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Top smartphones of 2018 with big batteries

A decent battery is the root of any smartphone worth its salt. It ensures that you can get the most out of your phone during any point of the day, without worrying about battery drain. More importantly, its the underlying factor behind whether or not you can listen to tunes on your device when you're on your way home after a long day at work.

Quite a few phones that go all out with their features, forget to back it up with a big battery. But, there are still ample options in the market that fall within the mid-range or budget segment.

Keep in mind that battery size alone isn't the determining factor for a smartphone's battery life. The phone's chipset and a consumer's usage pattern also have a big part to play.

Xiaomi's pet project, the POCO F1 has a 4,000mAh battery which powers a 6.1-inch Full HD+ (2246 x 1080 pixels) IPS panel. There's a Gorilla Glass coating on top of the display to prevent accidental damage to the screen. The POCO F1 is powered by top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset and an octa-core processor. The POCO F1 comes in 6GB/8GB of RAM and 64/128/256GB of onboard storage which is expandable. There's a dual camera setup on the back which consists of a primary 12MP sensor and a secondary 5MP camera that aids in depth sensing. On the front, the POCO F1 sports a 20MP selfie camera. The price of the POCO F1 starts from Rs 20,999 and goes all the way up to 20,999 for the Armoured Edition POCO F1.

Read the full review here: Poco F1 review

Mi Max 2

After receiving a warm response for the existing Redmi phones in India, Xiaomi introduced its plus sized Mi Max 2, which has a massive 5300mAh battery. As per the company's claim, the battery offers 18 hours of video playback, 57 hours of talk time and over 31 days of standby. Not only is the battery big, but the phone also has a huge 6.44-inch full HD display, which is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3.

Along with its mammoth battery and display, the smartphone offers decent support for day-to-day tasks. In fact, it can be a great smartphone for multimedia enthusiasts with features like the dual speakers. It comes packed in an attractive metal unibody shell, which adds to its premium feel.

So, if you are in the market for a phone with big battery and display, the Mi Max 2 can be a good choice.

Read the full review: Xiaomi Mi Max 2 review

Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1

The Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1 is the newest member of this list with its mega 5000mAh battery. Though the phone is equipped with a big battery, it doesn't last as long as you'd expect it to, but it crossed the 24 hour threshold nonetheless.

Keeping in mind that the phone only costs Rs 10,999, it's a decent option that runs on Stock Android offering an above average user experience. The company highlights the phone's audio feature, which is considerably loud, but isn't necessarily 'better'.

Also, keep in mind that the phone doesn't support fast charging. Even so, the review unit displayed 'charging rapidly' and did indeed charge 'rapidly'.

Overall, the phone has more features than other phones in the same price range and quite honestly, running on a pure version of Android is definitely a heavy selling point.

Read the full review: Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1

Gionee M7 Power

Launched in September 2017, the Gionee M7 Power sports a 6-inch full HD+ FullView IPS display with an aspect ratio of 18:9. The screen is protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass 3 on the top. The highlight of the phone is its 5000mAh battery, which offers tons of power.

It is powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 435 chipset, coupled with 4GB of RAM. The 64GB internal storage is expandable to up to 256GB.

The phone is available on Amazon in Black and Gold colours.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro

The Redmi Note 5 Pro is an incredible smartphone for its price point. Even after heavy usage through out the day, the battery won't run out in the span of 24 hours. Idle battery life will last for quite a while.

The camera performs well, the SoC boosts efficiency and the option for expandable storage make things a lot easier.

Read the full review: Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro

Moto E4 Plus

It may be the cheapest of the range, but the Moto E5 still packs a sizeable 5.7-inch display with a tall 18:9 aspect ratio display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chipset, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, 13MP rear camera, microSD slot and a rear facing fingerprint scanner. There's also a big 4,000mAh battery, stock Android 8.0 Oreo interface, headphone jack and a 5MP front facing camera. Not bad for the price, but the competition is really tight around this price.

Read the full review: Moto E5

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5

Just like its predecessor, which was previously on this list, Redmi Note 5 also comes with a battery capacity of 4,000 mAh. The phone lasts comfortably on a single charge for a whole day under heavy usage. If you use your phone with moderation, the battery will last even longer.

It takes around two hours to fully recharge using the regular 5V adapter provided in-the-box.

But if you already own a Redmi Note 4, then refrain from the upgrade because very little is different in the two variants. They even run on the same chipset.

Read the full review: Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 review

After launching the Srt.phone, India based Smartron has launched a budget smartphone in the country with a big 5,000mAh battery. While the device does not offer powerful hardware, it is good for a secondary device for all-day use priced at Rs. 7,999.

While the device is being offered as a budget device, it does not feel cheap at all. It features a metal body with plastic bands at the top and bottom and features a fingerprint sensor at the rear.

Read the full review: Smartron t.Phone P

Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro

Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro features a Snapdragon 653 with 6GB RAM that takes you through every task easily without any lags.

It has 64GB of internal storage which you can further expand to 256GB via microSD card.

With respect to optics, the phone has 16-megapixel rear and front cameras which perform decently in every lighting conditions. There is a 4000mAh battery inside which lasts for the whole day even with heavy usage.

The camera on your smartphone matters more than the battery? Then maybe you should be looking at our list of the best camera phones on a budget!Some people just a need a bigger screen because it make productivity tasks so much easier to execute. Here are the best 4G tablets in the market right now. Don't care about the battery or the camera? If you're looking for a holistic phone that covers all the bases and doesn't compromise on any part of the smartphone experience, then you should be looking at our list of the top 10 smartphones that we've tested.

The best Bluetooth speakers available in India 2018

Looking for the best Bluetooth speaker? We can help.

We've listened to hundreds of these wireless speakers over the years and have put our heads together to form a definitive list of the best ones you can buy.

If you want a quick and easy way to play music around your home or on the go, then nothing beats the convenience of a Bluetooth speaker. Simply charge it up, pair it to your phone, and you'll be able to play your entire music collection wherever you choose.

While the latest set of audio cans can do amazing things, they previously offered a weak and tinny sound. Improvements in Bluetooth technology meant that they're able to offer a very capable audio experience in their own right. And, better yet, battery capacities have improved such that you can use a Bluetooth speaker for several days on the trot without needing to recharge it.

But all of them are well worth a place in your tech arsenal, and with that in mind, here's our list of our top picks for the best Bluetooth speakers around. Some are rugged, some are stylish, some are weatherproof and some aren't fit for the outdoors - read through and take your pick.

UE Boom 2

This sequel to the UE Boom nails everything a Bluetooth speaker should be. It's loud, yet detailed. Portable, but still incredibly durable. Plus, even better, the addition of waterproofing turns what used to be the best Bluetooth speaker around for most occasions into the best one for every occasion.

If you're deep in the search for your next, or first, Bluetooth speaker, you can stop looking now. (But if you're looking for a little more power, the Megaboom – also from UE – is a great choice, too.)

Read the full review: UE Boom 2

Meet one of the Bluetooth speaker market's best-kept secrets. The Fugoo comes in your choice of jacket style (Style, Tough, or Sport), but no matter which one you choose, this speaker is just as suited for the elements as it is to your coffee table.

Despite its small size, this option offers surprisingly good sound performance and, get this, up to 40 hours of battery life when listening at medium volume. We were able to get nearly 20 hours out of it at a high volume.

Read the full review: Fugoo

As a package, the JBL Charge 3 offers a compelling set of features and excellent sound quality to boot. It punches well above its weight, playing it loud and distortion-free.

The Charge line of speakers have been on our shortlist of recommendations for a long time and the latest iteration maintains JBL's dominance in the portable Bluetooth speaker market.

Read the full review: JBL Charge 3

The Bose SoundLink Mini II is relatively ancient, having been released in June 2015. However, writing off the SoundLink Mini II because of its age would be a mistake, as it remains one of the best sounding wireless speakers.

That said, it punches way above what its size would suggest, producing deep bass, sparkling highs and a lush midrange. While most wireless speakers sound OK, the Mini II proves that small speakers don’t need to compromise on sound.

Read the full review: Bose SoundLink Mini II

Anker has a history of making excellent budget wireless speakers. While we weren’t entirely impressed with the Anker SoundCore 2’s sound, we couldn’t be too mad since the speaker was so affordable.

So what happens if you can stretch your budget? For around $20 more you get the Anker Soundcore Flare, an excellent waterproof Bluetooth speaker that can stand toe-to-toe with the competition.

The Soundcore Flare is an amazing value in the sub-$100 wireless speaker segment. Competitors like the UE Wonderboom (listed above) give the Flare a run for its money in terms of build quality but we give the Flare the slight edge with sound quality. We recommend the Flare for anyone looking for a wireless speaker that can do it all without breaking the bank.

Read the full review: Anker Soundcore Flare

When someone asks us for a recommendation for a waterproof speaker, the UE Roll 2 was always on the top of our list. We loved the Roll 2’s unique form factor, 50-foot wireless range and, obviously, it sounded good, too. Where it was lacking was in the bass department. Logitech, UE’s parent company, has fixed the Roll 2’s lack of bass by creating the appropriately named UE Wonderboom.

In our eyes, the UE Wonderboom bests the Roll 2 in just about every way – except for the Roll 2’s handy bungee cord. Still, ignoring that, if you’re looking for one of the best waterproof Bluetooth speakers on the market today, it’s hard to do better than the UE Wonderboom.

The UE Wonderboom is still not available in India but we have confirmation about its arrival to the country. Our global team has tested the device, hence we were sure about putting it on the best Bluetooth speakers' list.

Read the full review: UE Wonderboom

The Creative Muvo 2C is a speaker than punches well above its weight in terms of its sound quality. This tiny Bluetooth speaker is one of the smallest we've seen to pack its own bass radiator, which results in much better dynamic range than many other speakers at this price point. Plus, it's also feature-rich in terms of its inputs, allowing you to play music either over Bluetooth, a 3.5mm jack, USB or even insert a microSD card to play MP3 files directly.

Of course, that being said, if you spend more you'll get a more refined sound, better bass still, and a longer battery life. But if you're looking for a budget speaker than the Muvo 2C is hard to beat at this price.

More recently we've reviewed its older sibling the Creative Muvo 2, which could be an option if you want this same functionality in a slightly larger form factor. However, it doesn't present quite the same value for money as the 2C.

Read the full review: Creative Muvo 2C

It seems just about every speaker company has a wireless speaker that can take the abuse of being outdoors and Bose, a company most well-known for its brand of excellent noise-canceling headphones, is no different.

If you’re looking for something from Bose to take with you on your next hike, the SoundLink Color II is the company’s only splash-proof speaker that can stand up to the elements with an IPX4 rating.

Read the full review: Bose SoundLink Color II

The Marshall Kilburn might not appear to be the best choice in Bluetooth speakers. It’s large, heavy, doesn’t have USB charging and isn’t waterproof. Plus, almost Rs 25k is a lot to pay for a Bluetooth speaker. But none of this matters because the Kilburn sounds so darn good.

If design and audio performance are your two most important criteria for a Bluetooth speaker – and they should be – the Kilburn is near perfect.

Read the full review: Marshall Kilburn

Bringing bluntness over refinement, the JBL Flip 4 is a good Bluetooth speaker for the rugged outdoorsman in your friend circle. Its rough, tough design makes it perfect as a portable speaker to accompany all aspects of your life without worrying your home audio system.

Its all weather friendly design is a win, but a lack of definition and distinction in the mid-range ultimately means its sound quality is not quite up to scratch when compared with some, more high-end portable speakers.

Read the full review: JBL Flip 4

Note: Not all the speakers listed here are tested by India team. Some of them have been recommended by our global team, but all of them are available in India.

Now need something to listen to? Check out our collection of the best podcasts

Best movies on Netflix UK (September 2018): over 100 films to watch right now

Netflix may have mounting competition the likes of Amazon Prime and Now TV when it comes to the online streaming crown. But despite Amazon creating some great news shows and Now TV providing us with the best Sky has to offer, Netflix is still our favourite place for movies and TV shows.

There are lots of reasons why that's the case, including its (mostly) intuitive interface, offline modes, original series and films, huge catalogue of movies and, most importantly, the fact it's constantly updated week-on-week with some of the best entertainment on the planet.

Every day Netflix adds at least a movie or two, and every week at least three or four of them tend to be worth watching. This is what sets it apart from Amazon Prime, which has a great back catalogue, as well as lots of mediocre and, quite frankly, rubbish movies in its vaults.

SEPTEMBER UPDATE: Netflix has kicked off the cosy Autumn season with a bang already, and it doesn't show any sign of slowing up. This week, The Hangover parts 1, 2 and 3 land on the streaming site, perfect viewing for a lazy Sunday when you're nursing your own hangover. There's also dreamy road trip movie American Honey, a coming-of-age tale starring Sasha Lane and Shia LaBeouf.

A still from Gangs of New York

Of course it's great news that Netflix keeps its catalogue of movies topped up with fresh, award-winning and super entertaining titles. But it also means many of us spend a lot of time scrolling through anything and everything the service has to offer.

And, as many of us are all too aware, often the dilemma of so much great stuff to choose from (which is known as ‘decision fatigue’ in psychology circles) leaves us feeling fed up.

In an attempt to put an end to what we’re coining ‘Netflix fatigue’ once and for all, we’ve created this extensive list to the best movies that Netflix UK has to offer you right now. That's right. No more endless scrolling and no more movie-induced anxiety that you've made the wrong choice.

We'll be updating this cinematic hall of fame at least once a week, so be sure to keep it bookmarked so you can find out what's hot and ready to be watched on Netflix in the UK right now.

a still of ryan gosling in crazy stupid love

The best movies on Netflix

If you’ve been signed up to Netflix for more than a few months, you’ll know there are lots of mediocre movie choices. But if you only have time for the best of the best, don't waste those all too precious minutes searching through the site's extensive and exhausting back catalogue. Instead, delve straight into this guide.

To make your life easier (and enable your Netflix addiction), we’ve divided more than 120 movie recommendations up into categories that we're sure will suit every taste. We’ve got indie and thriller through to kids and documentaries.

And don't forget to keep checking back. Unlike its TV output, which seems to stay on Netflix for longer, movies on the streaming site tend to appear and disappear quickly. Enjoy!

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

If you are a TV fan, then check out our best shows on Netflix feature.Check out what the rivals are up to with the best movies on Amazon Prime Best Netflix sci-fi movies: fantastic films to stream on Netflix and Amazon nowBest horror movies: scary films to stream right nowOur weekly guide to upcoming things on Netflix

A coming-of-age tale about a teen called Star who joins a group of travelling magazine sellers as they journey across the American Midwest. It's trying to be quite gritty throughout, but the road trip story and dreamy shots (like the one above) make it much more heart-warming. Sasha Lane truly shines in the lead role and Riley Keough and Shia LaBeouf are also on top form as they play two of the teen magazine sellers she warms to - and clashes with.

A group of friends go to Las Vegas for a stag do and chaos ensues. The movie begins with their pre-drinking the night before and quickly moves onto the hangover the morning after. We have to piece together what happened the night before as they do and it's as gruesome, gross and hilarious as you'd expect. Because the first movie was such a hit there's now a trilogy of movie and all of them follow roughly the same formula. Hey, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Arguably one of Tarantino's best movies, The Hateful Eight is a gory Western set some time just after the American Civil War. As you'd expect from a Tarantino flick, the cast is one of the best bits. Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael Maden, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell take the lead roles as a ragtag bunch of criminals, bounty hunters and who knows what else who take refuge in a stagecoach stopover during a blizzard.

When Warcraft first came out it received mixed reviews and in many ways was a financial disappointment. But this action movie, based on the video game of the same name, from Duncan Jones is really compelling for fans of fantasy, monsters and otherworldly evils. Don’t expect flawless performances, but do expect your fair share of magical spells, orcs and sprawling battle scenes.

This South Korean action movie is about Sook-hee, a trained assassin with a thirst for revenge who uncovers secrets about her dark past. Not one for the faint-hearted, Sook-hee leaves a trail of gore, violence and plenty of bodies on her quest. It's been applauded for its action choreography and has been described as Kill Bill meets La Femme Nikita.

Sure Tom Cruise may have been at the helm of the remake of The Mummy in 2017, but we love the 1999 version starring Rachel Weisz, Brendan Fraser and John Hannah the most. Now the other two movies in the trilogy are also available on Netflix too. We know what you're thinking and yes, a Mummy-inspired three movie binge is definitely a good plan for the weekend. Treat yourself.

Based on the Marvel Comics, all three of the fantastic Iron Man movies are now on Netflix. The first movie in the trilogy is all about the making of Iron Man, when Tony Stark creates power armour to escape his kidnappers.

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

A sequel to the 2012 movie Jack Reacher, in this follow up Tom Cruise reprises his role as the military investigator-turned-vigilante in order to uncover the truth behind a big government conspiracy.

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

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

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

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

Saoirse Ronan plays a teen assassin, who has been trained relentlessly in the Finnish wilderness by her ex-CIA dad, played by Eric Bana. She's tracked down by a CIA agent, played by Cate Blanchett, who seems hellbent on killing her. Well, unless Hanna can do it first.

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

Natalie Portman takes the lead role in this biographical drama about the life of Jackie Kennedy, which takes place after her husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It’s a compelling but difficult watch at times, all about grief, trauma, consoling her children and Jackie’s struggle to create a legacy for her husband after his tragic death. As well as Portman, the movie has a great cast, including Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt - it was the final film that was released just before Hurt passed away in 2017.

From the writer of Arrival comes another alien invasion picture that has one of the more interesting twists that we have seen in a while. The whole thing plays out as a pretty simple affair. Micheal Pena is a factory worker who is plagued by visions and finds himself at the centre of a looming apocalypse. Some great set pieces manage to lift what is quite a tepid script - stick with it as the end is something else.

Beach Rats follows the story of Frankie, a teenager with a girlfriend and a seemingly 'normal' life who secretly meets up with older men to have sex and take drugs. He doesn't identify as gay or bisexual to his partner, friends or family. So this is a very powerful yet somehow dream-like look at his adolescent turmoil as he learns more about himself, the world and his sexuality.

Some of the themes of the movie, as well as the visual aesthetic, have been compared to the likes of Moonlight and Beau Travail, so if you were a fan of either or both of those films then give this a watch.

Historical drama denial is based on on a book call History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah Lipstadt. It's about a case called Irving Vs. Penguin Books Ltd in which Lipstadt, a scholar specialising in the atrocities of the Holocaust is sued by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for libel.

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Full Metal Jacket is set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and takes a long, hard look at man's desire to kill. It's split into two halves – the first, which is set at boot camp, follows a young recruit who is pushed right over the edge by an abusive drill sergeant. The latter half focuses on a military journalist who watches in horror as Vietnamese people are killed indiscriminately by the soldiers he's following for reasons they don't even understand.

This truly epic period drama from Martin Scorsese is set in 1863 in, you guessed it, New York. It follows the stories of some notorious gangs in the Five Points district, particularly the fictional gang leader William 'Bill the Butcher' Cutting, who is played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The film ends in a big battle between rival gangs, with Cutting facing off against Amsterdam Vallon, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore, the story follows Maggie (Gerwig) who has decided she wants a baby and wants to raise it all on her own. But everything goes a bit wrong when she falls for John (Hawke) who is married to, you guessed it, Moore's character Georgette. A complicated, at times funny and emotional love triangle ensues.

An original Netflix film, Kodachrome follows the story of Matt, played by Jason Sudeikis, and Ben, played by Ed Harris, and estranged father and son duo who embark on a road trip joined by Ben's assistant, played by Elizabeth Olson, to the last place to develop Kodachrome film in the US - a small photo shop called Dwayne's Photo in Kansas.

The Social Network is a biographical drama about the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and the early days of Facebook, as lawsuits, controversies and various other problems rolled in on the journey to it becoming a household name.

There's been some controversy about the movie, especially considering Zuckerberg and no one else from the Facebook team were involved in its making. But it received many highly positive reviews, which is down to all aspects of the movie, from the performances from the cast through to David Fincher's directing and Aaron Sorkin's compelling script.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This fantasy movie is based on a graphic novel by the same name and follows the story of 12-year-old Barbara Thorson who has a hard time getting on with her peers so escapes into a world of magic and giants.

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

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

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

A quirky tale about a man called Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell) who lives a normal, kinda dull existence and one day begins to hear someone narrating his life. Everything about the narration is super accurate, but when it reveals he's doing to die soon he tries to find the author to stop her, well, killing him off.

Some Like it Hot is a classic, and for good reason. Winner of numerous Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and featuring three of Hollywood's greats at the top of their game, it's a hilarious movie, with unforgettable central performances.

After witnessing the Valentine's day massacre, two male musicians try to escape town in disguise, as women.

If you've never watched it, treat yourself. If you have, you don't need any convincing to watch it again.

Watch on Netflix Now

This laugh-out-loud, yet totally heart-warming, comedy from Judd Apatow is perfect for easy Sunday watching. It's about a TV presenter, played by Katherine Heigl, who has to navigate the tricky ins-and-outs of having an unplanned pregnancy with the unemployed and kinda immature Ben, played by Seth Rogen.

Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical dark comedy classic has landed on Netflix. This dark comedy explores the fears around the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union, and the threat of impending nuclear disaster.

Directed, produced and also co-written by Kubrick, the story centres around a US Air Force general who decides to order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It then follows the action of a bomber after it's set off, as well as the heated debates about calling off the whole operation before the general brings about the end of the world.

Okay, so it might not be the light and easy watch you were looking for on a lazy, hungover Sunday. But it's a classic that's one of Kubrick's best.

