With the Galaxy Note 20 launch just a week away, all eyes will be on what upgrades Samsung brings to the table. While the chipset might remain unchanged, there might be a silver lining. While Samsung flagship like the Note series and the S series are powered by Snapdragon chipsets in the US and European markets, they come with Exynos chipset in Asian markets such as India. It often tends to lose out on the performance front against Qualcomm Snapdragon counterparts. However, a new leak suggests some good news in this regard. Samsung Galaxy Note 20 release date, price, news and leaks Upcoming smartphones in India: Specs, launch date, price (Image credit: Samsung/WinFuture) According to a tweet by Anthony, a Youtuber, Samsung Galaxy Note 20 will continue to be powered by the Exynos 990 chipset, but with major improvements in terms of the performance and efficiency. These optimizations should bring it closer to the Snapdragon 865 series. He even suggested that it is almost li...
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The best Android games of 2018
There are loads of great games available for Android, but how can you pick out the gems from the dross, and amazing touchscreen experiences from botched console ports? With our lists, that’s how!
We cover the best titles on Android right now, including the finest racers, puzzlers, adventure games, arcade titles and more.
We've tried these games out, and looked to see where the costs come in - there might be a free sticker added to some of these in the Google Play Store, but sometimes you'll need an in app purchase (IAP) to get the real benefit - so we'll make sure you know about that ahead of the download.
Check back every week for a new game, and click through to the following pages to see the best of the best divided into the genres that best represent what people are playing right now.
Android game of the week: Spitkiss ($1.99/£1.99/AU$3.69)
Spitkiss is a mashup of arcade shooty larks and platforming action, where you aim to get the bodily fluids of one Spitkiss to another. That might sound a bit grim, but this is actually a sweet-natured game played primarily in cartoonish silhouette.
Even so, your emission, once it’s hurled through the air and gone splat on a platform, starts to gloop downwards. You can then make it leap again, and – several hops later – splatter on your intended love.
Especially on larger screens, Spitkiss works really nicely. The visuals are vibrant, and the basics are easy to grasp. But as you get deeper into the game’s 80 levels, the twists and turns required to win get tougher to pull off – even when you hold down the screen for much-needed Matrix-style slo-mo.
The best racing games for AndroidOur favorite Android top-down, 3D and retro racers.
If you're fed up with racing games paying more attention to whether the tarmac looks photorealistic rather than how much fun it should be to zoom along at insane speeds, check out Horizon Chase. This tribute to old-school arcade titles is all about the sheer joy of racing, rather than boring realism.
The visuals are vibrant, the soundtrack is jolly and cheesy, and the racing finds you constantly battling your way to the front of an aggressive pack.
If you fondly recall Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge and Top Gear, don't miss this one. (Note that Horizon Chase gives you five tracks for free. To unlock the rest, there's a single £2.29/US$2.99 IAP.)
Anyone expecting the kind of free-roaming racing from the console versions of this title are going to be miffed, but Need for Speed: Most Wanted is nonetheless one of the finest games of its kind on Android. Yes, the tracks are linear, with only the odd shortcut, but the actual racing bit is superb.
You belt along the seedy streets of a drab, gray city, trying to win events that will boost your ego and reputation alike. Wins swell your coffers, enabling you to buy new vehicles for entering special events.
The game looks gorgeous on Android and has a high-octane soundtrack to urge you onwards. But mostly, this one’s about the controls – a slick combination of responsive tilt and effortless drifting that makes everything feel closer to OutRun 2 than typically sub-optimal mobile racing fare.
The first two Riptide games had you zoom along undulating watery circuits surrounded by gleaming metal towers. Riptide GP: Renegade offers another slice of splashy futuristic racing, but this time finds you immersed in the seedy underbelly of the sport.
As with the previous games, you’re still piloting a hydrofoil, and racing involves not only going very, very fast, but also being a massive show-off at every available opportunity.
If you hit a ramp or wave that hurls you into the air, you’d best fling your ride about or do a handstand, in order to get turbo-boost on landing. Sensible racers get nothing.
The career mode finds you earning cash, upgrading your ride, and probably ignoring the slightly tiresome story bits. The racing, though, is superb – an exhilarating mix of old-school arcade thrills and modern mobile touchscreen smarts.
Mini Motor Racing is a frenetic top-down racer that finds tiny vehicles darting about claustrophobic circuits that twist and turn in a clear effort to have you repeatedly drive into walls. The cars handle more like remote control cars than real fare, meaning that races are typically tight – and easily lost if you glance away from the screen for just a moment.
There’s a ton of content here – many dozens of races set across a wide range of environments. You zoom through ruins, and scoot about beachside tracks. The AI’s sometimes a bit too aggressive, but with savvy car upgrades, and nitro boost usage when racing, you’ll be taking more than the occasional checkered flag.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit exists in a world where the police seem to think it’s perfectly okay to use their extremely expensive cars to ram fleeing criminals into submission. And when they’re not doing that, they belt along the streets, racing each other to (presumably) decide who pays for the day’s doughnuts.
It’s a fairly simple racer – you’re basically weaving your way through the landscape, smashing into other cars, and triggering the odd trap – but it’s exhilarating, breezy fun that echoes classic racers like Chase H.Q.
And once you’ve had your fill of being one of the nitro-happy fuzz, you can play out a career as the pursued as well, getting stuck into the kind of cop-smashing criminal antics that totally won’t be covered by your car manufacturer’s warranty.
Final Freeway 2R is a retro racing game, quite blatantly inspired by Sega’s classic OutRun. You belt along in a red car, tearing up a road where everyone’s rather suspiciously driving in the same direction. Every now and again, you hit a fork, allowing you to select your route. All the while, cheesy music blares out of your device’s speakers.
For old hands, you’ll be in a kind of gaming heaven. And arguably, this game’s better than the one that inspired it, feeling more fluid and nuanced. If you’re used to more realistic fare, give Final Freeway 2R a go – you might find yourself converted by its breezy attitude, colorful visuals, and need for truly insane speed.
Rush Rally 2 is a curious rally racer, in part because it at first comes across as an unforgiving and simulation-oriented affair. It initially feels too easy to crash, and you too often find yourself pointing the wrong way or rather inconveniently having embedded your car in a tree.
As ever, though, Rush Rally 2 is about clicking with the feel of the game. Slow down a bit and take a touch more care and you’ll figure out how the physics works, and the layout of the courses.
The game will reveal its fun side – an arcade edge that won’t allow you to zoom along without ever using the brake pedal, but that nonetheless is quite happy for you to use other cars in rally cross skirmishes for slowing down instead. For the tiny outlay, it’s a bargain.
Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is a racing management game without the boring bits. Rather than sitting you in front of a glorified spreadsheet, the game is a well-balanced mix of accessibility and depth, enabling you to delve into the nitty gritty of teams, sponsors, mechanics, and even livery.
When you’re all set, you get to watch surprisingly tense and exciting top-down racing. (This being surprising because you’re largely watching numbered discs zoom around circuits.) One-off races give you a feel for things, but the real meat is starting from the bottom of the pile in the career mode, with the ultimate aim of becoming a winner.
It’s all streamlined, slick, and mobile-friendly, and a big leap on from the relatively simplistic original Motorsport Manager Mobile.
The best Android adventure gamesOur favorite Android point and click games, RPGs, narrative stories, choose your own adventures and room escape games.
Telltale has made a name for itself with story-driven episodic games and The Wolf Among Us is one of its best. Essentially a hard boiled fairy tale, you control the big bad wolf as he hunts a murderer through the mean streets of Fabletown.
Don't let the fairy tale setting fool you, this is a violent, mature game and it's one where your decisions have consequences, impacting not only what the other characters think of you but also who lives and who dies. Episode One is free but the remaining four will set you back a steep £9.59 / $14.99 / around AU$18. Trust us though, you'll want to see how this story ends.
Of all the attempts to play with the conventions of novels and story-led gaming on mobile, 80 Days is the most fun. It takes place in an 1872 with a decidedly steampunk twist, but where Phileas Fogg remains the same old braggart. As his trusty valet, you must help Fogg make good on a wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. This involves managing/trading belongings and carefully selecting routes.
Mostly, though, interaction comes by way of a pacey, frequently exciting branched narrative, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book on fast-forward.
A late-2015 content update added 150,000 words, two new plots and 30 cities to an adventure that already boasted plenty of replay value — not least when you've experienced the joys of underwater trains and colossal mechanical elephants in India, and wonder what other marvels await discovery in this world of wonders.
In Her Story, you find yourself facing a creaky computer terminal with software designed by a sadist. It soon becomes clear the so-called L.O.G.I.C. database houses police interviews of a woman charged with murder.
But the tape's been hacked to bits and is accessible only by keywords; 'helpfully', the system only displays five search results at once.
Naturally, these contrivances exist to force you to play detective, eking out clues from video snippets to work out what to search for next, slowly piecing together the mystery in your brain.
A unique and captivating experience, Her Story will keep even the most remotely curious Android gamer gripped until the enigma is solved.
There’s more than a hint of Zelda about Oceanhorn, but that’s not a bad thing when it means embarking on one of the finest arcade adventures on mobile.
You awake to find a letter from your father, who it turns out has gone from your life. You’re merely left with his notebook and a necklace. Thanks, Dad!
Being that this is a videogame, you reason it’s time to get questy, exploring the islands of the Uncharted Seas, chatting with folks, stabbing hostile wildlife, uncovering secrets and mysteries, and trying very hard to not get killed.
You get a chapter for free, to test how the game works on your device (its visual clout means fairly powerful Android devices are recommended); a single IAP unlocks the rest. The entire quest takes a dozen hours or so – which will likely be some of the best gaming you’ll experience on Android.
Initial moments in point-and-click adventure Milkmaid of the Milky Way are so sedate the game’s in danger of falling over. You play as Ruth, a young woman living on a remote farm in a 1920s Norwegian fjord. She makes dairy products, sold to a town several hours away. Then, without warning, a massive gold spaceship descends, stealing her cows.
Fortunately, Ruth decides she’s having none of that, leaps aboard the spaceship, and finds herself embroiled in a tale of intergalactic struggles. To say much more would spoil things, but we can say that this old-school adventure is a very pleasant way to spend a few hours.
The puzzles are logical yet satisfying; the visuals are gorgeous; and the game amusingly provides all of its narrative in rhyme, which is pleasingly quaint and nicely different.
Samorost 3 is a love letter to classic point-and-click adventure games. You explore your surroundings, unearth objects, and then figure out where best to use them. Straightforward stuff, then (at least in theory – many puzzles are decidedly cryptic), but what sets Samorost 3 apart is that it’s unrelentingly gorgeous, and full of heart.
The storyline is bonkers, involving a mad monk who used a massive mechanical hydra to smash up a load of planetoids. You, as an ambitious space-obsessed gnome, must figure out how to set things right.
The game is packed with gorgeous details that delight, from the twitch of an insect’s antennae to a scene where the protagonist successfully encourages nearby creatures to sing, and starts fist-punching the air while dancing with glee. Just two magical moments among many in one of the finest examples of adventuring on Android.
Love You To Bits is a visually dazzling and relentlessly inventive point-and-click puzzler. It features Kosmo, a space explorer searching for the scattered pieces of his robot girlfriend, bar the lifeless head that’s still in his clutches. Which is a bit icky.
Don’t think about that too much, though, because this game is gorgeous. Through its many varied scenes, it plays fast and loose with pop culture references, challenging you to beat a 2D Monument Valley, sending up Star Wars, and at one point dumping you on a planet of apes.
Now and again, you’ll need to make a leap of logic to complete a task, and puzzles mostly involve picking things up and using them in the right place – hardly the height of innovation. But this game’s so endearing and smartly designed you’d have to be lifeless yourself to fail to love it at least a little.
Thimbleweed Park is an adventure that sends you back to the halcyon days of 1987. Mainly because that’s when it’s set, in the titular Thimbleweed Park, and there’s been a murder. But also, this game recalls classic PC point-and-clicker Maniac Mansion, in everything from visual style to interface.
That doesn’t mean this is a crusty old relic. Industry veterans Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick have written a winning script (which gets increasingly weird as you play), and come up with dozens of cunning, tricky puzzles to keep your brain fizzing throughout the game’s 15-to-20-hour length.
Now and again, it perhaps gets a bit too obtuse. But mostly, this is a game that knows it’s a game - and that also wants you to know it’s a take-no-prisoners puzzle title. One that features plumbers who are also paranormal investigators, dressed as pigeons. (We did say it was weird.)
Bury Me, My Love is another game in the Lifeline mold – a branching narrative akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, which plays out in real time.
What’s different is this game’s narrative draws from the real-life stories of Syrian refugees. You play Majd, whose wife Nour is trying to reach Europe. She contacts you via a messaging app, and you respond with advice – which may have a very big impact.
This kind of adventure can be tense, leaking into your real life as you await responses, but Bury Me, My Love takes this to the extreme – for example, when it’s been 24 hours since you heard from Nour, who was heading to a heavily armed border.
This kind of topical subject matter won’t be for everyone, but if you want a game that will make you think a bit, it comes recommended.
Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery is an adventure game that’s about discovery and exploration. It’s a relentlessly beautiful experience, with rich retro-infused artwork and a lush soundtrack. The game encourages you to breathe everything in, take your time, and work at your own pace.
Unlike most adventures, which tend to be obsessed with inventories, Sworcery is mostly concerned with puzzles that are confined to one screen. Solutions are frequently abstract, involving manipulating your environment or even time itself. You may free woodland spirits with musical prowess, or discover a solution requires playing at set points during the lunar calendar.
It might come across as a bit worthy at times, and there are some missteps, such as the awkward, ungainly combat, but Sworcery is evocative and expressive, and full of pay-offs that tend towards the magical, unless you happen to be dead inside.
Minecraft on Android is the hugely popular sandbox PC game based around virtual blocks, right in the palm of your hand. Sort of.
In effect, it’s a stripped-back take on the desktop version, although you still get different ways to play. In creative mode, you explore and can immediately start crafting a virtual world. With survival mode come the added complications of gathering and managing resources during the day – and then battling against enemies during the night.
Although it’s a mite more limited than the full desktop release, Minecraft on Android still gives you plenty to do, and the randomly generated nature of the world provides potentially limitless gaming experiences. It’s certainly more than just a load of blocks.
The Room: Old Sins finds you investigating the disappearance of an engineer and his wife. The trail leads you to a spooky attic. On getting the lights working, you see a strange dollhouse, which then sucks you inside.
You discover the toy is in fact a full reconstruction of a mansion, with a side order of Lovecraftian horror. Unraveling the mystery at the heart of the game and its impossible world then happens by way of devious, complex, tactile logic puzzles.
Old Sins looks and sounds great, and moving around is swift – there’s none of the dull trudging you find in the likes of Myst. Of course, if you’ve played The Room, The Room Two, and The Room Three, you’ll know all this already. If you haven’t, grab Old Sins immediately – and its predecessors, too. They’re some of the finest games on Android.
The best arcade games for AndroidOur favorite Android arcade titles, fighting games, pinball games and retro games.
There's a great sense of freedom from the second you immerse yourself in the strange and futuristic world of Power Hover. The robot protagonist has been charged with pursuing a thief who's stolen batteries that power the city.
The droid therefore grabs a hoverboard and scythes across gorgeous minimal landscapes, such as deserts filled with colossal marching automatons, glittering blue oceans, and a dead grey human city.
In lesser hands, Power Hover could have been utterly forgettable. After all, you're basically tapping left and right to change the direction of a hoverboard, in order to collect batteries and avoid obstacles. But the production values here are stunning.
Power Hover is a visual treat, boasts a fantastic soundtrack, and gives mere hints of a story, enabling your imagination to run wild. Best of all, the floaty controls are perfect; you might fight them at first, but once they click, Power Hover becomes a hugely rewarding experience.
(On Android, Power Hover is a free download; to play beyond the first eight levels requires a one-off IAP.)
At its core, Forget-Me-Not is Pac-Man mixed with Rogue. You scoot about algorithmically generated single-screen mazes, gobbling down flowers, grabbing a key, and then making a break for the exit.
But what makes Forget-Me-Not essential is how alive its tiny dungeons feel. Your enemies don't just gun for you, but are also out to obliterate each other and, frequently, the walls of the dungeon, reshaping it as you play.
There are tons of superb details to find buried within the game's many modes, and cheapskates can even get on board with the free version, although that locks much of its content away until you've munched enough flowers.
If there was any justice, Forget-Me-Not would have a permanent place at the top of the Google Play charts. It is one of the finest arcade experiences around, not just on Android, but on any platform - old or new.
Coming across like a sandbox-oriented chill-out ‘zen’ take on seminal classic Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy has your little space-faring hero exploring a massive handcrafted world peppered with walls, hero-squashing boulders, and plenty of bling.
Much like Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy is mostly about not being crushed by massive rocks – you dig paths through dirt, aiming to strategically use boulders to take out threats rather than your own head. But everything here is played out without stress (due to endless continues) and sometimes in slow motion (when floating through zero-gravity sections of space).
The result feels very different from the title that inspired it, but it’s no less compelling. Tension is replaced by exploration, and single-screen arcade thrills are sacrificed for a longer game. As you dig deeper into Captain Cowboy’s world, there are plenty of things awaiting discovery, and even tackling the next screen of dirt and stones always proves enjoyable.
There’s a distinct sense of minimalism at the heart of Edge, along with a knowing nod to a few arcade classics of old. Bereft of a story, the game simply tasks you with guiding a trundling cube to the end of each blocky level. Along the way, you grab tiny glowing cubes. On reaching the goal, you get graded on your abilities.
This admittedly doesn’t sound like much on paper, but Edge is a superb arcade game. The isometric visuals are sharp, and the head-bobbing soundtrack urges you onwards. The level design is the real star, though, with surprisingly imaginative objectives and hazards hewn from the isometric landscape.
And even when you’ve picked your way to the very end, there’s still those grades to improve by shaving the odd second off of your times.
Still not sure? Try out the 12-level demo. Eager for more? Grab Edge Extended, which is every bit as good as the original.
Super Samurai Rampage is a manic swipe-based high-score chaser, featuring a samurai who has - for some reason - been provoked into a relentless rampage.
Said rampage is dependent on you swiping. Swipe left and you lunge in that direction, slicing your sword through the air. Swipe up and you majestically leap, whereupon you can repeatedly swipe every which way, fashioning a flurry of airborne destruction akin to the most outlandish of martial arts movies.
Along with dishing out death, you must ensure you don’t come a cropper yourself. And attack is your only form of defense, because when you’re moving, you’re also deflecting incoming projectiles. You’re also likely racking up quite the body count, which accumulates in bloody retro-pixel form at the foot of the screen.
It’s of course entirely absurd, and without much nuance; but Super Samurai Rampage is an arcade thrill that’s entertaining, and where repeat play is rewarded with gradual mastery – or at least lasting a few seconds longer before your inevitable demise.
Part Time UFO is a physics-based stacking game featuring a cute UFO that has crash-landed on Earth and now has to eke out a living. That’s right – in this era, aliens aren’t sent to Area 51, and instead scour job ads to earn some cash.
Fortunately, this little UFO is made of stern stuff and has a massive claw to pick things up. This proves handy for part time jobs, doing everything from stacking deliveries on a truck, to assisting a circus elephant’s grand finale – balancing on a tightrope, with five animals precariously plonked on a pole.
Since Part Time UFO embraces the frustration of claw machines, it can infuriate – not least when you topple a structure as the clock ticks down. Mostly, though, this is a charming and very silly game that’s loads of fun.
Pumped BMX 3 might initially give you the wrong impression. Colorful visuals and basic controls have it initially come across as a casual take on a BMX trials outing. But pretty rapidly, it bucks any complacency from the saddle and leaves it a shattered mess on the floor.
Whereas Pumped BMX 2 (also recommended) went for a more relaxed take on hurling a BMX into the air with merry abandon, this sequel is all about mastery. Try to wing it and you’ll be crushed, but properly learn course layouts and timings, and you’ll gradually work your way through each level.
That’s rewarding enough, but with confidence you can start peppering your runs with stunts to boost your scores, with routines that would make even seasoned BMX pros break out in hearty applause.
Holedown is an arcade shooter that has you blast strings of balls at numbered blocks. When blocks are hit enough times, they blow up, allowing you to dig deeper. Some blocks hold up others, and should be prioritized – as should grabbing gems that allow you to upgrade your kit (more balls; new levels; a bigger gem bag) when you run out of shots and return to the surface.
The mechanics are nothing new on Android – there are loads of similar ball bouncers. What is new is the sense of personality, polish and fun Holedown brings to this style of game. This is a premium title and a labor of love. There’s still repetition at its core, but Holedown feels hypnotic and encouraging, rather than giving you the feeling that it’s digging into your wallet – in contrast to its freebie contemporaries.
Osmos HD is a rare arcade game about patience and subtlety. Each unique level has you guide a ‘mote’, which moves by expelling tiny pieces of itself. Initially, it moves within microscopic goop, eating smaller motes, to expand and reign supreme.
At first, other motes don’t fight back, but the game soon immerses you in petri dish warfare, as motes tear whatever amounts to each-other's faces off. Then there’s the odd curveball, as challenges find you dealing with gravity as planet-like motes orbit deadly floating 'stars'.
It’s a beautiful, captivating game, with perfect touchscreen controls. And if you can convince a friend to join in, you can battle it out over Wi-Fi across six distinct arenas.
Since Pac-Man graced arcades in the early 1980s, titles featuring the rotund dot-muncher have typically been split between careful iterations on the original, and mostly duff attempts to shoe-horn the character into other genres. Championship Edition DX is ostensibly the former, although the changes made from the original radically transform the game, making it easily the best Pac-Man to date.
Here, the maze is split in two. Eat all the dots from one half and a special object appears on the other; eat that and the original half's dots are refilled in a new configuration.
All the while, dozing ghosts you brush past join a spectral conga that follows your every move. The result is an intoxicating speedrun take on a seminal arcade classic, combined with the even more ancient Snake; somehow, this combination ends up being fresh, exciting and essential.
The best endless runners for AndroidOur favorite Android games where you hoverboard, jump, sprint, or even pinball to a high score – or a sudden end.
Boson X is an endless runner that features scientists sprinting at insane speeds inside particle accelerators in order to generate the high-speed collisions required to discover strange new particles. And if you’re thinking that’s probably not entirely scientifically accurate, that’s true; fortunately, Boson X gets away with this by virtue of being breezy and intoxicating fun.
It comes across like Canabalt in 3D, mixed with Super Hexagon, as you leap between platforms, rotating the collider to ensure you don’t plunge into the void or smack into a wall. From the off, this isn’t exactly easy, but later colliders are truly bonkers – abstract and terrifying contraptions that shift and morph before your very eyes. Brilliant stuff.
People who today play mobile classic Canabalt and consider it lacking due to its simplicity don't understand what the game is trying to do. Canabalt is all about speed — the thrill of being barely in control, and of affording the player only the simplest controls for survival. ALONE… takes that basic premise and straps a rocket booster to it.
Instead of leaping between buildings, you're flying through deadly caverns, a single digit nudging your tiny craft up and down. Occasional moments of generosity — warnings about incoming projectiles; your ship surviving minor collisions and slowly regenerating — are offset by the relentlessly demanding pressure of simply staying alive and not slamming into a wall. It's an intoxicating combination, and one that, unlike most games in this genre, matches Canabalt in being genuinely exciting to play.
This one's all about the bling - and also the not being crushed to death by falling rocks and dirt. Doug Dug riffs off of Mr Driller, Boulder Dash and Dig Dug, the dwarf protagonist digging deep under the earth on an endless quest for shimmering gems. Cave-ins aren't the only threat, though - the bowels of the earth happen to be home to a surprising array of deadly monsters.
Some can be squashed and smacked with Doug's spade (goodbye, creepy spider!), but others are made of sterner stuff (TROLL! RUN AWAY!). Endlessly replayable and full of character, Doug Dug's also surprisingly relaxing - until the dwarf ends up under 150 tonnes of rubble.
One of the most gorgeous games around, FOTONICA at its core echoes one-thumb leapy game Canabalt. The difference is FOTONICA has you move through a surreal and delicate Rez-like 3D vector landscape, holding the screen to gain speed, and only soaring into the air when you lift a finger.
Smartly, FOTONICA offers eight very different and finite challenges, enabling you to learn their various multi-level pathways and seek out bonuses to ramp up your high scores. Get to grips with this dreamlike runner and you can then pit your wits (and thumbs) against three slowly mutating endless zones.
One of the most exhilarating games on mobile, Impossible Road finds a featureless white ball barreling along a ribbon-like track that twists and turns into the distance. The aim is survival – and the more gates you pass through, the higher your score.
The snag is that Impossible Road is fast, and the track bucks and turns like the unholy marriage of a furious unbroken stallion and a vicious roller-coaster.
Once the physics click, however, you’ll figure out the risks you can take, how best to corner, and what to do when hurled into the air by a surprise bump in the road.
The game also rewards ‘cheats’. Leave the track, hurtle through space for a bit, and rejoin – you’ll get a score for your airborne antics, and no penalty for any gates missed. Don’t spend too long aloft though - a few seconds is enough for your ball to be absorbed into the surrounding nothingness.
Run-A-Whale is a sweet-natured endless runner. Well, endless swimmer, given that its protagonist is a friendly whale giving a lift/thrill ride to a shipwrecked pirate.
There’s no tapping to leap here, though; in Run-A-Whale, you hold the screen to make the whale dive. When you let go and he breaks the surface, he soars (very) briefly into the air, before returning to the water with a splash.
As ever, the aim in Run-A-Whale is survival – and that in itself isn’t simple. The game’s one failing is it sometimes makes it really tough to avoid hazards, which can include whale-stopping walls someone’s carelessly built beneath the waves.
Mostly, though, this one’s a gorgeous romp through beautiful landscapes, grabbing coins, occasionally being fired into the sky by a cannon, and regularly fending off giant crabs and octopodes.
Super Hexagon is an endless survival game that mercilessly laughs at your incompetence. It begins with a tiny spaceship at the center of the screen, and walls rapidly closing in. All you need to do is move left and right to nip through the gaps.
Unfortunately for you, the walls keep shifting and changing, the screen pulses to the chiptune soundtrack, and the entire experience whirls and jolts like you’re inside a particularly violent washing machine. It seems impossible, but you soon start to recognize patterns in the walls.
String together some deft moves, survive a minute by the skin of your teeth, and you briefly feel like a boss as new arenas are unlocked. And although complacency is wiped from your face the instant you venture near them, Super Hexagon has an intoxicating, compelling nature to offset its mile-long sadistic streak.
Ridiculous Fishing is appropriately named, in that it’s – vaguely – about fishing, and it’s certainly ridiculous.
The game begins with you bobbing about in your open-topped boat, casting a line into the inky depths. You then tilt your phone to guide your hook, scooping up fish, and avoiding hazards. When you reel everything in, it’s hurled into the air, whereupon – for some reason – you blast it with a shotgun.
It’s all very silly, and there’s a smart compulsion loop: over time, you buy longer lines, and higher-powered weaponry, and can therefore snag more fish. And the more you shoot, the more cash you make. Clearly, in this world there’s a big market for seafood that has been airborne and almost atomized. As we said: ridiculous!
The best platform games for AndroidOur favorite Android platform games, including side-scrolling 2D efforts, exploration games and console-style adventures.
If you've played Laser Dog's previous efforts, PUK and ALONE…, you'll know what you're in for with HoPiKo. This game takes no prisoners. If it did take them, it'd repeatedly punch them in the face before casually discarding them. HoPiKo, then, is not a game to be messed with. Instead, it feels more like a fight. In each of the dozens of hand-crafted tiny levels, you leap from platform to platform via deft drags and taps, attempting to avoid death.
Only, death is everywhere and very easy to meet. The five-stage level sets are designed to be completed in mere seconds, but also to break your brain and trouble your fingers. It's just on the right side of hellishly frustrating, meaning you'll stop short of flinging your device at the wall, emerging from your temporary red rage foolishly determined that you can in fact beat the game on your next go.
The term 'masterpiece' is perhaps bandied about too often in gaming circles, but Limbo undoubtedly deserves such high praise. It features a boy picking his way through a creepy monochrome world, looking for his sister. At its core, Limbo is a fairly simple platform game with a smattering of puzzles, but its stark visuals, eerie ambience, and superb level design transforms it into something else entirely.
You'll get a chill the first time a chittering figure sneaks off in the distance, and your heart will pump when being chased by a giant arachnid, intent on spearing your tiny frame with one of its colossal spiked legs. That death is never the end — each scene can be played unlimited times until you progress — only adds to Limbo's disturbing nature.
The bar's set so low in modern mobile gaming that the word 'premium' has become almost meaningless. But Leo's Fortune bucks the trend, and truly deserves the term. It's a somewhat old-school side-on platform game, featuring a gruff furball hunting down the thief who stole his gold (and then, as is always the way, dropped coins at precise, regular intervals along a lengthy, perilous pathway).
The game is visually stunning, from the protagonist's animation through to the lush, varied backdrops. The game also frequently shakes things up, varying its pace from Sonic-style loops to precise pixel-perfect leaps.
It at times perhaps pushes you a bit too far — late on, we found some sections a bit too finicky and demanding. But you can have as many cracks at a section as you please, and if you master the entire thing, there's a hardcore speedrun mode that challenges you to complete the entire journey without dying.
There are varied mobile takes on limbless wonder Rayman's platform gaming exploits. The 1995 original once existed on Android, but was ill-suited to touchscreens and has mercifully vanished from Google Play; and Rayman Adventures dabbles in freemium to the point it leaves a bad taste.
But Rayman Jungle Run and Rayman Fiesta Run get things right.
They rethink console-oriented platformers as auto-runners – which might sound reductive. However, this is more about distillation and focus than outright simplification.
Tight level design and an emphasis on timing regarding when to jump, rebound and attack forces you to learn layouts and the perfect moment to trigger actions, in order to get the in-game bling you need to progress.
Both titles are sublime, but Fiesta Run is marginally the better of the two - a clever take on platforming that fizzes with energy, looks fantastic, and feels like it was made for Android rather than a 20-year-old console.
Harking back to classic side-on platformers, Traps n' Gemstones dumps an Indiana Jones wannabe into a massive pyramid, filled with mummies, spiders and traps; from here he must figure out how to steal all the bling, uncover all the secrets, and then finally escape.
Beyond having you leap about, grab diamonds, and keep indigenous explorer-killing critters at bay, Traps n' Gemstones is keen to have you explore. Work your way deeper into the pyramid and you’ll find objects that when placed somewhere specific open up new pathways.
But although this one’s happy to hurl you back to gaming’s halcyon days, it’s a mite kinder to newcomers than the games that inspired it.
Get killed and you can carry on from where you left off. More of a hardcore player? Death wipes your score, so to doff your fedora in a truly smug manner, you’ll have to complete the entire thing without falling to the game’s difficult challenges.
You might have played enough automatic runners to last several lifetimes, but Chameleon Run nonetheless deserves to be on your Android device. And although the basics might initially seem overly familiar (tap to jump and ensure your sprinting chap doesn’t fall down a hole), there’s in fact a lot going on here.
Each level has been meticulously designed, which elevates Chameleon Run beyond its algorithmically generated contemporaries. Like the best platform games, you must commit every platform and gap to memory to succeed. But also, color-switching and ‘head jumps’ open up new possibilities for route-finding – and failure.
In the former case, you must ensure you’re the right color before landing on colored platforms. With the latter, you can smash your head into a platform above to give you one more chance to leap forward and not tumble into the void.
Anyone who thought Nintendo would convert a standard handheld take on Mario to Android was always on a hiding to nothing. But that’s probably just as well – Nintendo’s classic platformers are reliant on tight controls, rather than you fumbling about on a slippy glass surface.
Super Mario Run tries a different tack, infusing plenty of ‘Marioness’ into an auto-runner, where you guide the mustachioed plumber by tapping the screen to have him perform actions.
You might consider this reductive; also, Super Mario Run is a touch short, and the ‘kingdom builder’ sub-game alongside the main act falls flat. Still, really smart level design wins the day, and completists will have fun replaying the world tour mode time and again to collect the many hard-to-reach coins.
Hero of the hour Dennis finds himself unicycling naked in this gorgeous platform game best described as flat-out nuts. In iCycle, you dodder left or right, leap over obstacles, and break your fall with a handy umbrella, all the while attempting to grab ice as surreal landscapes collapse and morph around you.
