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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Apex Legends could get gladiatorial ‘survival’ and player-stealing ‘recruit’ game modes
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:10:14 +0000
Intrepid data miners have once again been rifling through the files of Apex Legends to try to find clues of what might be coming next in the game, and it turns out that we could potentially see a new survival mode or a recruit mode, along with a kill camera feature, plus a couple of new playable characters (the eponymous Legends).
As spotted by @RealApexLeaks, there’s a reference to a ‘survival mode’ in the game’s files, although there are no details as to exactly what this may be. The only hint is that it involves a host NPC (non-player character), and possibly spectator NPCs, who could cheer players on, or sling emotes at them, giving the atmosphere more of a gladiatorial game show feel, presumably.
Naturally, this battle royale shooter is about survival anyway, so a ‘survival’ mode is a slightly puzzling concept in that respect. Perhaps it could be a PvE mode where squads face down waves of AI-controlled enemies?
Meanwhile, here’s everything that’s new in FortniteWe’ve also chosen the best gaming monitors for FortniteThese are the top free games to download on PCAll this is pure guesswork, of course, and these references in the Apex Legends files may simply pertain to features that were tested during development, and have since been abandoned (but lax coders haven’t tidied up configuration files as they should have done).
Recruitment driveAnother snippet uncovered by the same source is a ‘recruit mode’, which would suggest a game mode where any downed player you revive joins your team. That could put a very different spin on Apex Legends, as successful teams get bigger and bigger, with the last squad alive winning.
The potential kill camera is an interesting one, too, which would essentially offer a replay of how you died. That would be nice to see on some occasions, particularly in a hectic skirmish, where you’re not actually clear on exactly how you perished.
Then there are leaks pointing to a pair of new heroes: Octane and Wattson. The former apparently has some sort of stim injection as an ability, which would obviously power-up some aspect of the character – perhaps movement speed, or maybe that and melee damage, a combination which could make for some fun in a smoke cloud.
Wattson will seemingly be able to lay down a Tesla Trap, and will doubtless be themed around electricity given the ‘watt’ in his or her name. While again this is speculation, it’s clear that Respawn will want to introduce a couple of new Legends to the game fairly soon, to keep interest piqued.
We’ve already seen data-mined info which suggests EA’s battle royale shooter could get new game modes for duo squads and solo players, which number among the most requested features for Apex Legends – although there are definitely arguments for and against. Currently, the game is based on a three player squad, and very much focused on teamwork in that trio.
These are the best gaming PCs of 2019Via VG247
The best Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals in February 2019
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:07:25 +0000
So the Galaxy Note 9 has been out for a while now, making the Note 8 old news. Right? Well that's what you would think. But the 2017 model is so incredible that it still performs just like a new model and not to mention it is so much cheaper than its successor. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals are definitely still well worth a look. And it's still getting cheaper!
When the Note 8 first came out, EE had deals locked down tight but now there is a pretty good spread across providers so no matter your preference you don't have to switch, Although EE still does have some of the very best deals on this device - what else would you expect from the UK's fastest network. Samsung Note 8 deals are now under the £900-mark in total over the two-year contract and can go as low as £750.
The Note 8 is not by any means a budget device, however. It's a absolutely massive smartphone, not just in size but also in raw power. It's got the screen size and specification smarts to be a competitor to the highly praised iPhone X or iPhone's new massive iPhone XS Max and neither of those come cheap. But there are now some excellent Note 8 deals floating around. Check out our comparison chart and handpicked favourite Note 8 deals below.
Now we know some of you may have fiery memories of the Galaxy Note 7 in your head when looking at this device but leave those worries behind. Both the Note 8 and 9 have massively improved their batteries and you won't be facing overheating problems anymore. The Note 8 truly is miles ahead of the 7 in every way.
Check out today's best Samsung Galaxy Note 9 dealsThese are the best mobile phone deals in the UK right nowCheck out all of the best Samsung phone deals Our top 5 best Galaxy Note 8 deals in the UK today: Should I get the Galaxy Note 8 SIM free?Are you determined to get the very best price? Always looking to see how you can trim a few pounds off your new favourite gadget? As you probably know, you can now pick up cheap SIM only deals for as little as £4 a month, which could make it worth buying a SIM and handset separately or if you're willing to pay a bit more, how about Three's unlimited SIM deal for £20
The Galaxy Note 8's RRP has dropped massively recently to £649. That is much cheaper than it used to be but you will still be putting up a big chunk of money upfront. Even if you get the cheapest SIM card (usually around £4 a month for 500MB data), that would still cost near to £800 over the two years. You're probably better cranking up the upfront cost in our price comparison chart above, imposing a low maximum for monthlies and finding a cheaper deal in the long run.
