhone X. So the screen size is a bit misleading if you're moving from the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus or iPhone 8 Plus – it's not a full inch bigger.
A bigger screen, but smaller body for the iPhone 11 Plus? Credit: Forbes / Ghostek
In fact, the dimensions we've seen rumored point to an iPhone XS Plus size that's either matching or smaller than the 5.5-inch iPhone 8 Plus. One schematic (above) suggests dimensions of 157.2 x 77.1mm.
An older rumor puts the iPhone XS Plus at 158.4 x 78.1 x 7.7mm, only 0.2 inches thicker than the iPhone 8 Plus.
The same rumor claims the smaller iPhone XS will be the same size as the iPhone X, except again that it will be slightly thicker. This is thought to be because of a larger rear camera sensor and lens, so expect camera improvements.
iPhone XS specs Apple A12 chipset likely to provide a speed boost512GB of storage may be the new max size (and a maxed out price)Some models may see 4GB of RAM, others may stay at 3GB of RAMAll three new iPhones are thought to have the A12 chip, a natural upgrade on the A11 Bionic chip that appeared in all three of last year's iPhone models. See the pattern?
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said the iPhone XI might support faster mobile data speeds and come with a dual-SIM card slot, and 4GB of RAM.
That dual-SIM claim is backed up by lines of code found in the upcoming iOS 12 software update, and it means iPhone users could finally be able to benefit from two SIMs in one phone.
Kuo has also claimed that Apple will probably exclusively use Intel modems for 2018's models, rather than splitting the order between Intel and Qualcomm.
Apple could launch these three phones this year. Credit: KGI Research/MacRumors
We've also had other hints at the iPhone XI's power from a benchmark, which shows an unnamed iPhone as having 4GB of RAM and a 2.49GHz hexa-core chipset.
Apple never details the RAM in its phones, but we could see an upgrade here, too, from 3GB in last year's iPhone to 4GB in the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus. The company historically leaves one model behind, so we expect 3GB of RAM on the cheapest iPhone. We won't know this information until someone does a teardown on the release date.
Apple may add to the existing internal storage sizes, giving us 64GB, 256GB, and a new 512GB option for the iPhone XS – that's bigger than most laptop solid-state hard drives. The cheaper 6.1-inch iPhone may stop short of that, with 64GB and 256GB sizes.
iPhone XS cameraThe iPhone XS camera may be a big highlight, but we don't know much about it. Kuo predicts that both sizes will have a dual-lens rear camera, while the cheaper iPhone (the one with an LCD screen) will be the one with a single-lens rear camera.
Photos from the dual-lens camera are expected to be 12MP, with one telephoto lens and one normal lens, both with optical image stabilization (no change here). The difference may come from the backend software. Samsung, Google, and other Android phone makers have given us cameras that use machine learning to enhance photos, and Apple's iPhone X camera has fallen behind in our tests, especially in low-light situations.
On the front, all of the new iPhones are undoubtedly going to sport a TrueDepth camera – we know that because none of them will have a Touch ID home button. The last iPhones to use Touch ID will be the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.
We could see more depth-sensing features in the front-facing selfie camera, with a recent Apple patent pointing to a single-lens camera system that has dual-lens-like features. The question is whether this tech will be ready for the iPhone 2018 or iPhone 2019.
iPhone XS and iOS 12 iPhone XS to launch with iOS 12 out of the boxiOS 12 may launch on older iPhones on Tuesday, September 18Expect features exclusive to the larger iPhone XSOn September 12, in addition to seeing the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus, we're due to find out the official iOS 12 release date. Both phones will run this software.
We know all about iOS 12 thanks to WWDC 2018, but Apple almost always holds onto software surprises – usually ones that have to do with hardware and sensors that would tip off observers about new iPhone models in the works (Animoji was a secret until the iPhone X launch event).
With the introduction of the iPhone XS Plus we could see some exclusive changes that give the larger 6.5-inch phone tablet-like powers. There are some large-screen app interfaces reserved for the iPad, namely Mail and Messages, that give you more information on the screen (like messages threads).
iPhone XS battery Analysts predict a 10% and 25% larger battery iPhone XS Plus could go to 3,300mAh or 3,400mAhFast charger may finally be included in the boxYour next iPhone may have longer battery life, especially if you opt for the larger 6.5-inch iPhone XS Plus. Ming-Chi Kuo says the battery in that phone will be 25% bigger than the one in the iPhone X.
That puts the 6.5-inch iPhone XS battery capacity at 3,300mAh or 3,400mAh, a sizable increase over the iPhone X (which sits at just 2,716mAh). The 5.8-inch iPhone XS may see a smaller increase of 10%.
Charging your iPhone may be easier too, as iPhone XS leaks suggest Apple will include a fast charger in the box. Right now, this is a separate purchase (and we've been using our MacBook Pro charger with a Lightning-to-USB-C cable).
We've now heard that more than once, but the latest reports suggest you won't be able to buy it separately – so if you want Apple's new fast charger you might have to buy a new iPhone to get it.
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