The mission feels like a journey into what might happen if Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam were let loose on game design. One minute, you’re entering a top-hatted gent’s ear to find and kiss a ‘reverse mermaid’ on a levitating bike; the next you’re in a terrifying silhouette funfair that might have burst forth from a fevered mind during a particularly unpleasant nightmare.
Some of the levels are tough, and there’s a bit of grinding to unlock new outfits. But if you want something a bit more creative on your Android, you can’t do much better than iCycle.
In platform adventure The Big Journey, fat cat Mr. Whiskers is on a mission. The chef behind his favorite dumplings has disappeared, and so the brave feline sets out to find him. The journey finds the chubby kitty rolling and leaping across – and through – all kinds of vibrant landscapes, packed with hills, tunnels, and enemies.
The game comes across a lot like PSP classic LocoRoco, in you tilting the screen to move, the protagonist’s rotundness increasing over time, and several of the landscape interactions (oddball elevators; smashing through fragile barriers).
But The Big Journey very much has its own character, not least in the knowing humor peppered throughout what might otherwise have been a saccharine child-like storyline about a gluttonous cartoon cat.
As it is, The Big Journey isn’t terribly challenging, but it is enjoyable, whether you drink the visuals in and just dodder to the end, or simultaneously try to find every collectible and beat the speed-run time limits.
Mushroom 11 finds you exploring the decaying ruins of a devastated world. And you do so as a blob of green goo. Movement comes by way of you ‘erasing’ chunks of this creature with a circular ‘brush’. Over time, you learn how this can urge the blob to move in certain ways, or how you can split it in two, so half can flick a switch, while the other half moves onward.
This probably sounds a bit weird – and it is. But Mushroom 11 is perfectly suited to the touchscreen. The tactile way you interact with the protagonist feels just right, and although your surroundings are desolate, they’re also oddly beautiful, augmented by a superb ethereal soundtrack.
There are moments of frustration – the odd difficulty wall. But with regular restart points, and countless ingenious obstacles and puzzles, Mushroom 11 is a strange creature you should immediately squeeze into whatever space exists on your Android device.
Sonic Runners Adventure tries to pull the same trick as Super Mario Run, distilling the essence of a much-loved traditional console platform game into a one-thumb auto-runner. The difference with Sonic is that he blazes along at breakneck pace, resulting in a colorful effort that has more in common with Canabalt than the precision leapy nature of Nintendo’s game.
That’s not to say there’s no case for care and accuracy though. Sonic Runners Adventure features carefully designed multi-level landscapes, each with its own rhythm.
Crack the choreography and you’ll grab the rings, bonk the monsters on the head and give the evil Dr Eggman a serious kicking. If not, you can at least take solace that this game’s mobile-friendly levels aren’t terribly expansive, and so are geared towards immediately having another go.
The best puzzle games for AndroidOur favorite Android logic tests, path-finding games, match puzzlers and brain-teasers.
Persephone is a puzzle game set in tiny isometric worlds, packed with clockwork hazards, such as spikes and poison darts. Your aim in each is to reach the exit. Often, that involves triggering switches and pushing objects around. Persephone, though, has a rather unconventional take on how these things are achieved.
If you get killed, your corpse remains on the screen and you are reincarnated at the most recently accessed restart point. You can have up to three corpses available at any one time, unceremoniously using them to cross spiked pits, or shoving them into switches so to avoid being shot by a nearby projectile. It’s an amusingly dark comic twist, and one that makes Persephone stand out among a slew of ostensibly similar puzzlers.
The sort of silly maths game you might've played in your head before mobile phones emerged to absorb all our thought processes, Threes! really does take less than 30 seconds to learn.
You bash numbers about until they form multiples of three and disappear. That's it. There are stacks of free clones available, but if you won't spare the price of one massive bar of chocolate to pay for a lovely little game like this that'll amuse you for week, you're part of the problem and deserve to rot in a freemium hell where it costs 50p to do a wee.
It's not often you see a game about the "joy of cultivation", and Prune is unlike anything you've ever played before. Apparently evolving from an experimental tree-generation script, the game has you swipe to shape and grow a plant towards sunlight by tactically cutting off specific branches.
That sounds easy, but the trees, shrubs and weeds in Prune don't hang around. When they're growing at speed and you find yourself faced with poisonous red orbs to avoid, or structures that damage fragile branches, you'll be swiping in a frantic race towards sunlight.
And all it takes is one dodgy swipe from a sausage finger to see your carefully managed plant very suddenly find itself being sliced in two.
This is one of those 'rub your stomach, pat your head' titles that has you play two games at once. At the top of the screen, it's an endless runner, with your little bloke battling all manner of monsters, and pilfering loot. The rest of the display houses what's essentially a Bejeweled-style gem-swapper. The key is in matching items so that the running bit goes well - like five swords when you want to get all stabby.
Also, there's the building a boat bit. Once a run ends, you return to your watery home, which gradually acquires new rooms and residents. Some merely power up your next sprint, but others help you amass powerful weaponry. Resolutely indie and hugely compelling, You Must Build a Boat will keep you busily swiping for hours.
It turns out what makes a good snowman is three very precisely rolled balls of snow stacked on top of each other. And that's the core of this adorable puzzle game, which has more than a few hints of Towers of Hanoi and Sokoban about it as your little monster goes about building icy friends to hug.
What sets A Good Snowman apart from its many puzzle-game contemporaries on Android is a truly premium nature. You feel that the developer went to great efforts to polish every aspect of the production, from the wonderful animation to puzzles that grow in complexity and deviousness, without you really noticing — until you get stuck on a particularly ferocious one several hours in.
You probably need to be a bit of a masochist to get the most out of Snakebird, which is one of the most brain-smashingly devious puzzlers we've ever set eyes on. It doesn't really look or sound the part, frankly - all vibrant colors and strange cartoon 'snakebirds' that make odd noises.
But the claustrophobic floating islands the birds must crawl through, supporting each other (often literally) in their quest for fruit, are designed very precisely to make you think you've got a way forward, only to thwart you time and time again.
The result is a surprisingly arduous game, but one that's hugely rewarding when you crack a particularly tough level, at which point you'll (probably rightly) consider yourself some kind of gaming genius.
Some people argue programming is perhaps the best ‘game’ of all – and a brilliant puzzle. Those might be people you’d sooner avoid at parties, but Human Resource Machine suggests they could have a point. In this compelling and unique puzzle game, you control the actions of a worker drone by way of programming-like sequences.
The premise is to complete tasks by converting items in your inbox to whatever’s required in the outbox – for example, only sending zeroes. Like much programming, success often relies on logic, with you fashioning loops, and using actions such as ‘jump’, ‘if’ statements, and ‘copy’. These are arranged via drag and drop on a board at the right-hand side of the screen.
That might all sound impenetrable, but Human Resource Machine is in fact elegant, friendly, and approachable, not least due to developer Tomorrow Corporation’s penchant for infusing games with personality and heart.
That game where you cast a shadow on the wall and attempt to make a vaguely recognizable rabbit? That’s Shadowmatic, only instead of your hands, you manipulate all kinds of levitating detritus, spinning and twisting things until you abruptly – and magically – fashion a silhouette resembling anything from a seahorse to an old-school telephone.
The game looks gorgeous, with stunning lighting effects and objects that look genuinely real as they dangle in the air. Mostly though, this is a game about tactility and contemplation – it begs to be explored, and to make use of your digits in a way virtual D-pads could never hope to compete with.
Linelight is a gorgeous, minimal puzzler that pits you against the rhythmic denizens of a network of lines levitating above a colored haze. Your aim is simply to progress, inching your way along the network, triggering gates and switches, and collecting golden gems.
Early puzzles are content to let you get to grips with the virtual stick (one of the best on Android). Soon, you’re faced with adversaries that kill with a single touch. But these foes aren’t merely to be avoided – they must also be manipulated into position to trigger switches that open pathways that enable you to continue.
Now and again, new mechanics keep things fresh, as do abrupt changes in pace, such as a memorable several-screens-long pursuit/dance with an enemy towards the end of the game’s first section. In all, Linelight’s an enchanting, vibrant, superbly designed experience – an essential purchase for your Android device.
Monument Valley 2 is the follow-up to landscape-bending puzzler Monument Valley. As in its predecessor, you fashion impossible pathways by manipulating Escher-like constructions in order to reach goals.
This is a gorgeous game. The minimalist architecture is dotted with optical illusions. Imagination abounds throughout, and the color palette dazzles, half making you wish you could print every level out as a massive poster to stick on the wall.
The actual puzzles are slight and the game itself has been criticized for being short, but thoughts of brevity evaporate when you’re confronted by one of Monument Valley 2’s many spectacular, beautiful moments, such as a side-on level that resembles modern art and a section where trees explode from pots when bathed in sunlight. In short, this is a mobile experience to savor.
Framed 2 follows in the footsteps of Framed – a puzzle game based around rearranging panels of an animated comic book.
The story features a mysterious ship, smuggling, and quite a lot of sneaky spies. As you play a scene, something inevitably goes horribly wrong for the protagonist and you must swap frames around to make things play out differently. Like the original, this is all wonderfully tactile, but the puzzles are better this time around, with more emphasis on reusing panels.
It’s even fun when it goes wrong. You don’t often get to be entertained when failing in a puzzle game, but here you’ll want to fail each level if you succeed first time, just to see what amusing japes Framed 2’s cast would have got into otherwise.
Zenge is a sliding puzzle game whose early levels almost insult your intelligence, merely asking you to slide a few shapes into place. Don’t be fooled, though – Zenge is devious in a way that should make even the most jaded puzzle game fan grin.
At first, it’s just the cut of the shapes that thwarts efforts to shove them into place, but every now and again, new mechanics enter the mix, such as pieces that stick to each other, or buttons that flip shapes over.
All this plays out within a no-stress environment. There are no timers, move limits, shops, points or stars - it’s just you and the puzzles. Zenge’s purity alone would make it interesting, but the quality of the puzzles makes it a must-have.
Hidden Folks is a hidden object game with a soul. It’s reminiscent of those mass-produced posters where you scour a massive, cluttered scene, trying to find the one person with a silly hat. The difference is that everything here has been made with love and care, from the hand-drawn interactive illustrations to the amusing oral sound effects.
The basics are admittedly much as you’d expect: scour the screen to find specific objects or characters, and move on when complete.
We realize that might not sound like much, but there’s a charm and humor to Hidden Folks that sets it apart from any of its contemporaries. On a larger Android phone or a tablet, this is a particularly relaxing, absorbing game to lose yourself in for a few hours.
.projekt is a relaxing and brilliantly designed minimal puzzler that twists your brain by forcing you to think in two and three dimensions simultaneously. At the center of the screen is a five-by-five grid, which you tap to build blocky structures from cubes. The aim is to have the shadows they project match patterns on two visible walls.
At first, this is simple stuff, but .projekt subtly ramps up the challenge as you move through its levels. You’re forced to spin the canvas multiple times, and often to destroy your structure and rebuild as an approach turns out to be a dead end.
Never does .projekt become a frustrating experience, however. You’re not on the clock, there are no move limits, and there are no IAP lurking. It’s just about you and the blocks, and imagining how an object looks from two points of view.
ELOH is a puzzle game that wants you to experiment. It’s based around a strict grid that features masks, loudspeakers that emit colored blobs, and goals. The idea is to get the blobs to the goals, ensuring they’re the right color by bouncing them off of relevant masks along the way.
That might sound chaotic, but ELOH has a clockwork setup. Everything bounces at precise right angles, and shots are fired to the rhythm of a background soundtrack. But your approach to solving challenges can be like sculpting: set the blobs on their way and you can move puzzle pieces live, just to see what happens.
ELOH is therefore a pressure-free but engaging title – there’s no clock, and there are no ads. It’s just you, over 80 puzzles, and some cracking visuals and audio.
Layton: Curious Village in HD (US/RoW) is a slice of gaming history. Originally released for the Nintendo DS, Curious Village was the first Layton game; it sold over 17 million copies, and launched what’s since become a beloved series.
Lesser developers would have done a straight port to mobile and be done with it, but Level-5 acknowledges technology has moved on – and the clue is in the title. All of the game’s visuals have been spruced up for modern displays, and augmented with new animations.
Of course, the puzzles remain the real draw – and even some of the early ones are proper brain-thumpers. Add to this an engaging story (despite the iffy voice work) and Curious Village is a superb update, one that you should take time with and savor.
In The Dog House is a sweet-natured puzzler featuring a ravenous pooch and a bizarre house with moving rooms, floors, and corridors. Unfortunately for the dog, its dinner’s on the other side of said house, and you need to figure out how to get over there.
The mechanics of the game are a classic sliding puzzler, with a few twists. The house’s components can be slid and sometimes rotated, but you also need to use a bone to urge the dog toward the goal. The snag is any room the pooch is planted in cannot be moved.
In The Dog House rapidly becomes quite the brain-smasher, and it’s irritating that there’s no level-skip option when you’re stuck. Still, perseverance reaps rewards, because after the more arduous tests you’ll feel like a champ when you reach that bowl.
Dissembler is a match-three game with a difference. Instead of presenting you with a wall of gems that’s replenished when you make matches, Dissembler levels are akin to modern art – abstract creations comprising colored tiles.
You still swap two elements to try and match three (or more), but here matches vanish. The idea is to end up with a blank canvas. At first, this is easy, but Dissembler soon serves up challenges where you end up isolating tiles unless you’re very careful.
This shifts the game more heavily into strategic puzzling territory – and it’s all the better for it. You’ll feel like the smartest person around on figuring out the precise sequence of moves to clear the later levels. And even when you’ve finished them all, there’s a daily puzzle and endless mode to keep you occupied.
The best shooting games for AndroidOur favorite Android FPS titles, twin-stick shooters, scrolling retro shoot ’em ups and artillery games.
A young boy hurls himself down a massive well, with only his ‘gunboots’ for protection. There are so many questions there (not least: what parent would buy their kid boots that are also guns?), but it sets the scene for a superb arcade shooter with surprising smarts and depth.
At first in Downwell, you’ll probably be tempted to blast everything, but ammo soon runs out. On discovering you reload on landing, you’ll then start to jump about a lot. But further exploration of the game’s mechanics reaps all kinds of rewards, leading to you bounding on monsters, venturing into tunnels to find bonus bling, and getting huge scores once you crack the secrets behind combos.
The game might look like it’s arrived on your Android device from a ZX Spectrum, but this is a thoroughly modern and hugely engaging blaster.
In the late 1970s, Space Invaders invited you to blast rows of invaders. In the mid-1980s, Arkanoid revamped Breakout, having you use a bat-like spaceship to belt a ball at space bricks. Now, Arkanoid vs Space Invaders mashes the two titles together – and, surprisingly, it works very nicely.
Instead of a ball, you’re deflecting the invaders’ bullets back at them, to remove bricks and the invaders themselves. Now and again, Arkanoid is recalled more directly in a special attack that has you belt a ball around the place after firing it into action using a massive space bow.
Increasingly, though, the game is laced with strategy, since your real enemy is time. A couple of dozen levels in, you must carefully utilize powerful invaders’ blasts and onscreen bonuses to emerge victorious – not easy when neon is flying everywhere and the clock’s ticking down.
No Stick Shooter is a single-screen shoot ’em up that marries the best of old-school retro blasters with modern touchscreen controls.
As its name suggests, there are no virtual D-pads to contend with. Instead, as the aliens menacingly descend towards your planet, you tap their general location to fling something destructive their way.
The key to victory doesn’t involve tapping the screen like a lunatic, though. Your weapons need time to recharge, and specific armaments work well against certain foes. In a sense, it all plays out like a strategy-laced precision shooter on fast-forward, with you clocking incoming hostiles, quickly switching to the best weapon, and tapping or swiping to blow them away.
There are just 30 levels in all, but only the very best arcade veterans are likely to blaze through them at any speed – and even then, getting all the achievements is a tough ask.
Death Road to Canada is a zombie movie smashed into a classic retro game. Little pixelated heroes dodder about a dystopian world, bashing zombies with whatever comes to hand, looting houses, and trying to not get eaten.
The road trip is staccato in nature. The game constantly tries to derail your rhythm and momentum. In Choose Your Own Adventure-style text bits, the wrong decision may find you savaged by a moose. Elsewhere, intense ‘siege’ challenges dump you in a confined space with zombie hordes, often armed only with a stick. Handy.
These abrupt elements can grate – as can the slightly slippy controls that aren’t always quite tight enough; but otherwise this is an ambitious mash-up of RPG and arcade gaming, with generous dollops of black humor – and BRAIINNZZZ.
ATOMIK: RunGunJumpGun finds a nutcase blasting his way through corridors of extremely angry, heavily armed aliens, while he himself is only armed with a really big gun. That might sound fine, until you realize the gun is also his means of staying aloft.
This means to go higher, he must blast downward, temporarily becoming vulnerable to incoming fire. If he shoots forward, he starts to plummet towards the hard, deadly ground. ATOMIK therefore becomes a manic, high-octane balancing act of finger gymnastics, with the potential to get killed very frequently.
On every death, the game rewinds the level so you can try again, and wallow in your failure to complete challenges that are a mere 20 seconds long without dying dozens of times first. But when you crack one, you really do feel like a boss.
Super Crossfighter is essentially a neon Space Invaders played at breakneck pace. Your little craft sits at the foot of the screen, darting left and right, blasting the aliens above. But the foes you face aren’t doddering critters from 1970s gaming – they come armed to the teeth, hurling all manner of instant laser death and bullet hell your way.
Fortunately, you’re not wanting for firepower either. Your speedy craft can leap from the bottom to the top of the screen, scooping up gems that can subsequently be used to upgrade the ship in an in-game shop. There’s no IAP, note, for extra cash – this intense blaster is all about the skill you have in your thumbs, and your ability to survive wave after wave of neon-infused shooty action.
Jydge riffs off of Robocop and Judge Dredd, having you control the titular cybernetic law enforcer, eradicating crime in the megacity of Edenbyrg.
The game’s no-nonsense approach is typified by the ‘Gavel’ in this case being a massive gun. Jydge’s approach to dealing with bad guys mostly involves stomping about, shooting enemies, pilfering bling, and rescuing unfortunate hostages caught in the crossfire.
Initially, something about the game’s visuals and approach may make you play as if entering a neon-soaked outing that’s escaped from stealth shooter master and X-Com creator Julian Gollop’s brain, but really Jydge mostly plays out like a frantic twin-stick shooter. Tactics only really enter the equation when you realize you can nip back to earlier missions and tackle them again with new kit or approaches, in order to meet tricky challenges. Either way, it’s ballsy fun.
Implosion finds Earth having been given a beating by nasty aliens, leaving humans on the brink of extinction. As this is a videogame, humans have pinned all their hopes on you and your natty battlesuit.
Fortunately, said suit can dish out serious damage. As you stomp about Implosion’s gleaming environments, you blast, slash, and dash your way through hordes of identikit alien drones. Occasional boss battles then shake things up in terms of pacing and challenge. Between levels, you customize your suit, to unlock new combos.
The game’s creators call Implosion a AAA console-style title, and it looks superb and feels the part. Even the complex controls (for a touchscreen game) work well. A sticking point for some might be the price, but you can play six missions for nothing. If you then balk at a one-off IAP for a premium title, don’t subsequently wonder why we can’t have nice things.
Lichtspeer is a trippy take on tower defense – like a single-lane Plants vs Zombies, only you’re fending off deranged futuristic Nordic and Germanic foes, are armed with an endless supply of glowing javelins (the titular Lichtspeer), and act under the watchful eye of an angry, demanding heavy metal god.
So, yes, this one has a veneer of weird, but the underlying mechanics are straightforward enough: aim your spear Angry Birds-style, lob and repeat. Get in some headshots, and the game rewards you. Miss too often and the god’s wrath briefly freezes you, making you temporarily vulnerable.
The main downsides to the game are repetition and brevity. However, gradually acquired special moves shake things up (and are a godsend on packed levels), and when you’re in the neon Lichtspeer zone, it has a focused, hypnotic quality – along with a pleasing dash of madness.
The best sports games for AndroidOur favorite Android soccer, tennis, golf and management games.
You might narrow your eyes at so-called 'realism' in mobile sports titles, given that this usually means 'a game that looks a bit like when you watch telly'. But Touchgrind Skate 2 somehow manages to evoke the feel of skateboarding, your fingers becoming tiny legs that urge the board about the screen.
There's a lot going on in Touchgrind Skate 2, and the control system is responsive and intricate, enabling you to perform all manner of tricks. It's not the most immediate of titles - you really need to not only run through the tutorial but fully master and memorize each step before moving on.
Get to grips with your miniature skateboard and you'll find one of the most fluid and rewarding experiences on mobile. Note that for free you get one park to scoot about in, but others are available via IAP.
Table Tennis Touch brings the glory of ping pong to your Android device. You can partake in mini-games for training, or a full career mode, where you aim to smack a tiny white ball past the usual eerily floating bats of your opponents.
Visually, the game’s a treat with its gorgeously rendered locations. Most importantly, it feels great, recreating the high-octane nature of the sport, even if you do perhaps eventually get to the point where many matches are won by smashing super-fast shots diagonally across the table.
Even so, when you do get that winning point, at the end of a game where the lead’s shifted back and forth between you and an opponent, the game’s never less than invigorating.
Desert Golfing is an almost brutally minimalist take on golf. You start out in a side-on landscape, featuring a ball and a hole. You drag to aim, let go to smack the ball, and hope your aim is true. One or more shots later, the hole becomes the next tee, and a new challenge is presented.
That is basically the entire game. You get a score, although when you’re 50 holes in, it’s hard to know whether the number is meaningful. But the actual playing takes golf to a strangely relaxing and zen place. If you want realism or action, this one’s perhaps not for you; but if you fancy something golf-like to chill out with, Desert Golfing is great.
Football Manager Touch 2018 is an ambitious mobile title, in that it attempts to bring the full-fat Football Manager experience from PC to your Android tablet. (Sorry, phone users – you’ll have to make do with the cut-down Football Manager Mobile).
The good news is that this is a hugely detailed, feature-rich game, enabling you to delve into every aspect of your team, watch matches, and get very angry when your team blows a two-goal lead deep into stoppage time.
The bad news is that this is a game that will demand many hours of your time. After all, you’re not going to finish and win an entire league during a 30-minute bus ride. A single game in your ongoing campaign, however…
Kevin Toms Football * Manager is what happens when the man who created the original Football Manager game (the one released in 1982 for computers with 16k of RAM) brings the same pick-up-and-play ethos to Android. It’s crude. It’s simplistic. It’s also – as it turns out – an awful lot of fun.
Ultimately, the game mostly involves basic team selection/management, a smattering of tactics, and tense match highlights. It might seem prehistoric to anyone who cut their teeth on modern football management games, but it’s a delight for anyone hankering after immediacy from a management game, rather than something with so much depth it threatens to take over their life.
The best strategy games for AndroidOur favorite Android real-time strategy and turn-based games, board games, card games and map-making games.
Lara Croft games have landed on Android to rather variable results. The original Tomb Raider just doesn't work on touchscreens, and although Lara Croft: Relic Run is enjoyable enough, it's essentially a reskinned Temple Run.
Lara Croft GO is far more ambitious and seriously impressive. It rethinks Tomb Raider in much the same way Hitman GO reimagined the Hitman series.
Croft's adventures become turn-based puzzles, set in a world half-way between board game and gorgeous isometric minimalism. It shouldn't really work, but somehow Lara Croft GO feels like a Tomb Raider game, not least because of the wonderful sense of atmosphere, regular moments of tension, and superb level design.
A massive upgrade over the developer’s own superb but broadly overlooked MegaCity, Concrete Jungle is a mash-up of puzzler, city management and deck builder.
The basics involve the strategic placement of buildings on a grid, with you aiming to rack up enough points to hit a row’s target. At that point, the row vanishes, and more building space scrolls into view.
Much of the strategy lies in clever use of cards, which affect nearby squares – a factory reduces the value of nearby land, for example, but an observatory boosts the local area. You quickly learn plonking down units without much thought messes up your future prospects.
Instead, you must plan in a chess-like manner – even more so when facing off against the computer opponent in brutally difficult head-to-head modes. But while Concrete Jungle is tough, it’s also fair – the more hours you put in, the better your chances. And it’s worth giving this modern classic plenty of your time.
There’s a disarmingly hypnotic and almost meditative quality to the early stages of Mini Metro. You sit before a blank underground map of a major metropolis, and drag out lines between stations that periodically appear.
Little trains then cart passengers about, automatically routing them to their stop, their very movements building a pleasing plinky plonky generative soundtrack.
As your underground grows, though, so does the tension. You’re forced to choose between upgrades, balance where trains run, and make swift adjustments to your lines. Should a station become overcrowded, your entire network is closed. (So...not very like the real world, then.)
Do well enough and you unlock new cities, with unique challenges. But even failure isn’t frustrating, and nor is the game’s repetitive nature a problem, given that Mini Metro is such a joy to play.
The original and best of the GO games, Hitman GO should never have worked. It reimagines the console stealth shooter as a dinky clockwork boardgame. Agent 47 scoots about, aiming to literally knock enemies off the board, and then reach and bump off his primary target.
Visually, it’s stunning – oddly adorable, but boasting the kind of clarity that’s essential for a game where a single wrong move could spell disaster. And the puzzles are well designed, too, with distinct objectives that often require multiple solutions to be found.
If you’re a fan of Agent 47’s exploits on consoles, you might be a bit nonplussed by Hitman GO, but despite its diorama stylings, it nonetheless manages to evoke some of the atmosphere and tension from the console titles, while also being entirely suited to mobile play.
In the fantasy world of Solitairica, battles are fought to the death by way of cards. The foes barring the way to your quest’s goal set up walls of cards before them, which you smash through by matching those one higher or lower than the one you hold.
Then there are spells you cast by way of collected energies. Meanwhile, the creatures strike back with their own unique attacks, from strange worm-like beings nibbling your head, to grumpy forest dwellers making your cards grow beards.
In short, then, a modicum of fantasy role-playing wrapped around an entertaining and approachable card game. And on Android, you have the advantage of the game being free – a one-off IAP only figures if you want to avoid watching adverts, and have access to alternate decks to try your luck as a different character.
If you never thought a solitaire-like card game was an ideal framework for a tense stealth title, you’re probably not alone. But somehow Card Thief cleverly mashes up cards and sneaking about.
The game takes place on a three-by-three grid of cards. For each move, you plan a route to avoid getting duffed up by guards (although pickpocketing them on the way past is fair game, obviously), loot a chest, and make for an exit.
Card Thief is not the easiest game to get into, with its lengthy tutorial and weird spin on cards. But this is a game with plenty of nuance and depth that becomes increasingly rewarding the more you play, gradually unlocking its secrets. It’s well worth the effort.
First Strike is an oddball combination of territory-snagging board game Risk, and classic defense arcade title Missile Command. You pick a nuclear power and set about building missiles, researching technologies, annexing adjacent states, and – when it comes to it – blowing the living daylights out of your enemies.
The high-tech interface balances speed and accessibility, although games tend to be surprisingly lengthy – and initially sedate, as you gradually increase your arsenal, and shore up your defenses.
Eventually, all hell breaks lose, including terrifying first strikes, where enemies lob their entire cache of missiles at an unlucky target. If that’s you and your defenses aren’t strong enough, prepare more for ‘the end’ than ‘game over’ as the screen shakes amid all the destruction.
It’s thoughtful and clever (and often chilling), but First Strike never forgets it’s a game – and a really good one for real-time strategy fans.
Miracle Merchant has you mix potions for thirsty adventurers, fashioned from stacks of colored cards. Each customer asks for a specific ingredient, and mentions another they like. Across 13 rounds, you must manage your deck to ensure everyone goes away happy. Fail once and your game ends.
Decisions must be made carefully, because once cards are placed, they can’t be moved. Combinations prove vital for success: pairs of cards boost your score, as does matching cards to the colored icons found on those already in play. There are also ‘evil’ cards with negative values to overcome.
The game doesn’t feel as refined as the developer’s own Card Thief, but we enjoyed its elegance. There’s no messing about with special powers and leveling up – it’s just you, cards, and a set of rules. There’s perhaps a touch too much reliance on card counting and luck, but Miracle Merchant’s nonetheless a simple, engaging, unique stab on solitaire.
Card Crawl mixes solitaire and dungeon crawling, and does an awful lot with a four-by-two grid of cards.
In each round, an armor-clad ogre deals four cards, which may include monsters, weaponry, potions, and spells. Beneath sits your adventurer’s card, two spots for items to hold, and one to stash a card for later.
To progress to the next draw, you must use three of the cards dealt to you. For example, you might grab a sword, use that to kill a demonic crow, and then quaff a potion.
Getting through the entire deck requires strategy more than luck. For example, down health potions when you don’t need to, and you may not survive later when weaponless and battling multiple enemies.
Generously, the basic game is free; but we recommend buying the one-off IAP to unlock the full set of cards and game modes.
Freeways is one of those games that doesn’t look like much in stills, but proves ridiculously compelling from the moment you fire it up. In short, it’s all about designing roadways for autonomous vehicles.
It comes across a bit like a mash-up of Mini Metro and Flight Control. You link roads together, often by designing monstrous spaghetti junctions, only you’re armed with tools that make you feel like an urban planner drawing with chunky crayons while wearing boxing gloves.
The game’s crude nature is part of its charm. It’s more about speed and immediacy than precision, a feeling cemented when you realize there’s no undo. When your road system gets jammed, your only option is to start from scratch and try something new.
In truth, the inability to remove even tiny errors can irk, not least when roads don’t connect as you’d expect. Otherwise, Freeways is a blast.
Meteorfall is a ‘roguelike’ role-playing adventure masquerading as a card game. You choose a hero, and then set out on a semi-randomized journey, which largely involves hacking your way through a horde of monsters. Only instead of swiping a trusty sword, or moving about a turn-based grid, your actions, attacks and strategy all revolve around cards.
With each card you’re dealt, you choose, Tinder-style, to swipe left or right. Each direction has its own outcome, which may involve smacking your foe in the face, or replenishing energy. Over time, you build up your deck, gradually increasing your strength and skills – until the moment you overstretch and are horribly killed.
Given the simple interface, there’s loads of depth here. And with every game being unique, Meteorfall is an Android title that should keep you playing for months.
Reigns: Game of Thrones follows Reigns and Reigns: Her Majesty in marrying kingdom management with swipe-based interaction borrowed from Tinder. Only this time, there’s a massively popular TV show fused to its core.
You plonk your behind on the Iron Throne, as one of several major characters from the TV series, and set about imposing your will on the Seven Kingdoms. As you swipe left and right to make decisions, your fortunes with the people, army, church and bank fluctuate. Fill or deplete any one meter, and your reign will come to an abrupt – and likely bloody – end.
Given the basic interface, Reigns: Game of Thrones has surprising depth. It also has great writing, loads of content to find, and plenty of puzzles to solve, making it ideal mobile gaming fodder.
The best word games for AndroidOur favorite Android games that involve anagrams, crosswords and doing clever things with letters.
Sidewords is a rare word game that isn’t ripping off Scrabble or crosswords. Instead, you get blank grids with words along two edges. You must use at least one letter from each edge to make new words of three or more letters. Each selected letter blasts a line across the grid; where lines meet become solid areas filled with your word. The aim is to fill the grid.
On smaller levels, this is simple, but larger grids can be challenging – especially when you realize a massive word (that on discovery made you feel like a genius) leaves spaces that are impossible to fill. Fortunately, Sidewords encourages experimentation, and so you can remove/replace words at will.
It’s clever and a bit different; and if you tire of the main game, you can fire up mini-game Quads, which marries word-building and Threes!-style sliding tiles. Two for the price of one, then – and both games alone are worth the outlay.
Dropwords 2 mixes up well-based match games like Bejeweled and word games like Boggle. You’re faced with a grid of letters and must drag out words that snake across the board. When submitting a word, its letters disappear, and new tiles fall into the well to fill the gaps.
As ever in this kind of game, speed is of the essence. But also, you can gain extra seconds by submitting longer words – something that becomes increasingly important as you get deeper into the game.
Smartly, much of the game can be customized, including the board’s theme; and if you want to just chill, rather than be hassled by a relentless game-ending countdown, there are untimed modes too.
Blackbar is fundamentally a game about guessing words. Yet it’s also a chilling commentary on the dangers of a dystopian surveillance society.
The game begins with you receiving letters from a friend who’s started work at the Department of Communication. Anything from them considered controversial or negative is censored – a ‘blackbar’ – which you must correctly guess to continue.