To get the best price on your new SIM free Galaxy, you can head to our cheapest unlocked Note 8 deals page.
Wondering what all the fuss is about? Well the fervour for the Note 8 is probably doubled due to the fact that the Note 7 was pulled from shelves soon after release. But it doesn't take more than one look at the Note 8 to see that it justifies the hype.
The huge 6.3-inch ‘Infinity Display,’ is gorgeous to look at, the 6GB RAM innards go like a train and there are two best-in-class rear cameras. It's expensive, but we think the Note 8 is worth it.
Read TechRadar's full Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review
The best PS4 Pro prices, deals and bundles in February 2019
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:05:24 +0000
So you're thinking about PS4 Pro deals or maybe a bundle? Well we can most certainly help you out there as we're always checking out the latest sales. Maybe you're upgrading from your older PS4 so you can dive into 4K gaming. Or maybe you've never had a PS4 and are thinking you may as well start with the best. All solid choices, especially if you're already set with a 4K TV, even better if it has HDR too.
There are some fantastic-looking games out now to really make a PS4 Pro shine; Red Dead Redemption 2, Spider-Man, God of War, Detroit: Become Human are all serious lookers and jaws are bound to drop further when The Last of Us Part 2 sneaks onto our 4K TVs later this year.
You'll find all of the latest and best PS4 Pro prices from the big name stores in our comparison chart below. There's not too much difference in price between retailers at this time of year, but we're constantly on the lookout for the latest deals and bundles. Looking to buy in Australia? You'll want to take a look at our AU page.
If you'd prefer a standard PS4, then check out our PS4 bundles (USA) or PS4 deals (UK) pages. Don't forget to top up your subscription with one of our discounted PlayStation Plus deals too.
So keep this page bookmarked to stay informed of the latest PS4 Pro bundles when they arrive. If you're looking for more information on the PS4 Pro, take a look at our handy Q&A below the bundles.
PS4 Pro bundle deals (USA)Worthwhile PS4 Pro bundles have been pretty much non-existent in the US for the last few months. The PS4 Pro on its own has seemingly sold out at the regular $399 price, meaning we've only seen units for sale via third-party sellers on sites like Amazon/Walmart for prices often at least $40 more than usual. This long after release, we're not cool with that you shouldn't be either. As a bare minimum, you want at least one game with the console for $399, ideally less in the next few months. The only decent PS4 Pro bundle today is the Read Dead Redemption 2 one we've just added below, don't expect stock to last long on this one though.
PS4 Pro bundle deals (UK)Need an extra controller on the cheap? Take a look at the best DualShock 4 deals. We also have a guide to the best PlayStation VR deals too.
If you're buying a PS4 Pro, you'll probably need a cheap PlayStation Plus deal too. PlayStation Plus (aka PS Plus or PS+) allows you to play PS4 games online, along with access to the Instant Game Collection, a bunch of free games for PS4, PS3 and Vita each month. The default price for a year is £40. We've shopped around for you though and found a range of prices. So check out our guide of you want the best PlayStation Plus deals.
What is the PS4 Pro?Essentially, the PS4 Pro is an upgrade of the PS4, rather than a 'next-gen' console. The keywords to take in from the PS4 Pro are 4K and HDR. The new machine will allow game developers to include 4K options in their games, so expect the like of Uncharted 4, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Days Gone, Horizon: Zero Dawn and more to look even better on a 4K TV.
HDR, or High Dynamic Range is the other buzzword to be excited about as the PS4 Pro will allow for extra detail to be seen on a range of games and also a wider range of colors not usually displayed by traditional HD TVs.
Will my old PS4 games work on PS4 Pro?Absolutely. If you're planning on upgrading to a PS4 Pro from an older PS4, all of your games will still work. Not every title will be patched to take advantage of the new 4K/HDR capabilities, but the default upscaling (if you have a 4K TV) will more than likely see some improvement to the visuals and the improved console power may give the frame-rate a boost on some titles.