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

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

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

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

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

A comedy all about three retired men who go to Las Vegas to throw a bachelor party for their last remaining single friend. Sure that might not sound like the recipe for the best movie, but it's worth a watch because it's stars Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.

We don't really need to tell you the synopsis of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, do we? A load of paranormal enthusiasts/hunters all come together to stop an otherworldly threat. You know the drill. The great bit about the 2016 remake is it's a female-fronted ghostbusting team, featuring comedians and actors Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon. Critics were pretty divided when this version came out, with many praising the fresh approach but not being too keen on some of the story and script. Then again, it was always going to be near impossible to create a story so similar to the original.

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

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

Based on Bret Easton Ellis' tale of greed, capitalism and serial killing, this 2000 dark comedy-meets-horror flick has a stellar cast, including Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon and Willem Dafoe, among many others. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it's a deep and intense rollercoaster ride through sprawling monologues, 80s pop tunes and murder.

Martin Freeman stars in this Australian post-apocalyptic thriller that's based on a short film of the same name. It's about a world overtaken by a zombie virus and a husband and wife who are trying to survive with their young daughter. They've managed to stay uninfected so far because they've been living on a houseboat, but as you can imagine, that all changes. It's been mostly praised by critics, who enjoy its refreshing take on the zombie genre, its emotional depth and Freeman's performance.

A series of murders has ravaged London, which leads many of the locals to believe there's only one explanation: the mythical Golem must be to blame, a mythical creature from darker times. But, as you'd probably expect, it turns out it isn't a creepy monster that's to blame after all.

It's the perfect horror setup: 10 strangers are stranded in a motel thanks to a rainstorm. At the same time a murderer is about to be executed, only for his psychiatrist to make a last-ditch effort to keep him alive. So, how are these two tales linked? Well, that would be telling. Directed by The Wolverine's James Mangold, Identity may think it's brainier than it is but at least it's a whole lot of fun.

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

Joining Stephen King’s Carrie on Netflix comes another classic story from the horror author’s creepy collection: Misery. Bringing the tale of the story, which will be making anyone who has seen it wince right now, straight to your living room. The movie follows a famous author who is rescued from a car crash by a fan. We won’t spoil what happens next, but you can probably guess it’s not exactly the warm, homely kind of recovery you’d expect after you’ve had an accident. It’s certainly not one for the faint-hearted, so prepare to hide behind a cushion for about 50% of the running time.

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

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

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

This horror story is all about a robbery gone wrong. The three thieves hoping to steal money from a blind veteran's home are in for a terrifying surprise when they realise he's much more violent, unpredictable and aware than they originally thought.

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

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

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

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

Stephen King’s classic tale of the trials and tribulations of high school, fitting in, oh and having extremely powerful telekinetic powers has landed on Netflix, bringing the unforgettable and gruesome bloodbath of the 1976 imagining to the small screen.

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

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

Justin Lin directs the latest instalment of Star Trek with bombast. And thank goodness he does, because the explosions and flash camera angles manage to mask some of the cracks in this film. Don't get us wrong: Star Trek Beyond is a lot of fun, but feels a little smaller than the first two rebooted movies. There's more humour, though, and the cast still shine. Next time, though, more Bones please!

Alex Garland is a master of sci-fi. He directed Ex Machina, wrote 28 Days Later, and has now directed Annihilation. It has skipped past a wide cinema release, heading direct to Netflix. This sharp supernatural thriller sees Natalie Portman play a botanist investigating a mysterious, and expanding, wall of light in the deep south of America.

Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is a cinematic masterpiece. We're pretty sure you could watch it without sound or subtitles and still be in absolute awe of the aesthetics. But if you did that you'd also be missing out on a well-paced drama starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock full of twists and turns all about things not going quite as planned in space. It also has an exceptional soundtrack and visual effects. It's one to turn all the lights off for and watch on the biggest screen in your house - you won't be disappointed.

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

Based on the popular book series by the same name, Divergent is set in a dystopian and post-apocalyptic US in which people are divided up based on their skills and virtues. The main character is Beatrice, who finds out she doesn't fit into one of the set categories, but is instead Divergent.

It's the first instalment in The Divergent Series and two other movies, Insurgent and Allegiant follow it. A fourth and final movie is currently in production, but there have been a few hiccups due to the fact Allegiant didn't perform as well as expected at the box office.

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

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

A sequel to sci-fi classic Robocop, in this follow-up movie the half-machine, half-man super cop is on a mission to rid Detroit of a deadly new drug. It may not be as good as the original, but it's still a solid sci-fi movie and full of cheesy one-liners.

Watch on Netflix here.

In the not-so-distant future, people are ranked, judged and given jobs not based on their abilities and interests, but on their genetic makeup. Gattaca follows the story of a man with less-than-perfect DNA (Ethan Hawke) who is desperate to travel into space, which is a privilege only reserved for the perfect. With the help of another man with 10/10 DNA (Jude Law), he tries to game the system to bag himself a seat on the next mission to the stars. As you’d expect from this clever sci-fi story, there are lots of challenges, problems and interesting twists along the way.

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

Prepare to re-live your childhood with this movie length documentary that takes a deep dive into He-Man, its origins, stories and the impact the character had that went well beyond a toy line and a TV show. The great thing about this 2017 documentary is it's the result of a crowdfunding campaign from a few years ago. It's always great to see a genuinely good idea become a reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This dark thriller follows the story of a teenage boy (played by Brad Renfro) who finds out that an elderly man in his neighbourhood (played by Ian McKellen) is a Nazi war criminal. A twisted tale of blackmail and violence ensues which stirs up all kinds of disturbing emotions in both man and boy.

We know, we know, it sometimes doesn't feel quite right when a cult classic like OldBoy gets remade. Especially one that's been so popular over the years because it's so surreal, dark and chilling. How do you even begin to remake that sense of dark, skin-crawling unease? Well, Spike Lee gave it a good go in 2013. Josh Brolin plays the lead character, who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 20 years and then goes on a mission to find out why. Not for the faint-hearted, it's a decent remake, but as you'd expect didn't excite critics or gain cult status like Park Chan-Wook's original.

Leonardio DiCaprio plays the notorious high rolling stockbroker Jordan Belfort in this award-winning flick from Martin Scorsese. At times it's deadly serious, laugh-out-loud funny and in many ways a fable about the slippery slope a life all about money can send you down.

Steven Spielberg's classic 1975 thriller has arrived on Netflix, telling the story of a giant, man-eating shark who likes to snack on people in New England. There was no doubt that Jaws would make our list given that it's often considered one of the greatest movies ever made. In fact, it was the highest grossing movie of all time for a few years until Star Wars hit the scene.

David Fincher's Seven is a classic for all the right reasons. It'll keep you on the edge of your seat every step of the way, it's smart, it's gruesome and it's got some top acting from Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and a stellar supporting cast too. It follows the investigation of a serial killer who's killing his victims based on the seven deadly sins - hence the title. And that's all we'll say in case you've somehow never seen it before and don't know how it ends.

In this hard-hitting crime drama Johnny Depp plays the notorious American mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. The story follows the infamous criminal career of Bulger as he heads up the Winter Hill Gang of South Boston.

Martin Scorsese's flick Taxi Driver follows the story of a lonely veteran (played by Robert DeNiro) living in New York who becomes a taxi driver and slowly descends into madness watching the corruption and depravity of the city around him. It's not an easy watch, but it's a true classic and considered one of the greatest movies of all time.

In this thrilling crime drama set in Hong Kong, a policeman goes undercover in order to expose a detective who has been leaking important police business to his contacts in the criminal underworld. The mole doesn't know who it is that's tracking him, so ensues a cat and mouse game guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. If the plot sounds familiar, that's because Martin Scorcese's The Departed was based on this movie.

Starring Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, this crime thriller is about a veteran spy who takes on a dangerous mission to try and free his protégé who has been taken as a political prisoner in China.

Before Denis Villeneuve was wow-ing us all with Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, he directed Prisoners. It's a crime thriller with a stellar cast, including Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, about a child abduction. You'll be on the edge of your seat the whole time.

This crime thriller flick might not be award-winning, but boy does it keep you on the edge of your seat. Elizabeth Banks plays a woman who is sent to prison on a murder charge she denies, which leads her husband, played by Russell Crowe, to hatch a daring and detailed plan to break her out of prison.

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

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

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

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

Antonio Banderas! Adrien Brody! John Malkovich! The cast for Bullet Head is an exciting mix of three great actors that you'd think would light up the screen with slick dialogue and electrifying performances alone, but instead Bullet Head throws them all in a warehouse that for some reason is really hard to just, walk out of, with a killer dog. And that's the rather strange, rather ridiculous but somehow still very entertaining premise of Bullet Head. This movie ain't gonna win any awards, but if you're craving a bit of mindless action and drama with three familiar faces at the helm, then Bullet Head might just be your perfect movie for hangovers and lazy Sundays.

Calvary is an intense, disturbing and at some points darkly funny story about a priest in a small, rural town in Ireland who receives a mysterious death threat. While waiting to find out who the shady, would-be killer is, the priest continues about his daily business, which reveals that criminal acts, racism and domestic abuse run rife in the community. It’s whatever the opposite of easy watching is, so be prepared. But it’s a very well-made and captivating move in which Brendan Gleeson really shines as the protagonist priest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you're looking for a feel-good movie this weekend, check out About Time. It's a genre-defying film that's about time travel, romance and has a big helping of laughs thrown in for good measure. Domhnall Gleeson plays a man who finds out he can travel through time, so decides to go and win the woman of his dreams. But, as with all time travel tales, things aren't as straight-forward (and not-to-mention chronological) as they seem.

King of comedy Steve Carell joins forces with Ryan Gosling in this laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about a newly single man who has to (begrudgingly) face of the prospect of being single again. Luckily he has a hot, young smooth-talker to help him out. No prizes for guessing who plays who.

The 2005 version of Jane Austen's classic tale of romance lands on Netflix this week. This particular treatment of the period drama stars Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen as the young, stubborn and witty Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.

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

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

Yes it may be from the late 80s and nowadays robots should like more like the Westworld hosts rather than a big ol' pile of junk, right? But Short Circuit 2 is still an enjoyable sequel for the whole family.

It's about Johnny Five, a sentient ex-military robot who is trying to help a robot inventor who is in some hot water with a bunch of bad guys.

It's not going to win any awards for the story or the acting or anything else, really, but if you want to introduce your kids to fictitious robots from times gone by, this is a fun weekend watch.

This movie may have not performed particularly well at the box office when it was first released, but it's still a magical movie suitable for all the family. It follows the story of Alice years after she first ventures down the rabbit hole. She's spent years at see and this time finds her way back to Wonderland when she comes across a magical looking glass. When she arrives she quickly embarks on a mission to save the Hatter, who is acting madder than ever.

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

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

One for the kids (and big kids) amongst us, The Secret Life of Pets is about two pet dogs who find themselves outside and have to fend off a gang of sewer-dwelling angry animals known as "The Flushed Pets" who really want to stage an attack on humans. It's as ridiculous and entertaining as it sounds.

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

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

Best smartwatch 2018: The top smartwatches available in India

Best fitness tracker in India: The top activity bands in 2018

The whole catalogue of fitness-centric tech products have seen immense demand over the past few years, but the most sought after way to track your daily activities seems to be the fitness bands. In India, we have fitness bands ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 30,000 and the market for such products is growing.

While brands like Xiaomi have some dependable products like the Mi Band at unbelievably low costs, the segment is still dominated by known names like Garmin, Fitbit and TomTom.

A fitness tracker is the best way to monitor your health and activity without having to pay too much attention to it. It can constantly measure your vitals, quality of sleep and step count effortlessly and accurately. The differentiating factor that's used to judge a fitness band is its accuracy and usability.

In India, the fitness band market is filled with amazing devices, where almost all of them can do a fair job tracking basic activities. But we are only interested in the best, and here's the best fitness bands for your fitness needs.

The Moov Now is our favorite fitness band in the world right now. The best part is the price, which justifies the quality and features it comes with. It doesn't end there, as the band promises to offer a six month-long battery life.

On top of sleep monitoring features, the lightweight fitness band also comes with boxing and rep-based training with a dedicated swimming feature on top of basic sleep and steps tracking.

One compromise that you have to make is the GPS, but the price makes up for it.

Read the full Moov Now review

The Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro hasn't made any hefty changes to the company's wearable line since the Gear Fit 2, but there are a few improvements to an already great tracker that seats it in second place.

The Gear Fit 2 Pro has a gorgeous design that looks fantastic on your wrist and it sports a big, beautiful AMOLED display which lets you see all of your stats nice and clear.

It also comes with GPS built-in so you can leave your phone at home while you go for a run as well as a top-notch heart rate sensor that should give you one of the most accurate readings possible from a wrist-based tracker. Plus it will track your swimming too.

Read the full Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro review

The TomTom Spark 3 is the third best fitness watch that's also one of the most feature-rich out of the lot. You can upload and listen to music directly from the watch, without asking for a help from your smartphone. You just need to pair your watch with supported Bluetooth earphones and head out for a run.

More impressive features include the GPS tracking, heart rate monitor and route navigation, which makes it a great wrist companion while discovering new places.

Read the full TomTom Spark 3 review

Huawei Band 2 Pro is a sleek little fitness tracker that packs tons of features into its compact size and comes at a reasonable price.

The Band 2 Pro has heart rate monitoring, VO2 max, GPS, step and sleep tracking and a seriously impressive battery life. The slim screen means that this tracker will work just as well with running gear as it will with a business suit, although it isn’t going to be as easy to read as some of the competition.

So if you are on a lookout for a fitness device that promises accurate and precise metrics, then you might have to consider the option above but its slim, compact body at this price point is not for someone who wants to buy their first smartwatch.

Read our Huawei Band 2 Pro review

This may look more like a smartwatch than any of the other devices on this list, but as it runs its own software and has a very big focus on fitness we've decided to include it in our list of the best fitness trackers.

The Amazfit Bip design has been influenced by the Apple Watch (there's no denying that) and it comes packed with tons of features including GPS, an accurate heart rate tracker, multi-sport tracking, sleep tracking and VO2 Max features too.

If you're looking for a more watch-like design than everything else on this list, the Bip will be up your street. It's lightweight too and other highlights include the always-on display and strong battery life that should last around a month depending on your usage.

If this all sounds good, you'd be hard pressed to go wrong with the Amazfit Bip. It's worth noting the fitness tracker isn't available in all markets at the moment though and you may struggle to find the Bip where you live.

Read the full Amazfit Bip review

In fifth place is the Garmin Vivosmart 3, which is on the more expensive side of the fitness trackers listed but offers almost everything you'll want from an exercise tracker.

With a six-day long battery life, a heart rate monitor and fitness age feature, this is a device created more for gym-goers than runners.

The Vivosmart HR+, the device Garmin released before this tracker, came with GPS built-in but this newer version has dropped the feature, which is a shame for anyone who wanted to take this watch running.

Even so, you should definitely consider the Garmin Vivosmart 3, especially if you're looking for a band that can do high-end fitness tracking with almost a week-long battery.

Read the full Garmin Vivosmart 3 review

The Garmin Vivofit 3 is one of the best fitness trackers the company has ever created and that now means it sits in this prestigious list alongside some other fantastic tracking products.

We particularly like the super-long battery life of the Vivofit 3, which means you won't need to recharge your device for a whole year.

You'll miss out on phone notifications by buying this tracker, but you do get the benefit of an always-on display and some great fitness tracking features.

Read the full Garmin Vivofit 3 review

The Fitbit Charge 2 is the best Fitbit tracker you can buy right now. It's more expensive than some of the other options from Fitbit, but if you're looking to go jogging this is a great choice that won't cost you as much as a traditional running watch.

It connects with the GPS on your phone, has a large screen to display your data, a heart rate tracker and new fitness features we've only previously seen on the Fitbit Blaze.

It may not be the cheapest device on the list, but this is the best Fitbit tracker money can buy.

Read the full Fitbit Charge 2 review

Want a fitness tracker that looks more like a watch? You'll likely like the look of the Fitbit Blaze - it's one of the best fitness watches on the planet.

The first tracking watch from Fitbit is a strange looking device, but suits a lot of people and comes with automatic fitness tracking features that make it possible to just jump into an exercise and wait for the results to roll in right away.

With good battery life and a plethora of extra features compared to most other Fitbit devices, this may be the best tracker for you.

Read the full Fitbit Blaze review

Looking for a more affordable fitness band? Here are the best cheap fitness trackers of 2018

Buy Dell Vostro 3578 on Amazon

Best gaming laptops under Rs 50,000 for September 2018

No matter how much you play on our smartphone, tablet or console, nothing really beats gaming on a PC does it? And PC gaming is often better served by a laptop. There are several of these, which offer a great deal of performance without sacrificing much on portability. Here we have listed the best gaming laptops you can buy for less than Rs 50,000.

However, it is actually a bit tricky to choose the perfect gaming rig below Rs 50k, as none of them are properly suited for a hardcore gamer. You should aim for the right balance between processing power and graphics capability in the laptop you wish to buy.

We have selected the top 10 laptops that boast of optimum gaming capabilities while costing under Rs 50,000.

Please note that the prices mentioned below are based on what was available at the time this article was written. These may slightly vary as deals and offers keep changing from time to time.

But before we begin with the gaming laptops, here's the best value for money all-round notebook you can buy under 50k right now.

Dell Vostro 3578 is the first suggestion from us if the purpose is all round usage from office/college work to a slice of multimedia at home. It packs the latest set of Intel i5 8th gen processor with 8GB DDR4 RAM to power all the basic office chores. It's 15.6-inch display is not the best in the range, but still does its job quite well. The design is as basic as you can expect but the build is quite solid with premium finish on the outer shell. Has most common connectivity ports and ample of power for the price.
Budget gaming laptops from next page

With the 7th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU, the Lenovo Ideapad 320 80XL01D9IN clearly has the impressive processing power. However, this is not evenly matched with a capable graphics card. The 2GB GDDR3 NVIDIA GeForce 920MX simply doesn’t support hardcore gaming. Still, the laptop should be good enough for casual gamers to play on medium settings.

Externally, the Ideapad 310 80SM01HVIH is built quite decently. It supports a host of connectivity options ranging from dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth till Gigabit LAN and DVD Writer. This high-end laptop from Lenovo comes without Windows OS and you need to manually install it.

Asus has perfectly balanced the processing power and graphics performance of the R-Series R558UQ-DM983D. The 7th Gen Intel Core i5 paired with NVIDIA GeForce 940MX should be able to run most gaming titles with relative ease. The Full HD screen would surely be an eye candy - another plus for this machine.

The build quality of the laptop is good and it won’t feel cheap in your hands. However, availability is indeed a concern as the Asus R-Series R558UQ-DM983D often goes out of stock at various online as well as offline retailers pretty soon.

The HP AY503TX is a well-built laptop with decent specifications. Despite being a year old model, it is quite relevant even in today's market. The AY503TX will be able to run average to flagship games with standard settings.

The company has priced all of its 7th Gen Intel Core i5 laptops above Rs 50,000. Nevertheless, the HP AY503TX is quite good for gaming as well as multimedia consumption.

This is a very good under-Rs 50,000 gaming laptop by Asus. While everything is perfect about the Asus R558UQ-DM540D, it is the below-average RAM that bothers us. Moreover, there is only a single RAM slot in the notebook. This means you can't upgrade the RAM.

Apart from this, the Asus R558UQ-DM540D is a very good offering. It sports the top notch Bang & Olufsen Speakers, which, combined with the Full HD Anti-glare display makes the notebook an excellent entertainment gadget.

It is quite surprising to find a laptop with GDDR5 graphics priced below Rs 50,000. For starters, GDDR5 GPUs are significantly faster than GDDR3 options and offer enormous improvements in gaming and other graphics intensive works. This does make the Lenovo Ideapad IP 320 80XL033MIN one of the most powerful gaming notebooks on a budget.

If you can bear with the tiny 2-cell battery here, buying it is a no-brainer. Furthermore, the notebook also comes with Windows 10 preinstalled, relieving you from the troubles of installing a fresh OS.

The HP 15-be001TX is a relatively powerful laptop with an affordable price tag. With a 6th Gen Intel Core i5 and AMD Radeon R5 M430 GPU, the performance should be smooth. The notebook would run average to high-end games under low to middle settings.

On the outside, the laptop looks quite decent, while sporting DTS Studio Sound enabled stereo speakers. However, the HD screen somewhat spoils the show.

For a price of Rs. 42,990, it is hard to believe how powerful the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G is! It is possibly the best laptop you can buy in the Rs 40,000 and Rs 50,000 range. The notebook offers top notch graphics performance with great processing power and even comes pre-installed with Genuine Windows 10.

With the 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA 940MX GPU and 7th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU sitting inside, we can’t ask for anything better. The Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G is actually too good a deal.

The Lenovo IP 320 80XL0375IN is another blockbuster laptop that offers out of the world price to performance ratio. For a price tag of just above Rs 40,000, this notebook offers a high-end GDDR5 GPU, which is usually found in machines costing upwards Rs 60,000.

Admittedly, 4GB RAM is not the best fit for any gaming laptop, but one can only expect only so much on a budget.

However, there is a second RAM slot and you can always buy another RAM stick and slide it in. It supports up to 16 GB of RAM.

This is the DOS version of the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G and comes with identical specifications. The combination of 7th Gen Intel Core i5 Processor and 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce 940MX GPU is quite potent indeed. Even laptops costing upwards Rs 60,000 will have a tough time beating the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575.

The Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575 takes the crown of being the best gaming laptop under Rs 50,000. It is simply unbelievable what the company is offering at only Rs 40,990. Besides, the notebook also rocks dual-band Wi-Fi, Stereo Speakers, DVD Writer and HD Webcam.

These are the absolute best gaming laptops you can get within Rs. 50,000. Go through each of the 10 notebooks carefully and choose the one that is best suited to your needs. A little tip: Swap the Hard Disk with an SSD and you will unlock these machines’ true potentials.

Best laptops for students for under Rs 40,000

Best dual-camera phones in India for September 2018

Dual-camera phones are not particularly new. However, since the Apple iPhone 7 Plus was announced in 2016, manufacturers have been finding new routes to produce the best camera on phones with the help of a dual camera setup.

In fact, we recently witnessed a groundbreaking three-camera setup on the Huawei P20 Pro. But if you notice, the best camera phone in the market right now - the Pixel 2/XL still does the job with just one sensor, hence it did not make it to this list. You'll find it ruling the table in our best smartphone camera list though.

There was a time when there were few phones with two rear cameras, but things have changed so much that the trend has entered the budget phone market too.

So, what are some of the popular dual-camera phones that we can find in the Indian mobile market today? Let’s have a look.

Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus brings along a new variable aperture which changes as per the demand of the condition. Meaning, the low-light performance improves as it lets more light to enter the camera.

The only issue here's is the aggressive noise reduction algorithm that soften the details. But still, the phone is great for any kind of photography, and IP68 certification makes it usable in different environments.

Read the full review- Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus

The Galaxy Note is is currently the best dual camera smartphone in India. The newly launched flagship bears the same camera setup as the Galaxy S9 Plus.

The dual 12MP rear camera uses variable-aperture technology to switch between an f/1.5 aperture for low-light photography and an f/2.4 aperture for normal lighting conditions.

The secondary lens enables 2x optical zoom, which helps to capture sharp telephoto snapshots for distant subject. It has a fixed f/2.4 fixed aperture, and it retains the optical image stabilization like the primary lens. It works well, and it's very useful for those with shaky hands. There was ample of noise in the night-time shots with the telephoto lens, everything else remains perfectly crisp.

Front camera does selfies at 8MP and has autofocus, which is a first for a Galaxy Note phone. The camera app is filled with tons of mode options like AR stickers, wide group selfies, HD Super Slow Motion at 960fps and more. The camera app is dense, but it's still very easy to use and fast.

On top of everything, users get to opt for multiple storage variants as huge as 512GB storage with microSD card support.

Read full review: Samsung Galaxy note 9 review

The iPhone X may not be just about the camera but it is one of the major talking points of the phone. The iPhone X carries a promising set of lenses and it can focus faster, take better low-light shots and a lot more. The new camera is bolted on vertically this time, which clearly shows that Apple wants you to hold the phone in landscape rather than portrait.

The shots from the iPhone X are highly impressive — it shows huge improvement in low-light shots. Even when the light is fading, the details and colours look really strong. If you have something that can come close to competing with Pixel 2 XL in terms of quality and natural pictures, it is the iPhone X.

Read the full review: iPhone X

LG’s flagship smartphone for this year comes as an update to last year's V20. The LG V30+ comes with dual cameras comprising of a 16-megapixel primary shooter and a secondary 13-megapixel wide angle camera.

Unlike other OEMs, LG uses the secondary camera to enable wide-angle shots, which is something photography enthusiasts will be relieved about.

The 16-megapixel sensor has an aperture size of f/1.6, which allows more light to be captured by the camera and is backed by 3-axis optical image stabilisation and PDAF.

In our usage of the V30+, we found that the camera to be decent, but is not at par with the imaging prowess of phones like the Google Pixel 2. Then again, you get the V30+ at significantly lower price point.

Read the full review: LG V30+

The iPhone 8 Plus’ camera is an evolution rather than a revolution, but Apple didn’t need to reinvent anything here – it was already one of the best phone cameras on the market.

The thing that defines Apple’s cameras is how easy they are to use – with every release of new iOS software they gain new, if not necessarily spectacular features, to improve the power of the camera, and the sensor gets imbued with some new capabilities.

The overall performance of the camera is a cut above previous iPhone snappers, with the sharpness in mixed conditions being impressive – you can make out plenty of detail in both the brighter and darker sections of the photo. But what’s most impressive with the new iPhone 8 Plus is are the new editing capabilities, and what you can do with your photos post-capture.

Buy Apple iPhone 8 Plus at Flipkart

Read the full review: Apple iPhone 8 Plus

The OnePlus 6 doesn't feel out of the place alongside the likes of Samung, Sony or LG. In fact, the company has made a better value for money device when compared to most flagship currently. While the OnePlus 6 is a complete powerhouse in the performance department, it's no less in the optics department too.

It has the same camera configuration on paper as its predecessor, but OnePlus has increased the size of the sensor on the main 16MP camera by 19%, and it now has a 1.22um pixel size (up from 1.12um), enabling it to pull in more light and thus perform better in low-light conditions. Which makes it one of the better phones for photography in its range.

Read review: OnePlus 6

Nokia has launched the Nokia 8 Sirocco in India, the flagship from the company this year. Sure, it looks a lot like the perfect flagship phone, but it still has last year's chipset.

The phone has dual cameras powered by Zeiss. It's not the best in the class, but sure it's something worth checking out. The only issue is the price, which keeps it away from the competition. But if you're planning to buy this one just for the camera, we would recommend a cheaper device like a Pixel 2.

Read the review: Nokia 8 Sirocco

The flagship killer of the year, the OnePlus 5 came with an already impressive dual camera setup, but with an update in the form of the OnePlus 5T, it’s become a true flagship killer.

The reason for that, in part, is because the camera setup on the OnePlus 5T isn't the same as the one on its predecessor. While the now discontinued OnePlus 5 came with a secondary telephoto lens, the 5T doesn't and instead features a 20-megapixel snapper with an aperture size of f/1.7 and that improves its low-light shooting capacity.

Also, because of this little tweak, the camera can now capture more light and creates some better looking photographs in the price range.

There’s not a lot that hasn’t been said about the company’s new flagship and it’s currently selling via Amazon India and OnePlus' own store. The 64 and 128GB variants have been priced at Rs 32,999 and Rs 37,999, respectively.

Read the full review: OnePlus 5T review

The Honor 10's camera is actually the area where you can expect the it to perform better than its expensive alternatives. On the back of the Honor 10 sits a bug-eyed pair of camera lenses. One uses a 16MP colour sensor, the other a 20MP monochrome sensor.

Huawei and Honor have used a similar setup before, the higher-resolution 20MP camera being used to let you zoom at 2x and see more detail than you would from simply cropping into the standard 16MP image.

The camera performance is commendable and there's virtually zero shutter lag. Focusing is reasonably fast and you can use Auto mode and get the best possible shot in most cases.

Read the full review: Honor 10 review

The recently announced Mi A2 is the second generation of Xiaomi's Android One device. After the success of the Mi A1 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, Xiaomi has announced the slightly costlier Mi A2.

Since its partnership with Xiaomi for the Mi A1, search giant Google has partnered with Nokia, Motorola and other OEMs for premium Android One devices. Now, the two companies have partnered once again for the Mi A2.

The Mi A2 offers several upgrades over its predecessor, including an all new 18:9 display, improved cameras and an upgraded SoC. While these upgrades are good, the company has also taken some steps back by slightly reducing the battery capacity instead of increasing it and removing the 3.5mm audio jack.

Read the full review here: Xiaomi Mi A2 Review

The Honor Play is one of the most powerful devices from the company in the country and has been priced very competitively. The main highlight of the device is the Kirin 970 SoC, which is the company's current flagship SoC.

The Honor Play is gaming centric device and has been equipped with the company's GPU Turbo, a software and hardware solution that is claimed to increase the device's performance by up to 60% while reducing the battery consumption by up to 30% while gaming.

Coming to the cameras, the device sports a dual rear camera setup consisting of a 16MP primary sensor and a 2MP secondary depth sensor. The cameras come with features such as phase detection autofocus and EIS. Honor has said that it will push an OTA to enable AI stabilisation on the device in the coming days.

The Huawei Nova 3i is the only device in this list that features a dual camera setup at the front as well as the back. With this device, Huawei is targeting Oppo and Vivo that usually launch camera centric devices in the country. It was launched as the Huawei P Smart in some countries.

The device features 16MP + 2MP dual rear camera setup which is similar to the Honor Play. On the front, it sports a 24MP + 2MP setup. In our testing we found that the device performs well in daylight conditions and can add a background blur using both cameras.

The Nova 3i is powered by the Kirin 710 SoC and is expected to receive the GPU Turbo feature in the coming days, improving the gaming experience on the device.

Read the full review here: Huawei Nova 3i (P Smart) Review

The result of Xiaomi's partnership with Google, the Mi A1 supported by the search giant's Android One program is aimed at users who want a premium smartphone experience at a low price. The Mi A1 reboots Google's Android One program which was first created for budget OEM's. With its reboot, Google is now bringing more premium players into the fray.

The phone has a dual camera setup and houses twin 12-megapixel camera modules, one wide-angle, f/2.2 aperture and another telephoto f/2.6 aperture lens.

The best thing about the camera is the secondary telephoto lens, that is rare in this price segment. The dual camera is right now the best in the under Rs 15K category. And the reason being – color accuracy, well-defined details and impressive portrait blurring.

Read the full review here: Xiaomi Mi A1 Review

Xiaomi has improved the camera from its predecessor. It's at par with the Mi A1's camera, which means the Moto G5 Plus still sports a better camera in this price range. The Redmi Note 5 Pro produces warm, punchy colours with reasonable image detail. It can do reasonably well in low-light situations, though it's not the best we've seen in this range.

Also, the phone is a good buy at Rs 13,999. The 20MP front camera compliments the rear camera equally well. We also compared the camera with the OnePlus 5T, and the results were impressive.

Read the full review here: Redmi Note 5 Pro

Insert heading

Best DSLR cameras under Rs. 50,000 in India for October 2017

Best DSLRs under Rs 30,000 in September 2018

There was a time when 'photography' was limited to those with a professional camera. It was then followed by the surge of social media that led to the popularization of DSLRs and interest in photography saw an upswing.

A smartphone camera nowadays, of which the Google's Pixel is a good example, can do a fair job when it comes to good-looking or high-quality pictures. But if you want to pursue photography in detail, a DSLR is a better choice to learn the nitty gritties.

Since DSLRs are quite an investment, we suggest you start with a budget DSLR. Polishing your skills on an entry-level DSLR and then switching to a high-end/costly DSLR is usually the preferred path. There are some great options under Rs 30,000 that you can start with.

Here is a list of 5 budget DSLRs under Rs 30,000 that you can start with.

The Nikon D3400 succeeds the company’s other beginner-level DSLR – D3300. It is considered as one of the best choices for beginners with easy to use functions and quality results.

It comes with a Guide Mode, which teaches the user the art of clicking great pictures. The camera also delivers accurate colours and fine details with the help of a reliable 24.2 megapixel sensor.

Nikon has added a SnapBridge feature to this camera which allows users to transfer images to their smart devices via a constant Bluetooth Low Energy connection. You can also access the images using this connection even if the camera is switched off. Nikon D3400 is a feature-rich camera worth buying if you are a first-time DSLR user.

Read the full review: Nikon D3400

While Nikon offers a SnapBridge feature for transferring files to smart devices, the Canon EOS 1300D comes with built-in Wi-Fi and NFC connectivity which sets it apart from its predecessor - the Canon EOS 1200D.

Besides this, the camera is also equipped with an upgraded image processor-DIGIC 4+, and has a better screen resolution of 920k dots. It sticks to its promise of delivering fine image quality and captures well saturated and detailed pictures.

Read the full review: Canon EOS 1300D

Canon EOS 1500D comes with a 24.1MP APS-C CMOS sensor which forms the backbone for the DIGIC 4+ image processor. There are 9 autofocus points along with 1 cross point. The EOS 1500D also supports Wi-Fi and NFC. It is compatible with Canon's EF/EF-S lenses and EX-series speedlites.

The Nikon D5200 stands third in our list. It is an alternate to the Nikon D5300 at a much better price.

The quality of images it clicks with its 24.1-megapixel sensor is great for the price it comes at, and the EXPEED 3 image processing engine does a good job of enhancing images.

Its 2016-pixel RGB sensor helps scope out accurate scene brightness and colour information. Additionally, the camera has a wide ISO range of 100-6400 which can be further extended up to Hi-2 ISO 25600, thus, it allows for quality images in almost any lighting conditions.

Those who love capturing fast-moving objects will appreciate the camera as it features a continuous moving speed of 5fps.

Overall, the Nikon D5200 is a good camera for beginners with its articulating screen combined with a simple interface.

Read the full review: Nikon D5200

The Pentax K-500 camera features a 16-megapixel high performing sensor which delivers promising image quality when paired with the PRIME M image processing engine.

The K-500 shows that an entry-level DSLR doesn't have to compromise on features or control. Excellent image quality and build further enhances the camera's appeal, as does the viewfinder with 100%-coverage.

While the camera is good for the price, there's a reason why we ranked it at number five. The lack of any focus point display in the viewfinder is a small yet a very noticeable omission. That, along with the K-500's propensity to underexpose, makes it easy to lose faith in the camera's autofocus and exposure metering abilities.

Read the full review: Pentax K-500

You can also refer our manually curated best camera guides The best digital cameras in 2018 Best cameras of 2018: Top 10 cameras for any budget in India

Best free iPad games 2018

So you've got an iPad, but have come to the dawning realisation that you've got no cash left to buy any games for it.

Have no fear, because the App Store offers plenty of iPad gaming goodness for the (unintentional or otherwise) skinflint.

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.

Our updated pick of the best free iPad games are listed right here.

New this week: Soosiz

Soosiz is a fun platforming adventure which features a blobby protagonist, who in traditional platformer fashion runs left and right, leaps into the air, grabs gold coins, and jumps on enemies to dispatch them.

The twist? The world of Soosiz is based around tiny circular islands hanging in space, each of which has its own gravitational pull, adding an exciting new twist to a tried and tested format.

As you sprint from left to right, the screen spins and whirls, disorienting you as you figure out a route to the exit – and how not to leap from a floating island into oblivion. After a recent refresh, the game represents a great spin on an age-old concept.

Watch the video below for our 48hr review of the new iPad (2018)

A Way To Slay – Bloody Fight is a series of epic sword fights reimagined as turn-based strategy. You start each bout surrounded by weapon-wielding foes eager to take your head off. Double-tap one and you almost instantly appear before them, for a swift bit of ultra-violence. But then enemies get their turn. End up too near one of them and it’s curtains for you.

Assuming you can deal with liberal amounts of videogame blood being sprayed about, A Way To Slay is an excellent puzzler. Parked halfway between action and strategy, it feels fresh; and it’s enhanced further by the clever way you can adjust the zoom and panning of what you see before you, as if directing a very stabby movie.

Sneak Ops gives you a whiff of a Metal Gear Solid stealth experience on iPad, distilled down to the basics. You tap to sneak about, avoiding traps, and occasionally knocking out guards. The chunky graphics look fab on the iPad, and the largish screen means you can make more accurate prods.

This is just as well, given that death comes swiftly if you’re caught in a torch beam, or linger too long in a room with unbreathable air. Die and you’re whisked back to the start – or any restart point you’ve bought using floppy disks collected along the way.

This is a great, tense, exciting game, as you battle to the escape chopper. And there’s a new mission every day, so you can keep your virtual sneaking skills in tip-top condition.

It’s Full of Sparks is a platform game in a world where firecrackers are cruelly aware they’re about to explode – and are desperate to find water to extinguish their sparks.

Each side-on level is an urgent sprint to the finish line. The first is literally just that, but – inevitably – you’re soon dealing with platforms and hazards, many being triggered by a trio of colored buttons that enter the equation.

This thumb choreography adds another level to It’s Full of Sparks. It’s not enough just to be fast and know your way to the exit – you’re also frantically tapping buttons on and off, all too aware that your firework is about to go out in a blaze of glory.

It’s frustrating when that happen moments before watery bliss, but short, smartly designed levels keep you running, jumping and splashing, even when you’re occasionally gnashing.

Data Wing is a speedy but elegant neon-clad top-down racer. It’s also an intriguing narrative based around an irrational artificial intelligence’s attempts to escape its lot.

The racing bit is superb as you pilot your tiny craft, scraping track edges for boosts of speed during time trials. New challenges are slowly unlocked, such as races, and levels that flip everything on it side, pitting you against gravity and forcing you to use boost pads to reach a high-up exit.

A simple two-thumb control system ensures the game works brilliantly on every size of iPad, and as game and story alike unfold there are plenty of surprises in store. But perhaps the biggest is that a production this polished is entirely free. Get it!

Asphalt 9: Legends is a brash arcade racer with such a scant regard for physics and reality it almost makes its bonkers predecessor look like a simulation.

You blaze along hyper-real road circuits, having pimped-up sports cars do things no manufacturer’s warranty had ever considered. 360-degree turns off of massive ramps to pinwheel through the air! Nitro-boosting through skyscraper windows! Playing chicken with massive trains! We’re not in conventional racing territory here…

Like all Asphalt games, this one scrapes a key along its pristine bodywork in the form of IAP and grind; also, some players may be irked by a default control scheme that has you swipe and tap to time actions rather than actually steer. But despite its shortcomings, Asphalt 9: Legends remains a glorious and compelling oddball arcade racer.

Super Cat Tales looks like it’s beamed in from the 1980s. It’s all chunky pixels and bright colors as you bound about side-scrolling levels, grabbing coins and making for the exit.

Even the best-intentioned platform games often prove unwieldy on iPad due to the device’s size and whatever virtual controls you’re afforded. Not here. Your cat scoots about solely by you holding and tapping the left- and right-hand screen edges.

This is baffling at first, and you might pine for a more traditional setup, but once the system clicks, your moggie will be dashing, sliding and performing wall jumps like a feline ninja.

Combined with superb level design (featuring loads of secrets, plenty of variation and the odd dandelion field to scamper through), Super Cat Tales proves to be one of the best games of its kind on iPad.

Look, Your Loot! is a free-roaming RPG reworked as a sliding puzzler. It’s an odd combination, but it works brilliantly, mixing Threes!-style tile-shifting, scraps with monsters, and accumulating bling and skills.

You play as a mouse in a dungeon, surrounded by murdery foes. Flick and you move to an adjacent tile. The tiles behind follow, and something new appears at the other end of the grid. Attack an enemy and you win if your energy level’s high enough. Otherwise: bye bye, mouse.

The game feels more premium than freebie, and as you get better at planning your routes, you’ll survive to see dangers that force new approaches. One boss, Jack (as in O’ Lantern), unhelpfully turns nearby tiles into death-dealing pumpkins. In short, then, top stuff for RPG fans of all stripes.

Kind of Soccer is more a combination of relief and revenge than a digital take on actual soccer. There’s still a pitch and a ball to kick about, but no goals. Instead, you get points by booting the ball slingshot-style at the referee’s head.

That’s not especially sportsmanlike, but it is amusing, not least when you get power-ups like bombs and lasers to take on the hapless official. Fortunately for him (and giving the game extra challenge), your team’s not alone on the field.

Defenders will try to take the ball from you, and the ref lurks behind them when possible. Also, ping the ball out of bounds and you lose a point. Success therefore hinges on keeping calm and a careful aim – in other words, don’t lose your head before the ref loses his.

Cubor is a puzzler that features trundling cubes. The aim is to get each cube to its corresponding target. Sometimes, cubes have only one colored side, which must be placed face-down over its intended home.

That probably doesn’t have you already stabbing an install button, but Cubor’s a game that quietly takes hold, gradually sucking you in as you become engrossed in its simple, smartly designed puzzles.

It’s got something for everyone, too. Casual players can tinker with levels until they’re complete – and that might be reward enough. But for more hardcore puzzle fans, each level offers bonus stars for meeting move limits – many of which are extremely tough to crack, not least when you’re juggling five cubes on a decidedly claustrophobic level layout.

Shadowgun Legends gives you a big, dumb, brash first-person shooter for your iPad. It looks superb, whether you’re mooching about the neon-bathed central hub world, or merrily blasting hordes of evil aliens.

From a gameplay perspective, it’s no Call of Duty or Doom, but that’s fine for touchscreen play. After all, when you don’t have a gamepad in your hands, you’ll be glad you only need two thumbs to control movement and gaze, your guns discharging automatically when a foe’s in your sights.

But just because Shadowgun Legends is streamlined for mobile, don’t mistake it for being simple. There’s tons to do, a slew of power-ups to get you kitted out for tougher later missions, and an entertaining emphasis on ‘fame’ over character and story that if nothing else seems like savvy commentary on a great deal of modern media.

MMX Hill Dash 2 is a one-on-one monster truck racer, with tracks akin to roller coasters, full of unlikely peaks and crazy dips. Helpfully, then, the physics is so bouncy vehicles often feel like they’ll bound off of the screen, never to be seen again.

At first, this makes for an off-putting experience. It can feel like you’re fighting the physics with the two-button control system that deals both with braking and also rotation when a vehicle’s airborne. But grab vehicle upgrades and properly plan how to tackle a track, and you start making progress.

The game then becomes strangely absorbing – almost puzzle-like as you gradually figure out the choreography and upgrades required to crack a track. It is, however, best for players with a slightly masochistic streak, since you’re often hitting the same track time and again, until you get the kit and brainwave to defeat it.