Over the course of a number of communications, the story escalates in a frightening manner, and you find yourself feeling like you’re beating the system (man), despite ultimately just tapping in words to best a basic logic test.
If nothing else, this showcases the power of great storytelling; and filling in Blackbar’s blanks feels a lot more fulfilling than chucking more hours at a run-of-the-mill Scrabble clone.
Letterpress merges Boggle-like finding words within a pile of letters with Risk-like land grabs. You and an opponent (an online human or computer players of varying skill levels) take turns to tap out words on the five-by-five grid. Letters you use turn your color – and those you surround cannot be flipped by the other player during their next turn.
Winning therefore isn’t just about big words – not least if its letters are scattered about. Instead, you must carefully protect your territory and gradually eat into your opponent’s land. Battles can become tense and thrilling – not usually concepts associated with a word game. But then Letterpress is no ordinary word game – it’s much better than that.
Supertype is a word game more concerned with the shape of letters than the words they might create. Each hand-designed level finds you staring at a setup of lines, dots, and empty spaces in which to type. Tap out some letters, press the tick mark, and everything starts to move.
The aim is to get the letters you type to the dots. In some cases, the solution may be fairly obvious – for example, placing a lowercase l on each ‘step’ towards an out of reach dot at the top of a staircase, then having a p at the start tip over to set everything in motion. More often, you’ll be scratching your head, experimenting, trying new approaches, and then grinning ear to ear on cracking a solution.
Typeshift rethinks word searches and crosswords. You get a tactile interface of jumbled letters within draggable columns. Your aim is to change the color of every tile – and tiles only change when they’re part of a word you make in the central row.
The game occasionally heads further into traditional crossword territory, adding clues to the mix, which you must match to the words you find. Either way, it’s a brain-smashing touch-optimized word-game experience.
There are joyful animated and audio touches throughout, too, and everything feels hand-crafted, rather than you being sent endless algorithmically generated puzzles. Naturally, such polish costs money – beyond the free download, you pay for packs of puzzles. But they’re worth every penny.
33 essential smart home commands for Christmas
It's Christmas, which means you might well be spending more time than usual at home – and that means you'll be getting to know your smart speaker of choice a little better too. But with thousands of commands to pick from, have you worked out the most useful?
We're here to guide you towards some of our favorite smart home commands that can come in handy over the Christmas holidays: entertain guests, make travel plans run smoothly, and even get gift ideas, plus much more...
11 commands for your Amazon Echo this Christmas
Amazon Echo
These commands will work with an Amazon Echo smart speaker, or any other device that has the Alexa smart assistant on board. Use "Alexa" or whatever wake word you've set up.
1. "Hey Alexa, play Christmas music."
Get yourself and the whole family in the festive mood with a few randomly selected Christmas tunes – Alexa will use Amazon Music, Spotify, or whatever service you've set up.
2. "Hey Alexa, turn on/off the lights."
If you've got some Christmassy smart lights that work with Alexa – and the likes of Lifx and Philips Hue bulbs do – then you can switch them on (and off) with a voice command.
3. "Hey Alexa, what's the weather forecast?"
Before you set off for the in-laws, find out what the weather's going to do, so you know how much time to leave. You can ask for several days in advance if needed, as well.
4. "Hey Alexa, Wikipedia..."
Ask Alexa to read out any Wikipedia article to help settle family feuds, entertain your guests with some random trivia, or just learn something new while you're relaxing.
5. "Hey Alexa, play a trivia game."
Speaking of trivia, gather your friends and family around your Amazon Echo and launch a trivia game: Alexa will give you a choice of games and topics to pick from right at the start.
6. "Hey Alexa, where's Santa?"
Thanks to the Alexa skill added by NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), you can track Santa's position across the globe.
7. "Hey Alexa, name all Santa's reindeer."
Your Amazon Echo and Alexa can answer just about any Christmas-related question you want to offer up, including naming all of the eight reindeer who help out Santa Claus.
8. "Hey Alexa, tell me a joke."
Alexa can be quite witty when it wants to be, and if the conversation flags around the dinner table then get your Amazon Echo to tell the room a (family friendly) joke.
9. "Hey Alexa, set a timer for..."
One of Alexa's most useful features is its timers, so take advantage – have your Echo count minutes and seconds in the kitchen and ensure Christmas dinner is cooked to perfection.
10. "Hey Alexa, what is the IMDB rating for..."
Use Alexa to tap into the Internet Movie Database online and get ratings for any films on the box on Christmas Day – make sure you're only watching the best of the bunch.
11. "Hey Alexa, open Christmas kindness."
One of the Christmas-related skills you can enable on your Alexa device is this one: it'll suggest a small act of kindness you can carry out for someone to spread the festive cheer.
When will our smart speakers become conversation starters? 12 commands for your Google Home this Christmas
Google Home Hub
Google Assistant is on board all the Google Home speakers – including the Google Home Hub – and you can get into the festive spirit by saying "hey Google" then these commands.
1. "Hey Google, play [show or movie] on Netflix on my TV"
If you've got a Chromecast connected to the same Wi-Fi as your Google Home, and Netflix is connected in the Home app, you can throw up any show or movie from the catalog.
2. "Hey Google, turn on the Christmas lights"
Turn on your Christmas lights with Google Home – provided they're connected to a compatible smart plug, and you've named the plug "Christmas lights" in the Home app.
3. "Hey Google, tell me about my day"
Christmas can be a hectic time of year, so make sure you know everything that you've got to do over the day by calling up the appointments and events scheduled in your calendar.
4. "Hey Google, give me a Christmas fact"
Google Assistant is a treasure trove of trivia and facts of course, but you can specifically ask for something Christmas related and keep yourself and your guests entertained.
5. "Hey Google, play some Christmas carols"
Like Alexa, Google Assistant can play Christmas music from the likes of Spotify once you've got an account connected. Try asking for carols to get a more traditional, religious mix.
6. "Hey Google, flip a coin"
Having trouble getting family and friends to make a decision on the Christmas movie or whether or not to go for a walk? Get your Google Home smart speaker to flip a coin on it.
7. "Hey Google, tell me something good"
As it's Christmas, you might want to avoid all of the bad news floating around and hear a positive news story for a change – and this Google Home command will have one read out.
8. "Hey Google, set an alarm for..."
Alarms are bound to come in handy for Christmas, whether you don't want to miss the Queen's speech, or you need to know when it's time to get the turkey out of the oven.
9. "Hey Google, broadcast..."
If you've got multiple Google Home speakers at home, use the broadcast command to send a message to all of them at once – very handy when the Christmas dinner is ready.
10. "Hey Google, how's the traffic to..."
Heading out over Christmas? Ask your Google Home how the traffic is to a destination, and you'll get a summary and a driving time estimate, as well as the directions on your phone.
11. "Hey Google, call Santa"
One of the Christmas surprises Google has put in Google Assistant is a little Santa mini game – you have to help him organize a Christmas concert using your smart speaker.
12. "Hey Google, talk to Santa's hotline"
Switch to this command and you unlock another Christmassy experience inside Google Assistant. This time you have to explain whether you've been naughty or nice this year.
How to set up your new Amazon Echo 10 commands for your Apple HomePod this Christmas
Apple HomePod
Last but not least we have the Apple HomePod with Siri – here are some of the useful commands you can launch at Christmas by saying "hey Siri" followed by a command.
1. "Hey Siri, play..."
Of course your HomePod interfaces neatly with your iTunes or Apple Music library: Set up a festive Christmas playlist, then get it playing on your HomePod using this voice command.
2. "Hey Siri, dim the lights"
Like Amazon Echos and Google Homes, Apple HomePods can control your smart home kit, as long as its HomeKit compatible: you can dim your lights for Christmas Eve, for example.
3. "Hey Siri, add ... to my notes"
Christmas is hectic at the best of times, so use the iOS and macOS Notes app to remember everything you need to remember – this voice command can note down whatever you say.
4. "Hey Siri, where's a great place to..."
If you're stuck for something to do with the people you're seeing over Christmas, Siri on your HomePod can help – ask for restaurants, bars, or any other kind of venue you want.
5. "Hey Siri, wake me up tomorrow at..."
Make sure you're not late for anything that's happening over Christmas – whether it's a church service or the present opening – by getting Siri and your HomePod to set an alarm.
6. "Hey Siri, when is Santa coming?"
Apple has built a variety of Christmas-related questions and answers into Siri and the HomePod, and this is just one of them – get your kids to find out when Santa arrives.
7. "Hey Siri, what should I get... for Christmas?"
Here's another Christmas-themed question to try: if you're struggling for a late present ideas, ask Siri to suggest a suitable holiday gift for your brother, sister, nephew, niece or anyone else.
8. "Hey Siri, give me the latest sports news"
Christmas is usually combined with a hectic sports schedule, especially when it comes to football. Use this command to get the latest sports news and scores over the holidays.
9. "Hey Siri, how many calories are in..."
Siri and your Apple HomePod can be a big help in cooking over Christmas, from getting recipes to this command, which will tell you how many calories you're putting away.
10. "Hey Siri, text..."
Christmas is a time for family and friends, so get in touch with someone you haven't spoken to for a while by getting your HomePod to send them a festive message.
Amazon Echo vs Apple HomePod vs Google Home: the battle of the smart speakers
AMD may launch a new Radeon GPU at CES 2019
Recent leaks have strongly suggested that we would see new Ryzen desktop processors and APUs meant for laptop at CES 2019, but we might also get a bonus bonanza of new Radeon graphics as well.
Wccftech claims to have received a confirmation of the introduction of a new Radeon graphics card, which might just be the introduction of 7nm Vega II GPUs. AMD has previously stated that it will next introduce a 7nm graphics architecture and the company has done just that with its Radeon Instinct GPU in the enterprise market.
More recently we saw that AMD trademarked a new Vega II logo – though AMD could easily pull a fast one and introduce yet another generation of Polaris graphics cards.
Either way, we’re excited to see any new graphics cards from AMD after a relatively quiet year of GPU releases in 2018.
Ryzen againWhat does seem a little more certain is AMD’s plans to introduce new CPUs and APUs at CES 2019.
7nm desktops seem like a certainty given that AMD is on track to introduce 7nm processors following 12nm Ryzen 2nd Generation chips. It also helps a recent leak blew open the whole Ryzen 3rd Generation will start with quad-core entry-level processors leading up to some of the first mainstream 16-core CPUs.
An upcoming Picasso series of APUs that put together AMD’s 12nm processors with a new generation of discrete-class Vega graphics also seems all but certain as well. These new chips are said to power a new generation of laptops including the next-generation Surface laptop as well as a streaming-only iteration of the next Xbox.
Whether these rumors are true or not, we definitely know AMD will have an action packed CES 2019, you can bet we’ll be there to report on everything you need to know.
Meanwhile, the Nvidia Turing family of graphics cards is just getting bigger and bigger
The best Apple Watch apps we've used in 2018
It’s been an interesting year for Apple Watch apps. In the spring it seemed as if the Watch had lost its sparkle, with many big-name apps either languishing or being pulled from the Watch altogether. The problem wasn’t that Apple Watch apps are a bad idea, though.
Far from it, as our selection here demonstrates. It was that sometimes, apps were designed to answer the wrong question: “could we make a Watch app?” but not “should we?”
Now, the Apple Watch is onto its fourth generation, and the aptly-named Apple Watch 4 is proving pretty popular - so that's why you're probably here checking out the new apps. In fact, it's one of the best smartwatch options out there, and now we're at the fourth generation it's becoming a particularly accomplished smart option for your wrist.
Our favourite apps, the apps that are still here after a bumpy year, both should and could have been made. They exist because they’re useful, or because they’re entertaining, or because they make your life that little bit better.
In this round-up you’ll find apps for podcasting and procrastinating, for getting fit and getting stuff done, for messing around and for sorting stuff out.
Before you get into our list remember to head into the Apple Watch main app on your iPhone - that's where you'll see a list of the apps already installed on your phone that can also be transferred to your Watch. If you see any you like the look of here, you'll need to download them to your iPhone first.
Best Apple Watch apps for fitness and runningThere's no denying that the main thrust of the Apple Watch since the second model is for fitness: it's packing GPS, heart rate, water resistance and improved sensors to make the most of the fact people like to work out with this thing - it even connects to gym equipment.
This list of Apple Watch fitness, running, wellbeing and health apps are nearly all must-have - if you're going to do one thing with your new Watch, use it to become a healthier you in mind and body.
Strava
Strava is one of the most popular running and cycling apps around, but it’s always required you to have your phone or a non-Apple smartwatch to track your travels and record your vital statistics. Not anymore.
If you have an Apple Watch 2, the Strava Apple Watch app can use its GPS to record your run without requiring you to strap a phone to anything. The interface isn’t as pretty as the iPhone app’s interface, but when you’re running or cycling that doesn’t matter: the information you need is presented cleanly enough and the app is simple and straightforward to use.
The main app is free and offers essential features including distance, pace, speed, elevation and burned calories, and there’s a premium service for $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99 per month or $59.99/£54.99/AU$89.99 per year that offers more detailed post-exercise analysis, live performance feedback and personalized coaching - although not through the Watch.
However, if you’re someone who uses the premium features like Beacon on the main app, you might not find Strava on the Apple Watch to your liking compared to using it on the phone.
Nike Run Club
The ongoing love-fest between Nike and Apple continues to bear fruit: the latest iteration of the Nike Run Club app introduces some welcome improvements.
It now integrates with Siri Suggestions, which means the app can now suggest good times for a run based on your previous runs (the feature is off by default so it won’t nag you if you don’t want it to), and there are new Apple Watch complications including one for the Infograph face that shows how far you’ve run this month.
There’s hardly a shortage of running apps in the App Store but Nike’s budget is a bit higher than most, so the app feels a lot more premium than many others. It tracks and stores all your runs thanks to your Watch’s built-in GPS, enables you to listen to audio guides as you run, offers a range of challenges to keep you motivated and has good social sharing features, so you can turn your friends into cheerleaders.
It’s very well designed and the Watch app doesn’t sacrifice substance for style: while visually it’s very attractive it also shows all the information you actually need as you’re pounding the pavements. It’s a really good running app.
ECG
Apple’s much-heralded ECG app has finally arrived. It’s available for free to Apple Watch users and should automatically appear in your list of available apps as part of the watchOS 5.1.2 update, but you’ll only get it in a select few territories: the US, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam.
If you really, really want the app and you don’t live in any of those places you can get around it by changing the system region to one of the countries where it is available, although of course that will affect the other apps on your Watch too. For users in the UK it may be the only way to get the ECG app for the foreseeable future.
The app itself is simple and potentially life-saving. You simply put a finger on the Digital Crown, wait 30 seconds and the app analyzes the electrical impulses in your body; this enable it to detect some cases of atrial fibrillation. The emphasis here is on ‘some’: the app can generate false positive results, and it’s no substitute for a real doctor. However, by detecting issues that may otherwise go unnoticed it’s a useful thing for your Apple Watch to offer.
Cardiogram
We’ve written about Cardiogram before: it’s a very valuable health tracker that enables you to see how your heart is working over time, and which enables you to look for spikes related to what you eat, how you exercise and whether you’re particularly stressed at work. All you need to do is wear your Apple Watch, which checks your heart rate every five minutes. Cardiogram then crunches that data to give you an insight into what your body’s doing.
What’s interesting about Cardiogram now isn’t the app itself, but the partnerships that are starting to emerge.
In the US, Amica Life and Greenhouse Health Insurance are offering life insurance for Cardiogram users with any version of the Apple Watch: simply use the Cardiogram app and you can be eligible for up to $1,000 (around £775/AU$1,400) in accidental death cover for 12 months, with the option to purchase up to $50,000 (roughly £39,000/AU$70,000) more from within the app. $1,000 isn’t a lot in the great scheme of things, especially in America, but it’s a lot for free.
You don’t have to share data either, the insurers bet that people who use Cardiogram are more likely to take steps to improve their health than people who don’t.
As with most health things, such partnerships are subject to regulatory approval, and the Cardiogram partnership is currently available in Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana and Georgia. Expect more states and more partnerships soon.
MySwimPro
This is a tale of two apps, depending on which version of Apple Watch you have. If yours is a first-generation model then it’s a useful but limited way to track your swimming stats: the first-gen watch shouldn’t be submerged, so you shouldn’t wear it while swimming.
However, if you have a second-generation Apple Watch (Apple calls it the Apple Watch Series 2) then you can take it into the pool - and that makes MySwimPro a much more useful application. You can log your workouts while you’re still in the water, and you can also follow the app’s workouts to set goals and monitor your heart rate during your swim.
Once you’ve dried off you can pick up the iPhone or iPad app, which syncs data from your Watch and enables you to see your progress in much more detail: miles swum, hours spent swimming, top times for specific distances and so on.
You can share your triumphs online, or you can just watch videos showing how other swimmers do particular types of workout. It’s probably overkill if you only do the odd couple of laps at the gym swimming pool, but if you’re serious about swimming it's worth wearing on your wrist.
Nike Training Club
Nike and Apple are best friends forever, so it’s not a huge surprise to see Nike unveil another Watch app. This one’s really good, too. Describing itself as “your ultimate personal trainer”, Nike Training Club has more than 180 workouts covering strength, endurance, mobility and yoga, and they’re all free. There are daily personalized picks based on your previous activity, flexible training plans to help you achieve your fitness goals, and tips from top trainers.
The app splits jobs between phone and Watch. The former is where you do the planning and tracking; the latter is what you wear while you’re actually working out. By necessity as well as design that means focusing only on the information you really need right now, such as your heart rate and how many reps you still have to do before you can undo all your efforts with some cake and beer.
The app is by no means unique in its combination of Watch and workout tracking, although it does have Nike’s immediately recognizable and individual visual style. But what’s significant about this app is that none of its many workouts are hidden behind in-app purchases or pricey subscriptions. Everything in the app is free.
Gymaholic
The main selling point of Gymaholic isn’t in its Watch app: it’s an augmented reality avatar of you, and its muscles glow to show you what muscles you’ve worked and what ones you need to work a little more.
It also boasts a virtual trainer to show you how you’re supposed to do each exercise without landing yourself in the ER. It has the usual progress tracking and stats, although the presence of your 3D avatar does make it feel rather like the character creator in an online RPG.
You get 3D models in the Watch app, but they’re so small they’re just getting in the way. The rest of the app is pretty straightforward fitness fare, showing you the different exercises in your workout, tracking the reps and telling you whether your heart is about to explode. It also provides written instructions on how to carry out specific exercises, so for example it describes how to lift weights when you’re doing an incline dumbbell press.
It’s worth noting that there are some in-app purchases, but they aren’t expensive and you don’t need a pricey membership to use the app. Plus, many of the available programmes, such as the 4-day programme and chest-focused programme, are completely free.
Round Health
The longer we’ve had our Apple Watches, the more we’ve come to appreciate simplicity: while the App Store is full of apps that offer all kinds of features, the ones we actually use every day tend to do one thing very well. Round Health is that kind of app: it’s designed to make sure you take your medicine, and it does so with the minimum of fuss. You can also have it as a complication, so you know exactly what you need to take next.
Whether it’s vitamins or medication, most of us have had that “did I take it today?” thing. That’s no big deal if you’re just topping up your vitamin D in winter, but for people taking birth control or who have serious and/or chronic conditions it’s often very important to take certain medicine at certain times.
With Round Health you can set simple but persistent reminders that make sure you take what you need to take, and it supports more complex medical regimes involving multiple medications and schedules as well as tracking when you need to renew your prescription.
The term ‘life-changing’ is bandied around a lot to describe rather ordinary apps, but Round Health is a great way of helping you stay on top of your health.
Lifesum
Like many health-related apps, Lifesum really wants you to take out a subscription: that’s $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year, though it sometimes runs a 30% off promotion. The core app is free, though. Its goal is to help you think about what you eat and what activity you do and to make positive changes to make yourself healthier.
On the iPhone, Lifesum enables you to count calories and track your meals, discover healthy recipes and track your progress towards your goals. It works with other apps too, so for example if you’ve got a Fitbit or use Runkeeper it can get data from them.
On the Watch it’s a much simpler affair, urging you to stay hydrated, showing your progress towards your resting, moving and stretching goals and doing everything through a kind of little Tamagotchi character.
It pulls data from the Apple Health app as well as the Lifesum app to ensure you get the widest possible picture of your intake and activity, and you can add data as well as view it: for example, you can take a note of what you’re eating via the Watch app and then enter more details on the iPhone later. Unusually there isn’t a Watch complication, but the app does tie in with the Watch’s notification system to keep you updated.
Headspace
If you’ve ever felt that life is just that bit too busy or stressful, Headspace could help. It’s based around mindfulness, which is all about getting you to feel calmer without too much effort. In fact, it’s the opposite of effort: mindfulness is about taking a break from the rush.
The Apple Watch app is part of a wider offering for iPhone and iPad: it acts as a reminder and a coach, urging you to pick an exercise and focus on it for the allotted time. It also has an SOS mode for when things feel too much and you need help instantly. But it’s the main app that does most of the work, with daily mindfulness exercises and sessions designed to help with everything from workplace stress to sleep problems.
It’s very well done but one thing that might raise your stress levels is the cost: while the app is free to try it really needs a subscription to unlock its most useful features, and that subscription is $12.99/£9.99/AU$19.99 per month or $94.99/£74.99/AU$149.99 per year. That’s an auto-renewing subscription too, so you need to disable that in iTunes if you don’t want it to recur automatically.
WebMD
Medical apps don’t just exist to persuade you that your mild headache is terminal brain cancer. They can help keep you healthy too. While WebMD does indeed let you compare your symptoms with various illnesses and conditions to scare yourself silly, that’s not the most interesting thing about it or its Watch companion app.
WebMD enables you to detail your medication schedules, with dosage information and the option to be reminded of what you need to take and when you need to take it. This can be in the form of a notification, or you can have it as a Watch face Complication so it’s right there in the middle of the display.
It can also remind you of any prerequisites, such as whether you need to take your medicine with food or on an empty stomach. It’s the sort of simple but very useful thing the Apple Watch does well.
Over on the main iPhone app there’s plenty more to discover. You can read up on the side effects and precautions of specific pills or patches, find out if you need to go hiding from the flu or just catch up on the latest health and wellbeing news from various credible sources.
HeartWatch
How’s your heart? If you don’t know the answer, this app can shed some light. It might even save your life, as it did for James Green: the app alerted him about an unusual spike in his heart rate, and it turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. If it weren’t for the alert, Green might well have died.
You don’t really need more of a sales pitch to justify spending three dollars on staying alive, but HeartWatch isn’t a one-trick app. It pulls information from the Watch’s heart rate sensor to track what it’s doing when you wake, when you sleep, when you work out and when you just go about your day.
The reason for the different types of activity is simple: you don’t want your app warning you about elevated heart rate if you’re doing something designed to elevate your heart rate, an issue that used to drive us daft when exercising with our Apple Watch set to the defaults.
It won’t work without the Health app installed - that’s the route by which it gets its data - but you can also import data from other health apps if you use other kinds of connected health monitors.
One Drop Diabetes Management
We’re increasingly intrigued about HealthKit, Apple’s framework for health monitoring apps: we’ve already seen apps that can warn of rare but potentially lethal heart conditions, and now we’re seeing a whole host of specialist apps that can integrate with specific monitoring hardware to help with particular conditions. As the name suggests, this one’s for people with diabetes.
One Drop makes Chrome, a Bluetooth blood glucose meter that’s sold as a package with testing strips. If you have the meter the app gets information from each test, but if you don’t it’s still a useful app to help monitor your diabetes.
The app enables you to log your activity, your food intake and your medication and to share that information with HealthKit and the Health app (if that’s what you want to do). As ever the main iPhone app is where all the detail is, with the Watch app taking care of quick data recording and progress notifications.
The iPhone app builds on the basics with a database of foods’ nutritional information, historical data, insulin pump data and the ability to schedule reminders for your medication.
WorkOutDoors
If your idea of good exercise involves going far from the madding crowds, you’ll like WorkOutDoors. It’s a workout app that’s based around vector maps that you can easily rotate and zoom, tracking your location and your progress.
It uses the Watch’s GPS (if you have a GPS-enabled Watch) so there’s no need to take your phone on a hike, cycle or snowboard run, and features such as breadcrumb tracking, custom points of interest and customizable stats displays enable you to make the app truly your own.
In a nice touch you can export your workouts from the iPhone app in GPX format, which can be imported into many other workout apps and sites.
It’s very, very well thought out. For example, something as simple as the stats display is available in a variety of sizes to suit different kinds of activity (not to mention different levels of eyesight).
It makes good use of color-coding to make routes crystal clear, waypoints can provide extra information such as directions, and the map automatically rotates as you move so you’re always sure of the right direction. It’s a brilliant app for pretty much any outdoor activity.
Streaks
The trick to living better isn’t to damn near kill yourself on a treadmill and then give up after a few weeks. It’s to make smaller, lasting changes to your life, changes that you can and will actually stick to. And that’s what Streaks offers.
Whether you’re trying to eat more healthily, exercise more or break a smoking habit, Streaks enables you to track positive and negative habits. It offers a range of reporting tools so you can see exactly how well you’re doing, and you can track up to 12 different tasks at once.
They needn’t be exercise or eating tasks: you can remind yourself to walk the dog, study, take vitamins or practice a musical instrument. It’s good to see wheelchair users included in the default tasks list too.
Where Streaks really shines is in its integration with the Health app, which enables it to pull data to use for monitoring suitable targets you’ve set. That reduces a lot of the form-filling of similar apps, and it’s particularly effective if you’re trying to work on good healthy habits or eliminate unhealthy ones, or both.
There’s a Complication too, so that you don’t forget your goals, and the whole thing is customizable so that you can get it just-so.
Elevate Dash - Brain Training and Games
We’re not convinced by the supposed science of brain training - it’s a sector that makes bold claims based on very flimsy evidence - but there’s no doubt that spending time learning or practicing useful things is better for you than mindlessly swiping through trivia on Twitter.
Elevate claims that its brain training app will “improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence”, and it does so by setting little tasks for you: choosing the correct meaning of words, calculating percentages and so on.
Correct answers earn points, and you can track your progress on the main iPhone/iPad app as well as on your Watch. The Watch’s small screen means the games you get are very simple ones, but that works well when you’re on the move.
The app is free and lets you play 4 mini-games. If you want to access the full selection of 40+ Elevate games you’ll need your iPhone or iPad and a subscription to the premium membership package, which is $4.99/£3.99/AU$7.99 per month or $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year.
If you could do with a boost to specific skills - working out restaurant tips, perhaps, or improving your vocabulary - then you might feel that’s well worth the money.
Peak - Brain Training
From a team of developers, psychologists and neuroscientists, Peak is a great app for keeping your brain active. The Watch version offers three games, ideal for the smaller screen. Some of these seem simple at first, but they quickly become more challenging.
There are workouts to test memory, focus and problem solving – all of them fun, engaging, and the ideal to while away the daily commute.
Runtastic Six Pack Abs Workout
If you've been meaning to get that six-pack tummy but just don't have time to go to the gym, this iPhone app has high-quality videos of avatars performing crunches, situps, stretches and core twists that you can do in your own time on your bedroom floor, say.
Initial workouts with Runtastic are free, more come as in-app purchases. And if squinting at your precariously perched iPhone isn't doing it for you, the Watch app means you can see an animation on your watch, with vibrations on your wrist to start and end a set. It's easy to use and works well. Now you'll have to find another excuse not to work out.
MyFitnessPal
Information is power and if you're trying to lose weight, calorie tracking is a good way to stay focused. MyFitnessPal works out a daily calorie allowance based on how much weight you want to shed. Eat a meal and your allowance is spent, take exercise and you earn credit.
The Watch gives you a running total of remaining calories and how that breaks down into protein, carbohydrates and more. It can integrate with your steps total so you don't have to add those manually. It's simple but convenient and helpful.
Walkmeter GPS Pedometer
If walking's your thing, Walkmeter helps track your every step, showing your perambulations on a map and generating detailed graphs. The Watch app has clear data reporting and you can start and stop a walk from your wrist using the Watch's Force Touch actions.
Apple's own Workout app does a lot, but this app has more detail and the mapping detail on the iPhone is great. The app is free but for full Watch performance you need to upgrade to the Elite version for $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99. There's a lot here, including training plans and announcements as you hit targets or distances.
CARROT Fit
You may know CARROT from its weather app, which combines Dark Sky-style weather forecasting with sarcasm and lies. But CARROT wants to make you unhappy in many other ways - and what’s better for a sadistic AI than being in control of a fitness app?
Enter CARROT Fit, which takes a somewhat unusual approach to motivating you to get healthier and lose weight.
CARROT promises to “get you fit - or else”. To achieve that it offers a dozen punishing exercises (more are available via in-app purchases) accompanied by threats, ridicule, bribes and the occasional compliment.
It’s rude, crude and much more entertaining than trying to complete the rings on Apple’s own activity tracker, and we’re pretty sure it’s the only fitness app that rewards progress with cat facts. But there’s a proper fitness tracker in here too: it’ll track your steps and weight loss, remember your workouts and add data to Apple’s health app.
Most of the personality is in the main iPhone app, but the Watch alerts include such cheery prospects as “seven minutes in hell”. If you find getting fit or losing weight a little bit tedious, CARROT might be the, ahem, carrot that you need to get motivated.
Lose It!
If your Watch strap is feeling a little more snug than it used to, this app may be the answer: it’s designed to help you achieve your weight loss goals “without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.”
It tracks the calories you’ve consumed and the goals you’ve set, focuses on nutrition as well as overall calorie intake, works happily with other fitness apps and trackers and provides an online peer group where everybody encourages each other to achieve their ideal weight.
It also enables you to set exercise goals and focus on general wellness, so it’s not just about losing weight.
The Apple Watch app doesn’t replace the phone app completely - for example, you’ll need your phone handy if you want to use the barcode scanner to automatically record what you’re eating, and the team-based features such as group challenges are phone-based - but it’s a great way to focus on your goals, monitor your progress and keep your motivation no matter how sorely tempted you may be.
The program is $39.99/£29.99/AU$62.99 per year but you can explore the app for free without signing up.
Mount Burnmore
Fitness fanatics look away now: for those that find exercise really boring, and their get up and go often gets up and goes while they stay sedentary. Mount Burnmore could be the answer to that lethargy: it turns fitness into a game.
The concept is quite clever. Mount Burnmore depends on “active energy”, which it pulls from the Health app: the more calories you’ve burned, the more active energy you have in the game.
When you have sufficient energy you can attempt to solve the game’s puzzles, which involve finding routes around the titular mountain, collecting in-game items and smashing things with a pickaxe.
There’s a Complication that enables you to see your progress without launching the full game, and the app makes good use of the Digital Crown to help you navigate around larger levels later in the game. There are also leaderboards to compare with other players and in-game challenges to win freebies.
It’s bright, breezy and a bit brash, and we suspect it’s best suited to older children rather than grown-ups - although if you do give this one to the kids you might want to disable in-app purchases, as they can be used to buy in-game items.
Happier
Mindfulness, the art of focusing on being present and aware in the world instead of being constantly distracted by things and thoughts that don’t matter, isn’t something you’d associate with the Apple Watch. If you aren’t careful with your notification settings your Watch pings away merrily all day, interrupting countless trains of thought.
But the Happier app hopes to use the Watch to make you feel better, not more harassed.
The app itself is free, but it’s designed as a gateway to paid-for mindfulness courses. If you don’t go for them you can still take advantage of the app, though. You can tell the app how you’re feeling - we suspect “meh” is the most-used option - and it then responds with uplifting quotes to help you feel a bit more optimistic.
It can pop up to remind you to take a meditation break, and you can dictate a positive thought to a private journal or to the Happier community. That’s not as daft as it sounds: there’s some evidence that keeping a journal of positive things can boost your mood over time.
Just be careful what and how you share: one iTunes reviewer says that they were able to locate their private journal with Google.
Best Apple Watch apps for sleep trackingIt's worth noting that there aren't a lot of apps for sleep tracking, as the Apple Watch can't really last overnight on battery.
That said, there are some clever apps to do it, and many people are now on their sequel Apple Watch and can even have one for the day and one for the night - so sleep tracking with your 'Night Watch' is possible.
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
The App Store isn’t exactly short of sleep tracking apps, but Sleep Cycle offers more than just tracking. It can wake you up at the right point in your sleep cycle so that you jump out of bed like an excited puppy instead of rolling out of it with a woozy head.