What else can I watch in 4K/HDR on PS4 Pro?The PS4 Pro is compatible with 4K and HDR, and the content options for both are increasing all the time on services like YouTube and Netflix. Amazon Prime video is yet to be updated for 4K content though.
Does the PS4 Pro support 4K Blu-rays?No. This was a surprise if we're honest, especially as both the Xbox One S and Xbox One X consoles do. It's a bit of a gamble for Sony, but at the same time, 4K Blu-rays are very expensive for now and many consumers look to digital services to provide their 4K movies and TV content instead.
Do I need a 4K TV to run a PS4 Pro?No, the PS4 Pro will still work on a regular 1080p TV, you won't get the benefits of upscaling or HDR though. You may see a slim amount of extra detail, or frame-rate boost, but we wouldn't expect a massive leap.
If you are thinking of buying a 4K TV soon, then it's probably a good idea to splash out on the PS4 Pro instead of the regular or new PS4 Slim as it'll future proof you for a while. Be sure to look out for a TV that supports HDR too, in order to take full advantage of the PS4 Pro's capabilities.
Will PlayStation VR be better on the PS4 Pro?Early reports say yes. The PlayStation VR frame-rate is better on PS4 Pro and the resolution gets a bit of a bump too. PlayStation VR will certainly work on the older PS4s, you don't need a PS4 Pro to get involved there.
Does the PS4 Pro have optical audio support?Yes! The optical audio output has been removed from the PS4 Slim though, which is a massive shame. PS4 Pro owners though will still be able to use optical connections for their soundbars and sound systems.
What are the best games on PS4 Pro?We've dived through our back catalogue of PS4 games that have received a PS4 Pro update patch to see which ones look the best and have a noticeable difference. Take a look at our extensive feature - The best PS4 Pro games.
Three trials cloud core 5G network with staff
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:57:17 +0000
Three is trialling a “world-first” cloud-based core network with its staff ahead of a full rollout to customers later this year.
The overhauled core network, delivered by Nokia, is a key component of Three’s £2 billion 5G investment programme, which also includes new equipment, spectrum and an IT transformation.
5G networks will deliver improved speeds, greater capacity, and ultra-low latency that will enable a raft of new consumer and business applications. Three’s new core network will make it easier and quicker to rollout new services, while also reducing the cost-effectiveness of its infrastructure.
Three CEO: Capacity not speed is benefit of 5GThree bigs up 5G FWAWhat is 5G? Three 5G coreTo improve latency even further, Three has moved away from using just three data centres in London and the Midlands to 21 dotted around the country. This means that data processing in the core is performed closer to the point of collection.
All data centres have also been connected to fibre to reduce the time it takes to send data between mast and core. All of Three’s mobile sites have been connected to the core since December.
Three sees 5G as its opportunity to transform from the UK’s smallest mobile operator into the market leader thanks to its significant spectrum holdings boosted by auction victories and the acquisition of UK Broadband (which operates the Relish FWA service).
Three customers consume an average of 7.6GB a month and with demand for data increasing all the time, the operator believes 5G will finally give it the craves – especially after the failed attempt to merge with O2
It believes the additional capacity will ensure it can affordably boost the capacity of its mobile network to cope with exploding customer demand and support fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband than can be a genuine alternative to fixed line connectivity.
Here are the best Three mobile phone deals for February 2019
The best iPhone SE deals in February 2019
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:40:42 +0000
The iPhone SE may have been officially removed from the Apple Store, but the budget Apple smartphone continues to sell at some seriously rapid speeds. That's largely because the cheapest iPhone on the market recently had yet another price drop and heading into 2019 it is still beautifully cheap - and on this page you'll find the best iPhone SE deals in the UK.
Following Apple's product launch back in September, it feels like the iPhone SE 2 is still no closer to being released. But that hasn't stopped tariffs falling and you can now get iPhone SE deals on contract for a mere £15 per month - that means around £400 over the course of the contract!
The tech world rejoiced when the iPhone SE was released. Finally, a new Apple phone that doesn't require you to remortgage your house and take on a second job - unlike iPhone XS Max deals! It looks and feels exactly the same as the iPhone 5S. But instead of sporting two-year-old hardware it's fully up to date, with a super-fast CPU and graphics, and the 12MP iSight camera straight out of the iPhone 6S.