Ava Airborne is a one-thumb endless survival game. It features the titular protagonist hurling herself through a suspiciously hazardous sky, putting off for as long as possible the inevitable moment when she plummets back to Earth and face-plants into the dirt.

Holding the screen raises your altitude, and your aim is to burst balloons, zoom through hoops, and bounce off of trampolines – and definitely not to hit massive bombs or get horribly electrocuted by weird floating boxes.

Ava Airborne feels effortless, although you can see the care that went into it. This is especially apparent when you acquire and experiment with alternate transport, such as a giant yo-yo and a jet-fueled trombone. The beautifully rendered visuals also make it ideally suited to the iPad’s large display.

Runventure is a streamlined platform game that finds your little hero darting through trap-laden jungles, temples and castles. However, rather than use a traditional D-pad or have you auto-run and tap to jump, Runventure tries something new.

At the foot of the screen is the run-jumping bar. Drag across it and the hero runs, and the game previews the jump you’ll make on lifting your finger. With deft timing, you’ll leap on enemy heads, rope-swing across deadly ravines, and totally not die by falling into a spike-filled pit like an idiot.

That’s the theory. Initially, you’ll fail often as you get to grips with what seems like a needlessly awkward control system. But stick around, discover the nuance in the leapy action, and Runventure proves compelling. If nothing else, grab if if you’re tired of the same old thing.

Hue Ball is a strategic shooting game that features a little turret that oscillates back and forth at the foot of the screen. Tap and it fires a ball that bounces about. Other balls it hits disappear, and you must also ensure your ball doesn’t zip over the line of death, robbing you of a life.

There’s another ball, though – one you can’t hit. It fills the screen with color and shrinks towards the center. When it vanishes, every static ball gets another layer. When any end up with five, they become indestructible skulls.

This combination of clever mechanics makes for an entertaining experience, which works well on the iPad’s larger screen. And although the noodly chill-out audio seems at odds with Hue Ball’s take-no-prisoners claustrophobic end-game panic, it may calm you for long enough to make that perfect shot.

Drop the Clock features a grinning timepiece that’s hurled into single-screen challenges, with the goal of reaching an exit as quickly as possible. The snag: this world is full of angry red hammers, teleportation pipes, and other hazards.

You can’t control the clock as such – its path is predetermined. Instead, you control time. Press the screen and the clock’s own movement slows down, Matrix-style (if The Matrix featured a moustachioed clock rather than leather-clad, shades-wearing protagonists). With deft fingerwork and a little luck, you’ll figure out how to avoid your enemies and reach your goal.

Given that Drop the Clock resembles pinball in how its hero pings about, you’ll fail often. But levels are so short, and the game’s so relentlessly jolly, that having another go is a no-brainer – after all, you’ll be having a great time.

Dancing Line is a rhythm action game controlled with a single finger. You help a wiggly line carve its way through isometric worlds. Its survival is down to you tapping the screen at opportune moments, to make the line change direction rather than smack into a wall.

If that was it, Dancing Line would be easy to dismiss, but beautiful design ensures it’s a winner. One level features a piano, with keys moving to the soundtrack’s notes; part-way through, you’re suddenly inside the instrument, hammers raining down all around you. Elsewhere, you blaze through gardens and a savannah at sunset.

The game can frustrate when you fail near the end of a minutes-long level, and its ad-heavy freemium trappings can grate, but if you’ve a sense of rhythm, and a penchant for great-looking games that marry immediacy and elegance, Dancing Line is well worth a download.

The Battle of Polytopia is akin to turn-based strategy classic Civilization in fast-forward. You aim to rule over a tiny isometric world by exploring, discovering new technologies, and duffing up anyone who gets in your way.

The game is heavily optimized for mobile play. Technology stops evolving before anyone gets guns, you can only expand your empire via conquest rather than founding new cities, and there’s a 30-move limit that stops you dawdling. (For more bloodthirsty players, there’s a Domination mode, too, where you win by being the last tribe standing.)

You get the entire core game for free, but buy extra tribes and everything expands. You gain access to new maps, but also an online multiplayer mode, where you quickly discover whether you’re a powerful despot or one of history’s also-rans. However you play, Polytopia is one of the very best free games on mobile.

Mekorama is a path-finding puzzle game where you help a little doddering robot reach its goal. There are 50 hand-crafted diorama-like levels in all, which you spin with a finger. You then tap to make the robot head to a particular spot.

The pace is slow, but the game is charming and relaxing rather than dull. Wisely, it always provides you with several levels to tackle in case you get stuck on one, and new hazards and ideas regularly appear, such as sections of buildings that move, and patrolling robots that may help or hinder.

It works particularly well on iPad, largely because the bigger screen makes it easier to see what’s going on when you’re peering into a complex structure’s nooks and crannies, but the real prize is a level designer. There’s huge scope for long-term play through the ability to download levels and create your own.

Tako Bubble has roots in classic arcade games, but at its heart is a cleverly designed turn-based puzzler that straddles the divide between casual and challenging play.

You play an octopus, popping bubbles and aiming to recover a collection of beetles. Grab all of the colored bubbles and you finish a level, but only by popping them all do you get the satisfaction of a job well done.

The snag is the turn-based bit. You move, and then the ferocious monsters dotted about get their go. Get your timing wrong and the octopus is ejected from the screen.

Success is therefore about pathfinding – learning how enemies react and move, and planning accordingly. There’s no timer and no time limit, so it’s just you against the game. And while it’s approachable enough for all, getting every bubble is a very tough test indeed.

Slide the Shakes recreates the bartender slide, where a beverage is sent to a patron at speed – only in Slide the Shakes, the bars have been built by a maniac. They’re full of humps and gaps, set on slopes, and often covered in sticky goo and slippy ice.

In each level, you’re tasked with sending a milkshake to several precise destinations. Fall short and the game generously gives you another shot (albeit at the expense of a perfect score); smash the glass and you must start that round again.

This is a bright, breezy, immediate game, with intuitive catapult controls. It also avoids the irritating randomness of an Angry Birds, because the pull-back mechanism affords you plenty of accuracy. Just as well when you’re confronted with bar-top designs akin to motocross tracks.

Beat Street is a love letter to classic scrolling brawlers, where a single, determined hero pummels gangs of evil-doers and saves the day. In Beat Street, giant vermin are terrorizing Toko City, and will only stop when you’ve repeatedly punched them in the face.

On iPhone, Beat Street is a surprisingly successful one-thumb effort, but on iPad you’re better off playing in landscape. With your left thumb, you can dance about, and then use your right to hammer the screen (and the opposition).

The iPad’s large display shows off the great pixel art, but the fighty gameplay’s the real star – from you taking on far too many opponents at once to gleefully beating one about the head with a baseball bat. It turns out they do make ’em like they used to after all.

Carmageddon is in theory a racing game, but is really more a demolition derby set in a grim dystopia where armored cars smash each other to bits and drivers gleefully mow down ambling pedestrians and cows.

It’s a game of questionable taste and a brains-free approach. You may not be surprised to hear it ended up banned in several countries when originally released on PC back in 1997. These days, though, its low-res over-the-top feel seems more cartoonish than gory – and the freeform driving is a lot of fun.

The maps are huge, the physics is bouncy, and your opponents are an odd mix of braindead and psychotic. There’s no nuance, but loads of laughs to be had – assuming you’re not the type to get offended when a game congratulates you for power-sliding a startled cow into a wall.

Turn Undead: Monster Hunter is a spooky run-and-gun platformer, in the same territory as arcade classic Ghosts ’n Goblins. Hordes of zombies, vampires and werewolves need offing by way of your trusty supply of stakes, before you make for an exit – and a few moments of feeling smug.

But Turn Undead has another trick up its sleeve: it’s turn-based. This means time only moves on when you do, which upends everything you thought you knew about this kind of game.

In theory, the stop-start action should make things easier, enabling you to plan when to kill each nasty, but the clockwork nature of Turn Undead often transforms proceedings into a brain-smashing puzzler. Just try to make sure the brains getting smashed are those of the undead – and not your own.

To The Castle finds tiny knight Sir Petrionius doddering about gloomy dungeons, attacking monsters, pilfering bling and making for the exit.

The twist in this platform game is the limited controls; the knight runs of his own accord, and you can only make him either jump or unleash a devastating thrust attack that propels him forward, killing anything in his way.

These restrictions, married with tight level design, make for a fast-paced path-finding-tinged arcade platformer. Timing and good reflexes are key as you leap into the air, and then thrust attack to obliterate enemies or leap over spike pits. And if you get particularly good at all that, blazing through the 60 built-in levels, you can make your own in the game’s editor.

Breakout Ninja teaches us you shouldn’t imprison angry, green-eyed, immensely powerful ninjas. Here, the masked protagonist auto-runs, leaping over fences, kicking guards in the face, and occasionally smashing up entire buildings.

Your entire interactions with the game involve tapping the screen when the hero is atop yellow circles, whereupon he gets all punchy or leapy. That might sound reductive, but it’s an interesting take on the genre, lending a sense of choreography to each level.

It’s a pity what you do isn’t synchronized to a beat (this could have been an amazing rhythm-action title), but it’s nonetheless enjoyable and a bit different. And when you’re done with the initial dozen levels, you get to tackle them in ‘hard’ mode at breakneck speed.

Cally’s Caves 4 is a free game that appears so generous that you wonder what the catch is. The Metroid-style run-and-gun shenanigans find you leaping about, shooting anyone in your path. However, the hero is a girl with pigtails and a surprising arsenal of deadly weapons, neatly subverting convention.

The plot’s a tad more mundane - something about finding a cure for a curse. But the game retains its oddball credentials with a gaggle of strange enemies - everything from footballers to cleaver-lobbing chefs.

The jumping, blasting, and exploring is compelling stuff, which is just as well, because this is a big game, with hundreds of sprawling levels, 11 bosses, and stints where you temporarily control a psychotic ninja bear. No, that last bit isn’t a typo; and, yes, those bits are particularly great.

Up the Wall is an auto-runner with an edge. Or rather, lots of edges. Because instead of being played on a single plane, Up the Wall regularly has you abruptly turn 90-degree corners, some of which find you zooming up vertical walls.

The speed and snap twists make for a disorienting experience, but the game’s design is extremely smart where, most notably, each challenge is finite and predefined. Up the Wall isn’t about randomness and luck, but mastering layouts, and aiming for that perfect run.

It nails everything else, too. The game sounds great, and has sharp, vibrant visuals, with imaginative environments. It’s not often you’re frantically directing a burger in an abstract fever dream of milkshakes and ketchup bottles, nor a skull in a world of flames, lava, and guitars.

Into the Dead 2 finds you in a race to save your family, in a world overrun by zombies. Unfortunately, because you’re a massive idiot, you crash your truck while heading their way, and must then travel on foot. Across 60 stages, you grab ammo, dodge the lumbering undead, and occasionally shoot them in the face. It’s a frequently exciting, nerve-racking experience.

Also, it’s an auto-runner. So instead of stealthily sneaking about or being able to hide, you’re always blundering onwards (apart from during odd moments where you find a massive gun to satisfyingly mow down dozens of zombies in seconds).

The controls feel a bit weird – you kind of ‘drift’ left and right; but these limitations the game imposes ramp up the tension when you’ve dozens of undead before you, and are down to your last bullet.

Twisty Board 2 is an excellent example of how to make a sequel. The original was a throwaway effort, with you zig-zagging like a maniac on a hoverboard, to throw pursuing missiles off the scent. It got old fast.

But it turns out that was a training ground for the real fight. Twisty Board 2 dumps you in an alien war-zone, where – for some reason – the protagonists mostly jet about on hoverboards.

You’re still scything about, but now blast endless hordes of enemies, trying to carve a path to hostages. Once they’re all rescued, you set about blowing the living daylights out of a massive boss. It’s a tough, intense challenge, and you’ll need the skills of a dozen Marty McFlys to succeed.

Flipflop Solitaire is another of designer Zach Gage’s attempts at subverting a classic game. This time, spider solitaire caught his eye, and has been revolutionized by way of a couple of tweaks.

Like the original table-based card game, Flipflop Solitaire still has you arrange columns of cards in descending order. But now you can send cards to foundation piles, and also stack them in either order. (So a 4 or a 6 can be placed below a 5.)

These may seem like small changes, but they prove transformative. Every hand is possible to complete, if you can find the right combination of moves. This turns Flipflop Solitaire into a fascinating and surprisingly fresh puzzler, with you utilizing endless undos to untangle your web of cards.

San Giorli is a strange arcade game set in a neon city that’s seemingly been deserted. Mostly, it involves you plugging things in (or unplugging them), which doesn’t sound terribly exciting – but trust us on this one.

The levels scroll horizontally, and at any given point bits of cabling are strategically positioned. You must connect cables to activate machines that clear the way forward for your ship – which often requires careful timing and plugging/unplugging in a specific order. Also, your character rotates around your ship, attached to it by a cable, rather than having free movement.

It’s the limitations and the game’s slightly unusual nature that make San Giorli work – and especially on iPad. It’s tense when you need to perform a bunch of actions in order, spinning this way and that, your little hero’s head missing nearby scenery by a whisker.

In cmplt, every challenge is a blocky object with a bit of it missing. The entire game looks like it’s been crafted out of paper squares and dumped on your iPad’s screen.

You tap squares to ‘draw’ the object’s missing parts, which you’d think would be easy. And sometimes it is. One picture is a gamepad, and merely requires you to mirror the side you can already see.

But sometimes the shapes are abstract to the point of confusion. It’s embarrassing to think how long during testing it took us to crack a decidedly minimal take on the Statue of Liberty.

Still, ad-funded hints exist if you get stuck, and you’ll often chuckle on figuring out a level’s subject matter, before quickly tapping out its missing squares so that you can see what’s next.

Stranger Things: The Game is a rarity: a free tie-in videogame that’s not rubbish. In fact, it’s a really good old-school action-adventure that should delight old-timers and also click with people who follow the TV show.

The idea is to figure out what’s going on in Hawkins, Indiana, where things have gone deeply weird. You start off playing Officer Hopper, who scowls and punches his way about, but soon find kids to join your crew, including Lucas and his wrist rockets, and bat-swinging Nancy.

Occasionally, the game echoes old-school fare a little too well, with set-piece sections that are tough to crack (although you do get infinite attempts) – and the map is if anything too big; for the most part, though, Stranger Things: The Game is a clever, engaging, and compelling slice of mobile adventuring.

AuroraBound is a puzzle game that’s all about matching patterns. Each level provides you with a tiled board, onto which you place colorful pieces. The aim is to ensure that all the lines and colors join up.

This isn’t the kind of puzzler designed to smash your brains out – for the most part, it’s a rather relaxing experience. But as the boards increase in size, with patterns on each tile that are only very slightly different, you may eventually find your ego and complacency handed back to you.

Even so, AuroraBound never becomes frustrating. There are no time limits, and you can experiment by shifting pieces around at will. Neatly, the level select screen is a tiny puzzle to complete as you go, too.

Power Hover: Cruise is an endless arcade treat loosely based on the boss levels from the superb Power Hover. Your little robot gets to tackle four distinct environments on his hovering board, weaving between hazards. The aim is to last as long as possible before being smashed into scrap metal when you inevitably mess up and fly head-on into an obstacle at insane speed.

The game is visually stunning on the iPad’s large display, whether descending into Dive’s hazardous underwater tunnel, or zooming along Air’s tubular road that winds snake-like through the clouds.

But controls make or break this kind of game, and Power Hover: Cruise is blessed with a simple left/right system with plenty of inertia. Initially, it feels unresponsive, but before long you’ll be scything through levels like nobody’s business, in one of the most beguiling endless games on iPad.

Drag’n’Boom is a breezy, fast-paced arcade game that marries Angry Birds, Tiny Birds, Sonic the Hedgehog, twin-stick shooters, dragons and The Matrix. No, really.

Each level finds your baby dragon zooming about hilly landscapes packed with castles and tunnels, roasting guards and grabbing coins. Movement and unleashing fiery breath alike happen by way of ‘drag and fling’ directional arrows, and everything slows down while you aim, Matrix-style.

This all makes for an interesting combination, enabling deliriously fast zooming about and violence across the tiny worlds, but precision when you need it. Over its 40 levels, Drag’n’Boom could perhaps do with more variety – there are scant few enemy types to defeat. But it’s an exhilarating thrill-ride while it lasts.

Little Alchemy 2 is an exploratory logic game. You start off with a small number of items, which can be dragged to the central canvas. Items are then merged to create new ones.

At least that’s the theory. If you just set about randomly shoving items together, nothing happens. Instead, you must utilize rational thinking – or a little whimsy. For example, combine a couple of puddles and you’ll get a pond. Obvious, really. But also you can create a blender from a blade and ‘motion’, and a rocket from ‘metal’ and ‘atmosphere’.

In all, there are over 600 items to discover, and although Little Alchemy 2 can irk if you hit a brick wall, you can always pay for hints via IAP if you get stuck. Alternatively, tough it out and feel like a genius when you hit upon a suitably clever combination.

Battle Golf Online is a golfing game that’s thrown out the rulebook. You still use a stick to smack a tiny ball into a distant hole, but there’s no mucking about with fairways and club selection. Instead, you and an opponent stand at different edges of a lake, from which holes periodically appear. The first to five wins.

Play is fast and furious – more a race than precision sport. And fortunately, the controls are easy to grasp, merely requiring two taps to set your shot’s direction and strength.

But it’s the ‘online’ component that really helps this one shine – knowing you’re facing off against a human rather than your iPad adds an edge that’ll have you frantically blasting shots at everything from sea monsters to submarines, and wondering whether real-life golf could do with a similar blast of high-octane weirdness.

Silly Walks is a one-thumb arcade game, featuring wobbling foodstuffs braving the hell of nightmarish kitchens (and, later, gardens and gyms), in order to free fruity chums who’ve been cruelly caged.

The hero of the hour – initially a pineapple cocktail – rotates on one foot. Tapping the screen plants a foot, causing him to rotate on the other foot and changing the direction of rotation. Charitably, this could be called a step, and with practice, it’s possible to put together a reasonable dodder.

And you’ll need to. Although early levels only require you to not fall off of tables, pretty soon you’re dealing with meat pulverizers, hero-slicing knives, and psychotic kitchenware in hot pursuit.

It’s admittedly all a little one-level – Silly Walks reveals almost all in its initial levels – but smart design, superb visuals, and a unique control method make it well worth a download.

Topiary is a game of concentration, involving a single digit, and an on-screen plant you’re aiming to grow into a mighty oak – albeit a decidedly odd-looking, geometric, psychedelically colored oak.

You start off with a pulsating disc, and the aim is to prod the screen when it’s at its largest, thereby giving you the biggest base on which to build. Once that’s done, you get the next slice, which you try to tap when it exactly matches its predecessor.

Fail and your tree gradually narrows until you drop the final, super-skinny twig on top. Get five perfect matches in a row (which is no mean feat) and that tier will grow again. It’s all really simple stuff, but Topiary proves to be an entertaining and relaxing one-thumb arcade test of timing and nerve.

Flippy Knife finds you hurling dangerous knives, mostly at wooden objects. Which we admit doesn’t sound particularly thrilling – and you might also have had your fill of ‘Verby Noun’ games with colorful, chunky visuals, whatever the hook. But Flippy Knife does plenty to demand a space on your iPad.

The basic Combo mode has you drag upwards to hurl your pointy weapon into the air, Angry Birds style, aiming for it to flip and stick into a wooden platform on landing. It’s a good way to get a feel for your virtual knife.

Beyond that, there’s the thoughtful Arcade mode (lob a knife through an endless cabin), the frenetic Climb (a vertically scrolling pursuit of a thieving drone), and the archery-like Target. That is, if archery involved lobbing bloody great big knives at bullseyes strapped to trees – which we totally think it should.

Vertigo Racing is a sort-of rally game. We say sort-of, because although you’re pelting along a twisty-turny track, it happens to be at the top of a wall so high its base is lost in the clouds below.

Also, you’re barreling along in old-school muscle cars, to a classic guitar rock soundtrack, and you can’t steer.

Instead, the game does the steering for you, leaving you merely able to prod the accelerator or slam on the brakes, to stop your car plunging into the abyss. This transforms the game into a decidedly oddball take on slot racing, reimagined as a roller-coaster. Or possibly the other way around.

Either way, it’s fun, even if handling and camera issues make progress in later tracks tough. Still, the upgrade path is smart (with a generous dishing out of virtual coins to upgrade your cars and buy new tracks), making for hours of grin-inducing arcade action.

Virtua Tennis Challenge is an iPad reimagining of a classic Dreamcast tennis game. Although Sega claims it’s the most realistic game of its type on mobile, Virtual Tennis Challenge is in reality very much an arcade outing, with you darting about, attempting to defeat your opponent by way of lobs, top spins, and dramatic ‘super shots’.

The gestural controls leave a lot to be desired, resulting in tennis as if your player had downed a few too many drinks in the bar prior to their match.

But plump for the on-screen virtual D-pad and buttons (or use an external MFi gamepad) and you’ll find an entertaining take on repeatedly smacking a ball over a net, while the virtual crowd presumably gorges itself on virtual strawberries.

Splashy Dots is a puzzle game that wants to unleash your inner artist. It takes place on canvases with a number of dots sprinkled about. Your task is to figure out a path from the start to the end point that takes in every dot.

This is a familiar concept – there are loads of similar games on the App Store, but the execution of Splashy Dots ensures it stands out. Every swipe you make smears paint across the screen; and these brushstrokes and splats fashion a little slice of geometric art as you play.