That doesn’t mean it’ll start bleeping four hours before you need to get up, though. You set the 30-minute window in which you need to be woken and Sleep Cycle will find the optimum point during that window.
Unusually for a sleep tracker, Sleep Cycle doesn’t expect you to wear your Apple Watch to bed. Instead, it listens to you and detects vibrations from you, and that means it can detect and yell at you if you start snoring.
It’s just like having a partner, except you don’t have to put your partner on a wireless charging mat every night. And because it’s designed to be used by humans, of course there’s a snooze option: if Sleep Cycle wants to wake you and you really don’t want to get out of bed, you can shake or double-tap your phone.
The main app is free but if you want to take advantage of heart rate monitoring, reporting and goodies such as Hue smart lighting integration there’s a subscription service for $29.99/£24.99/AU$39.99 per year.
Sleep Watch
The massively improved battery life of the current generation Apple Watch makes it much better for sleep tracking: you can now wear your Watch in bed, pop it off while you get ready for work or school and leave home with a full charge for getting on with your day.
And that means there’s been an influx of new sleep apps, many of which take the basic idea of sleep monitoring and add additional reporting and insight.
When you use Sleep Watch you’ll get used to the daily question, how well rested do you feel? The app tracks that as well as your heart rate and the quality of your sleep to give an indication of how good or otherwise your sleep has been.
It offers daily sleep briefings (we’d love an abusive CARROT-style AI for the days when the report clearly says we’re knackered) and trend analysis, and it highlights whether your heart rate is dropping normally during rest - a potential warning sign if it isn’t.
It’d be good if we could also add blame, such as a heavy night out causing us to get up all through the night, but maybe that’ll be in a future version.
Best Apple Watch apps for music, podcasts and audiobooks Spotify Music
At last! Spotify finally makes its way to the Apple Watch with an app that does everything you might expect it to do. It plays music! It pauses music! It connects to other devices via the magic of Spotify Connect! It gives you playlists! It has a shuffle button!
The one thing it doesn’t do, though, is stream: the music you hear via your Watch is coming from your iPhone, not directly to the Apple Watch. We’d expect that to change in future versions of the app. It hasn’t been optimized for the larger display of the Apple Watch 4 either, so it looks a bit odd on the most recent models.
We’re big fans of and subscribers to Spotify: its catalog is enormous and it’s enormously sociable too, with apps for every conceivable platform. Being able to pay once for an ad-free subscription that works on your phone, tablet, Watch, TV, console and in the car is a fantastic thing.
While the ad-funded version isn’t too annoying we think the higher quality and convenient offline listening features (already available on iPhone but coming soon to the Watch app too) of the paid-for Premium version are well worth the money.
djay 2
We’re big fans of Algoriddim’s clever DJ app, and it’s a particularly fun thing to have on your iPhone: its clever algorithms and straightforward interface make it easy to mix like the pros, its Spotify Premium integration means your DJ box is almost infinite and its Automix feature does a really good job of working out the best places to transition and the right fades and effects to apply.
But sometimes you want to take part without necessarily firing up the full djay app on your phone, for example if you’re in party mode and want to quickly change tracks or just show off a bit.
Enter the Apple Watch app, which enables you to DJ in much the same way as you would if you were a giant in a world of really tiny people: don’t expect to do much scratching, but you can fade from one track to another, pause and sync, add special effects or turn Automix on and off. It’s effectively Apple Music’s watch integration brought to the world of DJing, and that means it’s an absolute hoot.
The watch integration is little more than a remote control, but that’s okay: the main app is really clever and enormous fun.
Overcast
If you love to listen to podcasts and you don’t already have Overcast, you’re in for a nice surprise: it’s a superb app, and its Watch integration is particularly well thought out.
In addition to the usual controls and lists of shows and episodes, it gives you quick access to two really useful features: Smart Speed, which can make the podcast play more quickly without turning into Alvin and the Chipmunks; and Voice Boost, which can make indistinct speech noticeably clearer and compensate for podcasters who can’t pick a single spot in front of the mic.
If you’ve ever strained to hear something only for the host to move closer to the mic and nearly blow your eardrums out, you should be rushing to the App Store already
Overcast is free, or $9.99/£8.99/AU$12.99 without the ads. We’d recommend going for the ad-free version, because while the advertising isn’t too invasive this is an app that’s been put together by people who really care about the end user experience, and paying for the full app is a great way to ensure that they’ll keep on caring.
Castro Podcasts
The Castro podcast app has been around for a while and has developed a loyal fanbase, and it’s just been given a major overhaul as well as an Apple Watch companion app.
On your wrist it’s really very simple: it enables you to move around the audio, change the volume or move between episodes.
On the iPhone the main app has been completely rebuilt with a brand-new playback engine to significantly boost speed and responsiveness, and the player screen now incorporates AirPlay controls for easier streaming to compatible hardware.
It’s a very good app, and there are extra features if you go for the optional Castro Plus subscription, including getting rid of silent sections, mixing stereo down to mono, episode limits to prevent your device from downloading entire volumes of podcasts, and automatic start positions to skip past standard intros and other pre-content content.
You can set these preferences on a per-podcast basis, which is a really useful option for power podcast users. You can try Castro Plus for a week before deciding whether to get it, and it’s available as a quarterly or yearly sub.
Audible
You may know Audible already: it’s the Amazon-owned audiobook service that enables you to devour books on the move, in bed or anywhere else you can get comfortable. The catalog is vast, books are often narrated by very big names and the overall quality is very high. And now, you can use it without taking your phone with you thanks to its Apple Watch app.
The app is compatible with every Apple Watch made so far and enables you to transfer audiobooks to your Watch, provided of course that you have enough available storage.
It’s important to note that Audible doesn’t stream to your watch: you need to sync your audiobook(s) from your iPhone, which can take a while over the Watch’s desperately slow connection. But once the book has been transferred you can play, pause, fast forward and rewind. You could listen via the Watch’s speaker but we wouldn’t recommend it; Audible is best experienced on a decent pair of wireless headphones.
We think the Audible Watch app is best suited to environments where you don’t want to have your phone: the gym is the one that springs immediately to mind: we can’t be the only people who’d rather listen to a book than pumping techno on a treadmill.
Musixmatch Lyrics Finder
Here’s a fun thing you can bring to your Apple Watch: real-time lyrics for whatever song you’re currently listening to. Musixmatch claims to be the world’s largest lyrics catalog, and in addition to the original lyrics it can deliver translations for those songs performed in languages other than English.
The Watch app feels rather like Shazam, with a pulsing “listening” icon as it attempts to find the right lyric for songs your microphone can hear, and it works with both Apple Music and Spotify. The latest update brought Siri Shortcuts support, so you can ask Siri to identify the song that’s playing on the radio.
The main app is free, but if you want some of its more advanced features you’ll need to shell out $3.99/£3.49/AU$5.99 a month. That removes the ads, enables offline mode for songs already recognized and offers a party mode with karaoke-style word-by-word displays.
We’re not sure the premium features are compelling enough to make us want to take out a subscription, but if they appeal to you then the price is the equivalent of a monthly cup of coffee so it’s hardly breaking the bank.
Best Apple Watch apps for photo and video GoPro
The GoPro app used to be called Capture, but its new name suits it better: after all, what else would you call the companion app for GoPro cameras? Like most camera apps for the Apple Watch, the bits you can do on your wrist are fairly limited. It’s really just a viewfinder and remote control, which is perfectly useful if hardly revolutionary.
The main iPhone app is more ambitious. It features Quikstories, which automatically turns your GoPro footage into a finished video complete with effects and background music. You can view the images and video you’ve captured on your camera, trim videos down and share to social media or via text or email.
One nice feature is the ability to overlay data such as GPS paths and locations on top of your footage. You can even detail the G-force you felt when you were doing whatever extreme thing you’ve been recording. There’s also video stabilization for Fusion cameras and the ability to turn 360-degree photos into videos.
It’s pretty good, but make sure your camera is compatible. The app is currently limited to Fusion, HERO6, HERO5, HERO4, HERO Session, HERO+ LCD and HERO+ cameras.
Camera Plus
While using Apple’s Watch as a remote control or viewfinder can be handy - we can’t be the only ones who use it to see what’s on top of cupboards or to read the meters when there’s loads of stuff between them and us - the app has always felt as if it could do more. That’s where Camera Plus comes in.
As an iPhone/iPad app it’s an interesting and fun alternative to the iOS 11 default, with a useful feature that enables you to control the camera on one iOS device with the Camera Plus app on another. It adds an extra function to the Watch too.
The Apple Watch bit is obviously a lot less ambitious, but it’s still useful. As with the Apple app, you can remote control the iPhone or iPad camera, turn the flash on or off, use a countdown timer and switch between the front and rear cameras. But where the Apple app offers the ability to turn Live Photos on or off, Camera Plus gives you the option to switch between photo and video.
The main iOS app is clearly the driver here, with some fun and useful features including flexible flash levels for better exposure and the aforementioned iOS-to-iOS remote control. But the Watch app is a handy, or perhaps wristy, companion.
Halide Camera
The Apple Watch version of Halide is very much the same as the Apple Watch version of Apple’s own Camera app: it’s a viewfinder with a shutter button and a timer that you can use to remotely trigger the iPhone camera. Remote triggering isn’t just a gimmick: it’s useful for taking long exposure shots or just enabling you to be in your own snaps.
The main app has been given a significant upgrade for the latest generation of Apple cameras, and it’s particularly good on the iPhone X where it can take full advantage of the TrueDepth cameras front and rear.
In a nice touch you can export photos’ depth maps as standalone PNGs, which opens up some interesting creative possibilities. The developers have clearly had a lot of fun with the dual sensors, because you can review depth captures and virtually move around the scene in augmented reality. It makes photos feel more like video game locations and it’s a lot of fun.
Halide’s developers have a pedigree: Ben Sandofsky was the iOS tech lead for Twitter, and Sebastiaan de With was a designer at Apple. That might explain why Halide feels so much more organic than some other camera apps, and why it’s such a pleasure to use.
VLC Remote
As you’ve probably guessed, this app is a remote control for VLC. If you’re not familiar with those initials they belong to one of our very favorite apps, the VLC media player.
It’s a kind of Swiss Army Knife for playing or streaming music and video, and it’s available on iOS and on desktop computers too. We love it for many reasons: it’s fast, it’s free and it can read media formats most of us forgot ever existed.
The remote app solves a simple problem with computer media playback: if you’re on the sofa you probably aren’t anywhere near the computer that’s got all your media files on it.
It works with VLC on Mac, Linux or Windows, automatically finds any running copy of VLC on your local network and enables you to control the on-screen action with your phone.
The Watch app reduces that to bare bones: it gives you volume and transport controls, shows cover art and offers additional options - repeat, shuffle, audio on/off and subtitles on/off - via Force Touch.
If you’ve made VLC the heart of your home entertainment, this app should save you from wearing a path in the carpet between computer and couch.
HomeCam for HomeKit
You can probably guess what this one does from the title: it’s an app for cameras that use Apple’s HomeKit. The app is a remote viewer that enables you to check multiple cameras simultaneously, and if your hardware supports features such as temperature and air quality monitoring you can then take action by invoking other HomeKit devices such as connected air conditioners or heating.
It can also combine data from multiple devices together, so for example you could overlay temperature data over a live camera feed, and it’s fully compatible with the new Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12, which enables you to create automated actions. You can also use it to control HomeKit features such as the lighting in a room, and you can add a Today widget for even faster access from your lock screen.
The main action happens in the iPhone and iPad app, largely because of screen real estate: the Watch has many good features, but a giant screen isn’t one of them. That means the Watch app shows a single-camera view.
It can use your Watch’s microphone and speaker as an intercom (again, if your camera hardware supports audio), but it’s best suited for quick camera checking when your iPhone isn’t handy.
FiLMiC Pro
Here’s an odd one: FiLMiC Pro has a distinctly average App Store rating of 2.3 out of 5 at time of writing, and yet the developers’ shelves are groaning under the weight of the app’s many awards from reputable websites and publications who say that for video, it’s the best thing since bread came sliced. What’s going on?
The short answer is that when you have hardly any reviews, one or two disgruntled users can send your rating down the drain. That’s clearly what’s happening here.
Negatives first. FiLMiC Pro costs more money than many apps, and it can kill your phone battery in prolonged use. But it’s an incredibly powerful iOS camera app used by film-makers, journalists and hobbyists alike. Pair it with a decent editor and your iPhone is a pro-level film studio.
The Watch app is really just a remote for the main event. You can record, pause and resume your recording and see what the phone camera’s pointing at, and you can play back what you’ve just recorded. It’s not really different from Apple’s own camera Watch app.
But the app it connects to is a powerhouse: people complaining about the price tag should really be marveling that it’s possible to get something so good for so little money.
Best Apple Watch apps for notes, passwords and making life easier Fantastical 2
Getting Fantastical 2 up and running on your watch can be time consuming, but it’s worth it: one of the very best iPhone calendar apps around develops even more powers when you add its app to your watch.
You can also add it as a complication, which means you’ll see details of your schedule right there in the watch face.
To actually make it work you’ll need to install Fantastical to your watch and then open the iPhone app, not the Apple Watch one. This is where you specify what information should be sent to the watch, and the options are extensive.
You can choose from events, calendars, reminders and lists, include a map of the event location, show end times and specify how reminders should appear, and you can even specify what should happen if you tap on the Fantastical 2 complication on your watch face.
It’s that kind of thought and attention to detail that makes us love the app so much.
The best thing about Fantastical 2, though, is that it understands you. Force Touch the app, tap on Add Event and Siri starts listening.
It knows what you mean by “lunch with Dave”, automatically putting the appointment at 12 noon, and it knows that if you say “to-do get dinner on the way home” you’re adding an item to a to-do list. Siri’s voice recognition performs brilliantly when it’s limited to such a specific set of instructions.
SimpleCommands
This is an intriguing one. SimpleCommands enables you to connect your Apple Watch to various other devices – LIFX lights, TP-link switches, Wink doors, Nest thermometers, Netatmo home automation and so on – and soon, services such as Spotify, Lyft, IFTTT, Todoist and Twitter.
Once you’ve established a connection, you can then control that connection via your iPhone or Watch (you need to set them up in the iPhone app first). Your Watch then becomes what the developer calls a listener.
All you then need to do to make something happen is tell the listener what to do. The main benefit is that to paraphrase Radiohead, everything’s in its right place: whether it’s your aircon or your lighting system, it’s all done from a single app on your wrist.
Brilliant, right? Well, potentially. The list of coming soon connections is longer than the list of currently supported ones, and early adopters say it’s a bit flaky: we’re still in version one-point-something territory, so you should expect bugs.
But if you’re fed up having to use different apps to control every different digital thing in your life, this could be the thing to make your digital life much more comfortable.
IFTTT
If This Then That, IFTTT for short, may be one of the most useful things on the internet. As the name suggests, it enables you to create scenarios where if this happens, it does that. And the ‘that’ can include all kinds of things, with a selection of connectors for software and hardware alike.
For example, you can automatically change your thermostat based on the weather forecast, or send someone a message when you’re near the shops, or backup your photo collection to a cloud storage site at a particular time or when a particular event occurs. It’s absolutely brilliant, and the main iPhone app enables you control more than 600 different apps as well as smart home devices such as Hue lights and Nest thermostats.
As you’d expect the Watch app doesn’t do everything. What it does do is provide quick access to IFTTT functions you’ve already installed or created on your phone, so for example you might post a quick tweet or turn your smart lights on or off.
That simplicity is no bad thing, because of course the whole ethos of IFTTT is to reduce the amount of effort you use to communicate with your various bits of technology.
1Password
A reliable and secure password manager is a must-have in these days of security breaches and hacks, and 1Password is one of the best. And it turns out that it’s also one of the best password managers you can use on your Apple Watch.
Our favorite apps don’t just port entire iPhone apps across. They think about what you’re actually likely to need on your wrist, and do that instead. In the case of 1Password that means you choose the pieces of information you want available on your Watch, so for example you might want details of a few logins, one credit card and a couple of notes, or perhaps the PIN codes for everyday locks.
If you’ve ever frantically scrolled through an iPhone app or contacts list to try and find the PIN for a bank card you don’t use very often, the appeal should be obvious.
Where 1Password gets particularly clever is in its support for team and family accounts, so you can share sets of information with everybody who needs it. And if a site you use has been compromised, 1Password will alert you to change your password. It’s great stuff, and comes with a glowing recommendation from Apple.
Drafts
On the face of it, and by face we mean Apple Watch face, Drafts doesn’t seem to offer much for six quidbucks: it enables you to dictate text and save it for later. But it turns out that it does an awful lot...it just does it in a really simple way.
On the iPhone, Drafts is designed to make it easy to capture ideas, thoughts, to-dos or anything else.
It has an email-style interface for easy navigation and it enables you to send your Drafts to a whole bunch of other apps and services: email, message, apps in your Share sheet, social media and so on.
It supports Markdown for easy formatting, and it hooks into the iMessage app to provide stored “snippets” of text and/or emoji for instant replies.
Bringing Drafts to the Watch makes it even faster. Tap on the microphone icon to capture and it does just that - but it also enables you to add to existing drafts using either your voice or the Scribble input, which means it’s brilliant for those moments when you think of something really clever to write or something you’d missed from your to-do list. It’s the kind of app you’ll quickly learn to love.
Hours
Many of us need to track the time we spend on specific tasks, but the team behind Hours rightly point out the three big pitfalls of time tracking: we forget to start tracking in the first place, forget to stop when we change tasks, or just forget to stop the timer(s) altogether. Hours hopes to address that by making it really, really easy to start and stop and switch.
The iPhone app is a very beautiful thing, with a visual timeline that makes it easy to see what you’ve been up to. The Watch interface is much simpler, but just as effective: you can see the list of tasks with a timer icon for each, and if you tap on a task you can add a verbal note as well as starting or stopping the timer.
There’s a Complication for instant access, and the app will prompt you from time to time to see if you want to keep the selected timer running.
The standard version is free and ideal for self-employed or freelance types, but the $7.99/£5.99/AU$12.99 upgrade to Pro adds multi-device synchronization, web access, reporting and data visualizations, team creation and management, and online backup, which means it’s a great team tool too.
Cheatsheet Widget
Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything, especially when you’re traveling. What level did you park the car on? What’s the hotel room number? What did you change the combination on your locker to this time? Say hello to Cheatsheet Widget, which is designed to remember the things you probably won’t.
It’s important to stress that Cheatsheet is not a secure app: it’s not designed to store any sensitive information. What it does instead is make it really easy to jot down all the little bits of information you might need during the day, from registration plates to flight numbers, bus routes, clothes sizes and bike lock codes.
It has 160 icons you can use to label each bit of information for easier identification, and you can add, edit and delete bits of information without having to open the phone. If you wish, you can use a Complication that shows your top memory-refreshing nugget of information right on the Watch face.
The main app is offered free, but if you want to use it on your Apple Watch you’ll need the Unlock Everything in-app purchase, which is currently $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49. If you’re constantly juggling, looking for or misplacing Post-It notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper, this app might just change your life.
Just Press Record
One of the most useful things about the Apple Watch is that it enables you to do things without having to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Just Press Record brings that handiness to voice recording, enabling you to capture bright ideas, rambling monologues or memos when you’re out and about.
The interface is just a big red button with a picture of a microphone on it, and as you might expect you tap it to start recording. The phone app can transcribe your recording to turn it into text - which means your recordings become searchable by keyword - and it recognises formatting commands such as “new paragraph” and “comma”.
To use it is to feel like you’re living in the future: we remember when dictation and transcription required a powerful PC and endless patience, and now you get much better results with a watch. Isn’t technology brilliant?
In addition to its recording and transcription features, the app syncs automatically via iCloud, so you can access it on all your devices - including macOS, for which there’s a separate app - and it uses the Watch’s own local storage so that you can record even if your phone isn’t currently connected.
Evernote
Organize your life better with Evernote, the brilliant note-taking app which saves photos, text, recipes, bookmarks, voice notes and more. On Apple Watch you can set reminders and check off tasks easily enough.
You can dictate new notes for those brilliant ideas you mustn't forget just by tapping the Plus button or Force Touching the screen. The Watch app can search existing notes using voice – though this wasn't as reliable as I'd have liked. Even so, if you're an Evernote fan it brings an extra level of convenience.
OneNote
If there’s one thing the App Store isn’t short of, it’s note-taking apps. But it’s worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsoft’s cloud, it’s a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.
We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services it’s completely free. Microsoft hopes you’ll like it so much you’ll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.
Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.
And that’s pretty much all it does - and that’s all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. We’d much rather have speed and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles.
Epicurious Smart Timer
The food site Epicurious isn’t scared of technology: it attempted to make a recipe app for Google Glass (although that didn’t quite work out). Its Watch efforts are much more successful, with the Watch doing what watches do best: timing. Think of it as an egg timer that can do more than eggs.
Using the app is simple. Choose the kind of food you want to time, such as a roast chicken or a steak, and tell the app how heavy it is and, where appropriate, how well done you want it to be. The timer lets you know when to flip or remove it from the heat.
It then tells you what to do, so for example in the case of your steak you’re urged to let it rest for five minutes and then slice across the grain. You’ll also see photos so you can compare what your food looks like with what it should look like.
It’s not the most comprehensive app around, but it isn’t supposed to be: it’s designed for relatively inexperienced cooks and the 40-odd items it does know about cover all the basics. If you’re unsure of cooking times or just easily distracted, it’s a great app to have.
AeroPress Timer
You can’t get much more hipster than this: an Apple Watch app for the AeroPress coffee maker, enabling you to use a gadget costing hundreds of dollars to work out how to make a cup of coffee.
But while it’s easy to mock it’s actually a really useful and well-designed app, assuming of course you have an AeroPress. It’s the kind of thing that watch apps excel at: it does one thing, and it does that thing very well.
AeroPress Timer’s thing is to help you make the perfect cup of coffee. The app features coffee recipes from the 2014 AeroPress world championship, and takes you step by step through the process for each: how much coffee to use, when to stir, when to steep, and when it’s time to take a sip of your masterpiece.
It’s not just about fancy award competitors either: the app also includes the instructions you need to make standard recipes, two cup recipes and to improve your brewing prowess in general.
If you’re the kind of person whose eyeballs are vibrating with caffeine by lunchtime, you’re going to love the convenience of having everything you need to hand. Or rather, on your wrist.
Owaves
Owaves is an interesting app: it’s a 24-hour day planner that’s designed for people who want to focus on their physical and mental health. That means scheduling and prioritizing me-time and play time as well as work time, a kind of Getting Things Done for the mindfulness generation.
Owaves is based around what it describes as the five key ingredients for a happy life: sleep, nutrition, exercise, relaxation and social interactions. You can still schedule work things, chores and day to day admin, but they’re not the sole focus as you’ll find in other planning apps. The idea is to make room in your life for your life.
The bulk of the action - scheduling events, seeing your entire schedule and so on - happens on your iPhone, and the Watch app has been designed as a companion rather than a replacement: it tells you what’s coming up rather than trying to replicate the main app’s functions.
You can add it as a watch face complication, which is particularly good on the Modular watch face: if you make it the main complication in the center it’s got room to tell you not just what you’ve scheduled now but also what you’ve got happening afterwards.
Voice in a Can
Voice in a Can is famous, or perhaps infamous: it hit the headlines because it brings Amazon’s Alexa to the Apple Watch, something neither Amazon nor Apple have decided to do so far. That’s an interesting idea, because in our experience Alexa is much more reliable than Siri on our various devices: she’s much better at recognizing our commands and doing what we want. However, while the idea’s interesting the execution isn’t great.
The app works, but there are some important restrictions. You can’t use it to control your music, play podcasts or make calls, and only some flash briefings work. If your watch goes into standby mode it drops the Alexa connection. The developers recommend extending the timeout period for apps on your Watch, which is effectively admitting that it just doesn’t work quickly enough.
Until or unless Amazon or Apple offer Alexa support this is the only way to have Alexa on your wrist, and the app is a handy way of controlling smart home devices if you’re committed more to Amazon than to Apple. However it’s very limited, very much a side project for the developer and more of a proof of concept than an app you’re going to use for everyday Alexa stuff.
Knock
Passwords are essential, but they’re also rubbish. The ones you can remember are easy to guess, the ones that are hard to guess are equally hard to remember, and if you do passwords properly it can be a pain to enter complicated strings of text and characters when you’re in a hurry.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could prove your identity to your Mac with your Watch? That’s exactly what Knock does.
Knock is a simple idea brilliantly executed. Provided your Mac is of relatively recent vintage - an Air from 2011 or better, a MacBook Pro or iMac from late 2012, a 2013 or later Mac Pro and so on - you can use Knock to automatically unlock your Mac or Macs by tapping the Apple Watch app.
It’s connecting via Bluetooth Low Energy - hence the reliance on relatively recent Macs; older ones don’t have Bluetooth LE - which uses tiny amounts of energy, so you don’t need to worry about the app killing your Watch’s battery any more than usual, and it works instantly if your Mac isn’t in sleep mode.
It may seem quite pricey for such a simple app, but think about how much time you spend locking and unlocking your Macs in a year.
Note that you may not need this if you have a recent Mac running macOS Sierra, as there’s a similar feature built in, but Knock is compatible with slightly older Macs too.
Authy
Passwords aren’t good enough anymore. The easy ones are too easy to crack, and the hard ones keep getting compromised when big-name firms get hacked and all their customer data gets compromised.
You can make your various online services much more secure with two-factor authentication, which adds an extra level of security to everything, and that’s what Authy offers.
The big benefit of Authy is that it isn’t insecure like SMS is, so you can be sure that your two-factor authentication code isn’t going to be intercepted and used by the bad guys.
Authy is compatible with Google Authenticator, so any service that accepts the Google tool will accept it – so you can use it not just with Google but with Microsoft and Amazon accounts too. There’s a growing number of Authy-supporting websites as well.
As ever, the bulk of the work happens on the iPhone app, with the Watch component simply providing access to the time-limited tokens so that you can enter the appropriate code into the site you want to access. That’s not a weakness: the whole point of two-factor authentication is to make life harder for the criminals without making it more annoying for you.
Find Near Me
Guess what this does. Go on, guess. Yep: it finds things near you. Sadly that doesn’t mean the TV remote, your keys or the gaming controller – whoever finds a way of doing that which doesn’t involve sticking Bluetooth tags to everything will become a trillionaire – but it does mean cash machines, bars and coffee shops. The only in-app purchase is $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 to remove adverts from the iPhone app.
It works exactly like you’d expect. First, you choose the category of thing you want to find. Then, you scroll through the results. And to finish, you tap the one you want to find out more about. From there you can then be guided on foot, in the car or on your bike.
The app makes extensive use of Google Maps, and that means it’s only as good as the Google Maps data: some users report inaccuracies such as long-shut businesses. If you’re wondering why you can’t just use Google Maps and cut out the middleman, it’s because Google canned its Apple Watch app last year: if you want Google Maps on your wrist, you need a third-party app that hooks into it. Like this one.
Deliveries
Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something you’re really excited about? Yes: there’s missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.
It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.
It’s unnecessary for the odd package, but it’s useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if you’re in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.
On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of what’s in and what’s incoming, so for example it’ll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.
There’s a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developer’s own cloud sync service.
Clicker
We’ve described the iPhone as the Very Hungry Caterpillar of tech, munching its way through entire product categories as stand-alone devices become iOS apps. We’re often delighted by the simplest things, and Clicker is one of those things.
It’s a replacement for those hand-held clickers people use to count things, and it’s appropriate for counting people, days, laps, drinks or anything else you might want to quantify.
To use it, just tap on the screen and tap again when you want another click. Haptic feedback means you don’t need to look at the watch, and you don’t need to have the clicker display all day: when you’re ready for a new click you can pull it up from its Complication. You can record up to 2,147,483,647 taps.
And that’s pretty much it: there are only two other options: subtract, to remove a mistaken click, and reset, to start again.
It’s hardly a must-have but it’s actually very handy, so for example we’ve seen users tracking how often they smoke during the day or how many glasses of water they’ve had. We wouldn’t recommend using it for counting sheep, though - or at least, not on the first-generation Apple Watch, whose battery isn’t really up to working nights.
Stocard
One of the things we hoped Apple’s Wallet/Passbook app would deliver was an end to purses and wallets full of loyalty cards: our purse is so packed with the damn things that if we sit down with it in a back pocket one of our buttocks is a good six inches higher than the other. Wallet hasn’t quite changed that yet, but Stocard has a pretty good try.
Stocard enables you to scan and store your loyalty cards (and some other cards such as some membership cards; generally speaking if it has a barcode or QR code on it, Stocard can probably digitize it), and then access them from your iPhone or Apple Watch when you’re at the checkout.
Whether it works or not depends on the store infrastructure: until recently the self-scanners in Tesco didn’t like it, but now that they’ve been upgraded they scan happily. The cards are automatically added to your Apple Wallet as well as kept inside the Stocard app.
The main benefit for you is convenience, as not only does Stocard reduce the amount of cards you have to carry without forcing you to miss out on loyalty points, but it also provides you with details of relevant special offers as you shop.
Best Apple Watch apps for email, chat and messaging Chirp for Twitter
You’d think Twitter’s brevity and the Apple Watch’s usefulness would be a match made in Heaven, but Twitter isn’t interested in maintaining an official Watch app and our favourite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetbot, is very limited on the Apple Watch. Enter Chirp, which promises to bring all the features you need to your Watch - and unusually, it does so without playing second fiddle to an iPhone app. Chirp was designed purely as a Watch app.
Chirp delivers on its promises: it does an excellent job of bringing Twitter to your wrist, with the ability to see tweets as well as their popularity in terms of likes and retweets. You can browse Twitter trends, see embedded photos, retweet or like other people’s posts, and you can actually interact with others.
You can post your own thoughts or reply to other people’s tweets, and the most recent update added support for sending Direct Messages and for viewing lists. Some of these features are restricted to the paid-for Pro version, but it’s a very cheap in-app purchase and the main app is free to use so you can try it before you decide whether you need the pro features.
Telegram
Oh, the drama: Telegram 5 initially dropped its Apple Watch companion app, but now it’s back! Back! BACK!
The reason for this is that Telegram 5 has been rebuilt from the ground up to make it faster and more efficient; the Watch update simply wasn’t ready in time.
Telegram is a secure instant messaging service that works on iPhone, iPad and once again, Apple Watch. It enables you to group chat with up to 30,000 people, which is more than enough for most of us, and unlike other messaging services it’s really good at sharing things like documents, zip files and other useful things.
It’s both free and ad-free, and if you’re worried about privacy you can take part in Secret Chats where messages self-destruct after a specified time. As with all private apps that doesn’t stop somebody taking a screenshot, taking a photo or duplicating content in some other way, but the end-to-end encryption does mean you can be confident that others aren’t listening in.
Telegram’s main selling point is its efficiency. It’s designed to do its job with the minimum amount of data transfer necessary, something that’s important in places with poor network coverage or for people with metered data connections, and it’s also designed to operate with the minimum load on your battery.
Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger on Apple Watch got a late start, but it finally lets you respond to those pressing messages to friends and family without opening up the sioled-off app on your phone or website on a computer.
You can initiate and reply with a thumbs up (which I see as kind of curt and rude) or dictate a reply. Sending Facebook's ugly smiley face or your current location can be done with the press of one or two taps too. No, there's still no WhatsApps for Apple Watch, but this is the next best thing from Facebook.
Tweetbot 4
If you aren’t already familiar with Tweetbot 4, it’s the best Mac and iOS Twitter client bar none. This is why it can charge $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 for an iOS app and people gladly pay it, and it’s worth checking out on the Apple Watch too.
Tweetbot doesn’t unleash the Twitter firehose onto your wrist - we can’t think of anything guaranteed to kill your battery more quickly - but it does give you exactly the information you need when you aren’t looking at your phone.
The developers have rightly assumed that if you have your phone to hand you won’t be using the watch instead, so they’ve concentrated on making an app for when you can’t or don’t want to pull your phone out of your pocket or purse. And that’s clever.
Its Activity pane shows you what’s happening in your feed, so if somebody’s followed you or replied to you or tweeted you then you’ll see it in Activity. Tapping on the item opens the appropriate tweet or user page, and with tweets you’ll see icons for a quick reply, a retweet or a like.