If cheap iPhone SE deals are what you seek, then you've definitely come to the right place. Use TechRadar's comparison chart to easily find the ideal plan, or scroll down further to find our pick of the best SE deals on the market.
More options: iPhone 8 deals | iPhone 7 deals | iPhone 6S deals | iPhone deals | Best mobile phone deals
Lower down the page you'll be able to read about all of the best iPhone SE deals on a model-by-model and network-by-network basis. But first of all here are the best deals so you can instantly see what the best offers are from EE, O2, Three and Vodafone.
Launched back in March 2016, the 'Special Edition' iPhone SE was a rare example of Apple dropping its entry-level price to allow bargain-hunters a piece of the iPhone pie. It reduced the screen size from the iPhone 6, but kitted it out with the same camera as the iPhone 6S. In short, it's a premium smartphone with a lower price tag – and we like that!
Read TechRadar's full iPhone SE review
Now let's break down the best iPhone SE deals by network...
Best iPhone SE deals on EE Best iPhone SE deals on O2 Best iPhone SE deals on Vodafone Best iPhone SE deals on Three
Final Fantasy IX on Nintendo Switch is a fantastic game, and an OK port
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:39:14 +0000
Despite having been reared on Nintendo consoles, the mainline Final Fantasy series has, aside from a few spin-off game exceptions, given Nintendo’s hardware a wide berth for more than 20 years. When the vintage 16-bit era of JRPGs came to a close, Final Fantasy VII saw developers Square Enix (nee Square) cosy up with Sony and its PlayStation, and pretty much never looked back.
Things are shifting slightly now though. With 2016’s Final Fantasy XV a multiplatform success, mobile devices ripe for peddling older titles on, and the Nintendo Switch console proving the perfect place to breathe new life into yesteryear's greats, vintage Final Fantasy games are making their way to Nintendo’s lead machine for the first time in decades.
Best Nintendo Switch gamesFinal Fantasy VII remake: everything you need to knowThe best RPGs you can play todaySure, they’re ports and remakes of older titles, but what a line-up developer Square Enix is offering: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy X / X2 and Final Fantasy XII, as well as spin-offs Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition, World of Final Fantasy, Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles are all headed to Nintendo Switch this year.
The first to land is Final Fantasy IX, out now, which I turned on yesterday afternoon and couldn’t stop playing until the early hours, 20 years after I first played it. It’s as captivating as ever – Square’s year 2000 attempt to bring its high fantasy, quasi-medieval style up to date for the 32-bit consoles of the day. I’d call it the Disneyfication of JRPGs with its monkey boys and bright-eyed, floppy-hatted wizards, were it not for Square’s eventual literal Disney RPG, Kingdom Hearts. The initial impact of Final Fantasy VII aside, Final Fantasy IX is arguably the best RPG of its generation.
Which is what makes the half-hearted Nintendo Switch port so frustrating.
Final frustrationsYou see, this isn’t a ground-up build of Final Fantasy IX but instead a reworking of the recent PC and PS4 versions, which were themselves based on the disappointing iOS and Android versions.
These editions were rife with annoyances not present in the original game. Noting that the touchscreen is not used in the Switch version, it still features an oversized, ugly interface designed to be tapped on mobile phones and tablets, as well as a font that misses the ‘ye olde time’ feel of the original. It’s plainly clear the lack of attention that’s gone into porting the game at the character naming screen, where you’re told to avoid using emoticons…
Image Credit: Nintendo / Square Enix
Likewise, the game launched with a bug that’s plagued all modern remakes of Final Fantasy IX – one that sees the wonderful, looping overworld map music kick off from the beginning every time you enter a battle. Remember, this is an old school JRPG, so random battles occur regularly. That means that rather than hearing a great piece of gaming music composition, you’ll quickly grow weary of hearing the same few bars over and over again.
Admittedly, there have been some attempts in these ports to improve the quality of life of these older titles whose sometimes arcane systems could be a turn-off for new players. For the most part these are welcome, but even they come with some annoyances. Hit the pause screen and you can turn on “cheats” that overpower your attacks, beef up your stats and combat attack times, switch off randomised battles and make the game run at a high speed to blitz through slower areas. But with the touchscreen unmapped and some face buttons not used, having to pause to access these and switch them off when not in use (especially the speed changing effect, which makes anything outside of battles unplayable) is a real frustration.