Over time, the canvases become increasingly complex, as you slowly build a gallery of abstract virtual paintings. A relaxing jazzy soundtrack and unlimited undos add to the relaxing vibe – only interrupted with a jolt when ads appear. But if those irk, you can silence them with a single $0.99/99p/AU$1.49 IAP.

Rocklien Run is a hybrid endless runner/shooter, featuring a little UFO blazing along space lanes populated by hordes of deadly creatures who’d very much rather the UFO wasn’t there. You tap left and right to avoid being horribly killed, attempting to scoop up bonus coins and stars along the way.

The stars are the key to Rocklien Run. Pick up a green one and your little ship starts spewing bullets. Grab a yellow one and you zoom along, temporarily indestructible. Keep on shooting, dodging, and picking up stars, and Rocklien Run transforms from a frustrating staccato experience into an exhilarating high-octane arcade blast.

Just be aware that for every breezily crazy game where you’re belting along at insane speeds, you’ll probably have another where you’re killed in approximately three seconds.

Hoggy 2 is a platform puzzler, with a firm emphasis on the puzzling. It features some cartoon slime molds, who’ve got on the wrong side of the villainous Moon Men. These rogues have taken the heroes’ kids, and so parents Hoggy and Hogatha vow to get them back.

The Moon Men’s fortress is a huge maze peppered with jars. Within each jar is a room filled with platforms, enemies, hazards, and fruit. Eat all the fruit and you get a key. Get enough keys and you can venture further into the maze.

The snag is that getting at the fruit can be tricky. Hoggy 2’s levels are cunningly designed, often requiring you perform actions in a specific order and manner, making use of power-ups that transform the protagonists into trundling granite squares or screaming infernos.

Add in lush console-style visuals and a level editor, and you’ve got one of the biggest bargains on mobile.

You know a game’s not taking itself too seriously when it begins with the hero trudging through a blizzard, only to be faced by a giant heavily armed walrus guarding the fortress of a megalomaniacal genius.

But Evil Factory is just warming up, and subsequently revels in flinging all manner of mutated madness your way in its hard-nosed top-down arcade battles.

For each, you dart about using a virtual joystick, while two large on-screen buttons activate weapons. Unfortunately, your bosses are colossal idiots, and have armed you with the likes of dynamite and Molotov cocktails. Bouts often therefore involve dodging bullets to fling wares at a giant foe, before running away like a coward.

It’s silly, relentless arcade fun – or at least it would be relentless if the ‘fuel’ based freemium model didn’t butt up against one-hit-death and tough later levels. Still, if the stop-start nature of playing becomes irksome, fuel limitations can be removed with a $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP.

With a name that sounds like something an angry railway employee would yell before slapping you, Conduct THIS! actually starts out as a fairly sedate railway management game. Little trains amble along, picking up passengers you have to direct to stations that match their color.

The controls are extremely simple: tap a train and it halts until you tap it again; and switches can be triggered to send a train the most optimum way at a junction.

However, the layouts you face very quickly become anything but simple, with multiple trains to control and vehicles to avoid – both of which sometimes unhelpfully disappear into tunnels.

This is a smart, colorful mix of arcade smarts and puzzling – even if it does have the capacity to drive you loco(motive).

If you’ve ever played the last level of PC classic Driver, with its psychotic police vehicles, you’ll have an inkling what you’re in for in Reckless Getaway 2. You pick a car and barrel about a little wraparound city, driving around like a maniac, until your inevitable arrest.

Well, we say ‘arrest’, but these police are crazed. SWAT vans will hurl themselves at your vehicle, oblivious to the carnage around them. Eventually, airstrikes will be called in, at which point you might question if the law’s applying a bit too much zeal towards grand theft auto these days.

Over time, the game’s repetitive nature palls a bit, and the physics is a bit floaty; but otherwise it’s a great fun freebie for virtual joyriders armed with an iPad.

This one’s all about counting really quickly. That admittedly doesn’t sound like much – but stick with it, because Estiman is actually a lot of fun.

It begins by displaying a bunch of neon shapes. The aim is to prod a shape that belongs to the most numerous group, and work your way to the smallest. Do this rapidly and you build a combo that can seriously ramp up your score. Now and again shapes also house credits, which can be used to buy new themes.

On iPad, the game looks great, and although some themes (such as gloopy bubbles) make the game easier, that at least gives you a choice if the minimal original theme proves too tricky.

And despite Estiman’s overt simplicity, its odd contrasting mix of relaxation (chill-out audio; zero-stress timer) and urgency (if you want those combos) proves compelling.

Its overhead viewpoint and tiny players might evoke arcade-oriented soccer games of old, like Sensible Soccer and Kick off, but Retro Soccer is very much a mobile oriented affair. In part, this is down to the main mode taking you through loads of challenges, rather than a league, but mostly it’s about the controls.

There are no virtual buttons and D-pads here – everything in Retro Soccer is about taps and gestures. You tap to move somewhere, dribble with the ball or pass. A swipe unleashes a shot if you’re within sight of the goal, or a scything sliding tackle that carves up a fair chunk of the field if you’re near an opposing player with the ball.

It takes a fair bit of getting used to and really needs the iPad’s large screen for you to have any hope of mastering the game. But stick around and you’ll find Retro Soccer an entertaining take on the beautiful game.

With its chunky graphics and silly demeanor, Westy West isn’t an entirely accurate recreation of the Wild West – but it is a lot of fun.

You hop about tiny towns, deserts, and mines, shooting bad guys and being rewarded for being the kind of sheriff who doesn’t also shoot innocents.

Although the controls mirror Crossy Road (albeit with a tap to shoot rather than leap forward), progression is more akin to Looty Dungeon, with you having to complete each miniature room (as in, shoot all the bad guys) before moving on.

The net result is a game that’s ultimately an entertaining arcade title, but that somehow also feels like you’re exploring a tiny universe – and one with character. It’s amusing when you’re facing a duel, and a pianist is rather conspicuously outside, furiously playing an ominous score.

We’re in broadly familiar territory with Bomb Hunters, which twins Crossy Road with bomb disposal. This means you get chunky graphics and a swipe-based take on Frogger, but must also quickly locate and deal with high-explosives that are soon to go off.

This twist transforms Bomb Hunters into a relentlessly frantic experience, and keeps you on your toes regarding the route you’re taking. Everything becomes markedly tougher when enemy snipers and grenadiers appear, and when some bombs only disarm when you complete a dexterity mini-game.

The swipe controls can be a touch iffy at times, but otherwise this is a smart take on an otherwise tired genre – and one that rewards repeat play through unlocks that boost your survival rate during subsequent games.

The clue’s in the title in this entertaining and arcade-oriented engineering test. In Build a Bridge!, you’re faced with a vehicle, a gap over which the vehicle would like to travel, and some materials to build your bridge. You lay down a structure on virtual graph paper, press play, and see what happens.

If your bridge falls to bits – as it invariably will on the first few attempts – you can go back, rebuild and try again. Should you want to properly test out your engineering skills, you must minimize the materials used to get a three-star award – tricky when you hit levels requiring outlandish solutions that incorporate jumps and hot-air balloons.

Some of the building can be a bit fiddly, but on an iPad Build a Bridge! proves a compelling test of your engineering skills.

We shouldn’t encourage them, really. Transformers: Forged to Fight is packed full of horrible free-to-play trappings: timers; gates; a baffling currency/resource system. And yet it’s a horribly compelling title. Much of this is down to how much fun it apparently is to watch giant robots punching each other in the face.

If you’re unfamiliar with Transformers, it’s based around robots that disguise themselves as cars and planes as a kind of camouflage - and then they forget about all that, transform into bipedal robots, and attempt to smash each other to bits.

This game has various Transformers universes colliding, which for fans only increases the fun – after all, old hands can watch with glee as old-school Optimus Prime hacks Michael Bay’s version to pieces with a massive axe. But for newcomers hankering for one-on-one Street Fighterish brawls on an iOS device, it’s still a freebie worth grabbing.

With Darkside Lite, you rather generously get the entire arcade mode from superb blaster Darkside. What this means is a slew of fast-paced and eye-dazzling shooty action, where you blast everything around you to pieces, while trying very hard to stay in one piece yourself.

The twin-stick shenanigans echo the likes of Geometry Wars (or, if you’re really old, Robotron) in terms of controls, but the setup is more Asteroids, obliterating space rocks – and also the spaceships that periodically zoom in to do you damage.

The entire thing’s wrapped around planetoids floating in the void, making for a dizzying, thrilling ride as you attempt to locate the last bit of flying rock before some alien attacker swoops in and rips away the last of your shields.

This one’s from the Pac-Man 256 folks, but this time the classic titles being mined appear to be Dig-Dug and Mr. Driller. And, yes, that was a terrible pun, because Digby Forever is all about mining, your little hero drilling deep into the ground on a quest for bling, trying to avoid regular cave-ins and various underground ‘one touch equals death’ denizens.

Bar a baffling card power-up system, Digby Forever is a breezy arcade blast. Its little world feels very alive, with explosions blasting pixels across the screen, and various creatures going about their business. Intriguingly, it also deftly deals with that problem in endless games of starting from scratch – here, you always restart from where you were last defeated.

With Dashy Crashy, the iPad shows bigger (as in, the screen) really can be better. The basics involve swiping to avoid traffic while hurtling along a road. New vehicles are periodically won, each of which has a special skill (such as the UFO abducting traffic, and the taxi picking up fares); and there are also random events to respond to, such as huge dinosaurs barreling along.

On iPad, the gorgeous visuals are more dazzling than on the smaller iPhone, and in landscape or portrait, it’s easier to see what’s in front of you, potentially leading to higher scores.

Also, the game’s multi-touch aware, so you can multi-finger-swipe to change several lanes at once – fiddly on an iPhone but a cinch on a tablet, making for an addictive, just-one-more-go experience.

Although Solid Soccer has the visual appearance of Amiga classic Sensible Soccer, this is a much more sedate affair, with decidedly strange controls that have more in common with Angry Birds than footie games.

As your little players scoot about the pitch, you use drag and release gestures to tackle and shoot, or drag back and slide left and right to dribble.

This all feels a bit floaty, but a few games in everything clicks, and you’ll have fun kicking off against online opposition. There is a sense of shallowness, however – there’s no offline mode and none of the extensive depth found in the likes of Active Soccer 2. Still, as a freebie iPad kickabout, Solid Soccer manages a scrappy win.

Here’s yet another game with a ‘Verby Noun’ moniker, and blocky voxel graphics. But although Guessy Stars riffs off of Crossy Road in those areas, it’s in fact a nicely-designed trivia game, in which you have to guess 300 famous faces, grouped into 12 item rounds.

In each case, you get a basic clue and a figurine to spin. Tap in an answer (using a suitably blocky custom keyboard) and the figurine explodes all over the screen if you guess correctly. If you’re close – just a small misspelling away – the game amusingly moves into game show host mode, asking “Can we take that?”

Should you get stuck, ask for more clues – but note: replenishing your clue token stash requires IAP or watching ads.

The world’s stretchiest canine’s found himself in a world full of sticky desserts and a surprising number of saw blades. His aim: get to the other end of this deadly yet yummy horizontally scrolling world. The snag: the aforementioned blades, a smattering of puzzles, and the way this particular pooch moves.

In Silly Sausage: Doggy Dessert, the canine hero doesn’t pootle along on tiny legs – instead, you swipe to make his body stretch like an angular snake until he reaches another surface, whereupon his hind quarters catch up.

The result is an impressive side-scroller that’s more sedate puzzler than frantic platformer – aside from in adrenaline-fueled time-based challenge rooms, which even Silly Sausage veterans will be hard-pressed to master.

Do you like brick-bashing Breakout? Do you like ball-whacking pinball? If so, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy Super Hyper Ball 2, which mashes the two together. Here, you get flippers to smack the ball around but also a little bat you move back and forth at the foot of the screen. Oh, and there are power-ups, too, which can be triggered to blow up hard-to-reach targets and bricks.

If that all sounds a bit like patting your head while rubbing your stomach, that’s not far off. Super Hyper Ball 2 can be like playing two games simultaneously.

Curiously, given its heritage, it can also be oddly pedestrian at times, but it’s mostly giddy fun, whether facing off against a laser-spewing skull boss, or smashing your way through a whirling disc with colorful bricks glued to its surface.

We’ve lost count of the number of puzzle games where you swipe to force a couple of blocks simultaneously slide about, aiming to make them both reach a goal. And on first glance, that’s Waiit.

But this title cleverly differentiates itself from mundane contemporaries by welding itself to the guts of an endless runner.

In Waiit’s vertically scrolling world, a universe-devouring entity is in hot pursuit. You must rapidly figure out routes to the next exit and deftly perform the swipes required to get both of your squares through unscathed.

Tension is mixed with charm as the little squares holler to each other by way of comic-style balloons. And although you’ll initially fail quickly and often – perhaps even hankering for a hazard-free zen mode – it’s Waiit’s relative toughness that’ll keep you coming back to beat your high score.

The best way to think about Brick Shot is as a radically simplified Tetris where you happen to be hurtling along at insane speeds. There’s just one shape here – a rectangular brick – and it must be fired along one of four columns, with you aiming to complete rows and make them disappear.

For the first fifteen shots, it’s pretty much impossible to mess up. The screen scrolls slowly, ensuring your aim is always true. Then Brick Shot ups the pace considerably, and even only having four columns to decide between can sometimes feel like three too many.

On the iPad at least, your fingers have space to rest and your eyes can more easily track incoming walls. Ongoing success unlocks alternate modes, although the straightforward original’s probably the best.

If you know your arcade history, you’ll know that Galaga is one of the earliest single-screen shooters. The sequel to Galaxian – where aliens started fighting back by way of dive-bombing – Galaga added ‘Challenging Stages’, where strings of ships would flit about rather than marching back and forth in formation.

Galaga Wars combines both approaches, increases the pace, adds glossy modern cartoonish graphics, and gleefully ends your war should your ship take a single hit. You must therefore weave through projectiles, efficiently offing opponents, and grabbing power-ups whenever they appear.

Regular boss battles up the ante in what’s a vibrant and compelling shooter. The excitement does eventually wane – levels never change and it’s a grind to reach later ones – but for a time this is a solid free blaster for your iPad, and for many of us that’s just the way we like our tablet gaming.

The original Flappy Golf was a surprise hit, given that it was essentially a joke – a satire on Flappy Bird. While Flappy Golf 2 is a more polished and considered effort, it’s essentially more of the same, giving you courses from the most recent Super Stickman Golf, and adding wings to the balls.

Instead of smacking the ball with a stick, then, you flap it skywards, using left and right buttons to head in the right direction. If you’re a Super Stickman Golf 3 aficionado, Flappy Golf 2 forces you to try very different approaches to minimize flaps and get the scores needed to unlock further courses.

For newcomers, it’s an immediate, fun and silly take on golf, not least when you delve into the manic race mode. The permanent ad during play also makes this a far better bet on iPad than iPhone, where the ad can obscure the course. (Disappointingly, there’s no IAP to eradicate advertising.)

This fast-paced rhythm-action game has you swiping the screen like a lunatic, trying to help your tiny musicians to the end of a piece of classical music without them exploding. Yep, things are tough in the world of Epic Orchestra – one bum note and a violinist or pianist will evaporate in a puff of smoke.

The entire thing is swipe-based. Arrows descend from the top of a narrow column at the centre of the screen, and you must match them with a gesture. At lower difficulty levels, this is insanely easy.

Ramp up the speed, though, and your fingers will soon be in a twist, despite the apparent simplicity of the task. A $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP unlocks more songs, but you get five for free.

One of the most ludicrous one-thumb games around, Brake or Break features a car hurtling along the road. You can hold the screen to brake, and if you don’t, the car speeds up. Sooner or later, it’ll be hurled into the air and start spinning, thereby awarding you with huge points – unless you land badly and smash your vehicle to pieces.

There’s a lot of risk-versus-reward and careful timing here, with gameplay that offers a smattering of Tiny Wings and a whole lot of weird.

Most of said oddness comes by way of the environment, which lobs all kinds of objects at your car, and regularly has it propelled into the air by a grinning tornado. Stick out the game long enough (or open your wallet) and you can unlock new worlds and cars to further shake things up.

Instead of blazing through larger-than-life takes on real-world cities, Asphalt Xtreme takes you off-road, zooming through dunes, drifting across muddy flats, and generally treating the great outdoors in a manner that will win you no favors with the local authorities.

As per other entries in the series, this is ballsy arcade racing, with bouncy physics, simple controls, an obsession with boosting, and tracks designed to make you regularly smash your car to bits.

It’s also, sadly, absolutely riddled with freemium cruft: timers; currencies; nags – the lot. But if you can look past that and dip in and out occasionally to allow the game to ‘recharge’, there’s a lot to like in this racer that’s decided roads and rules are so last season.

There’s a delightful and elegant simplicity at the heart of Mars: Mars. The game echoes iPad classic Desert Golfing, in providing a seemingly endless course to explore. But rather than smacking a ball, you’re blasting a little astronaut between landing pads.

The controls also hark back to another game – the ancient Lunar Lander. After blast-off, you tap the sides of the screen to emit little jets of air, attempting to nudge your astronaut in the right direction and break their fall before a collision breaks them.

Smartly, you can have endless tries without penalty, but the game also tots up streaks without death. Repeat play is further rewarded by unlocking characters (also available via IAP), many of which dramatically alter the environment you’re immersed in.

Like a simulation of having a massive migraine while on a stomach-churning roller-coaster, Groove Coaster 2 Original Style is a rhythm action game intent on blasting your optics out while simultaneously making your head spin.

It flings you through dizzying, blazing-fast tracks, asking you to tap or hold the screen to the beat of thumping techno and catchy J-Pop.

The game looks superb – all retro-futuristic vector graphics and explosions of color that are like being stuck inside a mirror ball while 1980s video games whirl around your head.

Mostly you'll stick around for the exhilarating tap-happy rhythm action, which marries immediacy with plenty of challenge, clever choreography tripping up the complacent on higher difficulty levels.

It never becomes a slog though – tracks are shortish and ideal for quick play; and for free, you can unlock plenty of them, but loads more are available via in-app purchase.

So crazy it has an exclamation mark in its name, Crazy Truck! is essentially a reverse Flappy Bird. Your blocky vehicle bounces around like a hyperactive hybrid of a 4x4 and a flea, abruptly returning to terra firma when you hold the screen.

This sounds simple enough, yet the controls are oddly disorienting, not least when your chunky vehicle's tasked with avoiding waves of deadly bombs and rockets that litter the screen.. which is at pretty much every moment.

Games are therefore very short; and, frankly, we shouldn't encourage this kind of iPad game, given that there are so many of them. But Crazy Truck! is colorful – if frequently frustrating – fun, and neatly has you tackle the same 'course' until you beat a virtual opponent. (Well, we say 'neatly'; whether you'll think that on your 27th attempt…)

Rather than requiring you to build a tower, Six! is all about demolition, tapping to blast Tetris-like shapes from a colorful column. The tiny snag is a hexagon sits at the top, and the second it falls into the void, your game is over.

In theory, Six! is the kind of game that should be ridiculously easy. In reality, the hexagon is big and unwieldy and the tower narrow enough that you must take care removing blocks, lest the plummeting shape spin and fling itself to certain doom.

When that happens, the simple fun rather nicely concludes with a frantic 'last call', where you tap like a maniac to grab a bunch of extra points before the screen dims.

We have absolutely no idea what’s going on in Masky. What we do know is that this is a deeply weird but thoroughly compelling game.

According to the game’s blurb, Masky’s all about some kind of grand costume ball, with you dancing to mystic sounds and inviting other masked dancers to join you. What this means in practice is shuffling left and right, adding other dancers to your merry band, and ensuring the balance meter never goes beyond red. If it does, everyone falls over – masks everywhere.

Beyond the lovely graphics and audio, there’s a smart – if simple – game here. Some masks from newcomers added to your line shake things up, flipping the screen or temporarily removing the balance meter.

Inevitably, everything also speeds up as you play, making keeping balance increasingly tough. We don’t doubt the unique visuals count for a lot regarding Masky’s pull, but the strange premise and compelling gameplay keep you dancing for the long haul.

Perhaps our favorite thing about Level With Me is that it’s, really, very silly indeed. The premise is to balance things on a massive plank, precariously perched atop the pointy bit of a tower.

Said plank’s position is shifted by tapping water at the foot of the screen, launching massive bubbles. These counter whatever’s lurking on top, unless you mess up and everything slides into the sea and explodes.

Tasks come thick and fast, often lasting mere seconds. You must quickly figure out how to balance 10 people when they’re being chased by zombies, construct a hamburger when its component parts are being lobbed from the heavens, and pop balloons by using a trundling hedgehog.

The themes admittedly repeat quite often, but everything’s so charming (and your games are so short) that this doesn’t really matter.

The BAFTA-winning INKS rethought pinball for mobile, breaking it down into bite-sized simple tables that were more like puzzles. Precision shots – and few of them – were the key to victory. PinOut! thinks similarly, while simultaneously transforming the genre into an against-the-clock endless runner.

The idea is to always move forwards, shooting the ball up ramps that send it to the next miniature table. Along the way, you grab dots to replenish the relentlessly ticking down timer, find and use power-ups, and play the odd mini-game, in a game that recalls basic but compelling fare once found on the LED displays of real-life tables.

PinOut! is gorgeous – all neon-infused tables and silky smooth synth-pop soundtrack. And while the seemingly simplified physics might nag pinball aficionados, it makes for an accessible and playable game for everyone else.

There's not a lot of originality in King Rabbit, but it's one of those simple and endearing puzzle games that sucks you in and refuses to let go until you've worked your way through the entire thing.