If you push into the screen using Force Touch you get an offer to create a new tweet, and both it and the reply option use Siri for dictation, because on-watch typing would be frankly horrible - and you can dictate a direct message or follow/unfollow accounts from the app too.
Outlook
Microsoft earned well-deserved death stares from many Watch users when it bought and retired the excellent Sunrise Calendar iOS app, but its Outlook app is worth adding to your wrist.
It’s from the new, interesting Microsoft, not the staid bore of old: it works well, looks great and won’t crash your watch.
Outlook is a combined email and calendar app that connects to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, and its main claim to fame is the focused inbox: instead of showing you everything emailed, it shows the most important stuff only and learns by watching your swipes.
It’s particularly good in a corporate environment, where its talents cope admirably with endless meeting requests, time changes and backside-covering email traffic, enabling you to prioritize things that matter and forget about things that don’t.
That doesn’t mean it’s only for corporate types, though. Outlook is a really, really good email app and boasts a useful Complication that enables you to see what’s next on your schedule from the main Apple Watch display. If you have a busy life, a busy inbox or both it’s a very useful app to have on your arm.
Spark
There’s no shortage of apps promising to make email fun again, and Spark is one of our favorites: on our Mac and on our iPhone it does a superb job of showing us what we want and hiding what we don’t.
The Apple Watch app is as well thought-out as its siblings, with the ability to use Messages-style quick replies as well as emoji and dictation. It’s quite possible to reply to most everyday emails without reaching for your iPhone, although the option to Handoff is there if a message is too long to bother scrolling through on your wrist.
The main selling point for Spark is its Smart Inbox, which groups messages from multiple accounts into personal, notification and newsletter categories. It then displays how many unread messages you have for each category in the Watch app’s home screen.
You can pin messages for quick access, and you can snooze them to hide them for a specified period of time. We find ourselves using that last one a lot: messages we can’t process properly on our wrists are quickly snoozed so they’ll resurface when we’re back at our Macs. If you have to handle a lot of email Spark is a massive time saver.
Twitterrific
There are lots of reasons to love Twitter, but there are lots of reasons to find it annoying too. Promoted tweets filling your timeline, people talking about subjects you couldn’t care less about, people retweeting people you couldn’t care less about, Piers Morgan… wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Twitter without all of those things? Don’t look to the official app for that any time soon. Go for Twitterrific instead.
Now in its fifth incarnation, Twitterrific on iOS is a superb Twitter tool. The Watch features require a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 in-app purchase to work fully, and they’re worth paying for: you can track your stats, be notified about direct messages, favorites, new followers and other action, use Handoff to start replies on your phone, compose tweets via dictation and block idiots instantly.
We’d recommend keeping notifications to an absolute minimum unless you only follow a few people - Twitter can be incredibly noisy when you follow and/or are followed by lots of people - but the Watch app is a great way of staying on top of Twitter while you’re out and about. It also reduces the risk of picking up your phone and thinking “while I’m here I’ll just check…” and losing hours to trivia.
Canary Mail
Canary Mail is a first: it’s the first third-party email app to use the Apple Watch 3’s 4G/LTE connection so you can access your email without lugging your iPhone around.
The feature is officially in beta but if you’re in the market for a new email app it’s a compelling reason to consider Canary over other iPhone email clients. The Watch support delivers short extracts of emails and the ability to quickly reply via scribbling or voice dictation.
The main iPhone app is very good indeed, supporting all the main email providers (including iCloud and, if IMAP’s enabled on the server, Exchange) and enabling you to use PGP, to use natural language search and to bulk-delete irrelevant or spammy emails. It offers email templates for frequently used messages, easy unsubscribing and integration with cloud storage, to-do and calendar services, and the none-more-black interface looks particularly good on the iPhone X’s OLED display.
It’s worth keeping an eye on the price if you’re considering Canary: it’s gone from being offered as a free trial for a few days with in-app purchases to $4.99/£4.99, and then to the current price of $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99.
Best Apple Watch Games Pokemon Go
Pokémon Go isn’t a new app, and its Apple Watch companion app isn’t exactly brilliant, as it needs the iPhone to be nearby in order to be useful. But that’s about to change with a new future called Adventure Sync. It’s a way of earning candy and hatching eggs in the Pokémon Go app without actually using the iPhone app.
Adventure Sync works by taking the Apple Health data your phone and watch generate and using that in the game. That means if you just go for a walk or a run wearing your Apple Watch, the distance you travel is recorded and then the Pokémon Go app can get that information to hatch more eggs and earn more candy. Nintendo promises a weekly activity summary, rewards for achieving specific milestones and ongoing progress monitoring, and you can opt in at any time.
The Watch app remains a companion app rather than an alternative to the iPhone app – it’s more of an information app than something you play – but it’s good to see a bit of lateral thinking when it comes to smartwatches. Using their data is much more interesting than trying to cram an entire iPhone app into a watch.
Runeblade
Some words don’t tend to appear together very often. “Donald Trump” alongside “uncontroversial tweet,” for example. “Large building project” and “on time and within budget”. Or maybe “Award winning fantasy adventure game” and “Apple Watch”.
Yes, really, you can get an award winning fantasy adventure game on your watch - and you don’t even have to pay any money for it to start playing.
That said, the big list of really expensive in-app purchases down the side of the App Store listing - thirteen bucks for a Ring of Resurgence, twenty bucks for 2,800 Diamonds - makes us wonder just how many of the 2,000 levels you’ll see without paying money.
The game itself is a bit simpler than a typical RPG, because a watch is a bit simpler than a smartphone. There’s precious little hacking and slashing; instead, it’s all about tapping. Monsters are vanquished with fatal tapping, money is amassed by more tapping, and the money you amass can be used to buy runes that make your taps more powerful.
And that’s about it. It’s a handy little escape for when you have a few minutes to kill, and while it isn’t going to change your life it can liven up the odd bus journey.
Tamagotchi Classic
Readers of a certain age will remember Tamagotchi, the infuriatingly addictive electronic pets that took over the world in the late 1990s with their incessant demands for care and attention.
And now they’re back! Back! BACK! And this time, they’re on your wrist - which is fitting, because Tamagotchi is apparently a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and watch. If you’ve never used your watch to raise a virtual pet, here’s your chance.
This app is the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e Gen1, and it uses the Apple Watch in several ways: when your Tamagotchi wants your attention it’ll pop up on your wrist, you can monitor your Tamagotchi’s health, and you can carry out care actions - such as feeding it a meal or making it go to the toilet.
There are two modes to choose from: toy mode, which recreates the originals, and App Mode, which adds special colors. The app also enables you to put multiple Tamagotchi into a gallery, where you can then take pictures of them, and save said digital snaps to your Camera Roll.
It’s spectacularly pointless, of course, but it’s also pretty cute and faithful to the original toys - so it’s an app for rose-tinted spectacle wearers as well as for people who’ve never encountered Tamagotchi before.
Best Apple Watch apps for education and learning Daily Dictionary
Daily Dictionary is a great example of the kind of apps that really work on your wrist: rather than blast you with notifications or try to cram tons of things into that relatively tiny screen, it delivers a little nugget of information that you might otherwise miss.
That nugget, of course, is a word. Every day, Daily Dictionary comes up with a new word. That can appear in your Apple Watch face’s complication, or as a push notification, or you can call the app directly. The complication is well designed, as it also includes today’s date, so you don’t need to have as separate date complication, enabling you to use your limited complication space for something else.
The word selection is practical rather than esoteric. The aim is to provide you with words you’ll actually use, so there’s no jargon or scientific terms you’re unlikely to use in your everyday conversations or writing. And the app enables you to see recent updates to catch up on any words you might have missed.
The core app is free, although a small purchase of just £2.99/$2.99/AU$4.49 a year unlocks the ability to customize the Apple Watch display.
Keynote
If you deliver a lot of presentations tied to a computer or iPad you might watch Apple keynotes with envy. Wouldn’t it be great if you could stride around the room like that, surreptitiously tapping a button to move to the next slide instead of hovering over your hardware?
There are plenty of electronic clickers to do just that, but why get another bit of hardware you’ll probably lose when you can control Keynote from your Apple Watch?
Don’t expect speakers’ notes, views of upcoming slides or other presentation app goodies: the Watch app is designed simply to play presentations and move to the next slide when tapped. Everything else happens on devices more suited to editing: your phone, or your iPad.
And provided there’s decent Wi-Fi or you’re close enough to the presenting iPad or iPhone for Bluetooth it works really well. It’s surprisingly functional-looking for an Apple app - it isn’t remotely pretty, and looks like it was designed in a tea break - but then how much design do you really need when you’re using your Watch as a clicker?
Do you prefer Office to Apple’s apps? Microsoft has a PowerPoint app for the Watch right here.
Babbel
Sometimes the best way to learn new things is to have fun, and that’s particularly true of languages: we can’t remember a taught word of the languages we rote-learned in school, but we can remember all the swear words and rude ones our peers snickered about on the bus home.
Babbel takes a more mature, but no less effective, approach to language learning, using data from the check-in service Foursquare to tell you about nearby words you need to find and translate on its Watch app. For example: you might learn the foreign word for a type of drink when you’re at a coffee shop.
The main iPhone app is more formal but still concentrates on real-world language, so you’re more likely to learn how to ask if somebody’s married or if they want some wine than tell them that your aunt’s pen is in the garden.
It’s proven to be effective and has more than a million subscribers, making it one of the most popular language learning tools around.
Just watch out for those in-app purchases, though: each language pack costs money, but some cost a lot more than others.
Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone is one of the big brands in language learning, and its various apps have won shelves full of awards for its combination of effective teaching and user-friendly app design. The Apple Watch counterpart to its main iPhone app is a good example of how the Watch can be used to supplement more fully featured apps: it’s tailored to the kinds of environments where the Apple Watch is the perfect device for a quick practice.
Rosetta Stone is all about real-life situations: ordering in restaurants, choosing things in shops, saying hello to people and so on. The Watch is ideally placed to practice that, and it’s set out with sensible categories and simple and fast navigation to get you to the bit you need, with audio examples of how to do it.
The main thing to watch out for here is the price: while the app itself is free, it’s useless without a language subscription. There are 24 languages to choose from and they start at $109.99/£93.99/AU$159.99 per year per language, with bundles for languages such as Spanish and French offering 5 levels for $199.99/£199.99/AU$319.99. Think of the app as a demo for the Rosetta Stone service rather than a stand-alone app.
Best Apple Watch apps for news and sports BBC News
Of course, bigger screens such as phones and, you know, TVs are best for expansive looks at the news, so the Watch's little face is reserved for headlines and photos with BBC News. These appear in Glances and tapping on one takes you to a very slightly fuller version, and lets you access the other headlines.
You can create a personalised news list on the iPhone and these show up in the Watch app, too. Ideal for snacking on headlines and letting you follow up with the main story elsewhere.
NHL
NHL isn’t just for American hockey fans, its app is one of the few legal ways to watch NHL games in the rest of the world.
The official NHL app has been given an extensive update for the 2018/2019 season, including the addition of Apple Watch support to display scoreboards and summaries and to notify you of the most exciting happenings. Sensibly there’s also an option to turn off notifications if you can’t tune in live and don’t want to spoil your viewing later.
The main iPhone/iPad app is very comprehensive, offering highlights, radio broadcasts and video streams as well as tons of in-game information. For US fans actually visiting the games, it even shows you where to get food and drink in the arena. In a nice touch you can also customize the app to reflect your favorite team’s colors.
High quality sports apps don’t tend to come cheap, and NHL is no exception: if you want to access the NHL.tv video you’ll pay £17.99/AU$27.49 per month to access the content from outside the US or $24.99 if you’re a US customer. We’re hoping the latest update crushes some of the bugs that seem to have plagued earlier versions of the app. There’s nothing worse than an app that freezes just before something really exciting happens.
Best Apple Watch apps for math and money Calzy 3
We’ve raved about the excellent PCalc calculator app, but Calzy is a worthy rival. The latest version, version 3, is a significant redesign that’s been optimized for iOS 11.
The most obvious difference is that the operators – plus, minus and so on – are on the same screen as the numbers, and that means it’s much faster to carry out multiple calculations, provided your fingers are fairly accurate: more buttons means a smaller tap area for each one.
It also shows you the running total as you go along, so for example if you’re doing a calculation where it’s this plus that times whatever you’ll see the results as you tap. It’s not as comprehensive as PCalc, but if all you need is a straightforward calculator on your wrist it’s a good bit cheaper.
The main iPhone app, as you might expect, does a lot more than the Watch app. It has light and dark themes, a customizable keypad, Handoff support and even a searchable history of every calculation you’ve made. It also offers currency rounding to keep numbers to two decimal places, and you can tap and hold to edit part of a formula if you realize you’ve made a mistake halfway through.
PCalc
The apps we tend to love the most are the ones that solve real-world problems, and PCalc falls into that category. Yes, it's a fantastically useful calculator and scientific calculator, but much more importantly it prevents fisticuffs in restaurants.
That's because of its handy bill splitter. Simply tell it how much the bill comes to, how many people are paying and how big a tip you want to leave, and the Watch app calculates how much each person should hand over. It supports watchOS 3's Scribble feature too, so you don't need to dictate or tap on a tiny keypad if you've downed that second bottle of wine. Alternatively you can use the Digital Crown to enter the figure in the tip calculator.
That's not all the Watch app can do, though. It includes a converter for distances and other measurements, and if you Force Touch the app you'll see a Send To iPhone icon as well as the clear and undo buttons.
And on the iPhone the main app is a great tool for serious calculating (and quick sums: there's a mini-calculator if you Force Touch the app icon). It's not the cheapest calculator app, but it's worth the money.
Pennies
Pennies was a recent Apple Editor’s Choice, for good reason: it’s a very simple and effective budgeting app that allows you to get on top of your spending without having to spend too much time doing so.
You can set weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, one-off and custom budgets, track in multiple currencies - great for holidays or business travel - and on the Watch, all you need to do is record how much you’ve spent against a particular budget, so for example if you have a shopping budget you’d tap it, tap Spend, and then enter the total.
The app then recalculates the amount you’ve got left, and if you wish you can have it displayed as a permanent Complication on the Watch face.
Pennies isn’t interested in what you’ve bought; just what budget it should be allocated to. As the developer puts it, “it’s all about keeping things easy and flexible so you can get on with having fun, spending what you want, and saving money at the end of the month.”
If like us you find personal finance a mix of tedium and terror, Pennies might be the app that helps you take control of your cash.
XE Currency
Currency converters abound on the iPhone and XE Currency is one of the best. While the Watch version doesn't have the calculator feature found on the phone, it's a clear chart of how many euros, Argentine pesos or Australian dollars a British pound buys.
You can add more currencies on the phone version – whatever's there is replicated on the Watch. A button at the base of the screen lets the iPhone app control the refresh rates, so you can avoid roaming charges.
Best Apple Watch apps for travel, weather and going out Citymapper
Citymapper is the pre-eminent public transport app, so no wonder it's an Apple Watch essential. It tells you how to get around selected cities including London, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona and New York.
As well as bus, train and subway times and directions, the Watch app even offers cycling routes and bike hire details such as London's rentable bikes. Once you've set up the journey on the phone, step-by-step notifications will appear on the Watch screen.
You can start journeys to home or previously saved destinations right from the Watch, and it will even help you find your way to nearby bus stops and train stations. Brilliant, just brilliant.
Transit
Transit is mainly for American users, but its city coverage extends to more than 50 non-US cities including London and Paris too. It’s a public transport app, and it works on a simple and largely accurate assumption: when you use the app, you’re in a hurry.
That means instant information for departures on nearby routes and a Take Me Home button that tells you how to get home as quickly and simply as possible. In a single screen it offers directions, details of the station, the next three departures and the number of the service.
Public transport tends to bring out the best in designers - think the simple genius of the London Underground map or the colorful signage on the New York subway - and that’s definitely the case here.
Transit makes excellent use of color and typography to provide all the information you need in a very effective way.
It may only shave a few seconds off your travel time, but if you’ve ever harbored dark thoughts when someone at the gate in front of you is wasting time you’ll know that for commuters, every single second counts. If you spend a lot of time traveling, you’ll save a lot of time with Transit.
Microsoft Translator
You know you’re living in interesting times when one of the best apps for an Apple device comes from Microsoft. But Translator is superb.
We refer to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy in another entry, and Microsoft Translator is the closest we’ve come to its Babel Fish - a fish you stuck in your ear to translate the universe’s many languages.
Translator sits on your wrist rather than in your ear canal, but it does much the same thing. Speak into your watch and you’ll see the translation, and it remembers recent translations on Watch or phone so you can find them again easily. You can also pin translations for instant access to essential words or phrases.
It gets even better if you use it on your phone, because it can translate in real time as you message somebody. You’ll see your typing with the translation in the same bubble, and it can even handle simplified Chinese and Arabic script.
The amount of thought that’s gone into Translator is obvious. Want to translate a sign? Point your camera at it. Want to have a conversation in a language you don’t speak? The phone display splits with your words facing you and the translation facing them.
App in the Air
We love a good pun, and App in the Air is a good one. It promises to be your personal flying assistant, and while it doesn’t actually fly it’s a useful assistant for anybody who does. It tracks all the information you need to know: what gate to go to, when you need to go there, how much time you’ve got before they shut the doors and, in the US, how to find the damn gate in the first place.
The Watch app takes care of providing essential information while the main iPhone app also tracks loyalty points, flight history (including TripIt integration), live status changes and anything else you might need to know. It even works where there isn’t a data connection, by sending status updates via SMS, and you can amuse yourself by calculating how many miles you’ve flown and how many different airports you’ve visited.
The catch is that the best bits are subscription services: if you want real-time flight status updates you’ll need the $26.99/£25.99/AU$41.99 annual subscription. That’s not expensive if you fly a lot, but it does mean the app is less immediately exciting to those of us who aren’t frequent flyers.
Night Sky
Night Sky is one of those gee-whiz apps that you use to show off your iPhone, and the introduction of a complication to let you know if the International Space Station was overhead was cute in a geeky way.
But the arrival of watchOS 4 has given the developers plenty of new toys to play with, and that means Night Sky is now one of those gee-whiz apps you use to show off your Apple Watch.
With this version of the app, your Watch now gets the same Sky Tracking features as the iPhone app has: you can now raise your wrist and identify the stars, planets and constellations around you.
There’s a time travel feature too, so you can track how the various heavenly bodies will move. It’s enormously clever and very impressive, and the main iPhone app isn’t bad either, as its Sky View knows of 115,000 celestial objects and enables you to increase or decrease light pollution, explore animated 3D models and customize notifications.
If you sign up for the $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 monthly premium subscription you get access to worldwide sky tours that you can save for future use - for example if you’re planning to visit a particular location in the near future.
Foursquare City Guide
Foursquare’s mission has changed somewhat over the years: what started off based around location check-ins and “king of the castle” bragging had to change when Facebook promptly copied the idea.
Robbed of its raison d’être, these days Foursquare has separated the check-ins from the venue recommendations. Foursquare City Guide’s job is to find decent bars and restaurants wherever you are in the world (if you still want to be the mayor of wherever, that’s the companion app, Foursquare Swarm).
The main interface of City Guide has five tappable areas: Search, Favorites, Food, Coffee and Nightlife.
Tapping on the appropriate option takes you to a list of venues, but instead of just filtering by distance the app also filters by Foursquare user ratings - so a rating of 9.5 that’s 500m away will appear below a 9.7 that’s 100m further.
The list gives you the name, price bracket, average rating and distance for each venue, and if you tap on a venue you’ll see reviews, photos, maps and other key information. The big selling point here is Foursquare’s global reach: it’s a really good app for travellers who don’t want to spend their time in the hotel bar or eating in faceless chain restaurants.
Uber
Calling an Uber isn't too difficult, unless of course your hands are full or running down last-second tasks. That's me right before I leave for a flight.
Often times, I'm packing my suitcase with last second gadgets and taking out the trash so it doesn't take on another lifeform by sitting there for a week. The Apple Watch makes it easier to hail the 21st century taxi.
The Uber Apple Watch app is not only simple to use, it lets you see vital information, like the time the driver will take to get there and the car he or she drives, complete with a picture (when they have one).
ETA - Arrive on time
Like Citymapper, ETA will help you get somewhere. The title refers to its front-and-centre information. You add a location on the iPhone and save it. Then it'll give you timings for driving, walking or taking public transport.
Some watch faces allow it as a complication, where it'll show the time it'll take to your top saved route. It knows what traffic is like so allows extra time for a drive in rush hour, say. On the Watch app you tap the chosen saved destination and it'll take you through to Maps for directions.
Similarly, for public transport directions in select cities Maps will provide the directions.
iTranslate
This powerful translation app works in 90 languages. It's free but for full Watch use you'll need the $6.99/£6.99/AU$10.99 in-app purchase which offers voice recognition and unlimited translations.
A Watch complication means you can tap on the screen to start translating straight away and if you'll let it, iTranslate will use your location to figure out what language it should be translating to or from.
It also responds to Time Travel so by winding the Digital Crown you can see phrases which change such as "Good afternoon" which is replaced by "Good evening" as you scroll forward.
Dark Sky Weather
Dark Sky is the first app we put on any new Apple device, and the Apple Watch is no exception. In fact, we think Dark Sky is at its most useful when you’re wearing it on your wrist.
What Dark Sky does seems very simple, but is actually very clever. It tells you what the weather’s going to do - not in a vague sense, but as in telling you that it’s going to bucket down in ten minutes and that the storm won’t stop for an hour.
That means it’s the perfect app for anybody who’s thinking about going outside for any reason, or who’s already outside and really ought to be getting inside in a big hurry.
In more dramatic climates it alerts of dangerous weather such as storms, and you can set it to notify you of specific kinds of weather that you select in the companion iPhone app.
We use it to decide if now is a good time to walk the dog, if it’s time to get the kids back to the car or if we really shouldn’t be going out dressed like that; you might use it when you’re hiking or biking, or doing any other activity that could be affected by changes in the weather.
If you used Dark Sky in the early days of the Apple Watch and found it painfully slow and unresponsive, give it another go: the current version runs on the watch, not on the phone, and the difference in performance really is dramatic.
Yahoo Weather
Dark Sky and CARROT Weather get all the reviews, but Yahoo’s weather app is a lovely thing on the Apple Watch.
It takes the same colorful, minimalist approach as the iPhone/iPad app, with screens showing trend lines for temperature, precipitation and wind speed, along with sunrise and sunset times and where the sun is right now, whether it’s going to rain and what the temperature highs and lows will be.
You don’t get the right-now weather warnings of Dark Sky or the sass of CARROT, just a clear, easy to understand and really well-presented set of predictions.
It’s not all sunshine and flowers, though. The host app is pretty big - 137MB, which is on the large side for a weather app, given that the UK Met Office app is 80MB and Dark Sky 20.8MB - and the accuracy of the weather forecasts seems to depend on where you live.
US users seem very happy with it, but UK users say it’s a little pessimistic: while it rains a lot in Britain, it doesn’t rain quite as often as Yahoo Weather says it will.
Then again, it’s better to warn of rain and be pleasantly surprised than to predict good weather when the skies are about to open.
Circa
It’s not a surprise that the Apple Watch attracts a lot of apps built around the idea of time, but few of them are as simple and as useful as Circa. It’s designed for global travellers or people whose life involves communicating with people around the world, and answers a simple and important question: is this a good time?
It may be a simple question, but it’s often a tough question to answer. If you’ve ever tried to find a time for a virtual meeting that works not just for you and your local colleagues but for colleagues halfway across the world you’ll know how much of a pain in the neck it can be.
Are they EST or PST? Are they behind us or ahead of us? Circa remembers these things so you don’t have to, offering crystal clear guides to when people are going to be available and when they should be in their bed.
It’s a niche app, but many of the very best Apple Watch apps are: it’s simple, beautifully designed and does exactly what it sets out to do. If you need this kind of thing, this is exactly what you need.
TripIt - Travel Organizer
Whether you’re a road warrior or an occasional holidayer, keeping track of the various aspects of your trip can be a pain. TripIt solves that by pulling all your travel-related documentation together.
All you need to do is send your travel confirmation emails - flights, hotels, car hire - to TripIt and the app will automatically organize them and tell you the information you need when you need it.
If you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo mail you can get TripIt to monitor your mailbox automatically, which makes things even easier. If you’re in the US, it even tells you when it’s time to head for the airport.
The phone app stores your itinerary and key documents, and the Watch app lets you know what’s important right now - so if you’re about to board a flight you’ll see the flight number and departure time, if you’re checking in you’ll see a booking reference and so on.
Things get really clever with the Pro subscription ($48.99/£38.99/AU$77.99), which adds live flight notifications, seat tracking and alternative flight finding should your plans change.
That’s probably unnecessary for most people, though: the free version of the app includes all the essentials you need for any kind of travel.
CARROT Weather
We’ve mentioned CARROT Weather before: it’s our go-to app when we want the weather forecast delivered by a hyper-intelligent artificial entity that wishes we were dead. In this massive update the app becomes even more horrible, and we mean that in a good way.
There are complications for your Apple Watch face as well as a completely misanthropic Watch app with all the weather information you could possibly need, displayed silently or spoken aloud depending on your preferences.
We particularly like the way you can specify just how horrible CARROT is to you, along with its political leanings. And on the accompanying iPhone app there’s a really fun feature that uses Apple’s ARKit to bring the forecast into augmented reality.
The developers are upfront about their pricing: if you want to use Weather Underground data instead of the default Dark Sky and take advantage of its radar pictures too, those features cost the devs extra money so you’ll need to pay another $9.99/£8.99/AU$14.49 per year for the Ultrapremium Club in-app purchase.
There’s also a cheaper Premium Club ($3.99/£3.49/AU$5.49pa) that enables you to customize the complications, to receive weather alerts and to have background data updates. It’s worth it.
Best Apple Watch apps for food and drink Just Eat
Proving that you should never underestimate our basic laziness, Just Eat created an app for people who couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to call for a takeaway. Now, it’s added an app for people who can’t be bothered reaching for their iPhone to open the Just Eat app.
One day historians may look back on this as one of the key steps in the downfall of western civilisation. Then again, easy pizza!
The Just Eat app is UK-only - if you’re in the US, try the Domino’s Apple Watch app instead - and it enables you to choose, order and pay for takeaways from the comfort of your wrist thanks to Apple Pay integration.
You can also choose to collect instead of having the meal delivered, but let’s be honest: if you can’t be bothered getting your phone you’re hardly going to want to go outside to collect your food - although if you’re driving it’s handy to order a pickup with a few taps.
The main iPhone/iPad app is much more attractive and informative, but when it comes to ordering regulars from your favorite local takeaways it doesn’t get much easier than having Just Eat on your wrist.
Yelp
You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in our favorite apps: they tend to approach their mission by asking what useful things the watch can do rather than trying to cram an entire phone app into that tiny screen, irrespective of whether that’s sane or useful. Yelp is a great example of an app that gets it right.
When you open it you’ll see just four icons: Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea, and Hot & New. Tapping on the one you’re interested in then shows you a list sorted by distance, with the all-important star ratings and average cost listed on top of a photograph. Tap again and you’ll get the opening hours and a map, and of course you can read the reviews too - that’s what Yelp is all about.
It’s particularly good for the kind of venues and experiences popular among bright young things in big cities, (the most committed Yelpers), but the database is truly enormous and doesn’t turn into tumbleweed whenever you venture into the countryside. Yelp’s app is very good for finding places in unfamiliar towns, or unfamiliar places in towns you know very well.
I sometimes wear my messy Chipotle burritos while scarfing down the healthy-ish Mexican platters, but I'm also purposely wearing Chipotle on my wrist to send order to the store via my Apple Watch.
While it's not the most groundbreak app, I can create a one-tap order with the Chipotle Apple Watch app and have my meal ready to go while I'm on the treadmill at the gym next door. It's as efficient as it is calorie rich. The best part is, I get the skip the always massive line.
The best free iPad games in 2018
So you've got an iPad, but also the dawning realization you've no cash left to buy any games. Fortunately, the App Store offers loads of gaming greats for the (unintentional or otherwise) skinflint.
Our lists cover the best free iPad puzzle games, racers, platform games, and more, split into categories (one on each page) for your perusing pleasure.
Plus, check back weekly for our free iPad app of the week. You’ll find that below.
Free iPad game of the week: Rowdy Wrestling
Rowdy Wrestling is a sports game on fast forward – one that’s performed a pile-driver on nuance and lobbed it out of the ring. It features chunky retro cartoonish fighters, whose arms whirl as they speed about. The buttons you stab afford you a degree of control, but initially bouts are like attempting to control chaos – akin to trying to steer an avalanche.
Over time, you figure out a modicum of tactics – combinations of moves that more often leave you victorious and your opponents unceremoniously hurled from the screen. Get particularly good and you can buy new wrestlers with currency earned in-game, and then have a crack at the career mode.
As ridiculous as real-world wrestling is, a career in that sport isn’t a patch on the madness at the heart of this game.
Our favorite iPad arcade games, including brawlers and fighting games, auto-runners, party games, pinball, and retro classics.
Super Fowlst is the follow-up to the unhinged Fowlst. Whereas the original was Flappy Bird in a box, reimagined as a hard-as-nails arena shooter, this sequel gives you more room to breathe.
The controls remain the same – tap left or right to ‘flap’ in the relevant direction, moving in an arc as you do so. But multi-screen levels and a lower concentration of enemies makes for an experience that has space for exploration and unearthing secrets, rather than solely being an ongoing frantic dash for survival.
That’s not to say Super Fowlst is easy – far from it. The boss battles in particular are extremely tough, and it will take you some time before you can last a dozen levels. But this one feels like anyone has a crack at becoming ‘super’ rather than only gaming gurus.
Train Party is a multiplayer game for between two and twelve people. In cooperative mode, you all work as a team, trying to keep a train going for as long as possible. You lay tracks for it to chug along, move wildlife from its path, and deal with a renegade track bomber. In competitive mode, Train Party gets added bite, the winner being the last person to survive without wrecking the train.
In either mode, this is a fun game, and it works particularly well on iPad. The larger display means even the sausage-fingered can play with an excellent degree of accuracy. Also, an iPad is a much weightier device to whack a chum with should they get a bit cocky after their fifth Train Party win in a row…
Shadow Fight 3 is a side-on one-on-one brawler set in a world of shadows that stands on the edge of a great war. In gaming terms, though, it’s mostly an excuse to whip your sword out, slice up your opponent, and then give them a few kicks and punches for good measure.
The fighty action works especially well on the iPad. The large screen provides plenty of space for the lush visuals, and your thumbs don’t cover anything important up while they battle with the surprisingly responsive virtual controls.
Your ongoing mission is a bit grindy at times, with an underlying RPG-lite mechanic of upgrades, but the brawls are great, whether you’re mastering a new weapon, unleashing shadow powers, or figuring out how to get the odd punch in when you’ve lost your sword and an opponent is moving in for the kill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad games where you sprint, jump, drive, hoverboard, dig, or pinball to victory – or your doom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cubed Rally Redline is an endless on-rails racer that should be so easy, but very much isn’t. As you belt along in your blocky car, you can move left or right across clearly defined lanes, and you even get a ‘time brake’ for going all slow-motion, Matrix-style, to sneak through tricky gaps.
But this game is so relentless and full of bonkers surprises that you’ll end up regularly smashing into cows, dinosaurs, and ocean-going liners inconveniently parked in the middle of the track.
Perseverance reaps rewards, though: coins collected en route pay for new vehicles that change where – and sometimes even how – you race. Top stuff – apart from those stompy car-smashing dinosaurs, obviously.
Our favorite free iPad gem-swap, tile-match, and rhythm action games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! Freeplay, where you watch ads to top up a 'free goes' bin, there's no excuse for going with inferior pretenders.
Triple Town is a match game where you merge cartoonish plant life and buildings. But don’t be fooled by the cute facade – this is a brilliantly designed brain-smashingly tough puzzler where you must think many moves ahead to succeed.
In this game, trios of things combine to make other things – for example, three bushes become a tree, and three trees become a hut. Such merges then give you space on the tiny board to evolve your town – especially when one particularly cunning move chains several merges together.
All the while, roaming bears and ninjas complicate matters, blocking squares on the board. At times surreal, Triple Town is also challenging and addictive. Note that free moves are on a replenishing timer, but if you can’t wait for another go, there’s an unlimited moves IAP.
Our favorite free iPad platform games, from classic side-on 2D games to ambitious console-style adventures.