One of the best things about this new version of Final Fantasy IX is the improved designs of the character models. They’ve seen a big resolution bump, and look far more detailed than their original counterparts. But the static backdrops have been given no such care and attention. It’s particularly frustrating given the efforts put in by hobbyist modders on the PC to refine these classic scenes. Head over to PC Gamer to see how modders are using AI to upscale pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. Some have even been working to make these true widescreen games, rather than having to put up with the borders added to the remake to fill a 16:9 display. If a single fan can produce these results, can’t an entire team at Square Enix give these classic games the spit and polish they deserve?
And why no global, anywhere, anytime save state option? The Switch is useful in this regard as its sleep mode can hold a state in waiting while sleeping, but of all the “cheats” that could be implemented, this is one that would have genuinely modernised the game, and has been part of emulated versions of the title for a decade or more. Instead you’re stuck with specific save points, which feel very outmoded and inconvenient.
Still a classic
Image Credit: Nintendo / Square Enix
Reservations about the care this port has been given aside, Final Fantasy IX remains a stone-cold classic of a JRPG, and one that shouldn’t be missed on the Nintendo Switch. Being able to bring a lengthy title like this out and about with you, before settling in for a longer dedicated session at home is likely just what I needed to finally finish this game after having owned it on four platforms over just shy of 20 years.
But the fact that myself and others are willing to play these classic titles again and again shouldn’t be taken for granted by the developers. Considering its the first time the classic Final Fantasy titles have made their way to a Nintendo console, I’d like to see a bit more effort from Square Enix to tidy things up on the forthcoming ports in the series due later this year.
Survival without the horror: the new gaming trend that brings the scares
Three extends best ever SIM only deal...again: £20 per month for unlimited data
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:32:11 +0000
Sometimes the best deals just won't die. We've been hearing for weeks about how Three is going to finally bring the curtain down on its so-called 'limited time' unlimited data SIM discount, only for the offer to be extended. And it's happened again.
First we were told that this SIM only deal would end at the start of the month, then on February 18. But now we've had confirmation from Three that it's extending it again. So you can now get this unlimited SIM only deal for just £20 per month until February 28.
There really is no catch to dodge here, simply the best SIM only deal you can get in the UK for big data. So if you've been thinking about a new SIMO and know that you're going to need plenty of leeway for Netflix binging, podcast downloading and Spotify marathons away from the Wi-Fi, sign up now...before it's finally too late!
If you haven't already been won over by this amazing offer then you'll be excited to hear that Three doesn't shy away from offering up some extra incentives as well. Whether that be free exclusive prizes or extra roaming. You can see all of best parts of a Three SIM only deal down below.
Wuntu - Exclusive offers and freebies with Three's rewards appGo Roam - Roaming abilities in 71 worldwide countries at no extra costTravel Swagger - Get travel upgrades with Easyjet with bag drop and early boardingProbably the only downside is that you have to commit to a whole year if you go for this offer. At £240 for an entire 12 months of all-you-can-eat data, texts and calls, we think it's still well worthwhile. But if you're a commitment-phobe who wants more flexibility to cancel, then check out Smarty's £25 per month unlimited data SIM that only makes you commit to 30 days at a time instead.
Still not convinced? Select from our list of best SIM only deals in the UK today
This Ford SUV can stop on a dime – all on its own
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:30:35 +0000
Driving cars in rush hour traffic is a major pain. You’re constantly braking, then pressing the accelerator again. The irony is that most of us go into autopilot mode, never even thinking that much about how often we’re repeating the same task. This is actually a good thing – it’s called ‘default mode’ and it means we can also talk to a passenger or eat a taco at the same time.
Yet, it’s still laborious. In a recent test of the 2019 Ford Edge ST – the performance version of the redesigned sport-utility vehicle with a 335 horsepower engine – a new feature called Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop-and-Go meant the car would slow down to a full stop and then resume as the traffic picked up again. It’s something Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, and others have offered for some time, but it’s the first SUV I’ve tested with this feature.
It’s interesting because you don’t really expect this level of automation in a Ford SUV, especially one that is mostly designed for hauling people around (and maybe a boat or a trailer).
Stop-and-GoThe Edge is packed with many other advanced safety features, including lane-keeping and collision detection. I put Stop-and-Go to the test in multiple driving scenarios, including a long stretch of highway and also around town at much slower speeds.