The premise is hackneyed — bunnies have been kidnapped, and a sole hero must save them. And the gameplay is familiar too, where you leap about a grid-like landscape, manipulating objects, avoiding hazards, finding keys, unlocking doors, and reaching a goal.

But the execution is such that King Rabbit is immediately engaging, while new ideas keep coming as you work through the dozens of puzzles. Pleasingly, the game also increases the challenge so subtly that you barely notice — until you realise you've been figuring out a royal bunny's next moves into the wee small hours.

In a marked departure from the impressive Phoenix HD and its procedurally generated bullet hell,Phoenix II shoves you through set-piece vertically scrolling shoot 'em up grinders. Every 24 hours, a new challenge appears, tasking you with surviving a number of waves comprising massive metal space invaders belching hundreds of deadly bullets your way.

A single hit to your craft's core (a small spot at its center) brings destruction, forcing you to memorize attack and bullet patterns and make use of shields and deflectors if you've any hope of survival. You do sometimes slam into a brick wall, convinced a later wave is impossible to beat.

To lessen the frustration, there's always the knowledge you'll get another crack at smashing new invaders the following day. Regardless, this is a compelling, dazzling and engaging shooter for iPad.

If you've experienced Colin Lane's deranged take on wrestling (the decidedly oddball Wrassling), you probably know what you're in for with Dunkers. In theory, this is side-on one-on-one basketball, but Dunkers is knowingly mad.

You only get two buttons, one of which dodders your player back towards their own basket, while the other lurches them into the air and in the opposite direction. All the while, their arms whirl like a hysterical clock.

You battle as best you can, grabbing the ball from your berserk opponent, fighting your way to the basket, and slam dunking victoriously. The entire thing is ridiculous, almost the antithesis of photo-realistic fare like NBA 2K; but we'd also argue that it's a lot more fun.

It's hard to imagine a less efficient way of building and maintaining a zoo than what you see in Rodeo Stampede. Armed with a lasso, you foolishly venture into a stampede and leap from animal to animal, attempting to win their hearts by virtue of not being flung to the ground.

You then whisk beaten animals away to a zoo in a massive sky-based craft - the kind of place where you imagine the Avengers might hang out if they gave up crime-fighting and decided to start jailing animals rather than villains.

Despite overly familiar chunky visuals (Crossy Road has a lot to answer for), this fast-paced, breezy game is a lot of fun, with you dragging left and right to avoid blundering into rocks, and lifting your finger to soar into the air, aiming to catch another rampaging beast.

Much like previous entries in the series, Super Stickman Golf 3 finds a tiny golfer dumped in fantastical surroundings. So rather than thwacking a ball about carefully tended fairways and greens, there are castles full of teleporters and a moon base bereft of gravity. The Ryder Cup, this is not.

New to the series is a spin mechanic, for flipping impossible shots off of ceilings and nudging fluffed efforts holewards on the greens. You also get turn-by-turn battles against Game Centre chums and a frenetic multiplayer race mode.

The spendthrift release is limited, though, restricting how many two-player battles you have on the go, locking away downloadable courses beyond the 20 initially built-in, and peppering the game with ads. Even so, you get a lot for nothing, should you be after new side-on golfing larks but not want to pay for the privilege.

If you like the idea of golf, but not traipsing around greens in the drizzle, WGT: World Tour Golf is the closest you'll get to the real thing on your iPad. Courses have been meticulously rebuilt in virtual form, based on thousands of photographs, and WGT's control scheme is accessible yet also quite punishing.

There's no mucking about spinning balls in mid-air to alter your shot here - mess up and you'll know about it, with a score card massively over par. But this is a game that rewards mastery and perseverance, and you feel like a boss once you crack how to land near-perfect shots.

WGT is, mind, a touch ad-heavy at times, but this is countered by there being loads to do, including head-to-head online multiplayer and a range of tournaments to try your hand at.

In Clash Royale, two players battle online, sending out troops to obliterate their opponent's three towers, while simultaneously protecting their own. It comes across a bit like animated chess, if chess pieces were armed to the teeth and ranged from a giant robot with a huge scythe to an army of skittering skeletons.

The troops you have available come by way of cards you collect, from which you select a deck of eight. In matches, elixir gradually tops up, which can be 'spent' deploying said troops, forcing you to manage resources and spot when your opponent might be dry.

Clash Royale is very much a freemium game. You can spend a ton of real-world cash on virtual coins to buy and upgrade cards. However, doing so isn't really necessary, and we've heard of people getting to the very highest levels in the game without spending a penny. But even if you find yourself scrapping in the lower leagues, Clash Royale is loads of fun.

Tie-ins between indie game companies and major movie houses often end badly, but Disney Crossy Road bucks the trend. It starts off like the original Crossy Road — an endless take on Frogger. Only here, Mickey Mouse picks his way across motorways, train lines and rivers, trying to avoid death by drowning or being splattered across a windscreen.

But unlock new characters (you'll have several for free within a few games) and you open up further Disney worlds, each with unique visuals and challenges.

In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz dodge tumbling building blocks, whereas the inhabitants of Haunted Mansion are tasked with keeping the lights on and avoiding a decidedly violent suit of armour.

Elsewhere, Inside Out has you dart about collecting memories, which are sucked up for bonus points. And on the iPad, the gorgeous chunky visuals of these worlds really get a chance to shine.

This smashy endless arcade sports title has more than a hint of air hockey about it, but PKTBALL is also infused with the breakneck madness associated with Laser Dog's brutal iOS games.

It takes place on a tiny cartoon tennis court, with you swiping across the ball to send it back to your opponent. But this game is *really* fast, meaning that although you'll clock how to play PKTBALL almost immediately, mastering it takes time.

In solo mode, the computer AI offers plenty of challenge, but it's in multiplayer matches that PKTBALL serves an ace. Two to four people duke it out, swiping like lunatics (and hopefully not hurling the iPad away in a huff, like a modern-day McEnroe, when things go bad).

As ever, there are new characters to unlock, each of which boasts its own court and background music. Our current favourite: a little Game Boy, whose court has a certain famous blocky puzzle game playing in the background.

At first glance, Looty Dungeon comes across like a Crossy Road wannabe. But you soon realise it's actually a very smartly designed endless dungeon crawler that just happens to pilfer Crossy Road's control method, chunky visual style, and sense of urgency.

You begin as a tiny stabby knight, scooting through algorithmically generated isometric rooms. You must avoid spikes and chopping axes, outrun a collapsing floor, and dispatch monsters. The action is fast-paced, lots of fun, and challenges your dexterity and ability to think on the move.

As is seemingly law in today's mobile gaming landscape, Looty Dungeon also nags at the collector in you, offering characters to unlock. But these aren't just decorative in nature — they have unique weapons, which alter how you play. For example, an archer has better range than the knight, but no defensive shield when up against an angry witch or ravenous zombie.

Touchscreens have opened up many new ways to play games, but scribbling with a finger is perhaps the most natural. And that's essentially all you do in Magic Touch, which sounds pretty reductive - right up until you start playing.

The premise is that you're a wizard, fending off invading nasties who all oddly use balloons to parachute towards their prize. Match the symbol on any balloon and it pops, potentially causing a hapless intruder to meet the ground rather more rapidly than intended. Initially, this is all very simple, but when dozens of balloons fill your field of vision, you'll be scrawling like crazy, desperately fending off the invasion to keep the wizard gainfully employed.

Time travel weirdness meets the morning rush hour in Does Not Commute. You get a short story about a character, and guide their car to the right road. Easy! Only the next character's car must be dealt with while avoiding the previous one. And the next. Before long, you're a dozen cars in and weaving about like a lunatic, desperately trying to avoid a pile-up. For free, you get the entire game, but with the snag that you must always start from scratch, rather than being able to use checkpoints that appear after each zone. (You can unlock these for a one-off payment of $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49.)

With its numbered sliding squares and soaring scores, there's more than a hint of Threes! about Imago. In truth, Threes! remains the better game, on the basis that it's more focussed, but Imago has plenty going for it. The idea is to merge pieces of the same size and colour, which when they get too big explode into smaller pieces that can be reused.

The clever bit is each of these smaller pieces retains the score of the larger block. This means that with smart thinking, you can amass colossal scores that head into the billions. The game also includes daily challenges with different success criteria, to keep you on your toes.

With iPads lacking tactile controls, they should be rubbish for platform games. But savvy developers have stripped back the genre, creating hybrid one-thumb auto-runner/platformers. These are entirely reliant on careful timing, the key element of more traditional fare.

Mr. Crab further complicates matters by wrapping its levels around a pole. The titular crustacean ambles back and forth, scooping up baby crabs, and avoiding the many enemies lurking about the place. The end result is familiar and yet fresh. You get a selection of diverse levels for free, and additional packs are available via IAP.

Having played Planet Quest, we imagine whoever was on naming duties didn't speak to the programmer. If they had, the game would be called Awesome Madcap Beam-Up One-Thumb Rhythm Action Insanity — or possibly something a bit shorter. Anyway, you're in a spaceship, prodding the screen to repeat beats you've just heard. Doing so beams up dancers on the planet's surface; get your timing a bit wrong and you merely beam-up their outfits; miss by a lot and you lose a life. To say this one's offbeat would be a terrible pun, but entirely accurate; it'd also be true to say this is the most fun rhythm action game on iPad — and it doesn't cost a penny.

We imagine the creators of Smash Hit really hate glass. Look at it, sitting there with its stupid, smug transparency, letting people see what's on the other side of it. Bah! Smash it all! Preferably with ball-bearings while flying along corridors! And that's Smash Hit — fly along, flinging ball-bearings, don't hit any glass face-on, and survive for as long as possible.

There are 50 rooms in all, but cheapskates start from scratch each time; pay $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 for the premium unlock and you get checkpoints, stats, iCloud sync, and alternative game modes.

One of the most innovative multiplayer titles we've ever played, Spaceteam has you and a bunch of friends in a room, each staring at a rickety and oddball spaceship control panel on your device's display. Instructions appear, which need a fast response if your ship is to avoid being swallowed up by an exploding star. But what you see might not relate to your screen and controls. Spaceteam therefore rapidly descends into a cacophony of barked demands and frantic searches across control panels (which helpfully start falling to bits), in a last-ditch attempt to 'set the Copernicus Crane to 6' or 'activate the Twinmill' and avoid fiery death.

The best puzzle game on mobile, Threes! has you slide cards about a grid, merging pairs to create ever higher numbers. The catch is all cards slide as one, unless they cannot move; additionally, each turn leads to a new card in a random empty slot on the edge you swiped away from. It's all about careful management of a tiny space.

On launch, Threes! was mercilessly cloned, with dozens of alternatives flooding iTunes, but 2048 and its ilk lack the charm and fine details that made Threes! so great in the first place. And now there's Threes! Free, where you watch ads to top up a 'free goes' bin, there's no excuse for going with inferior pretenders.

At some point, a total buffoon decreed that racing games should be dull and grey, on grey tracks, with grey controls. Gameloft's Asphalt series dispenses with such foolish notions, along with quite a bit of reality.

Here, in Asphalt 8, you zoom along at ludicrous speeds, drifting for miles through exciting city courses, occasionally being hurled into the air to perform stunts that absolutely aren't acceptable according to the car manufacturer's warranty. It's admittedly a bit grindy, but if you tire of zooming about the tracks in this game, there's no hope for you.

In Triple Town, you have to think many moves ahead to succeed. It's a match game where trios of things combine to make other things, thereby giving you more space on the board to evolve your town. For example, three bushes become a tree, and three trees become a hut.

All the while, roaming bears and ninjas complicate matters, blocking squares on the board. At times surreal, Triple Town is also brain-bending and thoroughly addictive. Free moves slowly replenish, but you can also unlock unlimited moves via IAP.

Pinball games tend to be divided into two camps. One aims for a kind of realism, aping real-world tables. The other takes a more arcade-oriented approach. Zen Pinball is somewhere in-between, marrying realistic physics with tables that come to life with animated 3D figures.

Loads of tables are available via IAP, including some excellent Star Wars and Marvel efforts. But for free you get access to the bright and breezy Sorcerer's Lair, which, aside from some dodgy voice acting, is a hugely compelling and fast-paced table with plenty of missions and challenges to discover.

With almost limitless possibilities in videogames, it's amazing how many are drab grey and brown affairs. Frisbee Forever 2 (like its similarly impressive forerunner) is therefore a breath of fresh air with its almost eye-searing vibrance.

There's a kind of Nintendo vibe - a sense of fun that continues through to the gameplay, which is all about steering a frisbee left and right, collecting stars strewn along winding paths. And these are a world away from the parks you'd usually fling plastic discs about in - here, you're hurled along roller-coaster journeys through ancient ruins and gorgeous snowy hillsides.

Argh! That's pretty much what you'll be yelling on a regular basis on playing this endless racer. Cubed Rally Redline shouldn't be difficult. You can go left or right on five clearly defined lanes, and there's a 'time brake' for going all slow-motion, Matrix-style, to weave through tricky gaps; but you'll still be smashing into cows, dinosaurs and bridges before you know it.

You'll persevere if you're particularly bloody minded, or just to see what other visual treats the developer's created for hardcore players.

Best laptops for students for under Rs 40,000

Best laptops under Rs 40,000 in India for September 2018

The top laptops under Rs. 40000 now often feature a dedicated graphics card for mild gaming on a budget, without compromising on other aspects of the device. The sub 40K is most the most asked price segment when it comes to notebooks. From students to office-goers, everyone can easily get a laptop that does basic day to day tasks with an ease.

If it's about the add-ons, many of them offer a dedicated graphic card, or multimedia features or sometimes you may get additional power for intensive tasks. But certainly not enough power to suffice the need of a video editor or a graphic designer for that matter.

Still, finding the best laptops among the options available can be a little challenging. There are many configurations available, some with newer processors and some with older ones. Some of the previous generation laptops may also be better than newer ones when you consider the specs-to-price ratio.

As always, we’ve tried to make the job of selecting the best laptop under Rs 40,000 easier for you.

Note that these prices and deals were available when this article was written.

HP has several affordable options when it comes to laptops with an integrated graphics card. The HP 15-BE015TU features a 15.6-inch HD backlit LED display, along with the full set of connectivity options. Dual speakers, DTS audio sound and HP’s Truevision HD webcam round up the specs of the laptop.

The first Dell entrant in this list, the Inspiron 3567 comes with the latest generation of Intel’s Core i5 processor with integrated Intel HD graphics. It looks minimalist and comes with six hours of battery life, which is good compared to other options.

The Inspiron 3567 also features a similar 15.6-inch HD display, but comes with half the RAM compared to its competitors at this price. You will have to decide whether you want the latest generation processor or more RAM.

Another good laptop from Acer is the Aspire E5-575G. It comes with a 6th gen Core i3 processor, but makes up for it with a dedicated 2GB NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card.

Compared to the E5-575, it is slightly more expensive but having a dedicated graphics card could be worth it if your main goal is to game comfortably.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5000 is powered by a seventh generation Intel Core i6 processor coupled with Intel HD Graphics. It features a 15.6-inch full HD display, offering a vivid visual experience to users.

It is a powerful device and at this price point, offers excellent value for money to its users. It runs on Linux and sports dual stereo speakers with MaxxAudio Pro support, for a good audio experience.

The Asus X541UA-XO561T features a 15.6-inch HD display and is powered by a sixth generation Intel core i3 processor with Intel Integrated HD 520 graphics. It is equipped with 4GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD and runs on Windows 10 Home.

Like other affordable laptops, this device from Asus also lacks dedicated graphics and is equipped with Intel HD graphics. Additionally, it offers only 4GB RAM, but considering its price, it is a capable contender in this list.

The HP 15-bs145tu features a 15.6-inch full HD display and is powered by an eighth generation Intel core i5 processor with Intel HD 620 graphics. It is equipped with 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD and runs on DOS.

The laptop is equipped with some good features from HP such as the HP Fast charge that allows you to charge the device to 90% in just 90 minutes and HP Audio that delivers rich bass and provides clear voice. This powerful device is a good option if you are looking for a long term device and are willing to spend around Rs. 40,000.

Acer has another E5-575 laptop with a newer Core i5 7th generation processor with integrated Intel HD graphics. It also comes with 8GB DDR4 RAM and a full set of connectivity options. Considering its current price, the E5-575 Core i5 is a good machine to consider, compared to the Dell Inspiron 3567.

The Lenovo Ideapad 310 comes with a 6th gen Intel Core i5 processor and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce N16V-GMR1 graphics card. A full set of ports for connectivity and a decent design makes the Ideapad 310 another worthy contender in this segment.

It also comes with decent battery life, making it a good all-round package under Rs 40,000.

The Dell Vostro 3468 with 7th Gen Intel Core i5 processor is next in this list. The laptop comes with Window 10 operating system and has a plenty of ports including 1xUSB 2.0, 2xUSB 3.0, 1xHDMI port and 1xVGA port. Weighing 1.96kg, the laptop is lightweight which makes it highly portable for the users.

So, apart from getting a good processor, you will have a number of connectivity options and that too with a reasonable price tag.

Falling next very close to under-40k category is the Lenovo Ideapad 320. The laptop has in-built Harman speakers with Dolby Audio which ensure crystal clear sound to the users who like to consume media.

Along with superior sound quality, the laptop also offers crisp display with up to full HD IPS resolution. The 7th gen Intel i5 processor is still among the best you would get on a competition, so performance and efficiency is ensured. A 2GB graphic card also lets you play mild games without needing a gaming laptop, but of course, heavy titles might not fit in that system. But overall, it's a highly recommended machine for the price.

To compete with the above mentioned laptops, here comes the Dell Inspiron 15 5567. The laptop comes loaded with a good number of ports and Windows 10 Home operating system.

Its anti-glare LED backlit display along with Waves MaxxAudio Pro will definitely enhance your viewing experience. In addition to this, the 1TB storage capacity will allow you to save a number of multimedia files in the system.

Weighing 1.69 kg, this light weight laptop comes with DOS operating system and offers a good amount of storage space to the users. The CPU with a clock speed of 2 GHz along with 2 GB AMD Radeon R5 M430 graphics card handles the gaming aspect smoothly, thus leaving no space for glitches. It also provides a number of connectivity options and long working hours to the user.

The specs sheet of this laptop is somewhat similar to the laptop that we have mentioned above. But, there are some differentiating features as well. This includes 64-bit Windows 10 Home operating system, 8GB DDR4 RAM and the weight. Although the laptop will be heavy in weight, it will not on your pocket.

The best laptops for gaming under Rs 50,000

Save over £300 on this Sky TV deal with the best of TV and Sky Sports - all in HD

Just because the footy season has kicked off already, that doesn't mean your chance for a cheap Sky deal with Sky Sports has ended. Actually, you're just in time to save a massive £342 on a new contract that's packed with not just a huge amount of sport content, but a generous helping of other TV channels too.

Sky has slashed the price of this Sky Sports and Entertainment bundle from £59 a month, to just £40. And you're getting the complete Sky Sports package and Entertainment channels all in HD.

Sky Entertainment is your base package and comes with a great selection of top channels including Sky Atlantic (the home of Westworld and Game of Thrones), Fox, Sky One, Comedy Central and more. As for Sky Sports, you're getting the compete package which covers a lot more than just football. You get Sky Sports, Sky Sports Football, Sky Sports F1, Sky Sports Golf, Sky Sports Cricket, Sky Sports Action, Sky Sports Arena and Sky Sports Main Event.

And don't forget, you're getting all of this content in HD with no need to pay the usual extra prices to get Sports and Entertainment channels in HD. There's a small one-off £20 setup fee, but otherwise you're laughing at just £40 a month instead of £59.

Sky Sports and Sky Entertainment £59 £40 a month

If you'd like to add any other extras, just click 'Edit your order' on the screen after adding this bundle to your basket. Sky Cinema's movies on demand service is £10 a month and gets a new premiere every single day. Sky Box Sets is also worth a look at a tiny £5 a month.

Sky Broadband has also just been reduced - now from only £18 per month

Best power bank in India: Best batteries over 10,000mAh

Believe it or not, smartphone batteries have gotten better over the last few years, especially compared to when Android phones just arrived into the market. The powerful pocket computer demand power and OEMs do their best to offer the best solution for battery efficiency.

Still, the need of a reliable powerbank that sticks around to charge your phone in the most crucial times, we see powerbanks up to 10,000mAh a good solution. We have bigger power banks in the market, but 10,000mAh carries enough power to charge your phone at least twice. It's not comparatively bulky, charges sooner and is neither too huge or too small for that matter.

We have created a list of best battery banks around 10,000mAh. Do let us know if we've missed any.

Don't want to carry a brick with you? Checkout the best phones with big batteries here.

This new power bank from Xiaomi comes with a battery capacity of 20000mAh and is also the first power bank by Xiaomi which is manufactured in India. It offers dual USB output and also supports Quick Charge 3.0 on a single port. That is, you can charge two devices simultaneously but if you want to charge your device quickly then you have to skip using the other port.

The power bank is compatible with various devices and offers a conversion rate of 85%.

This power bank from Intex comes with two USB ports which allow users to charge two devices simultaneously. Its built-in LED indicators display the charging status and the battery life. You can also save battery life by switching to the power saving mode. This 16,000mAh power bank is available at Rs 1,399.

You can charge a standard smartphone up to four times with this particular power bank. It’s compatible with a wide range of devices as well.

One of the key highlights of this product is that it comes with three USB ports, allowing you to charge three devices simultaneously.