Super Cat Tales 2 is a platform game that requires just two of your thumbs. Tap and hold the left or right of your iPad’s display, and you can make your on-screen heroes – cats with unique super powers – walk, dash, leap, and wall-jump like kitty ninjas.
Naturally, there’s a point to all this activity: the cats are trying to save their world from an alien invasion. They must therefore scoot about, avoid enemies, find hidden secrets, and grab the bling that’s oddly left lying about in this kind of game. Also, for some reason, they can sporadically jump into huge yellow tanks to dish out serious destruction.
With a smartly written script, superb level design, and vibrant retro-infused visuals, Super Cat Tales 2 is one of the best platformers on iPad. That it’s free makes it a steal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad logic tests, path-finding challenges, bridge builders, and turn-based puzzlers.
Slydris 2 subverts Tetris by rethinking and expanding on that basic framework, transforming the result into a tactical turn-based puzzler. Shapes still fall into a well, but several appear at once – and during each go, you can only move one of them (either a hanging shape, or one already in the well).
In order to keep the well from filling up, you must therefore ‘shatter’ larger pieces by using part of them to complete lines, whereupon cut off bits rain down and create chain reactions. Immovable shapes make progress tougher, but power-ups come to your aid, including a two-by-two block that smashes anything it lands on.
This is smart, cerebral, neon-infused endless puzzling magnificence – one of the best games of its kind on any platform.
Pivotol recalls well-based puzzle games like Tetris and Columns, but gives the sub-genre a massive injection of neon (and a super-cool electronic soundtrack), and then has you engage your brain. And that’s because rather than upping the panic with a relentless procession of shapes dropping into the well, Pivotol is a more strategic turn-based affair.
Here, it’s colored blocks that fall down, and they’re zapped from existence whenever you connect six or more. Every turn, you can choose to pivot four blocks about a central point, aiming to set up lucrative combos, and make use of special blocks that obliterate anything nearby.
It’s an interesting and compelling new spin (oho!) on such games – and also suitably tense when you’re trying desperately to clear some blocks, knowing you’re one turn from disaster.
Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle is a sliding puzzler with lashings of gore. That’s not a combination you hear too often, but Killer Puzzle is unique. Set broadly in the world of Friday the 13th, it features horror icon Jason Voorhees on a mission to chop up anyone in his immediate vicinity.
That might sound horrific, but Killer Puzzle is more South Park than splatter flick. The chunky visuals present everyone as colorful but gormless cartoon characters, and the more bloody (and ridiculous) cut scenes can be skipped entirely.
Really, it’s the puzzling bits that will make you stick around. Across the game’s many levels, your brains are given a beating as you figure out labyrinthine routes to get to your final targets. (Still, that’s a nicer ‘brain beating’ than the targets end up getting…)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Our favorite free iPad on-rails, 3D and 2D racers, and trials games.
Pico Rally is a high-octane racer controlled with a single thumb. In short, hold down on the screen, and you get a burst of speed; raise your digit and you slow down a bit. Steering is taken care of, and so victory is about learning the twists and turns in each circuit, and not losing speed by smashing into barriers and other cars, or grinding across the dirt.
In essence it’s more or less slot racing, in terms of the basic nature of the controls, and the behavior of the cars. But the way Pico Rally keeps shaking things up with its varied track design, races, and pursuits, ensures it blazes through the checkered flag as one of the iPad’s premier racers, despite being a million miles away from traditional fare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad scrolling blasters, FPS games, precision shooters, twin-stick blasters, and vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups.
Fortnite parachutes 100 players on to an island, with the simple task of being the last person standing. Okay, so it’s not that simple, given that everyone wants to kill you.
The road to survival initially involves realizing that your pickaxe isn’t going to cut it, and therefore locating weapons with which to dish out wanton violence. Over time, the area in which players can survive shrinks, at which point you might consider building a defensive fortress.
The mix of building, scavenging, exploration and action mixes perfectly to create unique scenarios within every game, and the game is kept fresh with regular content updates.
Fortnite’s origins on platforms with physical gamepads are somewhat betrayed by complex virtual controls, however this is a much more minor issue on iPad given that there’s more than enough space for your fingers not to cover the action.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad soccer, golf, tennis, basketball and other sports games.
Golfing Around is a golf game with a rather old-fashioned approach. Instead of photo-realistic courses where you could feasibly knock a virtual caterpillar out of a virtual tree with your virtual three-iron, this one’s all vibrant, cartoonish fare, played from above.
The controls are simple: you rotate your golfer, and use a power meter to smack the ball. If it heads to the red, you get extra boost, but your aim starts swinging wildly about, risking your shot’s accuracy. There’s also a full-course map, which isn’t so much a nicety as a necessity for aiming, and for choosing the right club.
This all sets Golfing Around up for a solid par, but a built-in course builder snags it an eagle. It’s great fun to make your own courses to share, although do remember Pebble Beach never used its greens to spell out naughty words.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad RTS and turn-based strategy games, board games, and card games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 Roadwith 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.
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.
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.
Our favorite free iPad games all about crosswords, anagrams, and playing with letters.
Alphabear 2 has you tap out words on Scrabble-like tiles set into a grid-like board featuring bears. As tiles are used, bears grow to fill the gaps, often becoming comically tall or thin. Simultaneously, tiles have turn countdowns on them; those that reach zero become immovable stones, scuppering any gigant-o-bear schemes you had in mind.
This is very similar to the original Alphabear, only this time there’s smarter visuals, a story involving a time machine (everything’s gone wrong, but you can apparently fix history by spelling words), and a smattering of educational content through a built-in dictionary and modes based around morphemes.
An underlying meta-game with collectable bonus bears remains baffling and endearing in equal measure, but otherwise this one’s a furry good word game that’s definitely worth bear-ing in mind.
The Impossible Letter Game is admittedly only tangentially related to word games, but it’s a good bet for boosting your concentration and powers of observation when it comes to letters.
The basics of the game don’t really change throughout its many rounds and modes: it’s essentially about finding mismatched letters within a sea of characters. For example, you might be faced with a grid of E’s, and somewhere in there will be a solitary F to tap.
As you work your way through, the letters get smaller, and it then starts trying to break your eyes and brain with all kinds of tricks, using movement and color. Entertaining, although probably not one to try if you’re suffering from eye strain!
Wordgraphy is essentially a set of crossword puzzles. The tiny snag is that the letters are all in the wrong places, and although they can be moved, they can only swap with certain letters elsewhere in the puzzle.
You’d think this restriction would make things easier, but it really doesn’t. You’ll sit there faced with a set-up that resembles an H on its side. The central column will have a completed word, but you’ll stare in baffled fashion at all the other letters, flipping them about to make various flavors of gibberish.
But when things click, you’ll feel like a genius – at least until the point you’re then confronted by a new and even tougher puzzle.
Bonza Word Puzzle rethinks classic crossword puzzles, mostly by taking a completed one, hacking it to bits, and then tasking you with putting the thing back together again.
The result is something like a marriage of tetrominos, jigsaws and Scrabble, and it’s initially rather pleasant as you drag a few pieces about your iPad’s display, and feel slightly smug as everything comes together in seconds.
Naturally, Bonza’s sting in the tail then emerges: puzzles with loads of pieces, sprayed about the screen in a manner that’ll make your eyes boggle. At that point, it becomes a stern test, even if a clue helpfully hints at the kinds of words you should be making.
Spellspire features a grumpy wizard trying to make his way up a tower. Given that this is a videogame, all manner of deadly foes stand in his way. To clear a path, the pointy-hatted hero must blast enemies with his wand – a wand powered by letters.
Yep – this one’s actually an anagrams game, despite the role-playing-lite shenanigans. You get ten letters per floor and use them to spell words that are transformed into magical blasts. The longer your word, the more powerful the magic.
There’s some grind if you want to make it to the top – bosses are initially very tough to beat. But every play adds to your coffers, giving you a fighting chance of reaching the top of the tower, where we can only hope the wizard finds a really big dictionary.
Letterpress is what happens when you mash Boggle into Risk with a fork. You get a small grid of letters, and tap out a word. Doing so turns its tiles your color. Your opponent then attempts to do the same, in a kind of lexicographer’s take on a tug ’o war.
The twist is that letters you surround are temporarily locked, meaning your opponent can’t flip them on their next go. Careful strategizing is therefore at least as important as showing off your long-word skills.
With a basic rule-set and minimal visuals, it’s interesting how gripping Letterpress proves to be. But when you’re deep into a match, you and an opponent figuring out how to grab those last few unclaimed letters, it’s like no other game of its kind.
Scrabble [non-US App Store link] should need no introduction. The much-imitated crossword game pits you against one or more opponents, as you lay down letter tiles on a board, attempting to make use of special score-boosting spots wherever possible.
This digital take on the classic boardgame enables you to brush up your skills against a computer player, play friends on your local network, or take on all-comers online. On iPad is the best way to play, providing you with a full-size board and stats, without any need to scroll.
If there’s any downside, the app does belt you with ads quite often, and you’ll probably at some point get irritated by the computer opponent’s penchant for deeply obscure words. Nonetheless, Scrabble on iPad betters its many clones.
The best iPhone apps we've used in 2018
Apps are the cornerstone of the iPhone – what really set it apart from Android. The best iPhone apps are typically best in class.
However, finding the greatest apps among the millions available isn’t easy, and so we’ve done the hard work for you.
Our lists compile the very best the iPhone has to offer, whether using your iPhone for photos, video, drawing, music, office tasks, reading, maps, weather forecasts or keeping kids entertained.
This round-up compiles our favourites, from top-quality creative tools and video editors to the finest productivity kit and social networking clients.
In addition to our ongoing list of the absolute best, every week we're adding our picks for the latest and greatest new or updated apps, so check back often.
Even if you don't have an iPhone right now, it's worth reading up on what's available if you're considering investing in the iPhone XS or even one of the older models (if you need more info, check out our list of the best iPhones) - but note that some of these titles will only work with models from iPhone 5S and later.
Read on below for our free app pick of the week then click through to the following pages for the best iPhone apps across a range of categories.
iPhone app of the week: Shepard Fairey AR - Damaged
Shepard Fairey AR - Damaged is essentially an art exhibit crammed into your iPhone – and in a rather more literal sense than you might expect. If the name Shepard Fairey doesn’t ring a bell, you’ll likely recognize his most famous work – the iconic ‘Hope’ image of Barack Obama. In Damaged, he tackles the current political climate in a similarly arresting manner.
As a viewer, the AR bit of the app’s name is important. This is no slideshow with written notes. Instead, the entire warehouse-sized show has been transformed into a virtual space you can explore with swipes and taps, or even by walking around yourself.
All the while, you can optionally take in Fairey’s narration, giving you extra context behind the work in what’s easily the best virtual art exhibit on the iPhone.
Best iPhone photo editing and camera appsThese are our favorite iPhone apps for editing snaps, capturing photos and video and applying the filters that actually make things look good.
Camera+ is a combined camera and editor. Despite the wealth of available options, the interface is initially quite minimal, with a modes strip across the top of the screen, a zoom slider, and the shutter. But tap the + button and you reveal further modes, including a timer, a stabilizer and smile detection.
Similarly, tap the viewfinder area and Camera+ enters a ‘pro’ mode, with manual controls, and scene options for shooting under specific lighting conditions. The interface is finicky compared to Obscura 2, but Camera+ is undoubtedly powerful.
Post-shooting, you can edit with adjustment tools, filters, and frames in the Lightbox. This all comes across as impressively friendly and straightforward, and although the range of tools doesn’t compare to Snapseed’s, it’s enough to keep you within the one app for the most part.
Oilist is a generational art app. You feed it something from Photos, choose a style, and it gets to work, continually repainting your image. It’s like someone’s trapped a tiny van Gogh in your iPhone.
In fact, it’s like a slew of artists are stuck in your device, because Oilist has a massive range of styles to choose from, taking in everything from classic oil painters through to modern art. Although the app can be left alone in a dock, you can capture stills for posterity, or fiddle with settings (including brush strokes, mood, ‘chaos’ and gravity) to redirect the virtual artist.
Whether you interact or just sit back and watch, Oilist is mesmerizing – kind of like a painterly lava lamp, only what you see is based on one of your own cherished photographs.
Snapseed is a free photo editor with a feature set that rivals the very best premium apps. It’s geared towards users of any level, from those who fancy applying quick filters to anyone who wants to dig deep into adjustments and powerful editing tools.
The range of options is dazzling, and the interface is smartly conceived. You can crop, make adjustments, and edit curves, all with a few swipes and taps. Often, vertical drags select parameters, and horizontal drags define an effect’s strength – tactile and intuitive. Even better, edits are non-destructive, and can be removed or changed at any point by accessing them in the edits stack.
As a final sign off, the app enables you to save any combination of adjustments as a custom preset, which you can then apply to any image in the future with a single tap. Superb stuff.
Obscura 2 is the best manual camera app for iPhone. It achieves this not with a slew of features, but by providing an interaction model that’s so brilliantly conceived that you simply won’t want to use another iPhone camera.
Echoing manual cameras of old, everything is based around a contextual wheel that sits above the shutter. Initially, you use it to select a tool. When setting focus or exposure, the wheel enables you to make fine adjustments with your thumb. You get a real feel of precision control, with optional haptic feedback confirming your choices.
The app makes the odd concession to modern photography trends with a range of filters, but mostly Obscura 2 wants you to think a little more about what you’re snapping, all while breathing in its minimal yet approachable and deeply pleasing design.
Filmborn is an app for camera obsessives – for those who revel in the joys of film, but come away unimpressed with apps that present an over-saturated, overblown take on old-school photography.
The interface is icon-heavy, but gives you fast access to tools that will improve your photography. There’s manual focusing, a range of grid overlays, and a blown highlights preview that outlines problematic areas of a potential snap.
The film filters will appeal to fans of real-world stock, subtly transforming images in a manner that’s pleasingly realistic. Filmborn even educates you regarding when’s best to use each one. The app also includes basic editing functionality, although a key tool – curves – frustratingly sits behind IAP.
Despite that niggle, Filmborn is well worth checking out if you fancy fusing photography’s past with its present.
Retrospecs is a camera app that wants you to see the world as if it was being rendered by ancient computing and gaming hardware. Load a photo – or take one using the app – and you can select from a wide range of systems, such as the Game Boy, Commodore 64, and original Mac.
But this isn’t just a single-tap filter app for aficionados of pixel art. You can adjust dither, image corruption, and virtual CRT distortion. You get animation effects and video support. And should you get fed up with the included emulated systems, you can even make your own.
So whether you believe all your photos should look like an eight-bit video game or want to add a crazy glitch sequence to your next YouTube video, Retrospecs fits the bill perfectly.
Halide wants you to focus on deliberate, thoughtful photography. Its creator has remarked that many camera apps now have interfaces like airplane cockpits, and Halide was stripped back accordingly.
That’s not to say Halide is bereft of features, but those it has are all about taking better photos. You can adjust focus and exposure manually, and use ‘focus peaking’ to highlight areas of sharp contrast within the frame, and the grid overlay’s central rectangle turns yellow when your phone is held straight.
If you have a modern iPhone, Halide offers a groundbreaking depth mode with ‘depth peaking’ and a depth map preview. You can also view portrait photos in augmented reality.
The net result of all this is a premium camera app that feels like a professional tool – money well spent if your idea of photography isn’t based around filters and stickers.
Afterlight 2 is a powerful photo editor for your iPhone. All the basics are there, including one-tap filters, cropping, and brightness/contrast sliders. Itls more professional features allow you to manipulate curves, selective hue/saturation/tone controls, filter editing, and a double exposure tool for Lomography fiends.
A highlight, though, is the text tool. It’s a cinch to add words to your pictures, and fine-tune everything with custom leading, kerning, and erasing. In fact, the entire interface feels very considered – there’s a lot going on in this app, but it remains approachable throughout.
One misstep is that edits are destructive – although there’s unlimited undo, you can’t remove a specific step unless you eradicate all the work you did afterwards. Otherwise, this is an excellent app, and one that wisely doesn’t mess about with subscriptions and IAPs – even additional pro-designed filter packs are free.
Pic Collage offers ways to quickly turn some photos into something special, and the best mode is Grids. You select some images, which Pic Collage automatically drops into a grid layout. If you’re not keen on what you get, you can choose something different, add a background, or manually fiddle with the dividers.
Double-tap an individual image and you get further tools, including an ‘effects’ area that’s not far off a fully-fledged photo editor. You can add stickers and text to your masterpiece, and even doodle over the top of everything. If you fancy something more structured, the Cards mode offers predefined card layouts, and Freestyle lets you go entirely freeform.
Everything can be tried entirely for free, but exports have watermarks. Be rid of those for a one-off IAP that’s very much value for money.
ProCam 5 is an iPhone camera app with a lot of options. Not one for minimalists, then, but the app’s design is such that while it could have drowned you in a bewildering array of options, it actually ends up being very usable.
The main camera shoots to RAW, TIFF or JPEG, and optionally shoots HDR. There are several modes (burst, night, slow shutter, and so on), and you can manually tweak ISO, exposure, shutter speed, and focus.
Usefully, you can also opt to shoot only when your iPhone is perfectly still; and there are handy visual guides, too, including a focus peak meter, a grid of thirds, and a tilt meter.
When you’re finished shooting, you can delve into a capable editor for trimming, perspective correction, frame-by-frame video clip review, and the application of lenses and filters. It’s very comprehensive, making for a high-value package.
MaxCurve is a photo editor aimed at people who want more control over adjustments. The app includes the basics – cropping; vignettes; sharpness; grain – but its real power is in the curve tools that afford a huge amount of control over color, lightness, saturation, and other aspects of your photo.
The approach is very different from most of MaxCurve’s contemporaries, and, notably, the curves take up a lot of room, sitting in front of the image you’re editing. But they do provide a very tactile means of making everything from subtle tweaks to dramatic changes.
These effects are all non-destructive, too, applied as layers, to which you can also add colors (with blend modes) and textures. Bar its slightly cluttered interface, the only real problem with MaxCurve is it can be a bit too clever – there are no quick-fix buttons for things like exposure. But perhaps that’s the point.
Infltr began life as a photo filter app for people who considered choosing a filter too much effort. Instead, you dragged your finger across the screen, watching as the filter updated live. Simple. Fast. Random.
But this brutally stripped-back approach nudged Infltr towards gimmickry – something its current incarnation addresses by affording you a modicum of additional control. The original functionality still exists – the app nicely going full-screen when you activate it – but there are editing and filter management features too.
Along with adding a filter in the original way, you can select a pre-made option, make basic adjustments, and alter the photo’s crop and skew. All edits are non-destructive, so you can revert or make further changes later, and your settings can be saved as a custom style. The net result is an app that’s evolved from an interesting curio to a must-have iPhone app for photographers.
There are quite a few apps that attempt to automatically get rid of backgrounds from an image, or have you paint them out with a finger. Exacto, though – as its name might suggest – is all about precision.
Using the pen tool, you tap out a string of blue points on the screen, which map out the outline to mask. Any point’s position can be adjusted by selecting it and then dragging anywhere on the screen. Exacto places black points between the blue points, and these when selected bend the line, so you can create a curve with two blue points rather than dozens.
There’s unlimited undo, project auto-save, and a layers system for multiple selection. And although you might balk at the price for what’s effectively a single-feature app, Exacto is unparalleled at what it does on iPhone, and opens up scope for creative superimpositions and collages when using other creative software.
Modern iPhones have some seriously impressive camera hardware, and are capable of taking clean, vibrant shots. So it’s perhaps no surprise that iPhone users are often hell-bent on slathering said images in filters and messing them up.
Mextures is a decidedly extreme example, providing a theoretically unlimited number of layers to play with, each of which can have some kind of effect applied. These include grit, grain, light leaks, gradients, and more.
Because each layer can be fine-tuned in terms of opacity and blend mode, you can get anything from subtle film textures to seriously eye-popping grunge effects.
Hit upon something particularly amazing and you can share your ‘formulas’ with other people. Or if you’re in need of a quick fix, you can grab something that’s already online to overhaul your snaps.
There are two sides to Hipstamatic. In its ‘native’ form, the app apes old-school point-and-click cameras. You get a tiny viewport inside a virtual plastic camera body, and can swap out lenses, film, and flashes, along with messing about with multiple exposures and manual shutters. It’s pleasingly tactile and twangs your nostalgia gland, but feels a bit cramped.
If you’d rather use your entire iPhone display to show what you’re snapping, you can switch to a ‘pro’ camera mode. That’s closer in nature to Apple’s own Camera, but with Hipstamatic’s huge range of rather lovely filters bolted on – a great mash-up of old and new.
And if you’re wedded to Apple’s camera, Hipstamatic’s still worth a download, given that you can load a photo, slather it in filters, add loads of effects and bask in your creative genius.
Apple offers a burst mode when you hold down the shutter in its camera app, but this is for very rapidly taking many shots in quick succession, in order to select the best one.
By contrast, SoSoCamera is about documenting a lengthier slice of time, taking a series of photos over several seconds and then stitching them together in a grid.
The grid's size maxes out at 48 items and can be fashioned however you like. It's then just a question of selecting a filter, prodding the camera button, and letting SoSoCamera perform its magic.
The resulting images, while low-res in nature, nicely capture the feel of time passing, in many cases better than video; although do experiment first with the filters, because some are a bit too eye-searing.
The best animation apps and video editors for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for editing and creating videos, GIFs, Live Photos and cinemagraphs.
8mm Vintage Camera is an app dedicated to shooting authentic retro films. In other words, it transforms your otherwise pristine iPhone videos into something that could have been shot anywhere from the 1970s back to the 1920s.
This is more than a basic filters app, though. When shooting live, you get to see the effect, can swap out lenses to add spotlights, color fringing and other effects, and can even add jitter to imitate frame shakes.
Polishing off a superb app are features for working with existing video (which you ‘record’ into 8mm, in a manner similar to Apple’s Clips), and stitching together multiple shots, complete with titles and music. You get a couple of themes included in the purchase price, and several more are available via IAP.
nception is a photo/video reality-bender of the opinion that everything looks interesting when you start mucking about with mirrors. It provides over 20 symmetric reflection presets, some carving the screen in half, and others being a mite more complicated.
You can shoot live stills or footage, and import existing content. When working with either, there are color filters to overlay; and with video, it’s possible to adjust the frame rate and speed. So if you want some slo-mo (rather than just standard speed) weirdness, that’s just a couple of taps away.
Naturally, nception isn’t the kind of filter app that you’ll wheel out for every occasion, but it’s great for experimenting with, and getting some weirdness into photos, especially when exploring cities and wanting to capture a unique take on local architecture.
Stop Motion Studio Pro is designed for people patient enough to craft stop-motion masterpieces. It’s a friendly app, but flexible too. You can shoot in-app to add new frames, add existing images from your iPhone, or import video, which is converted to a string of stills.
The editor is powerful: you can copy and paste frames; a Painter mode offers text, shapes and backgrounds; you can create custom titles; and it’s possible to import audio. Playback of audio is intelligent, continuing until completion (rather than just the end of the frame), allowing multiple effects to be overlaid.
The app overreaches with talk of rotoscoping – drawing over frames in the stype of A Scanner Darkly – but for everything else, this is ideal fodder for taking your first steps towards becoming the next Aardman or Ray Harryhausen.
Motion Stills is all about making the most of Live Photos you shoot on your iPhone, whether simply browsing them, or transforming them into something to share online.
The main feed is worth the download alone, bringing your photos to life as you scroll, without the need for further interaction. Motion Stills also applies stabilization, removing wobble from your pics.
Beyond this, Motion Stills offers a range of creative tools. You can make grid-like collages from Live Photos, overlay text and emoji, or with a few swipes turn a selection of Live Photos into a shareable movie. This is all far beyond what Apple lets you do in the Photos app, and an astonishingly good product for no outlay whatsoever.
Quik is a video editor for anyone who doesn’t want to spend a great deal of time (or, indeed, any time) editing. At its most basic, you select photos and videos, choose a theme, and let Quik get on with fashioning a movie you can share with your friends – and then pretend you did all the hard work yourself.
If you’re not quite happy with Quik’s output, you can switch to an alternate theme, which alone will dramatically alter what you see. But also you can trim and reorder clips, change focal points, and add music and titles.
Although such effort is rewarded, Quik amusingly offers up videos if you do nothing at all – every week, you get an automatically compiled highlights reel. These can be amusingly scattergun in nature, but are fun to check out whenever you’ve had a particularly memorable week.
Cinegraph is about using existing videos (or Live Photos) to create images that move. Areas selected by the user animate in an endless loop while the rest of the image remains static – a beguiling effect.
The selection of tools is small, but focused on the task at hand: basic adjustment options for your image, brush/overlay settings for outlining the part(s) of your image that will move, and the means to fine-tune the video output, for example to crossfade the end of the loop.
There’s no automated stabilization, which is a pity – you’re effectively restricted to videos or stills shot using a tripod with no wobble whatsoever. But with the right starting point, Cinegraph is capable of fashioning little slices of magic. And unlike much of the competition, there’s no messing about with subscriptions or IAP for ongoing use or removing watermarks.
A playground for GIFs, ImgPlay aims to bring life to whatever you capture with your iPhone – or to fine-tune the motion within those things that already move.
You start off by loading pretty much anything from your Camera Roll: photos, videos, Burst mode images, Live Photos, or GIFs. With stills, you can select a number of them to stitch together, essentially making ImgPlay a kind of low-end stop-motion tool.
But it’s with Live Photos and Burst shots that ImgPlay really becomes interesting. You can take the video or sequence of images your iPhone shoots, trim the result (including removing individual frames), add a filter and text, and then export the lot as a GIF or video.
For free, the app’s full-featured, but buy the small IAP and you get more filters, no ads, and no watermark on export.
The burst mode in Apple's camera app is designed to get you the perfect photo in tricky situations. If you've a fast-moving subject – or are snapping someone who blinks a lot – you hold the shutter, very rapidly take loads of photos, and later select the best.
But in capturing anything up to dozens of photos, there's potential to do something with those you'd usually discard. Burstio is all about turning such images into animations.
Launch the app and you see your burst photos as little film strips, each detailing the number of images within. Select a burst and you can trim the series, adjust playback speed, and alter playback direction.
Your edit can then be exported to video or GIF. The process is elegant and simple, and brings new life to images you'd otherwise never use.
The best art and design apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for painting, drawing, sketching, design and animation.
Linea Go is the mini-me to the impressive Linea Sketch for iPad. Despite the iPhone app’s more limited canvas, it’s still a great means of getting down sketches and visual notes.
Tools mostly live in pop-up panels at the bottom of the screen. You get five layers, a handful of pens and pencils, and a smart color picker that makes it a breeze to flick through related shades. You can switch backgrounds at any point, choosing from textures and guides (such as an isometric grid). Pressure sensitivity makes it a touch wearing to scribble with digital pencils when using a finger, but the pens and other tools work well.
The end results can look rather digital, but Linea Go wins out in terms of elegance and efficiency. With iCloud cross-device sync, it’s a smart choice for iOS-based sketching.
Comic Life 3 is for creating comics from photos and other images on your iPhone. Although it works best on the bigger screen of an iPad, it’s surprisingly usable on an iPhone, not least due to the sheer speed at which you can put together a great page (or, if you’re feeling ambitious, a full multi-page book).
Much of this is down to the app’s varied templates, which get you up and running in no time. You can quickly import pictures into frames, add speech bubbles and sound effects, and then export the lot to a variety of different formats.
Oddly, the one thing the app does badly is comic-style filters – you’re better off using Prisma for that. But for making custom comics from doodles or photos of amazing days out, Comic Life 3 can’t be beaten.
Procreate Pocket is a great bet if you fancy dabbling in digital finger-painting. Whether you’re a novice scribbler or a jobbing artist, this app’s sleek interface wants to get out of your way and let you paint.
The toolbar that runs along the top of the display provides fast access to brushes. At the left of the screen are two sliders, for adjusting brush size and opacity. If you find them distracting, a four-finger tap puts you in full-screen mode, leaving you alone with your miniature masterpiece.
It all feels fluid and sleek, but there’s depth here too. A fantastic brush editor (including custom grain sources) unleashes all kinds of creativity, and the layers system provides scope for more advanced compositions. And when you get really good, you can share time-lapse recordings created automatically by Procreate Pocket, and await glory when a TV network comes calling.
Moji Maker is a construction kit for emoji. Because, as everyone knows, there can never be enough emoji in the world. On opening the app, you can tap Random to see what it comes up with, or begin with a clean slate. Loads of shapes are available, to which you add facial features, hats, and hands – everything from bushy beards to bizarre sci-fi shades.
As each element is added, you can pinch and drag to adjust its size and orientation. There’s also a deeper – if slightly fiddly – Adjust screen for flipping elements and changing their position in the stack.
When you’re done, you can save your creation for later use, either through Moji Maker’s Messages app or keyboard extension, or by sharing oversized portraits that should certainly get a friend’s attention. Or make them think giant emoji have invaded and finally taken over.
What kind of art do you think you can make from the humble rhombus? That’s the challenge you face when working with Isometric, which is – as its name suggests – designed for creating isometric artwork.
The app is very simple to use – you tap a rhombus to add it to the canvas, and can tap existing ones to rotate them. Shapes can be dragged together to make larger groups, and elements on the canvas can be colored and styled.
Isometric is especially well suited to abstract geometric art, and proves relaxing to use when stressed about the world and its problems.
But with a little planning, you can coax it towards more realistic, ambitious fare. Either way, the canvas can expand to a whopping 2048 x 2048, and you can export your angular masterpieces to Photos – or to vector formats with an additional IAP.
On the iPad, Graphic resembles a touchscreen take on desktop vector powerhouse Adobe Illustrator. You might think you’d need to be mad to try and squeeze that into an iPhone, but Indeeo has succeeded in fine style.
The app, equally happy in portrait and landscape, is initially set up for vector-based sketching, with you scribbling freehand lines that can subsequently be tweaked and edited. Smartly, the app always lets you know what’s going on under your finger, because Graphic shows that area elsewhere on the screen while you draw.
Delve deeper and you’ll find a shape library, Bézier curves, a layers system and everything else you need to craft illustrations and logos on your iPhone. It can be a touch fiddly at times, but the powerful zoom and general friendliness, of what’s a hugely powerful mobile app, help immeasurably.
Head back to the 1980s and pixel art was just, well, art. Computer graphics were chunky due to technological limitations, not because of the aesthetic desires of creatives. Nonetheless, for a mix of reasons – nostalgia, primarily – pixel art remains popular in illustration and videogames.
On iPhone, Pixure is a great app for dabbling with pixel art. Along with prodding individual pixels using a pencil tool, there’s a neat flood fill option and shape tools too. Layers provide scope for more complex art, as does the option to import an image from elsewhere as a starting point.
There’s no lock-in either: you can export to a range of formats to share your miniature masterpiece, or work on it further elsewhere.
Photoshop is so ingrained in people's minds when it comes to image editing that it's become a verb. Oddly, though, Adobe's largely abandoned high-end mobile apps, choosing instead to create simpler 'accessories' for the iPhone and iPad, augmenting rather than aping its desktop products. Valiantly filling the void is Pixelmator, a feature-rich and truly astonishing mobile Photoshop.
It's packed full of tools and adjustment options, and works well whether you're into digital painting or creating multi-layered photographic masterpieces. On iPhone, Pixelmator's naturally a bit cramped compared to using the app on iPad, but at the price it remains an insanely great bargain.
The best entertainment apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for having fun with your iPhone, whether stargazing, reading, watching TV or checking out Twitter.
Infuse Pro 5 frees you from having to load videos on to your iPhone when you fancy watching them. Instead, films and shows can be streamed from wherever the files happen to be stored, which can be pretty much anywhere, such as a drive plugged into your router, Dropbox, a networked PC, or Plex.
Once you add a folder, Infuse figures out what’s in it, and quickly downloads relevant cover art and metadata. It looks superb, and comes across a lot like a refined take on Netflix, but for your own personal movie and TV collection.
Assuming you have the network bandwidth, playback is seamless, regardless of the files you’re working with. If you want to send footage elsewhere, there’s Google Cast and AirPlay support, and Infuse will even download subtitles on request for when you’re trying to watch something on the sly.
Fiery Feeds is a powerful, usable, beautifully designed RSS reader. Once you’re subscribed to some website feeds, Fiery Feeds pulls down headlines and synopses – all for free.
It’s a great way to track sources you know and enjoy, so you never need miss anything important. You get a slew of options for customizing the visual appearance of the app, and many ways to share interesting content.