On the highway, you will definitely appreciate the feature. After a while, you barely notice the automation. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the real benefit of technology like this when it just takes over for you and you stop noticing it. The Ford Edge would slow down, maintaining a nice distance between me and a minivan or a huge semi truck. Like any car equipped with adaptive cruise control, you can set the gap distance from far away to much closer.
Around town, the Edge also worked fine, but I did notice a few times when it could have worked better. This is actually true of all cars with a feature like Stop-and-Go. Volvo calls it Adaptive Cruise + Pilot with City Safety. Mercedes-Benz calls it Active Distance Distronic. The Edge would inch forward to the car in front of me, but in a downtown area where roads bend and divide a lot, the Stop-and-Go feature wouldn’t quite work.
This isn't surprising, because the AI in cars hasn't advanced to the point where it can really understand complex road conditions. A sensor scans in front of you, and if it 'sees' a car ahead it will stop. When that car moves forward, you’ll move forward. Yet, if the road bends suddenly, the sensor won’t see there’s still a car and you’ll speed up.
I’d prefer if an AI algorithm knew you were on a bendy road, knew there was a car in front of you still, and decided not to speed up. It means you have to manage the Stop-and-Go feature, which is not that helpful.
In another instance, still in a downtown area, I pressed resume for the Adaptive Cruise Control and the car sped up to the right speed, but I knew there was a stopped car about 100 yards in front of me. Sensors only scan so far ahead, but if the Edge had known there were stopped cars, it could have gradually increased in speed (which is what human drivers do).
The future is in the backseatThis isn’t meant as a complaint – the technology for AI-driving is still evolving, and I appreciated the automations in a normal highway traffic setting. Cars don’t yet connect to the intersection, the traffic lights, and other cars (at least not in my area – they do in Las Vegas).
The good news is that the AI will only improve and we’ll take a backseat to all of this automation and AI-powered driving some day. Literally.
On The Road is TechRadar's regular look at the futuristic tech in today's hottest cars. John Brandon, a journalist who's been writing about cars for 12 years, puts a new car and its cutting-edge tech through the paces every week. One goal: To find out which new technologies will lead us to fully driverless cars.
PS Vita will 'soon' end production in Japan
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:27:11 +0000
We knew it was coming, but it doesn't hurt any less: production of the PS Vita in Japan is coming to an end.
According to the official PlayStation Japan website (and spotted by Gematsu), shipments of the PCH-2000 ZA11 (PS Vita Black) and PCH-2000 ZA23 (PS Vita Aqua Blue) are "scheduled to end soon".
These are the only two PS Vita models still in production in Japan, which means the handheld console's end is in sight.
PS5: All the games, specs, news, and rumors for Sony’s Playstation 5The best cheap PS Vita prices, sales and deals in February 2019Best PS4 games 2019: essential PlayStation 4 releases No surprisesWhile the news is heartbreaking, it's not actually a surprise. Sony revealed last year that it would be ceasing production of the PS Vita in Japan in 2019, the handheld console's biggest market.
European and US production of the PS Vita has already ended and, from March 2019, PS Vita and PlayStation 3 games will no longer be included in the PS Plus monthly lineup.
So if you're wanting to get your hands on a PS Vita before they become a part of gaming history, then you better strike now.
Read more: PS Vita is still the best portable PlayStation money can buy
If you want to see features smartphone manufacturers will introduce in 2019, look at phones made by Huawei in 2017/2018
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:18:43 +0000
If there is one phone manufacturer that could be singled out for producing the best phones over the past few months, it would be Huawei. It is easy to see why Huawei won multiple awards from TechRadar Middle East including the best phone and the best camera phone. Huawei produces phones with features and technologies that other manufacturers adopt in their upcoming smartphones.
Let's highlight some of the innovations made by Huawei over the last few months.
7nm processor
Huawei was the first company in the industry to announce a 7nm based chipset- the Kirin 980. It was also the first company to ship an Android phone with a 7nm processor which was the highly successful Mate 20 Pro released in October of last year.
We will see plenty of Android phones based on 7nm chipsets released this year but owners of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro have enjoyed the performance of these next-generation chipsets for a few months already.
Punch hole technologyLast year's trend in screens was the notch while this year, the notch is replaced by a very small cut-out in the screen known as the punch hole. Not only was Huawei amongst the first to introduce this technology, it did it in a right way.