The power bank can be snatched up for Rs 999 via Amazon. Intex offers 1 year of warranty for the product as well.

This particular offering from Ambrane supports fast charging, much like the majority of the power banks here. It has the typical Ambrane design on board, so if you’ve owned an Ambrane power bank before, chances are that you will find some similarities here. This particular offering can be bought for Rs 899 via online retailers.

This power bank has been around for quite some time now. Sold under Huawei’s Honor brand in India, the device comes with a combination of metal and plastic materials. It doesn’t have fast charging, though. This power bank can be yours for Rs 1,299.

Packing a sleek design and LED torch on board, this Ambrane power bank serves more than one purpose. It is currently available on Amazon for Rs 1,199, and the seller is offering the power bank in seven colors.

Priced at Rs 1,190 on Amazon India, this portable charger provides sufficient power to juice up your smartphone several times a day. Due to its high conversion rate, it will charge your device quickly. The user will also get one year warranty at the time of its purchase.

The only drawback of this power bank is, it is compatible only with smartphones, whereas other power banks can charge a variety of devices.

As the name suggests, the Flipkart Smartbuy is the exclusive product owned by the e-commerce giant. Priced at Rs 799, the portable charger comes with a battery capacity of 12,500mAh and offers dual USB output ports. It also supports smart charging and is compatible with multiple devices.

The power bank is available at one year warranty and 10 days replacement policy.

Bonus entries (over Rs 1,500)

The latest entrant in our bonus category is the Pebble PB66 power bank which offers a battery backup of up to 20,000mAh. It is compatible with multiple devices and has two USB ports to charge two devices at a time.

To ensure the protection of the charging devices, the power bank has features like over voltage protection, over discharge protection, over circuit protection, and over current protection.

The portable charger can be bought online from Amazon India at Rs 1,999.

Intex is one of the most popular manufacturers in the accessories segment today. Although the company is known for its smartphones, the manufacturer’s power banks have received some recognition in the market as well. This 20,000mAh power bank from the company can be bought for just Rs 1,799 online, making it one of the best entries on this list.

Last but not the least, is the 20,800mAh power bank from Ambrane which comes with three ports allowing users to charge three devices simultaneously. It is also equipped with torchlight so that you don’t feel unsafe in darkness. Just like Mi 2i power bank, the device is also manufactured in India and has a high conversion rate.

Priced at Rs 2,199 on Amazon India, the charger is compatible with multiple devices and is available in Black and White.

Don't think power bank is a good idea? Checkout best phones with big batteries.

You’ll soon be able to make Skype calls from your Alexa device

Amazon has its own voice calling (and messaging) service built into Alexa devices (and the app), but if you wanted to use your Alexa-powered hardware to make Skype calls instead, this will be possible before long.

Microsoft has just announced that Skype calling is coming to Alexa devices, and will be rolling out “later this year”, so within the next few months. This will mean that you will be able to make and receive voice calls from your Echo, or indeed video calls if you have a device with a display (like the Echo Show).

It doesn’t matter what the recipient’s hardware is, of course, so you obviously aren’t restricted to just calling people with Amazon’s devices.

To make a call, all you’ll have to do is ask Amazon’s digital assistant: “Alexa, call Bob on Skype,” and Bob’s your uncle (which is presumably why you’re calling him).

Microsoft didn’t say whether or not you’ll need to load up this functionality as a skill on your Alexa device, but that will likely be the case.

Two heads are better than one

Amazon and Microsoft are already working with each other to bring their two digital assistants – Alexa and Cortana – closer together in terms of cross-platform integration, with Cortana able to summon Alexa on Windows 10 devices, for example. So the ability to use Skype via Alexa isn’t exactly an out-of-the-blue surprise.

Indeed, we’ve most recently seen Xbox One users get the benefit of this broad initiative, thanks to a new Xbox Skill that allows you to hook up any Cortana or Alexa-powered device to your console. This lets you pull off tricks like using your Amazon Echo to navigate the Xbox One interface, or trigger a screenshot, adjust the volume and so forth.

As ever, when big tech companies work together in this way, the consumer who owns the hardware is the winner, which is always good to see.

Check out all the best Amazon Alexa deals going right now

Via Neowin

Life inside a pro-esports team house with Fnatic: streaming, training and burritos

In the middle of a suburb in North-East London sits a white, three-story semi-detached house seemingly like every other in the street. However, the moment you step over the threshold and you’re greeted by an AS Roma doormat and a multitude of Fnatic and AS Roma flags. Unlike the other houses in this street, this one is inhabited by the AS Roma Fnatic FIFA team - the leading esport organization’s pro FIFA team.

Last week, the AS Roma Fnatic players moved from their respective countries and into the modern five-bedroom house (worth a cool £700k/$1m/AU$1.3m), which includes a hot-tub, a top-of-the-range gaming shed for training and streaming, pool table and widescreen TV. We caught up with the players over a game of pool, to see what it’s like living and working with your teammates and competing at a professional level.

Team basics

AS Roma Fnatic is a division of Fnatic, one of the leading esports organizations in the world. Assembled over the past year, but originally launched two years ago, the current roster is made up of four players: Rannerz from Ireland, Damie from Poland, Zimme from Sweden and Insa (who is the only one that doesn’t live in the house) from Italy. In addition, the team’s manager Colin (a.k.a Cojo), who hails from the US, and coach Enzo, from France, also live in the house.

So it’s pretty cozy.

All the players are in their early twenties and late teens, and were previously flying in from their home countries to attend competitions. Fnatic’s management decided moving the entire team into one house would allow them to focus on training, streaming and competing in the run up to the release of FIFA 19.

Despite living in the same house and playing for the same team, each player had a different route to AS Roma Fnatic.

Manager Colin was previously a university student in Kansas, but had always been a soccer fan and a big gamer. His introduction to the competitive scene was with Halo 3, but he later became involved with FIFA content creation, which led to him running and organizing FIFA Pro league. During this time, Colin met a lot of professional gamers, but quickly realized there weren’t many esports managers.

Rannerz (left) and Zimme (right)

"All this time, I was thinking to myself 'none of these players have agents',” he tells me. “All these clubs were picking up these players but there was no one to represent them, to make sure they're getting good deals and to make sure their contracts aren't exploiting them – which unfortunately in esports is an all too common thing."

Colin began the process of gathering players to manage, picking up between 10 and 12 initially. Next came the hard part: finding a soccer club to back them. After sending out hundreds of emails to various clubs, one of the responses came from the Italy-based Roma, who had an existing relationship with Fnatic. After both parties agreed to a collaboration, As Roma Fnatic was born.

“I feel like we've grown stronger ever since then,” Colin says. “Over the past, almost two years now, I've expanded and now manage the Rocket League and Street Fighter teams as well. It's been a long road.”

In addition, bringing the player’s together under one roof was also Colin’s brainchild – with both management and the players expecting 2019 to be a big year for the team.

"I first put the idea of a house ten months ago,” Colin explains. “At the time, the team wasn't at a point where we felt it was necessarily time to get a house – I don't think we were as competitive as we wanted to be.”

“I think now we have a team we're really confident in, so we wanted to put the guys in the best position possible to succeed this year. And with other team houses such as DOTA and League of Legends, we see positive results so we thought we would bring that strategy into FIFA."

Damie (Left) and Enzo (right)

While Colin macromanages the team, researching signings and keeping everyone on track, it is coach Enzo who micromanages gameplay strategy.

Enzo began coaching esports in his home country of France at the age of 14. However, realizing he was a bit too young to be doing so, he moved into coaching youth football for a few years instead.

His return to professional esports coaching came with FIFA 17 when, as a free agent, he applied to be AS Roma Fnatic’s analyst (which he admitted to unfortunately misspelling in his application). Although Enzo coaches the team full time, he’s still studying at a university in France and is in his third year of a sports management degree – luckily his work with the team is a valid excuse for skipping classes.

Enzo has three players to coach in the house: Rannerz, Damie and Zimme. Swedish-born Zimme previously played for pro teams before, and even turned down Roma two years ago, but when his contract with esports team Red Reserve expired he decided it was time to make the change.

Damie

Polish-born Damie, on the other hand, admits he "came to FIFA out of nowhere.” Damie didn’t play FIFA professionally until FUT Champions, a competitive game mode introduced in FIFA 17, became a feature. At the same time, Damie moved to London with his family, then enrolled in a college until he began playing FIFA 17 with a view to becoming a professional esports player.

Fortunately the time sank into FIFA 17 paid off, and Damie earned third place in his first ever professional event.

"From that point I was like 'I really enjoy playing FIFA so this is my time',” Damie explained. “When FIFA 18 came out, everything changed. I played so good. I knew people were starting to know me as a player. The whole year was almost perfect, it's like a perfect story – I just came out of nowhere."

In addition to his expertise in FIFA, Damie is also close to the highest rank in League of Legends and Counter-Strike. When we asked why he didn’t go pro in either of those games, his reply was simple: "I wasn't good enough."

Similar to Damie, Rannerz, from Ireland, didn’t start playing FIFA 17 until FUT Champions was announced. However, unlike Damie, Rannerz played the game for a year and didn’t qualify for any events. It was only with the release of FIFA 18 that Rannerz hit his stride, achieving 38 wins and a top 25 placement in the leaderboards within the first week of release. He was then drafted in the Gfinity tournament and signed a proper contract with AS Roma Fnatic.

Stick to the schedule

Five young gamers moving into a house in a foreign country may seem like a recipe for disaster, but it’s manager Colin’s job to keep the players’ eyes on the prize. He has devised a rough day-to-day schedule for the players, which will be implemented when FIFA 19 releases. The schedule varies week to week, but it essentially sets four-hour blocks that tell the guys when they need to be practicing or streaming.

Other blocks include coaching sessions with Enzo, in which he runs through concepts, formations and opponent preparation, Gfinity review sessions, which see the team breaking down the positives and negatives of the previous week, prep sessions for tournaments and media trips.

But it’s not all work. Once a week Colin schedules a team-building activity for the players to do inside the house and outside the house. As the team is still fairly new to England, activities include visits to Alton Towers, Thorpe Park and even Stonehenge, while last week’s indoor activity involved watching an episode of Manchester City’s All or Nothing series.

It’s not a typical 9-5 schedule, and many of the players will be streaming late to accommodate their fans globally, which means scheduled activities don’t start until after noon.

"It's not the kind of job where you wake up at 9am," Colin tells me. "It’s because of the way our sleep schedules are and because some of the best streaming hours are a bit later."

House rules

As expected, there are rules which come with an arrangement such as this. One is that none of the players can stream in their rooms after 11pm in case it disturbs their neighbors. Another is that, while family and friends can visit London and the house, people cannot stay over as there isn’t enough room. However, partners are allowed to stay for a couple of days – as long as they don’t interrupt the schedule.

So how does Colin stop everyone from getting on each other’s nerves?

“That's what team building is there for because it centralizes those activities,” he explains to me. “I think these guys all get along, and that was a big part of putting the team together too. I got guys who had personalities which fit together as well as gameplay abilities which matched our ambitions.

“I've had teams before, which had internal strife and we've had to either change the roster or take drastic steps to figure the roster out, but I wouldn't have gotten this house if I had one of those rosters where I was confident they would get along and treat this as a job.”

“These guys understand this is their job, their livelihood and they're being paid a salary. We're paying for this house every single month not for them to hang out and have fun, but because we think it will help them become better players."

Moving up and out

In addition to the general struggles which come with moving five young men into a house together, there’s also the reality that they each have moved from their home countries to somewhere completely new.

"For me it was quite hard to be honest,” Zimme tells us. “It's just because it's different. But then I decided that I really wanted to move because I wanted to still compete at a high level and I think I can really improve from here."

I asked Colin how he, as the manager, deals with instances like Zimme’s. In this case, the pair spoke one-on-one about Zimme’s concerns, and Zimme also spoke to the Fnatic boss Patrik Sättermon – who is also a Swedish-born former player living in London.

The homesickness struck a chord with us, considering the pressure these young guys are under, and we wondered how much is being done for their mental health alongside their physical wellbeing.

“We're actively looking into the psychology stuff right now because we've used ones in the past for different teams but we've never used one for FIFA specifically,” Colin tells us when we ask whether they have a team psychologist.

“Same on the nutrition side. One part of their schedule is we go to the gym two times a week, mandatory. The third time is optional, but there's set times for those. It's at least six hours a week at the gym. There's a lot of different aspects we can still get better at and work on."

In instances of extreme homesickness, players can return to their homes as long as there isn’t an event on.

“As long as they're meeting their obligations every month in regards to streaming and practising then I'm not, like, a dictator because I think their mental health is as important as their physical and competitive health,” Colin explains to me. “I think sometimes it's just nice to go home for a few days."

In addition, Colin has set aside three to four weeks during the holiday season for the players to return home and spend time with their families to “reset mentally”. But until then, Colin is surrogate mother - cooking for his team three days a week, mainly Mexican food.

AS Roma Fnatic

FIFA 19

FIFA 19 will bring many changes to the game, resulting in the team having to shift their strategies and gameplay to fit the new meta. But there’s not long to adjust, the Gfinity tournament is only a month away giving the team little time to adapt.

But has playing FIFA at a competitive level ruined their love of the beautiful game? Apparently not.

"With FIFA 19, I think it'll be fun because it's the new game,” Colin explains. “Speaking for myself, we're in FIFA for a reason. We love the game and we care about the game, even when it's not in its best state and when it is in its best state.

"I think a lot of these guys see this as a career that they can take long term so there has to be some sort of passion there."

Find out what it takes to become a professional esports player

Every great choice of smartwatch for your iPhone

Apple Watch 4 vs Apple Watch 3 vs Apple Watch Series 1: which is the best for you?

Donning an Apple Watch in 2018 is a little more tempting because of new deals, fresh features, the watchOS 5 update and a higher app count. It's a fantastic smartwatch series, as long as you're expecting an iPhone-tied convenience gadget, not a life-changing piece of technology.

Why? Two versions of the watch makes our best smartwatch list, but smartwatches aren't a game changer or revolutionary like smartphones from ten years ago. They're just an everyday awesome add-on; truly an accessory.

Apple never ended up calling this the 'iWatch', but it really is "my watch" - with all its iterations the company has proved it's the Apple's most personal and customizable gadget yet.

We've put together the guide below to talk you through the differences between all five iterations of the Apple Watch. There's the original Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Series 1, Apple Watch Series 2, Apple Watch Series 3 and now the Apple Watch Series 4.

It's a complicated mix of smartwatches now with over 100 different flavors with the variety of case materials, colors, sizes and interchangeable Apple Watch bands too, so there are a bunch of a tough decisions to make.

You don't have to choose an Apple Watch - here are our best smartwatches for iPhone What Apple Watch models are there?

It's best to think of the Apple Watch in five distinct generations, so far. There was the original device that was released under the name Apple Watch in April 2015, but you'll struggle to find retailers selling this device now and you'll probably only be able to get it second hand.

We wouldn't recommend buying that watch now as it won't be able to run with the latest watchOS 5 software and will miss out on the latest features, so you're better off buying a more recently released Apple Watch.

It was replaced by the Apple Watch Series 1 in September 2016, which is largely the same device but with Bluetooth 4.2 technology and a faster dual-core chipset. The original Apple Watch is now referred to as Series 0, but you probably shouldn't worry about that if you're buying a new watch as it's difficult to find it.

The Apple Watch Series 1 is easier to find through third-party retailers, but Apple has now stopped selling the device.

Alongside the Series 1, Apple announced the Watch Series 2 (which we refer to as the Apple Watch 2 to make things a little simpler). This brought new technology like built-in GPS and water resistance and a slightly larger battery.

Apple is no longer selling the Watch Series 2, but you can buy find this from a limited number of third-party retailers.

2017's smartwatch is called the Apple Watch Series 3 and it comes with LTE technology (if you want it) as well as a variety of fitness features and improved GPS.

Then there's the most recent version - the Apple Watch Series 4 - that comes with a larger display than the other versions and some new heart rate features too.

Apple Watch price comparison

Largely the pricing for the Apple Watch works by how old the product is. If you want the Apple Watch Series 1, you'll be able to find that for a lot less money than the Apple Watch 4.

Below we've got a live widget that will show you the latest deals for all the versions of the Apple Watch if you want to see the exact price right now. Bear in mind you can also get the Apple Watch 4 or 3 on a contract because of the LTE features, and you can't do that for the other two devices.

Apple Watch vs Apple Watch 2 vs Apple Watch 3 Original Apple Watch is cheaper, but it's very difficult to findApple Watch Series 1 is faster, but lacks Watch 2 featuresApple Watch 2 has GPS, a brighter screen and is water-resistantApple Watch 3 has a faster chipset and optional LTEApple Watch 4 has a larger screen and an improved heart rate tracker

You can't buy the original Apple Watch easily anymore, so here we're going to break down the differences between the watches referred to as the Apple Watch Series 1, Apple Watch 2, Apple Watch 3 and the Apple Watch 4.

Design

Until the Apple Watch 4, the series has been very similar in terms of design. There have been a few minor changes, but the Apple Watch 4 marks the first time you can buy it in 40mm or 44mm variants. That allows for a slightly larger screen, plus there's haptic feedback on the digital crown too.

The Apple Watch 3 and below come in either 38mm or 42mm versions. Only the Apple Watch 2 and Apple Watch 3 are waterproof though, so don't try taking the original watch in the pool with you.

Display

All generations of the Apple Watch feature square displays, but the technology used differs. The Apple Watch featured an OLED Retina display with Force Touch at 450 nits, while the latter models have an improved technology that runs at 1000 nits. The Apple Watch 4 comes with a larger display too.

Performance

You don't need a huge amount of power in the Apple Watch, but each passing generation has been a little snappier. The Series 1 features an Apple S1P system on a chip, while the Series 2, Series 3 and Series 4 feature an S2, S3 or S4 in that order.

Each watch has featured 512MB of RAM, apart from the Apple Watch 3, which features 768MB. We don't yet know how much RAM is in the Apple Watch 4.

Fitness

All versions of the Apple Watch feature a heart rate monitor, accelerometer, gyroscope and ambient light sensor. The Apple Watch 3 was the first time the device sported an Altimeter though, and the Apple Watch 4 has ECG features for the first time.

These are limited at the moment and will only be available in the US later in 2018.

For GPS, you will get that on the Apple Watch 2 and an improved version of the tech including Galileo and QZSS features is on the third iteration. The Apple Watch 2, 3 and 4 feature swimming modes.

Battery

The battery life of the Apple Watch has remained largely unchanged. If you go for the versions it'll have a smaller battery inside than the larger one, but that's largely because of the difference in case size.

Connectivity

Each version of the watch has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology built-in, but the Apple Watch 3 and 4 have a cellular option. This means you can use an optional eSIM to give yourself a connection when on the move.

Read our Apple Watch reviewRead our Apple Watch 2 reviewRead our Apple Watch 3 reviewRead our Apple Watch 4 review What iPhone do you need to use an Apple Watch?

Unlike Google's Wear OS devices, the Apple Watch only works with one type of phone. You'll need to have at least an iPhone 5 running iOS 10 or later to be able to use an Apple Watch or Apple Watch 2.

If you want an Apple Watch 3, you'll need to have at least an iPhone 5S running iOS 11 software for the non-LTE version or an iPhone 6 to be able to use the LTE variant.

We answer the big question: can the Apple Watch work without an iPhone? Apple Watch colors and sizes

A big change for the Apple Watch 4 is the size, so now it comes in 40mm or 44mm options.

All of the other models of the Apple Watch come in either 38mm or 42mm versions. Some color options are limited to certain size watches, but our simple advice here is go for the larger version if you want a watch with a bigger screen and you don't mind spending a touch more.

It's difficult to get the difference in size across here, but if you're uncertain on size it's worth trying each on in the shop to be sure. Below we've got three examples showing off the four different sizes, as well as a comparison of the screen sizes.

You've then also got to choose the color of your watch as well as what material you want it to be made of. The Apple Watch 4 comes in gold, space grey or silver if you want it to be made of aluminum, and the same colors come in stainless steel too.

White and grey are also color options if you choose the ceramic version of the Apple Watch 3, but these are much more expensive and are called the Apple Watch Series 3 Edition. These are now hard to come by as Apple doesn't officially sell them.

There's also the Apple Watch Nike+, which is the same device as the Apple Watch 3 but comes with exclusive watch faces, the Nike+ Run Club app pre-loaded and a choice of lots of Nike branded sports bands.

That's not all though. If you like the idea of a handcrafted leather strap, you may like the look of the Apple Watch Hermès. Again, it's the Apple Watch 4. but here you get an exclusive watch face using the Hermès Carrick font as well as high-end leather straps for your wrist.

The Apple Watch Series 1 is only available in aluminum in space grey or silver.

Apple Watch bands and straps

Apple Watch Hermès with the Double Tour strap

There are dozens of straps sold by Apple that offer a huge variety of styles for your wrist. When you first buy your Apple Watch you'll have a strap included, but you can buy and easily switch out different straps that you buy separately.

There are material and color options available including woven nylon, Nike sport, leather, bracelets and much more. Any Apple Watch strap works with any Apple Watch, as long as you've got the right smaller or larger size watch.

Plus there are lots of third-party bands available too, but make sure you get the right size as it won't support all watch straps.

Want to see our favorites? Here's our selection of the best Apple Watch bands Apple Watch software updates

Apple's watchOS 5 update gave every model a boost apart from the original Apple Watch. If you've got the older model, you'll be stuck at watchOS 4 as the company doesn't plan to give it anymore updates.