Pay the annual IAP ($9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99) and Fiery Feeds opens up further. You get a text view mode, which means synopses expand to full article feeds without you having to visit the original sites. The app also provides smart views – automatically generated feeds of ‘must reads’ and other interesting finds, bringing them to your attention when you’re tight for time.
Sky Guide wants you using your iPhone to explore the night sky. Move your iPhone around and you’ll see stars, planets, satellites and comets, as if there was nothing between you and the heavens. Alternatively, you can manually drag a finger, to explore at leisure, tapping on objects to find out more about them.
There’s an elegance about Sky Guide AR, which sets it above its iOS contemporaries. Everything from the background audio to illustrations of constellations showcases taste.
Instead of bling, you get beauty, not least when you fire up the time travel mode, and watch the stars swirl into an endless spiral of light.
And then there’s augmented reality. If you’re a keen stargazer, but can only get outside during daytime, Sky Guide will magically project constellations over the sky as seen by your iPhone’s camera. It’s a great reminder that the stars are always there, just waiting for you to look at them somehow.
Pimp Your Screen is an app for customizing your iPhone. At its most basic, this means wallpaper. You select a category, swipe until you find something you like, tap to bring up a Home screen mock-up, and save the image to Photos when you’re done.
However, Pimp Your Screen goes further than its contemporaries in key ways. There’s a Themes section, which pairs matching lock and Home screen wallpapers. There are also ‘makers’ for both screen types, which enable you to combine components in a creative manner.
In the Lock Screen Maker, you can define a background, and add text. Swiping the status bar or clock adds a background for that area alone; swipe below the clock and a (static) calendar appears.
The Home Screen Maker adds a slew of virtual shelves and icon ‘skins’ to the status bar and page backgrounds. The results can vary from beautiful to eye-punchingly taste-free. Probably best if you try to veer toward the former.
Comic Zeal is the best comic reader for iPhone. You import comics from cloud libraries or by dragging and dropping them to a special address in your web browser (sadly, there’s no local network drive access), whereupon they’re displayed as a grid or list.
Through slightly fiddly but powerful organizational tools, your collection can be categorized and tagged, making individual issues easy to access later.
The reading experience is the best bit, though. Whether you load a PDF, CBR or CBZ, Comic Zeal quickly renders pages. Page turn animations can be disabled, and you can use ‘assisted panning’ to efficiently read through zoomed pages that would otherwise be unreadable on an iPhone. There’s also a single tap button for switching between single pages and double-page spreads.
Ultimately, comics are still best read on a larger display, but Comic Zeal shows iPhones needn’t be left out when you’re on the move and want your next superhero or indie comic fix.
One of the things the iPad’s been really great at – with the right app installed – is making science approachable. But Stephen Hawking’s Pocket Universe is, in many ways, more ambitious than iPad tomes.
That’s because it attempts to bring accessibility to Stephen Hawking’s phenomenal work on mind-bending topics such as space-time and the expanding universe - and squeeze everything into the much smaller screen of an iPhone.
Given such weighty subject matter, this is a surprisingly friendly digital book, broken down into easily digestible, bite-sized sections. Throughout, the app playfully animates, filling your screen with color and using illustration to aid understanding of the text.
Naturally, there’s still the possibility of bafflement, but the app helpfully tracks what you’ve read, and is perfect brain food for filling journeys on the bus in a manner mindlessly scrolling through social feeds can never hope to compete with.
In these days of flashy news apps like Flipboard, old-school RSS readers get something of a bad reputation. But there's something really handy about subscribing to your favourite sites, and knowing you'll get every article delivered in chronological order, for you to pick through at leisure.
On the iPhone, Reeder 3 remains an excellent app for browsing and reading feeds. The interface is straightforward, and a built-in Readability view enables you to quickly load the text and images from feeds that only otherwise supply you with brief synopses.
If you've got an iPhone that supports 3D Touch, you can use that for article previews in the articles list.
The best health, diet and exercise apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for keeping fit, workouts, reducing stress and relaxing.
Paprika wants your main companion in the kitchen to be your iPhone. With the app, you can store clippings from foodie websites. Recipes are intelligently saved offline, and can be edited. You can even add photos of your successes, thereby giving you something to aim for next time!
The app also supports everything else about mealtimes. You can create grocery lists, track what’s in your cupboards and when ingredients expire, plan meals that are synced with Calendar, and create reusable menus.
The app’s not the most vibrant in its class, and lacks the handy step-by-step imagery and videos found in the likes of Kitchen Stories and Tasty, but for getting on with the business of planning and making meals, on an ongoing basis it deserves the app equivalent of a Michelin star.
Streaks is a to-do manager all about helping you form good habits – and ridding yourself of bad ones. You begin by selecting a task and defining how often you want to do it. Tasks are subsequently checked off, and you can track your progress by way of the app’s various graphs and statistics.
Where Streaks succeeds is in the flexibility of the tasks you can add, and the razor-sharp focus on getting habits infused into your routine. The bold interface is ideally suited to six tasks, forcing you to prioritize. You can set reminders, and mark items as done using the Today widget or an Apple Watch.
Task types are varied. There are those that integrate with Health, negative tasks (like smoking) to avoid completing, and timed tasks for things like meditation sessions. In all, it’s an excellent app for coaxing out a better you.
White Noise+ is an ambient noise machine, which aims to drown out distractions by filling your ears with something pleasant instead.
Rather than just offering you sounds to play, or sliders to adjust volume levels, it takes the form of a mini mixing desk akin to the smart drums grid in GarageBand. You drag sounds into the 16 available slots, with those towards the top playing at a louder volume, and those towards the right offering more complexity. It’s intuitive, effective and looks really great as well.
Neatly, should you happen upon a particularly pleasing combination, it can be saved for later playback, and the app itself includes a few examples to get you going. There’s also an alarm built-in, for using the app for meditation sessions – or to help you not oversleep when having a quick afternoon nap.
Zombies, Run! is a fitness app that urges you on not just with stats and data, but with the threat you’re about to be torn limb from limb by the undead.
Fortunately, it doesn’t just randomly blare BRAINZZZZ into your ears – it’s a full-fledged adventure experience, co-created with an award-winning novelist. So as you huff and puff, you gain insight into a dystopian future, head out on supply runs, and try not to become lunch for a zombie horde.
For free, you get a few missions, one of which unlocks every week, and interval training workouts. But the subscription packs in hundreds of missions – enough to keep you going for many months. If you’re a fan of horror or just fancy an exercise app that isn’t all about numbers and music, it’s an excellent buy.
MyFitnessPal aims to get you fitter by helping you track what you eat. Given that such tracking often involves logging meals, the app speeds things along by way of a barcode scanner, a colossal food database and a recipe importer. If you tend to eat the same meals often, you can save favorites.
All the while, your calories are tracked, and you can check how you’re doing against any goals you’ve set. The ability to connect exercise apps also means MyFitnessPal can become a kind of hub for your general wellbeing.
As ever, there’s a pro version. This seriously ramps up data, analysis and support, with the likes of nutrient insights, tips articles and fine-grained goals. In either incarnation, MyFitnessPal works well to help you more easily understand how food intake affects you.
Runkeeper is a training aid and run tracker, which has been around for more than a decade. Since its debut, it’s evolved from mapping out your runs by utilizing your iPhone’s GPS to become a kind of digital personal trainer.
If all you’re looking for is a way to track exercise, Runkeeper remains a winning app. Whether you’re running, walking or cycling, Runkeeper provides real-time data in massive glanceable numbers, and plenty of data to delve into when you’re done.
Runkeeper Go takes things further than logging and stats. For $9.99/£7.99/AU$14.99 per month, you gain access to premium training plans, and custom workouts designed to fit your schedule and ability. The price is obviously a jump up from the free app, but it’s cheaper than a human trainer, and effective when you want more than the basics.
Streaks Workout dispenses with the complexity and problems associated with mobile exercise apps. Don’t want to trudge about in the rain? Streaks Workout has you exercise inside. Lacking kit – or even a chair to lean on? This app only demands you have access to a floor.
It’s also a cinch to focus on exercises you prefer. If you fancy doing push-ups but hate planks, tap the relevant buttons accordingly. You can then jump into a semi-randomized routine that’s between six and 30 minutes long (labelled, respectively, ‘quick’ and ‘pain’).
As of version 3.0, there’s a custom workout option, too – great for people who need to know what’s coming next and how many reps to do. We suspect some exercise nuts might still consider the app limiting, but for mere mortals wanting to get fit, Streaks Workout is among the best there is on iPhone.
Insight Heart was apparently designed to make medical education explorable and fun. This is achieved by having a realistic beating heart float before your face, via the magic of augmented reality (AR).
It’s very weird, but also oddly fascinating. After planting a human outline’s feet, the outline fades and you’re left with an organ levitating above your carpet. Go in close and the heartbeat gets louder; go really close and the heart opens, so you can explore how the blood flows.
Offering further insight, the app can show how conditions affect the heart, for those times when you’re desperate to see some arterial hypertension above your kitchen table. We want a brain app next, please.
The best kids apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps, learning tools, musical toys and games for toddlers and children.
Zen Studio‘s developer describes it as a meditation app for kids, but really it’s an engaging and entertaining combination of coloring and musical toy. It’s ideal for anyone who needs to relax for a while – regardless of age.
The app’s canvases are triangles that you color in with a tap and emit a note whenever you do so. Drag out a line or tap a few triangles in quick succession and you’re treated to a little melody. It’s all very ‘zen’.
You get the bulk of the app for free, but pay the one-off IAP and it opens up in useful ways: white paint for ‘deleting’ colored triangles; a range of template-based tutorials; and unlimited save slots. You might feel ‘zen’ about not splashing out, but this is an app that’s well worth paying a few bucks for.
Foldify is a rarity – an app that’s not entirely devoted to the digital realm. Instead, it invites you to create little characters on your iPhone, which you can then print on to card or paper, and construct by way of deft folding and a dab of glue.
The interface is first-rate. You kick things off with a template – anything from basic cubes to little blocky people, cars and arcade machines. You then scribble all over that with a pen tool, slap on stickers, and import your own images. All the while, you can admire your handiwork as a little 3D model that’s updated in real-time and can be spun with a flick.
There’s also a social aspect for sharing your creations and downloading other people’s works – including amusingly cuboid takes on Steve Jobs and the original Mac.
Bandimal is probably the world’s cutest music-making app. And although it was designed for children, we’ll wager anyone with a soul will be grinning from ear to ear shortly after starting to play.
It involves loading animals into one of three available slots, and tapping out notes on a dotted grid. When the playhead moves over the dots, a sound plays, and the animal bops along accordingly – such as a whale blowing colored water while emitting suitably deep bass noises.
It’s relentlessly jolly, sounds superb, and automatically stores every song you make. And as if to cement how perfect the app is, load one of your songs and the animals count in before it starts playing.
Playground AR does what it says on the tin, in that it’s a playground for having fun with augmented reality. In short, it’s a physics sandbox, which enables you to build virtual structures on a real-world flat surface.
Placing blocks is a bit weird, because this app isn’t about drag and drop. Instead, you drag to rotate an item, and adjust its position by physically moving your device. However, there’s tons of scope here for the patient, including the means to create machines with joints, wheels and thrusters – and then blow them up with bombs.
It’s a pity you can’t save set-ups, but at least when you’re playing with virtual blocks there’s no mess to clean up when you’re done.
Toca Life: Office is an app designed for children, ostensibly giving them insight into what their parents do all day at work. Only this office is probably a lot more exciting than the one you get to spend many hours in every week.
Here, tiny fingers can dot 35 distinct characters about the place, and role-play in an office, bank, rooftop, courthouse, and apartment. There’s a virtual daycare, a swanky glass elevator, and a bank vault with an alarm.
You can draw on a whiteboard, print from the computers, discover a helicopter, and even make superheroes. Chances are you’ll want to try this out yourself when your kid’s done, too, if only to imagine how exciting your own office life could be.
DNA Play is an educational app for children that serves as an introduction to the basic science behind DNA. At least in theory. Really, most tiny people will be more excited about the prospect of fashioning all kinds of bizarre, colorful creatures by way of dragging and tapping.
The app begins with you completing simple ‘gene’ puzzles, which see you dramatically adjusting a monster’s characteristics, and this can be done by simply hammering away at a body part to switch it for something new - ideal for less dextrous younglings. Each monster can then be saved and its photo shared.
Occasionally, objects show up, giving you the chance to propel your monster along on a skateboard, feed it a pile of fruit, or have it totally freak out when faced by a spider significantly less terrifying than the monster. But best of all, if you get caught playing with the app yourself, you can argue you’re in the midst of an important scientific breakthrough. Probably.
If you’ve got yourself a resident tiny human, your house probably has a few of those wooden puzzles where letter shapes are shoved into their respective slots. Endless Alphabet isn’t quite, well, endless, but contains dozens of such puzzles, which work brilliantly on the touchscreen.
On your child selecting a word, monsters sprint along the bottom of the screen, scattering its letters. They then need to be dragged back into place, coming to life as they’re moved. When a word’s complete, monsters act out what it means in a charming animated cut scene.
There are some minor grumbles here and there – the app’s resolutely US-English in nature, and the sounds letters make when dragged might confuse, since they’re not full letters nor the phonics often used in education. Otherwise, this is a first-rate, charming, enjoyable educational app for youngsters getting to grips with words.
If you've seen tiny humans around iOS devices, you'll have noticed that even those that can't speak beyond bababababa and dadadadada nonetheless merrily swipe and poke at screens.
Metamorphabet capitalises on this ingrained infatuation with shiny touchscreens, and cunningly attempts to teach the alphabet via the medium of surreal interactive animations.
It starts off with A, which when poked grows antlers, transforms into an arch and goes for an amble. Although a few words are a stretch too far (wafting clouds representing a daydream, for example), this is a charming, imaginative and beautifully designed app.
If you've been around young children for any length of time, there's no escaping The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
That greedy larva seems to hypnotise tiny people, gluing them to whatever format it appears in, be it book or TV animation. There have been apps, too, but those we've seen before have disappointed. My Very Hungry Caterpillar, though, is a new take on the character, turning it into a kind of virtual pet.
Children familiar with the source material will watch happily as fruit they pluck from trees is quickly munched by the wriggly protagonist, but this app has far more to offer.
Gradually, it opens up all kinds of activities, such as growing a garden, playing with a ball, making art by getting messy with paints, and having fun on a pond. The app changes with the seasons, and so in winter the caterpillar gets to gleefully slide across frozen water, but in warmer months goes sailing.
It's all very charming and adorable, along with being entirely without risk — there's no way to off the little blighter. It's also finite: the little caterpillar grows fat and eventually becomes a butterfly, at which point a new egg appears to start the cycle again.
And if we're being honest, there's something quite cathartic in seeing the little chap through this journey, to the point we imagine quite a few adults will sneakily launch the app for a while when their child's asleep.
For most kids, plastic keyboards and annoyingly loud toy drums are a typical starting point in music, but Loopimal ambitiously attempts to introduce children to the concept of computer sequencing. Fortunately, it does so by way of highly animated dancing cartoon animals, bright shapes, and plenty of flair.
Hit play and you're immediately shown an animal bobbing its head to a backing track. You then drag coloured pieces (from a selection of five) into eight empty slots. When the playhead moves over the shapes, the animal adds its own sounds and melodies, often while performing impressive gymnastic feats.
It's Loopimal's character that initially wins you over. Unless you're dead inside, you won't fail to crack a smile when an octopus starts playing funky basslines with its tentacles, or the percussive Yeti gets all stompy. Smartly, once the player clocks how Loopimal works, the screen can be split into two or four, to combine animals and their unique sounds.
The one big miss is the inability to save your compositions, but every Loopimal riff is in C-major; this means you can use just the white notes on nearby keyboards to play along with whatever madness is happening inside the app.
The best music and audio apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for making music, listening to podcasts and being a DJ.
Capo touch helps musicians learn songs without resorting to sheet music. Instead, you load an audio file and the app detects guitar or piano chords – however obscure the artist or song happens to be.
To help you master tricky bits, there’s a variable speed slider, and you can loop user-defined regions. There are isolation tools as well, to bring specific instruments to the fore. Chords can be edited, regions named, and entire songs transposed to different keys.
There are snags in that the app requires local music files to work with (so no bringing across a song from Spotify or Apple Music). Also, you need annual IAP to get more than 60 seconds of playback per session. But as a learning aid when you absolutely must nail a song, it’s an essential install.
Samplebot is a colorful grid of buttons that you use to capture sounds. Press a pad, make a noise, and it’s then played by tapping the pad again. Fun stuff – but it turns out Samplebot has more layers than an onion.
Recorded sounds can be trimmed, and arranged in a sequencer. Pre-defined drum patterns are included, but you can also tap out your own. Beyond that, you can import audio from cloud services, Music, Files, or the clipboard, and manage sounds in-app. Tracks can be exported, and Samplebot can even be synced to other music apps.
In short, then, Samplebot is ideal for anyone wanting to make some noise, whether you fancy recording and playing back pots and pans being whacked, or creating entire songs.
GarageBand is a music creation app and recording studio. Ambitiously, it aims to suit newcomers and pro musicians alike – and it succeeds.
For newcomers, there are smart instruments that automate chords and riffs, and a grid pad for triggering samples and loops. Gain in confidence and you can plug in a guitar and use GarageBand’s excellent range of amps, experiment with the timeline, and create drum patterns in the Beat Sequencer.
For pros, though, this app connects to other apps via Inter-App Audio and Audiobus, can ‘import’ entire third-party apps as Audio Units, and enables you to record, arrange and mix up to 32 tracks.
The app’s a stunning achievement, and we suspect many long-time musicians can’t believe such a thing exists on a phone.
TabBank is a ‘smart notepad’ for people interested in songwriting on the go. And we mean that in the traditional sense: writing lyrics and chords, rather than prodding virtual synths.
Songs are written in basic markup. Each has an artist and title (after which you add colons), lyrics, and chords (added inside square brackets). Fancy melodies can be added by writing tab using dashes and numbers. The preview then makes everything readable – and playable. Well, sort of, as you can tap to play chords, and play tab in a slow-motion kind of way.
If that all sounds like hard work, you can grab tabs from countless websites, too, through a Safari extension; and everything can be exported to PDF, if you buy the one-off IAP. We’d like to see auto-play, rather than you having to tap individual chords, but otherwise this one’s a boon for budding songwriters.
In a sense, featuring Brian Eno : Reflection in this round-up is a bit weird. Unlike other collaborations between musician Eno and software designer/musician Peter Chilvers, Reflection is broadly devoid of interaction. Instead, it effectively just plays Eno’s ambient Reflection album, but with some clever twists.
Unlike the standard album, which is the same every time you listen, the audio here has phrases and patterns within that continually interact in different ways, and subtly change as the day progresses, creating an endlessly changing version of the music. Likewise, the painterly visual on the screen slowly morphs before your eyes.
It’s pricey, but ultimately gives you endless Eno and is an intoxicating experience for anyone that likes their ambient fare. The man himself describes the app like sitting by a river: it’s the same river, but always changing. By contrast, the standard Reflections album initially sounds similar, but it’s a recording frozen in time, never changing.
The iPhone is well-served when it comes to podcast apps, and Pocket Casts has a decidedly premium and feature-rich feel.
Podcast discovery is straightforward, by way of search, charts, trends, networks, and categories. Organization is deftly dealt with, through customizable filters and the ability to download or stream.
Playback is also smart, including a speed boost function, silence-trimming for talky shows, and a volume boost for when listening in a noisy environment.
Naturally, there will be comparisons with Overcast, which is an excellent free app, with a similar feature set. For our money, Pocket Casts nudges ahead in terms of interface and usability, making it worth the outlay.
Pocket Casts also has the advantage of being available on a range of platforms – ideal if you also use Android and want to sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress between all your devices.
This ambitious app by (ex-King Crimson) musician Adrian Belew is his take on cutting-edge modern music. He reasons that to hold someone’s attention today, music must be quick, surprising and random, making a statement and rapidly moving on.
FLUX by belew very much does that, by way of blasting out sonic snippets and semi-randomized imagery the second you hit play.
The conceit is that you rarely get the same thing twice. Songs appear in different forms, with alternate mixes, lyrics and instrumentation.
Amusingly, one ‘song’ is merely a countdown, introducing whatever comes next. It’s certainly a long way from a traditional album – and all the better for it, showcasing how apps have the potential to revolutionize music.
You might first look at djay Pro for iPhone and wonder if the developer’s gone a bit mad. You get virtual decks, sliders, and a bunch of buttons – but on an iPhone it looks a little like a DJ set-up for toddlers.
The truth is, you’re probably not going to be banging out your latest set using the app alone – although you can connect it up to a range of hardware and use it as the brains behind a controller.
However, whether you’re a wannabe or pro DJ, djay Pro for iPhone warrants investigation for allowing you to experiment on the go. The app’s hugely powerful and feature-rich (waveforms; four decks; sampler; amusing sound effects; properly clever beat-matching), making it far more than a curiosity or novelty.
As a free app, Ferrite Recording Studio is mightily impressive – a kind of beefed-up Voice Memos, which lets you bookmark bits of recordings to refer to later, and then edit and combine multiple recordings in a multi-track editor view.
But when you pay for Ferrite, it becomes a fully-fledged podcast creation studio on your iPhone.
First and foremost, in-app purchases remove track and project length limits. This affords much greater scope for complex projects, which can have loads of overlaying tracks and potentially be hours in length.
The paid release also adds a range of professional effects, which can help transform your project by making the audio cleaner and more engaging.
But whether you pay or not, Ferrite's usable, intuitive interface should make it a tempting go-to tool for amateur podcasters, even if they're also armed with a PC or Mac.
Apple's built-in Music app has increasingly sidelined personal collections, instead heavily focussing on the Apple Music streaming service. Cesium is a player designed to help you enjoy your existing music library once again.
The interface marries old-school functionality with modern iOS design, offering tabs to quickly access artists, albums, songs and playlists.
Mostly, though, Cesium is great at providing the features music fans want: you can quickly edit and add to an upcoming queue; library sort options enable you to switch between alphabetical and chronological lists; and the landscape mode is just like the portrait mode but in widescreen, rather than trying (and failing) to do something 'clever'.
So if you're after a music player for iPhone that's tasteful, smart, full-featured and free of gimmicks, buy Cesium.
Let's immediately get one thing out of the way: Korg Gadget isn't cheap. It's not the sort of app you're going to download for some larks, use for a few minutes, and then casually toss aside. However, if you've any interest in making music — whether as a relative newcomer or jobbing musician — it is quite simply the best app available for iPhone.
Purely as a tool for live performance, Korg's app is first-rate. You get a bunch of miniature synths, referred to as 'gadgets'; they're geared towards electronic music, but still have plenty of range.
There are drum machines, a gorgeous bell synth, some ear-smashing bass instruments, and plenty of other options, whether you want to be the Human League for a bit or go all clubby.
Each synth comes with a slew of presets, but you can fiddle with dials and levers to make your own, which can be saved for later use.
When it comes to writing music, you can record live, tapping out notes on a tiny on-screen keyboard or by using a connected piece of hardware. Alternatively, there's a piano roll for tapping out notes on a grid as you do in GarageBand, creating loops to then combine into a song in the mixing-desk view.
Korg Gadget is one of the most flexible and intuitive music-making apps we've seen on any platform, and the deepest on iOS. It was superb on the iPad, but that it actually works — and is very usable — on iPhone is nothing short of astonishing.
The best office and writing apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for file management, video memos, writing, email, spreadsheets, notes, presentations and calculations.
1Password, like iCloud Keychain, is used to store website logins and payment information. But this app then goes further, being able to house details for servers, app license details, notes and identities.
The other big advantage is 1Password being a standalone app. Launch it and use Face ID or Touch ID and you’ll quickly be browsing your logins and data, which can be further refined through the use of favorites and tags. A first-rate password creator is bundled, too, for when you need a new or replacement website password.
The core app is free to try for 30 days, after which point a subscription is required. However, this unlocks the app across a range of supported platforms, including macOS, Android and Windows – something iCloud Keychain cannot compete with.
FileBrowser is a file browser app, which you probably already guessed from its name. But this isn’t for rummaging around what’s on your iPhone – it’s for getting at files stored pretty much anywhere else.
Connecting to a PC, Mac, or some other local or online storage is straightforward, whereupon you can send and receive files. Usefully, favorite connections can be saved to quickly get at them later, as can often-used folders – the latter being stored as bookmarks.
Although the app has the odd strange omission (the lack of Share sheet integration being the most obvious), its basic interface almost hides a wealth of features, including file viewing, audio recording, archiving, internet downloads, and even streaming capabilities. It does a lot, without overwhelming you with features, and is a good buy if Apple’s Files doesn’t meet your needs.
Calzy 3 is a playful, friendly calculator app that betters the one built into your iPhone in key ways. As well as playing a pleasing sound whenever a key is tapped, it gradually builds a sum below the main display. Not only does this allow you to sanity check your ongoing calculation, but also you can at any point tap a figure or operator and swap it out for something else.
Another useful feature is the ‘memory area’ where you drag figures from the main display, which can later be dropped on operators to add to the current sum. We also liked how Calzy 3 automatically stores calculations you make in a scrollable history. You can bookmark useful sums for later retrieval, and assign a label (text or emoji) for added context.
Noted is a rich-text notepad and voice memos app combined. This isn’t a new concept on the iPhone – other apps do much the same. But Noted differentiates itself by enabling you to mark important moments within the recording.
This is achieved using #TimeTags. As you type up notes while recording, tapping a button places a tag inline. When you subsequently tap a tag, your recording instantly starts playing from the relevant moment. This means you can take basic notes during a meeting or lecture, and then flesh everything out later, without having to constantly scrub through a recording to find the relevant parts.
You’ll need a subscription to make the most of the app – not least to record more than a handful of notes – but for many people, #TimeTags alone will be worth the outlay.
MindNode 5 helps you connect your thoughts and figure out how ideas link together. This is achieved by way of mind maps – diagrams that begin with a central thought and connect it to related ones, typically resulting in something resembling a mutant spider.
However, when you work with MindNode 5 instead of paper, such messy results don’t happen. Instead, you get a system that can automate and lay out even the most complex of interrelated thoughts beautifully, with color, icons, and images when appropriate.
This all works nicely on the iPhone’s smallish screen, too. A superb Quick Entry mode helps, transforming a bullet-point list into a mind map via a single tap, but the entire interface is heavily optimized towards iPhone use. In short, MindNode 5 is easily the best in its field.
PCalc is a traditional calculator – like the super-powered equivalent of something you might find sitting on a desk. If you want something more conventional than the calculator meets sort-of spreadsheet Soulver, PCalc is simply the best there is on iPhone.
For a start, the app’s almost absurdly feature-packed. There’s multiline and RPN, a paper tape, and multiple undo. Need conversions and constants? Done. Engineering and scientific notation? Sure. You can even edit the individual buttons, if you for some reason want the 6 key to be massive.
The app has a slightly odd sense of humor, too. Head into the Help section in its Settings and fire up the ARKit About PCalc screen, and lob anti-gravity bananas about the place. This is a calculator with leaderboards and achievements, and – we say again – anti-gravity bananas. Buy it.
Just Press Record is a highly usable audio recorder and transcription tool. It’s also an excellent example of how to take an app that’s extremely simple and add new features without drowning it in complexity.
To start, you still tap a big, red button, and then record whatever you want to say. Saved recordings head to iCloud, meaning they can be accessed on any device. On your iPhone, they’re found in the Recents and Browse tabs, the latter listing them by date.
There’s also a Search tool – which might seem redundant until you realize every recording is automatically transcribed. Naturally, this doesn’t always nail context – during testing, it mixed up ‘synced’ and ‘sinked’ – and you have to manually say punctuation (such as ‘comma’).
Still, this means that you can share text rather than just audio files, and that every utterance you make can potentially be found by keyword, instead of you scrabbling through a huge list of recordings. It’s really smart stuff.
Pennies is all about managing your money. But whereas finance trackers have a tendency to be dry and complicated, Pennies goes for a much friendlier approach. Using the app’s colorful, straightforward interface, you can quickly and easily define new budgets around any kind of topic, and add or remove money from them.
Much of the app’s effectiveness lies in the way it encourages you to categorize your spending. Want to cut down on coffee? Create a ‘coffee’ category and get a monthly and daily budget, along with a visible reminder of when you can next spend.
Your entire history always remains available in an ongoing scrolling list, and because Pennies syncs across devices, your figures are readily available on iPad and Apple Watch too. In short, it’s the budget tracker for the rest of us.
Untitled rethinks screenwriting. Rather than you having to remember how to format your next Hollywood blockbuster, Untitled prioritizes you getting ideas down, through providing a helping hand regarding how your script should look.
This works by way of simple-to-remember shorthand, such as placing dialogue underneath a character’s name, or ‘>’ before a transition. The app’s also intelligent enough to reformat scene headers (intro/location/time) from plain English into the correct style.
On iPad, Untitled is a friendly screenwriting tool, but its relaxed, note-taking approach really feels at home on iPhone. It’s not a tool you’d likely use to fine-tune a fully polished screenplay, but it’s excellent for starting one – wherever and whenever inspiration strikes.
You can of course use a wide range of apps for storing real-world scribbles – photograph a journal page and you can fling it at the likes of Evernote, say. But Carbo tries something more ambitious. Your sketches and notes are cleaned up, and converted to vectors, while preserving your original stroke.
What this means is that images within Carbo retain the character of your penmanship, but are also editable in a manner standard photographs are not – you can select and move specific elements that Carbo intelligently groups, adjust line thicknesses throughout the entire image, add annotations and tags, and export the result to various formats.
It's a friendly, intuitive app to work with, and efficient, too – a typical Carbo note requires only a tenth of the storage as the same image saved as a standard JPEG photo.
On the desktop, Scrivener is popular with writers crafting long-form text. On iPad, the app is - amazingly - barely altered from the PC and Mac release; but Scrivener on iPhone is a slightly different prospect.
That's not to say this isn't a feature-rich and highly capable product. You still get a solid rich-text editing environment and a 'binder' to house and arrange documents and research, before compiling a manuscript for export.
What you lose on the smaller screen is those features that require more space: a two-up research/writing view; the corkboard for virtual index cards.
But Scrivener is still worth buying - although you're unlikely to write an entire screenplay or novel on an iPhone, you can use the app to take notes, make edits, and peruse your existing work, wherever you happen to be.
Traditional calculator apps are fine, but even if they come with digital tape, you don't get figures in context. By contrast, a spreadsheet is overkill for most adding-up tasks. Soulver is a neatly conceived half-way house — like scribbling sums on the back of an envelope, but a magic envelope that tots everything up.
You get two columns. On the left, you type everything out, integrating words as you see fit. On the right, totals are smartly extracted. So if you type 'Hotel: 3 nights at $125', Soulver will automatically display $375 in the totals column.
Line totals can be integrated into subsequent sums, ensuring your entire multi-line calculation remains dynamic — handy should you later need to make adjustments to any part.
Given the relative complexity of what Soulver's doing, it all feels surprisingly intuitive from the get-go. There are multiple keyboards (including advanced functions and currency conversion), you can save calculations and sync them via iCloud or Dropbox, and it's even possible to output HTML formatted emails of your work.
There are two flavors of Scanbot, each of which is impressive in its own right. For free, you get a superb iPhone scanner with cloud storage integration, QR code support, and the means to detect edges for any paper document you want to digitise. Upgrade to Scanbot Pro and things get more interesting. You can add pages to existing scans, quickly name files using a clever smart-naming system, and search/extract text from previous scans.
There's also an automated actions feature, where the app finds the likes of phone numbers and email addresses within your scans, turning them into single-tap buttons within each item's actions menu. It's not quite accurate enough to be witchcraft, but we nonetheless happily leave important scans within Scanbot these days, rather than immediately deleting after export.
The best productivity apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for being productive with launchers, focus timers and to-do lists.
Yoink can be thought of as a super-charged version of the clipboard. It’s used to stash all kinds of things for later – text snippets, URLs, images, and even documents and emails. Items added to Yoink can be renamed, formed into groups called ‘stacks’, and previewed.
Files integration means you can get at everything you’ve stored in the app without actually going into Yoink itself. Siri Shortcuts support also means you can stash your clipboard’s contents without first activating the app.
Cross-device capabilities round out a great app – iCloud sync allows you to get at Yoink content saved on any of your devices. And so although this is probably not an app you’ll use every day, it’s a massive time-saver when you need to collate files from disparate sources on mobile.