Instead of applying a screen damaging “through hole” technology, Huawei chose to put the camera under the LCD screen with the smallest cut-out in the industry.
Triple cameras
Huawei introduced a triple rear camera setup with the P20 that was released in the spring on 2018. That phone broke all records for mobile photography and was selected as the best camera phone by TechRadar.
Huawei further enhanced the triple camera setup with the Mate 20 Pro by introducing an ultra-wide lens on the back along with the main 40MP sensor and the telephoto lens fixed at the industry leading 3X optical zoom. Expect similar setups in competing flagship phones this year- almost one year after Huawei introduced this technology.
AIAI is the buzz word in the industry with phone manufacturers scrambling to adopt this feature into their phones. But Huawei had the insight to see AI becoming an integral part of the phone experience and had it introduced on its Kirin 970 chipset that debuted with the Mate 10 Pro way back in 2017. Let that sink in- what other manufacturers are trying to figure out in 2019 was already introduced by Huawei back in 2017.
Reverse wireless chargingAlthough phones have supported wireless charging, Huawei was the first tier-one manufacturer to introduce reverse wireless charging on their phones with the Mate 20 Pro.
This feature allows you to charge other devices wirelessly and is very forward thinking as we move to a future with seamless connectivity and wireless support in peripherals. Expect other phone manufacturers to follow with this feature in their upcoming smartphones.
The one thing that's completely clear is that Huawei is leading with innovation when it comes to smartphones. If you want to get an idea of features that next generation phones will introduce this year, buy a Huawei phone already available today.
But if you want to see where the industry will follow, look towards the next high-end flagship which is expected to be announced on the 26th of
Huawei founder says US cannot crush it
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:14:38 +0000
Huawei founder Reng Zhengfei has said the company has no plans to halt investment in the UK and has refuted allegations made against the company of fraud and espionage.
The company is facing multiple challenges on different fronts, with several nations expressing concerns about the use of Huawei kit in their telecommunications infrastructure.
The US and Australia are the only notable examples of Huawei gear being effectively banned in the rollout of 5G, but others are being placed under pressure by the US to follow suit.
Meanwhile, Zhengfei’s daughter and company CFO Meng Wanzhou is currently being held in Canada as US officials attempt to extradite her to face charges of fraud related to alleged dealings with Iran.
What is 5G? Everything you need to knowGSMA suggests Huawei talks at MWC 2019These could be the first 5G phones Huawei USThese events have brought the normally reclusive Zhengfei back into the public eye. Last month, he held his first briefing with foreign reporters for four years and now in a wide-ranging interview with the BBC he has reiterated Huawei’s belief that the US’s actions are politically motivated and once again denied any links with the Chinese government.
"There's no way the US can crush us," he is quoted as saying. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit.”
The main basis for these security fears is that Huawei could be required to install backdoors into its kit that could facilitate spying. Part of the reason behind the apparent mistrust is Zhengfei himself.
Prior to founding Huawei in the 1980s, he served as an engineer in the Chinese military and attended the 1982 National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. He told reporters he was invited as a reward for a device he invented while in the army.
“The Chinese government has already clearly said that it won't install any backdoors,” he continued. “And we won't install backdoors either. We're not going to risk the disgust of our country and of our customers all over the world, because of something like this.
"Our company will never undertake any spying activities. If we have any such actions, then I'll shut the company down."
(Image credit: Huawei)
Huawei UKHuawei has repeatedly denied such accusations, pointing out that it works with security agencies around the world and that it sells products to more than 500 operators in 170 countries without issue. This includes the UK, where BT, EE, Vodafone and Three are all customers.
In the UK, the use of Huawei kit is subject to a specialist monitoring body, and UK operators are waiting for the outcome of a government review to see if they will continue to be allowed to use the company’s gear.
There is unlikely to be any enthusiasm for a ban among customers who value Huawei for its innovations and fear a reduced pool of suppliers will increase prices.
Huawei and its customers will be buoyed by reports that the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) believes there is no reason why it can’t mitigate any perceived risk.
Zhengfei says that even if there is a ban, Huawei will still invest in the UK and could even increase its interest should the US continue to be hostile.
"[We] won't withdraw our investment because of this,” he told the BBC. “We will continue to invest in the UK. We still trust in the UK, and we hope that the UK will trust us even more.