It's worth looking at the features within watchOS 5, and if you get an Apple Watch be sure to update it as soon as possible to make full use of all the new features.

How to download watchOS 5 to your Apple Watch Apple Watch apps and watch faces

Since the original Apple Watch, we've seen the company grow its titles that you can use on the watch as well as the amount of watch faces you can switch around to give the screen a different look.

For a full guide to our favorite bits of software on the wearable, check out our best Apple Watch apps guide as well as best Apple Watch games and best Apple Watch faces.

IRL: The 10 Apple Watch apps I use every single day What's next for the Apple Watch?

If you're planning to buy an Apple Watch soon, now is the perfect time. We've only just seen the Apple Watch Series 4 launch - that's was in early September 2018 - so we expect it to be at least a year until we hear about an Apple Watch 5.

It may be even longer too, so if you're to set buy a new watch in the coming months, you're sure to be having it for the longest lifespan possible. It also means the price of the Apple Watch Series 3 and some of the other models has dropped too, so it's well worth upgrading soon if you're certain it's a device made for you.

Get ahead of the competition with our Mario Kart 8 Deluxe tips and tricks

Best Nintendo Switch Online Games: The best online games for co-op and versus multiplayer

Get ready for Nintendo Switch, round two. When the Nintendo Switch Online service launched in September, it marked a new stage for the house of Mario, which had proved its resurgence with the runaway success of its half-portable, half-home console. But what games actually come with online functionality and are going to help you get the most out of Nintendo Switch Online?

Yes, this is a paid service, and yes, anyone playing online multiplayer before this month will have been able to use a lot of those features for free. (We know.)

But this is the boat we're in, and Nintendo's paywall is in keeping with the likes of Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus, which charge significantly higher monthly or subscription fees.

So whether you're a Nintendo Switch owner looking to make the most of the online service, or just someone wanting to know why the hell they should sign up after paying for a $300 / £300 console, these are the local co-op and online multiplayer games that get all the better for having the Nintendo Switch Online service.

Looking to enhance your experience? Check out our picks of the best Nintendo Switch accessoriesOr not got the console yet? These are the best Nintendo Switch deals around

Let's be honest, the main selling point of Nintendo Switch Online is probably the NES games that come bundled in.

There's no Virtual Console this time around, so you're reliant on Nintendo leasing you the retro classics rather than letting you buy what you want at any time.

Even so, these games have been lovingly remastered with plenty of pleasingly modern features to let you pause, save, and reload each NES game at any point during play. Not to mention different viewing options if you want that more authentic arcade machine feel.

Actual two-player games here Ice Climbers or Balloon Fight are perfect for a nostalgia trip with your buddies. And even the solo titles – Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and so on – have been updated for more connected play, meaning you can swap between Joy-Con controllers with a friend or enjoy voice chat over the Switch smartphone app while you take a trip down memory lane.

Other NES titles you get at launch include Soccer, Tennis, Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Excitebike, Tecmo Bowl, and Yoshi.

But there'll be a steady trickle of other games each month for subscribers, which are bound to start including comparatively more recent SNES and N64 games down the line.

Play for: local co-op

We couldn’t make a list of the best online games without this: a beautifully Nintendo take on team-based shooters with teenage squids splaying maps with colored ink.

The fun, cartoony art style and fluid gameplay are exactly what you expect from Nintendo, with a sharply competitive streak and quick-fire matches that make it perfect for short play sessions. The first game did the impressive job of pulling players to the struggling Wii U console, and while the loss of a second screen on the Nintendo Switch entry is mourned, this is still a wonderfully fun game.

The single player offering has got stronger with the recent Octo expansion, but don’t be mistaken: this is a masterful multiplayer game through and through. There are local co-op options if you have more than one Switch to hand, though the game doesn’t support split-screen play on a television.

Play for: online multiplayer

Weapons, shields, engines, and... love?

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a funky 2D shooter that sees you pilot a spaceship across the galaxy to help restore love to the universe. The popping visuals and bumping soundtrack are what make this game, though the cooperative elements also aim to bring you and your other players closer together – you won't make it through the game without them.

There's technically a single-player mode, but for the full force of this lovingly-made indie game, you'll want to find someone to share it with.

Play for: local co-op

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is in a sense of repackaging of the Wii U entry – but is still well worth your time and money.

Accessible with plenty of modes, vehicles, and on-track madness, Nintendo's iconic arcade racer is always one of the best multiplayer games out there, while this entry comes with a set of new characters and all the previously released DLC included from the starting line.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe caters for four players in split-screen co-op, or up to eight consoles linked up wirelessly – or against anyone you like online.

Play for: online multiplayer or local co-op

How to improve on ‘the beautiful game’ of football? By replacing humans with cars, obviously.

Rocket League is that wonderfully simple premise that everyone can get behind: haphazardly zooming across a pitch and occasionally knocking a giant ball into the goal. It’s on pretty much every gaming system out there by now but is an affordabke must-buy if you don’t have it on another console already.

Play for: online multiplayer and local co-op

A casual co-op game about the most stressful restaurant kitchen imaginable.

Overcooked 2 supports up to four players in couch co-op – though you'll need a joy-con for each one of you – and will see you cooking up a storm as you all try to keep your kitchen running in increasingly madcap and unstable environments (hot air balloons, anyone?).

Cue flaming dinners, furious customers, and shifting stages that faithfully recreate the stress of being a working chef (not really). It’s simple but chaotic, and perfect for a quiet / loud night in after actually making yourself dinner.

Play for: local co-op or online multiplayer

This game isn’t even out yet and we’re that confident. Easy to play, hard to master, Super Smash Bros has always been a Nintendo stalwart: a mad fighting game brawler that pits video game characters from across Nintendo’s extensive catalogue against each other in battle. Pikachu vs Luigi. Kirby vs Ice Climbers. Toon Link vs Samus. The chaos knows no ends.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate arrives on December 7 and is the closest thing to a definitive Smash Bros we’ve seen, with every single character ever to have appeared across the franchise – with some fun new ones bundled in, including Metroid’s Ridley and Donkey Kong Country’s King K. Rule.

Add to that over 100 stages, countless gameplay improvements and a bunch of new modes to jump into, and you have a Smash Bros entry that will no doubt be a big draw for players signing up for Nintendo Switch Online.

Play for: online multiplayer, local co-op

Ok, so, technically Fortnite doesn’t require Nintendo Switch Online – like any free-to-play game on the console – but it’s a must-have for anyone into online competitive gaming.

Fortnite is a stupidly successful take on the battle royale genre, which drops 100 players into a shrinking map and lets the chaos ensure, with neat building mechanics and plenty of llama-based humor to make it stand out from the crowd. Publisher Epic Games constantly tweaks and improves the service, bringing in new modes and items to make sure there’s always something new to try out too.

And it’s played by everyone from 10-year-olds to full-grown adults, and apparently the Canadian rapper Drake, so don’t worry about not fitting in. Cross-play also means you can compete with players on their Xbox One, PC, or on mobile – though sadly still not PS4.

The game makes its fortunes selling cosmetic items or letting you choose your own character – rather than randomly selecting one – but there’s no obligation to fork out. The Nintendo Switch version even supports motion controls, if you fancy setting yourself more of a challenge in the online arena.

Play for: online multiplayer

Pokken Tournament DX is a 360-degree fighting game with a roster of Pokemon to take each other on in 1-on-1 or 3-on-3 battles. Another fantastic Wii U game that didn’t get the love it deserved – until it was ported over to the Switch, with even more pocket monsters to play with.

This isn’t the turn-based combat you’ll know from the mainline series, either – here you have to choose your moves and movements in real-time to take down your opponents, adding a real rush to proceedings.

Not to mention the HD graphics, with character builds and attack animations brought into their lively 3D splendor. But it’s not all looks: this is a satisfying fighting game with great mechanics and plenty of nostalgia for fans of the series.

Play for: local co-op or online multiplayer

Minecraft on Nintendo Switch? The second best-selling video game of all time (after Tetris) has come far since it first launched in beta back in 2011. The mining and building mechanics offer near-endless scope for creation, combining the fun and freedom of Lego with the possibilities of virtual sandbox game.

Make the castle of your dreams, create to-scale replicas of the Millenium Falcon, or wander around the countless creations of friends and strangers across the globe.

It's well suited to the Switch's pick-up-and-play mentality, even if it's playable on pretty much everything by now – notably in VR – with plenty of cross-play between platforms. There are various modes for different styles of play, including a Creative Mode that lets you focus on building, or an Adventure Mode more geared towards exploring other user-created maps and areas.

Play for: online multiplayer or local co-op

Best stereo speakers: the best bookshelf, floor, and Hi-Fi speakers in 2018

SweetVinyl’s SC-1 makes your old records sound brand new

Vinyl has been having something of a renaissance in recent years, as music consumers craving a tangible, physical vessel for their music in an age of digital streaming and downloads are flocking to vintage record shops in search of their favorite LPs.

Buying second hand vinyl, or even digging out your ageing collections can be hit and miss in terms of audio quality, with vinyls being particularly susceptible to wear and tear, especially if they have been stored incorrectly.

However, even the most distorted records can be saved with SweetVinyl’s SC-1, an add-on noise removal device for your record player that removes pops and clicks using a sophisticated algorithm without damaging your precious vinyls.

How does it work?

Although noise removal devices have been available to music industry professionals for a while, this could be the first time that amateur audiophiles will have access to the technology in their own homes.

The SweetVinyl SC-1 uses algorithms to improve audio quality in real-time, while retaining the depth and clarity of the original recording, only removing the unwanted distortion from the record. You can also use it in 'bypass mode', which isolates the digital processing from the audio, allowing you listen to the recording in its original format and hear exactly how the SC-1 makes a difference to the listening experience.

There’s also a dedicated SugarCube app for iOS and Android devices, meaning you can switch modes without getting up to physically switch buttons on and off the device.

SweetVinyl SC-1

How does it sound?

We tried out the SweetVinyl SC-1 for ourselves using one of our scruffiest records, and were really impressed with the digital clean up process. Although it took a little time to set up, if you’re a hardcore audiophile, the results are well worth it.

A word of warning though: you will require a pre-amp with your record player for the best results.

The speed at which the SC-1 removes clicks and pops is staggering, and music sounded overall more clear and far warmer, with well defined bass, mid, and high frequencies – it definitely does the job. One great feature is that you can isolate the clicks and pops the SC-1 removes, so you can really hear the difference it’s making to your record.

Still, we couldn’t help but miss some of that retro-sounding distortion – after all, isn’t that part of the charm of listening to vinyl – why not just listen to remastered digital versions of your favorite records?

It’s clear that this product is for a very niche market of audiophiles who love the warmth of vinyl but hate the fact that their old records sound more and more distorted as they age.

SweetVinyl SC-1

So here’s the kicker: the SweetVinyl SC-1 is currently on sale for $1999 (£1550 / about AU$2800), so you’d have to be really passionate about vinyl to want to buy one for yourself from Music Direct. That being said, it really does work, and if you already have a hefty record player setup with a preamp and decent speakers, you may well be in the market for something to make those old records sound even better.

With the vinyl market booming, we’re certain there are people out there who would jump at the chance to make their dilapidated record collections sound like new again, much like there’s a bustling market expensive anti-aging face creams.

Still, there’s something to be said for just allowing yourself (and your records) to simply age gracefully and naturally.

Xbox Two vs PS5: predicting the future

PlayStation Now games can now be played offline, if you have the space for them

Anyone who's used Sony's PlayStation Now service – or any platform that allows you to stream games over the internet – will be familiar with the frustration of your connection dropping out mid-session.

Starting today, PS Now will be allowing gamers to download titles from the service in order to play them offline, up to the same level of 4K resolution and 5.1 surround sound as streamed titles.

PS Now has hundred of titles available to stream over Wi-Fi or ethernet connection – Bloodborne, God of War 3, and DiRT Rally to name but a few – giving players a way to access AAA and indie titles without taking up precious hard drive space.

The feature is being rolled out to users during the remainder of September, so if you can't see the function in your PS Now app, it should be there in the next few days. Players will also need to connect online at least once a week to verify your subscription is still active – otherwise your downloaded games will return from whence they came.

Gently down the stream

PS Now's new downloads are a neat workaround for gamers wanting the ability to stream, but who appreciate the virtues of offline play that doesn't require forcing your housemates off Netflix to up your bandwidth speed.

Console makers Sony and Microsoft make no secret of their ambitions for cloud gaming, which moves the brunt of the processing work away from your console and onto their own servers, which in the long run could lead to simpler 'top box' consoles that require lower production costs. Microsoft are even rumored to be planning a cloud-only Xbox Scarlett Cloud gaming console as early as 2020.

Alongside this week's announcement of the PlayStation Classic mini console – a standalone mini console with 20 PS1 era games programmed in – it looks like Sony is doubling down hard on fan service before it hits the holiday period.

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: Procreate (US$9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99)

Procreate is the kind of digital painting app that could feasibly tear jobbing artists away from the desktop. Feature rich, it also has an immediacy that makes it approachable for relative newcomers looking to paint on a touchscreen.

The interface is unobtrusive; by default, tools are accessed from a strip at the top of the screen, and brush size and opacity sliders sit at the left. Simple gestures can take you full screen, or undo a duff stroke.

This simple interface is augmented with a slew of features: custom, sharable brushes; layers with masking; drawing guides (such as isometric grids); live symmetry effects; Quickline for snapping strokes to straight lines; warp and liquify. As your skills advance, you can export video of you painting your masterpiece – or a 30-second timelapse ready for social media.

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

Affinity Designer brings desktop-grade vector illustration to iPad. Its huge range of tools are ideally suited to anything from high-end illustrations through to interface design. Every stroke always remains editable, and you can zoom to an absurd degree, and never lose detail.

The app works nicely with Apple Pencil or your own digits, and has a smart gestural system where holding fingers on the screen mirrors desktop keyboard modifiers. Elsewhere, you can pinch layers to group them, or drag one layer on to another to create a mask.

This is an app you can get lost in – but in a good way. The more you use it, the more you realize its sheer scope. And it even shares a file format with Affinity Photo, so you can bounce documents between the two without losing anything.

LiquidText PDF Reader has a misleading name. Although it is for reading and annotating PDFs, thinking it only capable of those things does the app a disservice. Really, you should consider it a hugely powerful product for dynamically gathering your thoughts, and quickly getting at important content within documents.

For free, you can import PDFs (along with Microsoft Office files), make highlights, and drag excerpts to a work area. Go pro and you can gather and link information across multiple files.

The app feels perfectly suited to the touchscreen. You can use Apple Pencil to scribble live ink lines that become dynamic links between documents. Gestures enable you to quickly collapse lengthy documents to read highlights, search results, or non-contiguous pages. For students, researchers, and anyone who wants to go beyond paper, LiquidText is a must-have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Best action camera 2018: 10 cameras for the GoPro generation

If you're looking for the best action camera, then you've come to the right place. Action cameras are unlike any other kind of camera. They're designed to be attached to helmets, surfboards, cars and other objects, and they're small, tough and simple to operate, with a lens that captures the world in high-definition video and in a wide-angle fish-eye perspective.

Their small size and dramatic POV ('point of view') footage has made them popular with extreme sports participants, who capture their adventures by attaching cameras to themselves or their equipment. They're also used by TV production companies where using a regular video camera would be impossible.

You don't have to be an adrenaline-junkie or filming your own TV show. Action cameras are also great fun for the family, especially on days out or vacations when you simply want to hit record and document you time together.

Who makes the best action camera though? GoPro is without question the market leader - in fact, they invented this whole action camera genre. They're not alone though, with a number of new rivals out there to tempt you.

When it comes to key features on action cameras, most now shoot 4K footage, though some do these better than others, offering faster frame rates for buttery-smooth footage, while the very best action cameras have slick image stabilization systems to make the most of this.

While action cameras are principally for shooting video, the best action cameras also shoot pretty decent still images as well, though don't expect anything better than a point-and-shoot compact camera.

Other features to consider when looking for the best action camera include Wi-Fi, GPS and touchscreen control. These all bump up the price, and while they are invaluable in some situations, you can still get great footage without them.

Before we look at our top picks of the best action cameras you can buy right now, GoPro has just announced three new action cameras. The top of the range GoPro Hero7 Black replaces our best action camera, the Hero6 Black (below). We're in the middle of testing one, but take a look at our hands on GoPro Hero7 Black review to see what we think so far.

While it may appear to be a minor update from the Hero5 Black on the outside, a lot's changed on the inside. The Hero6 Black gets a new GP1 processing engine, allowing you to record super high-quality 4K footage at 60fps. Other highlights include an improved image stabilization system, while the Hero6 Black offers a wider dynamic range and better low-light performance than the Hero5 Black. Waterproof down to 10m, the Hero6 Black has a useful 2-inch touchscreen, voice commands and an updated app with QuikStories that automatically transfers and edits your footage for you. If you want the best action camera, this is it.

Read our in-depth GoPro Hero6 Black review

It may have been overshadowed by the new Hero6 Black, but the Hero5 Black still has a lot to offer. Shooting 4K footage up to 30fps, video footage is incredibly smooth, while the ability to shoot stills in raw format brings even more flexibility. Waterproof down to 10m without the need for a protective case, it's also simple to use, while the addition of a rear touchscreen, voice control and GPS make it one of the most feature-packed cams currently available. The great news is that GoPro's just wiped $100/£100 off the price, making it an even more tempting proposition.

Read our in-depth GoPro Hero5 Black

If you're aquatic-minded, or you need to know exactly where you were, and how fast you are going when you took a video, buy a GoPro Hero6 Black. However, if you're more interested in saving money on features you didn't even want, the Yi 4K+ Action Camera is one of the simplest and best designed gadgets around. Everyone considering buying an action cam should have a look at the Yi 4K+ Action Camera because it's almost exactly the same and, in some ways, even better than a GoPro.

Read our in-depth Yi 4K+ Action Camera review

If you've been eyeing up a GoPro for some time, but haven't been able to justify the price, the stripped-down Hero could be the answer. It doesn't shoot 4K, but does shoot nice and smooth Full HD footage and is a great camera for the novice or casual user who just wants to capture the action without worrying about which frame rate or resolution they should be using. There are better specified-action cameras out there for a similar price, but they don't have the refined design and polished control of the Hero.

Read our in-depth GoPro Hero review

TomTom Bandit

Bullet shape cams might have fallen out of fashion recently thanks to GoPro and its box-shaped cameras, but the TomTom Bandit bucks the trend. In fact, the Bandit packs features that other manufacturers will need to follow if they're to keep up with this newcomer. Taking years of GPS experience, TomTom has built in a series of sensors that not only record location but speed and G-force too, so that when these sensors pick up that something exciting has happened they automatically tag the footage. Back in the pub and with the app open and connected, a quick shake of your phone and the app will automatically edit your footage ready for upload. It really couldn't be easier.

Read our in-depth TomTom Bandit review

Olymous TG-Tracker

The TG-Tracker's futuristic design is hard to miss with an ultra wide 204 degree lens. Headline video resolutions include 4K at 30fps, 1080p at 60fps and an impressive 240fps at 720p for slow motion capture. This is an action camera ready for anything and even features a small LED video light built in. Sensors are the big news for the Tracker with GPS, compass, acceleration sensors plus a barometer and thermometer all capturing data from inside the compact case. The intel from these can all be displayed when viewing back the footage or in the video edit so you can show just how extreme you are. What's more, it's waterproof to 30m, features built in stabilization and can withstand temperatures down to -10C.

Read our in-depth Olympus TG-Tracker review

How often do you take an action cam underwater? If the answer's not a lot, then the Yi 4K Action Camera could be for you. While there's an optional underwater case available, the camera isn't waterproof. There is a large and responsive touchscreen, a big battery and a fast file transfers however, and while it may lack a few niceties – and we would include lens distortion correction and image stabilisation in that list – the Yi 4K Action Camera remains a great value addition to any adventurer's kit bag.

Read our in-depth Yi 4K Action Camera review

Yi's range of action cams are pretty cheap, but this is the most affordable model in the range. While it shoots 4K footage, the frame rate is pretty slow and jerky. Don't let that put you off though as the Yi Lite can shoot some really smooth Full HD footage up for 60fps. With easy to use touchscreen navigation, a decent app and all the essential features most occasional users want, the tough, reliable and affordable Yi Lite proves an impressive entry-level action camera. If you're looking for something even more affordable, take a look at Yi's Discovery Action Camera - you won't find a better camera for the price.

Read our in-depth Yi Lite Action Camera review

GoPro Hero4 Session

The Hero5 Session follows on from the Hero4 Session, stripping back the action camera concept to its basics, but sharing many of the same specs as the Hero5 Black. That includes 4K video capture up to 30fps, image stabilisation, voice control and is waterproof down to 10m. The large Record button on the top starts and stops recording so there's no worrying about different modes and options – that's all handled by the app (though it does have a simple menu system if you wish). Back to basics, but still captures the quality of video that you'd expect from GoPro.

Read our in-depth GoPro Hero5 Session review

All action cameras are now promising 4K at 30fps, but Sony’s effort is about a lot more than just resolution and frame rate. The diminutive FDR-X3000R's biggest claim is Balanced Optical SteadyShot (B.O.SS) image stabilization, which works across all resolutions and recording modes. It also includes an underwater housing – a rarity in the action camera market – and comes with a wearable, mountable live view remote, a smartwatch-sized contraption that allows the FDR-X3000R to be operated from afar, and its images previewed in real time.

Read our in-depth Sony FDR-X3000R review Best GoPro camera: ultimate action cams What camera should I buy? Use our step-by-step guide Best camera Best waterproof camera