Launch Center Pro resembles the iOS home screen, but it launches actions rather than apps. For example, instead of firing up Phone or Safari, Launch Center Pro can trigger a call to a specific person, or launch a particular website.
There are, naturally, some limitations. The Launch Center Pro website outlines supported apps and actions (click ‘all’ to see the full range); but you’ll likely already own a bunch of these, and be able to think of ways the app can make using an iPhone easier for you.
You don’t even have to launch the app either – shortcuts can be assigned to Today view widgets, or Quick Actions when you press down on the app’s icon. In short, it’s a great speed dial for your favorite app actions.
Fantastical 2 acts as a replacement for the iOS Calendar app. You might question the logic in buying something like this, but Fantastical 2 quickly pays for itself by making you more efficient.
This is apparent the second you check out the main view. Rather than having to laboriously tap each day to see its events, Fantastical 2 provides a scrollable feed, making it a cinch to see how your schedule looks into the future – and to quickly browse the past.
Reminders are integrated, too, and event input includes a powerful natural-language parser. As you tap in the likes of ‘TechRadar lunch at 3pm on Friday’, a live preview builds. And none of the data you add is locked in – Fantastical 2 works with your existing iCloud account, Google Calendar, or Exchange.
BFT - Bear Focus Timer is yet another app designed to make you use your iPhone less and concentrate more, but if you need a sense of focus and are easily distracted by your iPhone, it’s one of the best of its kind.
First, it features a friendly bear, and who doesn’t like bears? Secondly, the app’s Pomodoro-style timers are adjustable, so you can fine-tune lengths for work, short breaks, session counts, and long breaks (recommended after several work/short break sessions).
The app’s interface is the real star though, inviting you to turn your device upside-down to get the timer going. Pick up your phone and the timer stops, while the previously friendly bear scowls. It’s amusing and chastising in equal measure, making you smile, flip your phone back, and listen to the app’s helpful hubbub-drowning noise loops.
Things 3 is a task manager that wants to help you get more done. The interface is sleek and the workflow is smart, helping you collect thoughts and plan your time efficiently.
The app’s core is to-dos, but it allows you to add context, such as the time, date or location that you plan to carry the task out. Things 3 then populates a Today view with the day’s tasks (cleverly grouping things you do at home under a This Evening heading), and puts later tasks in an Upcoming list.
The finer points of the app’s design and interactions make it a joy to use. Animations are subtle, but colors are bold. Clever details are dotted about, like the ability to position a new entry by dragging the to-do button to a list.
Things 3 isn’t cheap – especially if you also buy it on iPad and Mac – but the potential time savings make it good value.
The idea behind Forest is to get you to leave your iPhone alone. It does this by having you plant a tiny sapling and set a timer. If you succeed in not using your iPhone until the timer’s done, you get to plant what’s now a little tree in a virtual forest. If you succumb to temptation, Forest mercilessly kills your tree, leaving a barren little twig.
Amusingly, if you try to trick the app by switching away, it’ll immediately send a terse reminder to have you switch right back. But despite this somewhat gruff element, Forest ranks among the best gamified focus aids.
Over time, it’s rewarding to see your forest grow, unlock new trees, and delve into detailed statistics. Also, using coins earned in-app, you can buy real trees for communities that need them. And all because you avoided Facebook for a few hours.
Focus and burnout are two commonplace issues for people in work. Too often, you can become distracted from tasks; but also there’s the risk of working long hours without a break, leading to fatigue. Focus Keeper aims to deal with both.
The timer is loosely based around the Pomodoro Technique (a time management method), and recommends splitting your time between 25-minute work sprints and five-minute breaks. After four sessions, you take a longer break of about half an hour.
The app is clutter-free, and easy to use. The timer combines a minimal iOS-like design aesthetic with hints of a real-world timer’s dial. You can delve into statistics, adjust work/break lengths, and choose alternate alarm and ‘ticking’ noises. Most importantly, however much this is all about psychology, it does work. Need convincing? Try the free version first.
The best travel and weather apps for iPhoneOur favorite iPhone apps for planning a holiday, currency conversion, weather forecasts and mapping.
Dark Sky Weather started out primarily as a rainfall tracker, with luminous clouds billowing over a dark background map. Now, the app is much more conventional – but arguably massively more useful.
The main forecast page shows current conditions and a local map. Usefully, little arrows denote the direction a storm’s heading, so you can always spot that at a glance, rather than having to check the full animated rainfall view. Below that you get rainfall predictions for the hour, the daily forecast, and a weekly outlook. It’s all very sleek, efficient and usable.
The app’s accuracy may vary by location, but during testing in various countries we’ve found its rainfall predictions to be spot-on. It’s also a nicely flexible app regarding warnings – several notifications are built in, and you can add your own based on a range of weather conditions.
V for Wikipedia is a Wikipedia reader. That in itself might sound like an odd recommendation for a premium app, but bear with us.
Although V can be used to search Wikipedia in the normal way, it starts off in its Nearby tab, flagging articles of interest in your vicinity. This looks great, tabs snaking their way from map locations to large thumbnails. It’s practical, too, for finding out more about the local area, without resorting to review-oriented web services.
This sense of polish extends to the article views. Typography and layout are first class, and a slide-in contents list is only a tap away. So while you might narrow your eyes at the prospect of paying for a Wikipedia reader, Viki will have said eyes busily and regularly reading the world’s most dynamic encyclopedia.
WeatherPro is a weather app designed for people who favor information density over aesthetics. That’s not to say WeatherPro looks bad – its white-on-blue stylings are perfectly nice. But where it excels is in providing fast access to a wealth of weather data.
For any selected location, a single screen shows the current conditions, a local radar, upcoming predictions and then a forecast for the coming week. The latter packs temperatures, sun hours, precipitation forecasts and wind speeds into a tiny space.
In pretty much all cases, tapping on something lets you delve into even more information, and additional taps provide layered mapping and radar services. Accessing some layers requires an IAP subscription, but just the bare-bones WeatherPro is a great buy if you want at-a-glance forecasts packed with detail.
Citymapper is a navigation aid for finding your way around big cities. It doesn’t cover the entire globe, but is instead focused on a handful of major destinations, such as New York, Chicago, Tokyo, London, Paris and Sydney. Locations are periodically added by way of user votes.
If you live in or visit a supported city, Citymapper is superb for helping you find your way around more efficiently. The app quickly finds where you are and offers options – in real-time – of how to reach your intended target.
And small details really help it stand out, such as you being able to track the location of a bus you’re waiting for, alerts that blare when your stop’s coming up, and even recommendations of the best carriage to get on – and the fastest station exit to use.
Google Maps is the best mapping app on iPhone.
It’s extremely good at locating places you want to visit, be that a distant town or a point of interest like a restaurant or store. When it comes to turn-by-turn driving directions, the voiceovers lack the nuance of Apple’s Maps, but the actual directions tend to be more helpful when it comes to dealing with incidents like congestion.
Google Maps is great for planning and non-car use, too. There are reviews and recommendations for places to go, public transport routing, and Street View – a navigable 3D street-level map for scoping out landmarks that proves handy when traveling somewhere or visiting a new place.
Importantly, you can also download chunks of map for offline use, turning Google Maps into a turn-by-turn navigator even when you lack a data connection.
CARROT Weather rethinks weather apps, mostly in being helmed by an angry AI that seemingly won the ‘most likely to kill people in their sleep’ award over HAL. Sure, you get the usual rainfall warnings, hourly forecasts, and weekly outlooks, but they’re all delivered with a layer of snark.
Venture into the excellent Today view widget and CARROT will ‘LOL’ if it’s going to rain. If it’s sunny, she’ll hope you get tan lines, call you a meatbag, and suggest you make the most of the nice weather – “or else”.
It’s uniquely entertaining in its App Store category, but also usable, colorful, and configurable. The maps are extremely variable by country, and some layers require IAP – as do a number of useful settings. But otherwise this is one of the best – and certainly the most fun – weather apps for iPhone.
We’ve lost count of how many currency converters exist on the App Store, but it’s vanishingly rare to see anyone try something properly different.
Elk bucks the trend, with a unique interface and approach that might not appeal to traders, but feels very much like currency conversion for the rest of us.
On firing up the app, you select your two currencies and it offers a list of current rate conversions. For USD to EUR, for example, you get a list of the rates for one through ten dollars. Swiping from the right increases these values by ten. To access rates between two values, tap an entry.
Smartly, you can also input a fixed rate, for example to track your spending on a holiday when you’ve already got your cash. Most of the features are behind a paywall, but a 14-day trial lets you try them for free.
This one’s all about ‘points of interest’, hence the name – Poison Maps (‘POIs on maps’). Essentially, it’s a wealth of information from OpenStreetMap shoved into an app and twinned with an interface that makes it a cinch to drill down into categories.
So, mooching about London and fancy a bite to eat? Tap on the food and drink icon. Something quick? Tap Fast Food. Pizza? Sounds good.
Each tap filters the POIs and navigation buttons displayed, and arrows point at nearby locations when you’re zoomed in. Everything’s extremely responsive, and the maps and icons are clear and easy to read. Other nice bits include a full-screen mode, a search function, and public transport overlays.
The only snag is Poison Maps is a gargantuan install – well over 1GB. If that’s a bit rich, smaller regional alternatives by the same developer exist, each being a free download with a small IAP to unlock all categories.
From a functionality standpoint, Living Earth is a combination clock/weather app. You define a bunch of cities to track, and switch between them to see current time, weather conditions, and when the sun's going to make an appearance and vanish for the day.
Tapping the forecast quickly loads an outlook for the entire week; prod the clock and you'll get the weather and time in each of your defined locations.
What sets Living Earth apart, though, is the globe at the screen's centre. This provides a live view of the planet's weather - clouds, by default, which can be swapped for temperature, wind and humidity.
We like the clouds most, along with the way the virtual planet can be slowly spun with the slightest swipe. It'll then lazily rotate between zones in daylight and those lit up after night has fallen.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2050 entry-level graphics card leaks out
On the heels of rumors of a new GeForce RTX 2060 and mobile versions of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards, we’ve now heard word of a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050.
A new graphics card featuring 896 CUDA Cores, 14 SMs, 4GB of video memory and a maximum frequency 1,560 MHz has appeared in the GeekBench database as revealed by renowned leaker TUM APISAK. This rumored GPU has only been identified as a “Graphics Device” created by the Nvidia Corporation, but it safe to assume it’s built upon the Turing architecture and it will likely be the new GTX 1050 (Ti) replacement as it only features 4GB of video memory.
It also seems that our mystery GPU scored 114,206 points in OpenCL that’s remarkably higher than the existing GeForce GTX 1050 Ti’s result of around 84,000 points.
In the same tweet from TUM APISAK, GeekBench records also point to the existence of an upcoming GeForce RTX 2060. What’s more, the supporting documentation seems to confirm the GPU will feature 1920 CUDA Cores, 30 SMs, 6 GB of GDDR6 memory and a maximum frequency of 1,200MHz.
According to the benchmark page, the GeForce RTX 2060 has also scored 211,876 points in OpenCL, which supposedly puts it ahead of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti that scored only 175,000 points.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 11-series remergesNow this all lines up with what we’ve come to expect from Nvidia’s new RTX lineup – seriously bumped up specs and scores – but new reports in the rumor mill have been pointing to the existence of a separate Nvidia GTX 11-series.
Multiple sites (including Wccftech and Videocardz) have reported that this GTX 11-series would be an extension of the Turing line that forgoes the inclusion of ray tracing RTX cores. This would purportedly lead to a second line of more affordable GPUs that will be begin with the GeForce GTX 1160 and 1150.
Before we buy too much into these reports, we wanted to remind you that this current line of GPUs was already rumored to be the GTX 11-series before Nvidia pulled the rug under all of us and introduced the RTX 20-series. So this is ground we can’t imagine Nvidia would want to retread unless it really feels threatened by AMD’s upcoming line of 7nm Vega II GPUs.
However this shakes out, we’re sure to know everything Nvidia has planned as all will likely be announced at its CES 2019 press conference.
Via Tom’s Hardware
After Christmas sales 2018: the best deals the day after Christmas
Day After Christmas Sales for 2018 are here to help you buy what you didn't get as a present for Christmas, and US retailers like Walmart, Amazon and Macy's are happy to oblige with discounts.
We've tracking the price drops that are happening – even ahead of Christmas Eve – to highlight the best After Christmas deals on the internet. A lot of the discounts from a month ago are actually holding up, and we're seeing even cheaper prices in some cases.
The trick here is get what you really wanted, and do so at a better price. Retailers in the US want to offload extra inventory between now and January and lure buyers who are returning gifts into spending as much or even more money with them.
So, if you're looking for the best After Christmas sales today, check our constantly updated list of deals below.
After Christmas Sales Quick Links Walmart After Christmas salesAmazon After Christmas salesB&H Photo After Christmas salesBest Buy After Christmas sales The best After Christmas Sales 2018 After Christmas sales tip from the expertsHere's a great piece of advice for everyone shopping online: look for open-box or refurbished items in excellent condition during After Christmas sales. People who don't exactly get what they want and never play with the tech often return it. US retailers have to label these items open box and the typically come with significant price drops.
For example, that Apple HomePod deal for $250, down from $350, was actually price matched by an open-box discount that lasted a lot longer. In one case, we got it for $238, and it was listed in excellent condition.
The same will go with items like this PS4 Pro:
We'll continue to update our After Christmas sales list throughout the week, as we discover more discounts. This is just the start of what we expect US retailers to price drop. We'll also keep tabs on which deals expire, so you can hit checkout with reliable deals, as many after likely to sell out.
EE's mobile phone January sales start early - deals on iPhones, Samsung and SIM only
Ho-Ho-Ho. Nope, that's not the sound of Santa's sleigh arriving - it's the sound we made when we found out that EE has already released a batch of mobile phone deals for the January sales.
The deals start today and include a whole host of handsets. There's up to £150 to be saved on contracts for the likes of the iPhone 6S (and 6S Plus), Samsung Galaxy S8 and A6, and the Huawei Mate 20 Lite and P Smart - the last of which starts at a mere £15 per month.
Perhaps the most attractive savings come on EE SIM only deals where tariffs have been slashed on big data. We're talking 60 glorious gigabytes and unlimited calls and texts on the UK's fastest 4G network at a very reasonable £30 per month. Or reduce that monthly cost by a tenner for a still excellent 25GB.
It's even selling unlocked handsets for as little as £9.99 (when bought with a £10 PAYG top-up), with £50 off the Huawei P Smart that comes down to a very reasonable £139.99.
You can head to the EE website to check out all of the network's latest mobile phone deals, but be sure to get in there quick - these 'January sales' end on New Year's Eve!
See more:
Check out all of the UK's best mobile phone dealsOur top 15 unlocked SIM-free phones and pricesDon't miss out on the cheapest SIM only deals available today
DeepRay’s use of AI technology makes it better than the human eye
You can do an awful lot with digital imaging to make things look better. Take an editing program like Photoshop, for example. Even if you’re not a professional, it’s relatively easy to tweak and fine-tune your less-than-perfect shots and make them look a little more presentable.
If you’re an imaging-editing hotshot, meanwhile, it’s entirely possible to transform substandard pictures into minor masterpieces. Retouching has therefore been good news for anyone wanting to get rid of rough edges in a shot, particularly if they’re selling something that needs the subject matter to look, well, perfect.
British innovation outfit Cambridge Consultants, however, are taking that thinking and turning up the repair process to 11. The company, based unsurprisingly in a science park in the flatlands of Cambridge in the UK, has just unveiled the rather science-fiction sounding DeepRay.
This is technology based around artificial intelligence (AI) that can produce sharper and much less distorted images from pictures that have been damaged or had elements obscured. More impressively, DeepRay uses AI to tackle live video too.
Smart thinkingWhy would a company want to invest time and money in doing something like that? Well, when you start to think about potential uses for this sort of application it all starts to make sense.
DeepRay has oodles of potential, and the company cites the world of autonomous driving, as well as uses in healthcare and medical imaging as a few of its potential target markets. And, the company seems to have so much faith in its new system that it reckons DeepRay can outperform humans when it comes to scrutinizing imagery, be it a still shot or moving footage.
DeepRay could help improve the accuracy of camers on cars
Tim Ensor, commercial director for artificial intelligence at Cambridge Consultants said: “This is the first time that a new technology has enabled machines to interpret real-world scenes the way humans can – and DeepRay can potentially outperform the human eye. This takes us into a new era of image sensing and will give flight to applications in many industries, including automotive, agritech and healthcare.”
The company has a video that showcases the powerful potential of DeepRay and, with a little bit of imagination it is possible to see where the idea could be used to good effect. Think, for example, of autonomous vehicles with on-board cameras that will be subjected to obscured or distorted views due to weather conditions and dirt obscuring their lenses and other vital sensors that view the road ahead. DeepRay might be able to use its deep learning technology to help those cameras see more clearly.
Promising resultsCurrently the system doesn’t appear to be perfect, with the results we’ve seen looking passable but flawed. However, the point is that the technology is heading in the right direction. “The ability to construct a clear view of the world from live video, in the presence of continually changing distortion such as rain, mist or smoke, is transformational,” adds Ensor. “We’re excited to be at the leading edge of developments in AI. DeepRay shows us making the leap from the art of the possible, to delivering breakthrough innovation with significant impact on our client’s businesses.”
DeepRay can put back the goodness lost in images
Of course, purists might claim that all this jiggery-pokery isn’t really the way to do things and, when it comes to correcting images then they might have a point. In the same way as Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework called Sensei can magically transform images, among other things, DeepRay could unfairly be seen as being a bit of a cheat. But, unlike Photoshopped magazine covers, this isn’t a system that is being used to fool the eye into thinking an image looks better than the real thing.
In fact, if DeepRay is able to read complex visual situations and correct live video then the benefits are obvious. It’s a potentially very practical solution. And, if the system can actually outperform the human eye then perhaps an autonomous vehicle might be a lot safer having it on-board. DeepRay, reminds Cambridge Consultants, is able to learn what real-world scenes and objects look like and, similarly, judge how they appear when various distortions are applied.
Cars are increasingly using more cameras that could benefit from DeepRay
From there, the system can tackle distorted images it has never seen before and form a real-time judgement of the actual scene. DeepRay has the capacity to see through the distortion using extensions of the complex-sounding Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
Part of the training process includes six neural networks competing against each other in teams. These teams invent difficult scenes and situations and subsequently attempt to remove any distortion that might be present.
Technical revelationThe company says that this sort of end-to-end training using so many networks together has only been possible in the last couple of years. Cambridge Consultants are hardly newcomers to the field of innovation either. They’ve been in existence for over 50 years and currently boast a workforce of more than 800 staff.
So if the research being carried out to develop DeepRay helps us all see more clearly in the years to come, albeit digitally, then so much the better. Our future vision might just depend on it.
What is AI? Everything you need to know
Huawei kit stripped from UK police network
Telecommunications equipment made by Huawei is being removed from a communications system currently being developed for the UK's police and emergency services.
BT confirmed the news after stating earlier this month that it would swap out the Chinese hardware giant's gear from the “core” of its 3G and 4G mobile networks.
The Sunday Telegraph first reported that Huawei's equipment would be removed from the Emergency Services Network (ESN) and this could further extend the £2.3bn project.
BT will cover the cost of the switch and the telecom believes that this will not lead to further delays on the project.
Emergency Services NetworkThe ESN was originally scheduled to be completed by the end of 2019 and the new system would replace an existing one owned by Motorola called Airwave.
The new system is designed around giving police, fire, rescue and ambulance services secure priority access to EE's 4G network that is currently being extended thanks to additional radio frequencies in rural areas and new mast sites.
The ESN should prove cheaper to operate than Airwave while also providing improved voice and data capabilities. However, in September the Home Office announced that it would pay to use Airwave until the end of 2022 with the possibility of extending its use further if need be.
A spokesperson for EE explained the telecoms decision to no longer use Huawei's equipment to the BBC, saying:
"We have ongoing plans to swap to a new core network vendor for ESN, in line with BT's network architecture principles established in 2006. This will be managed with no disruption to the ESN service."
Via The BBC
We've also highlighted the best Huawei phones
EU signs off major microelectronics project
A joint microelectronics project, with the aim of encouraging investment in internet-connected devices, has secured EU approval by France, Germany, Italy and Britain.
The project will receive $2bn in state aid and 29 companies and research bodies will participate including Robert Bosch, Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Osram, Carl Zeiss, Global Foundries and Murata.
The European Commission is also hopeful that public support for the project will help generate an additional $6bn from private investors.
The microelectronics project is expected to be completed by 2024.
Microelectronics innovationMicroelectronics themselves are small electronic components often referred to as chips and sensors that are found in smartphones, computers, cars and other electronic devices.
European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager praised the EU's approval of the project and explained how it will help the region innovate further, saying:
“Innovation in microelectronics can help the whole of Europe leap ahead in innovation. That’s why it makes sense for European governments to come together to support such important projects of common European interest, if the market alone would not take the risk.”
The project will focus on delivering energy efficient chips, power semiconductors, smart sensors, advanced optical equipment and compound materials.
Via Reuters
Interested in internet-connected devices? This is everything you need to know about the IoT
TechRadar Middle East 2018 Awards
Although the smartphone industry keeps producing tons of new smartphones every year, the amount of really good phones that we saw was this year incredible. There was a great phone for everyone this year, no matter what your budget was.
That definitely made it much harder to choose our favorites from the year, but it is something that needs to get done. Today, we're announcing the categories in which we'll be honoring products from 2018 as well as opening our People's Choice awards up for voting.
Voting will close by mid January, following which we will reveal our Editor's picks as well your picks.
Categories for Editor's Choice Awards Phone of the YearBest Mid-Range PhoneBest Camera PhoneBest WearableBest TabletBest LaptopBest HeadphonesBest TVBest Smart Home DeviceInnovation in Technology Categories for People's Choice Awards Phone of the YearBest Mid-Range PhoneBest Camera Phone (Blind Test)Best Online RetailerBest Tech Brand Vote for your favourites and win awesome prizes!It won't be fun if there weren't any giveaways and we've got plenty of gear to giveaway. We will randomly select one entry from each category for People's Choice awards to win a prize.
On top of that, everyone who picks all the right winners will go in a draw to get a collection of assorted goodies. You know you want them! Just make sure you follow us on Instagram and YouTube for more surprises.
But hurry up as the voting closes on the 15th of January 2019, following which we will randomly select winners.
By taking part in this competition you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the Competition Rules: www.futuretcs.com. Entries are submitted by completing the form above.
Open to persons aged 18 years or over and living in the Middle East. The winners will be chosen at random and be notified via email. The prizes are non-transferable and non-refundable. There is no cash alternative and winner will have to collect the prize from Dubai.
Microsoft may launch its own webcams
Microsoft is reportedly preparing to launch its own line of external webcams next year with the goal of bringing Windows Hello facial recognition to all computers running Windows 10.
Paul Thurrott initially reported that the software giant is currently developing new 4K camera for both its PCs as well as its Xbox One gaming console.
The cameras for Windows 10 will enable facial recognition on all Windows 10 PCs. As of now, the feature is only available on devices with built-in webcams such as Microsoft's own Surface line.
The new devices may even sport Surface branding and they could allow users to login to their systems using only their faces.
USB-C webcamThere also appears to be a connection between Microsoft's new webcams and the one it had previously said would be available with the next version of its Surface Hub. The Surface Hub 2 is expected to arrive in 2019 and the device will include a USB-C port.
In an interview with The Verge back in October, the head of the company's Surface unit, Panos Panay suggested Microsoft could soon release a USB-C webcam, saying:
"Look at the camera on Surface Hub 2, note it's a USB-C-based camera, and the idea that we can bring a high fidelity camera to an experience, you can probably guess that's going to happen."
Microsoft has made great strides recently in its push for password-less sign in using Windows Hello and the October Update to Windows 10 brought support for WebAuthn-based authentication which could soon be utilised to let users sign into sites such as Office 365 using security keys.
Via ZDNet
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The best Boxing Day sales 2018: deals landing before January sales
The Boxing Day sales are tantalisingly close right now. Actually, it seems that a few stores decided life would be easier if they pushed the discount button a bit early as we've been able to find some crackers already. It looks like the final days of deals season 2018 are going to running strong right through until those January sales for 2019.
But surely you've got better things to be doing on the Christmas break than checking through all the retailer sales and shifting through what they're claiming to be epic deals when you know full well you've seen them cheaper elsewhere on your travels on the same day. So let us do it for you and roundup the finest, genuine ones right here!
So yes sit back, scroll down a little and you'll see we've started to round up the best offers so far. We'll be updating this page throughout the Christmas, Boxing Day and right up until the dust has cleared on those January sales too. It's time to: Treat. Yo. Self.
When do the Boxing Day sales start?Not a silly question at all. As we just said, a lot of stores are starting today and we expect even more will go live on Christmas Day - yes they're pretty keen. If just before Christmas is the time to scramble for last-minute gifts, anytime from the day itself onwards is the chance to treat yourself or use those gift vouchers to make a great deal a truly spectacular bargain.
When do the January sales start?Expect an early start here too. Although if we're going off the last few years, the January sales haven't been particularly special. It's been all about the Boxing Day deals really, although we're pleased to report some of the better ones stayed online a good few days into January. January sales are more of a continuation of the remaining Boxing Day sales so you can probably expect to see many stores simply rebrand the sales to 'January sales' the day after Boxing Day on December 27th.
Given many workplaces are off until around January 2nd, retailers are keen to show you the best deals as soon as possible while you've got time off at home rather than try to push deals on you while you're heading back to work or nursing that New Year's Eve hangover.
What deals can I get right now before the Boxing Day sales?Some of you really have turned up early for the Boxing Day deals and January Sales. Well, here are some highlights of the hottest discounts on the latest tech deals you can get in the UK right now.
Back to the top ^Check out our full guide to the best cheap TV sales and deals Back to the top ^Check out our full guide to the best cheap laptop deals Nintendo Switch Boxing Day deals PS4 Boxing Day sales Xbox One Boxing Day sales Back to the top ^Don't miss the full list of Nintendo Switch prices and bundle dealsCheck out even more PS4 prices and PS4 Pro dealsCheck out the full list of Xbox One deals and Xbox One X prices Back to the top ^We've also rounded up the other Fire TV deals and Amazon Echo prices Back to the top ^ Back to top ^We've rounded up some extra Fitbit sale prices and cheap smartwatches Back to the top ^ So who's having a Boxing Day sale?All the big stores get stuck in. With so many keen shoppers going online over the Christmas period in recent years, it's just too good a chance for them to finish 2018 off with some extra money in the bank. Let's take a look at the big hitters below and what you can nab from each.
Boxing Day sales retailer quick linksMore a fan of browsing through the sales for your own special deals? Well, let us give you a head start. The links below will take you through to a wide range of retailers we're used to seeing get stuck into the Boxing Day and January sales spirit.
AmazonArgosAO.comJohn LewisCurrysZavviMobiles.co.ukCarphone WarehouseBoohooNextLovehoney The best Boxing Day sales January sales from last yearWant a little taste of what to expect in the upcoming Boxing Day sales? Directly below you'll find a selection of some of the best deals we saw last year. Naturally, these prices expired a long time ago, but they they could be even cheaper now too! We'd certainly keep our fingers crossed for lower prices each year too.
How mobilizing your business helps you do more with your technology stack
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are spending confidently on their tech stacks. Much of this is driven by the affordability of cloud-based services. Tools such as marketing automation, CRM, and web analytics, are helping SMBs to improve productivity, increase efficiencies, and reveal new insights into their business operations.
But with so many emerging technologies available, there are many decisions to be made. Choose the right solutions and your business is optimized for growth and expansion. Choose the wrong solutions and your investments may end up under-utilized and your business plans stalled.
Why its difficult to find solutions that are "fit-for-purpose"Because technology powers almost everything SMBs use, choosing the right solution starts with understanding how that product will enable your business.
For example, SMBs often have immediate, tactical pain points that they need to address, such as time-consuming and manual workflows. But they’re also looking to maximize and coordinate their investments in a meaningful way and are turning to cloud and mobile technologies to help them do just that.
Today, 62% of SMBs are using one or more cloud-based solutions in their business while 49% use mobile applications to manage operations. But with so many software-as-a-service (SaaS) and mobility options, how do you ensure these investments are both future-proof and work with your existing technology stack?
The problem with today’s tech stack, particularly for SMBs, is that SaaS tools are often procured by teams or individuals with little oversight by IT. This leads to disjointed, fragmented silos that can create operational blind spots for companies, not to mention shadow IT headaches.
Another challenge is data. Data is being captured at astonishing rates across your business – data about customers, employees, equipment, inventory, and so on. Data that could drive insights, decisions, and even compliance – if you have the power to collect, share, and learn from it. The trouble is most businesses are using manual processes to collect information – paper forms, fillable PDFs, images, etc. – making information time-consuming to collect and deriving insights from that data impossible.
Yet, there are solutions that address each of these challenges, and they draw on the tools that SMBs are fast embracing – mobile technology and cloud services.
For example, cloud-based mobile workflow platforms make it easy for SMBs to create powerful applications (no coding required) to capture, share and glean insights across all facets of the business. By replacing each of your paper forms with an application that can be filled out on a smart device and passed from one user to another for review and approvals, tedious tasks, errors, and inefficient processes are replaced with a digitized, streamlined workflow. And, because the data is stored in the cloud, it can be seamlessly pushed into existing tools like QuickBooks, Box, Google Drive, or other systems via Zapier integrations for greater utilization and insights.
By spending less time on inefficient paperwork, like completing inspections, filling in timesheets, customer surveys, retail inventory control, and more, employees can get more done and the customer experience is improved. Imagine being able to add photographs, signatures, location/time stamps and even dispatch people to jobs from a shared calendar, all from a single app.
Check the box for future-proofing your tech stackOnce a single use case or pain point is addressed, you can expand the scope to include other tasks and business processes. So, you might start with a payroll application, but then you identify a need to improve your inventory control. Adding an application for that workflow is easily done. Using pre-built templates or codeless customization you can quickly build an application to help you keep inventory and displays up to date.
There are thousands of use cases for the mobile digital capture solutions, so it is easy to expand into other workflows or tackle emerging pain points as your business positions itself for future growth – at a much lower cost than bespoke solutions.
Transitioning your business to mobile technology will not only streamline transactional processes, give you more accurate information, save hundreds of hours, but it will also reduce the footprint of your tech stack and take the pressure of IT.
As your company continues to digitally transform, look to procure solutions that seamlessly interface with existing systems and data – across your operations. No one wants 20 vendors in their tech stack, SMBs need unified, turnkey, future-proof solutions that address today’s need while easily scaling to tomorrow’s. Such solutions must be easy to implement and integrate with legacy tools so that your tech stack delivers maximum results with the least amount of impact on your investments and resources.
James Robins, Chief Marketing Officer at GoCanvas
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Free gift of Fallout Classic Collection on PC might cheer up disappointed Fallout 76 players
Bethesda is giving away a free copy of Fallout Classic Collection on PC to those who bought Fallout 76 earlier this year – or indeed, to those who buy the game before 2018 is out.
The company announced on Twitter that anyone who has logged on to the full release version of Fallout 76 gets the freebie, and this applies not just to PC gamers, but also to Xbox One and PS4 players.
The free codes for Fallout Classic Collection on the PC will be distributed at some point in January (likely early on according to Bethesda), although if console gamers don’t own a computer, obviously they won’t be able to do much with them.
Gaming goodiesFallout Classic Collection comprises of the original Fallout game plus Fallout 2, along with Fallout Tactics, so it’s an impressive compilation of veteran titles for those who haven’t experienced them in the past.
If you haven’t bought Fallout 76 and still fancy the sound of the Classic Collection, then bear in mind you can get it discounted in Steam’s Winter Sale right now – the official retail price is £13.99 (around $18, AU$25), but it currently has a 70% price cut down to £4.19 (around $5.30, AU$7.50). Grab it here.
As you’re probably aware, Fallout 76 wasn’t well-received by many, and we were disappointed in our review, where we observed that this latest outing in the franchise was “an empty shell of a Fallout game, lacking the personality and story which drives the series.”
Fallout 76 also suffered from further controversy regarding its refund policy, and the PC version of the game was criticized for being overly easy to hack, too (an accusation Bethesda denied).
Check out our best gaming PCsVia Eurogamer
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