"We will invest even more in the UK. Because if the US doesn't trust us, then we will shift our investment from the US to the UK on an even bigger scale."
Here are the best Huawei phone deals for February 2019
The best iPhone 7 deals in February 2019
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:12:43 +0000
It may now be in its terrible twos, but Apple's iPhone 7 remains one of the best mobiles we've ever used and the price of iPhone 7 deals is way less than its successors.
So forget those iPhone 8 deals. Laugh in the face of iPhone XS deals and move on from those iPhone XR deals If you like the idea of buying an iPhone but aren't that enthusiastic amount the kinds of costs attached to them, then the iPhone 7 could be an ideal middle ground.
That said, other than the fantastic 20GB+ tariffs knocking around on EE and O2 and a few standout three deals however if you were hoping for Vodafone deals you will be sad to hear that they're just not so competitive right now.
On this page you'll find all of the best iPhone 7 deals you can get right now. Whether you're looking for unlimited data, a free phone or any other type of tariff, you can use our comparison chart below to choose the cheapest option out there. Scroll down to find the best deal for you.
And don't forget that you'll get £10 off the handset cost if you get your iPhone 7 from Mobiles.co.uk - you just need to enter our exclusive 10OFF discount code when you get to the checkout.
See also: iPhone 8 deals | iPhone 7 Plus deals | iPhone 7 SIM-free | Samsung Galaxy S8 deals | Best mobile phone deals | iPhone deals
At the top of our guide you'll see what we've chosen as this month's best value iPhone 7 deals in the UK. These are chosen purely on the basis of value - unlike some other sites we don't manipulate the order of these deals for commercial gain! And if you're loyal to a particular network, we've picked out the best deals on the four major networks - those being EE, O2, Three and Vodafone.
Vodafone has a habit of having great iPhone 7 deals one day and then removing them all in a instant so if you don't see any Vodafone deals then it is likely they are in one of those times.
The best cheap PS4 bundles, deals and prices in the February sales
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:08:47 +0000
Ok, let's do this. 2019 is here and you're finally after a cheap PS4 bundle deal. The release schedule has just come to the end of the busy season, so you've got plenty of games to choose from as we round up the best PS4 prices. Naturally, lots of the below PS4 bundles come with the hottest new games.
We're on the hunt for the lowest PS4 prices all year round, so we aren't easily fooled by the fake deals that don't actually save you any money over buying the games individually. We're here to help save you as much money as possible. We also want you to play the games everyone's shouting about which is why we're going the extra mile to track down PS4 and PS4 Pro bundles with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, FIFA 19, Spider-Man and more. Sometimes though, you can get a load of older games with a cheap PS4 for even less money, so we'll keep our eyes out for those offers too.
This page lists the best cheap PS4 prices in the UK, but we also have dedicated guides for US readers and our Australian ones too. Below you'll find a comparison chart that automatically pulls in the freshest and cheapest PS4 deals from UK retailers, followed by our hand-picked selection of the best PS4 bundles that offer the best value discounts on the additional software or accessories. After those deals you'll find we've also covered the same options for the PS4 Pro prices.
The PS4 Slim is... slimmer, quieter and smaller
The PS4 Slim launched (with no games included) in September 2016 for around £259 (500GB) or £310 (1TB) and has now replaced the original fatter PS4. The new console is smaller, lighter, more power efficient and cheaper than the remaining stock of the older PlayStation 4 deals nowadays, so you're not paying more for the refined tech. We'd advise you check out the cheap PS4 bundles further down this page as many of them are cheaper than buying the console on its own or you can get a lot more for a spending a bit extra on top.
You'll often find that the most attractive way to get a cheap PS4 is with a bundle with extra hardware or extra games. These are the best PS4 bundle prices currently available in the UK – we update these deals on a regular basis.
Extra PS4 retailer links:Want to look through some more cheap PS4 deals? It's ok, you're only hurting our feelings a little. The links below will take you straight to the PS4 console deals section of the following websites, just in-case you fancy digging out a bargain of your own.
PS4 deals - AmazonPS4 deals - AOPS4 deals - VeryPS4 deals - John LewisPS4 deals - CurrysPS4 deals - Argos
The PS4 that offers 4K gaming and Netflix
Essentially, the PS4 Pro is a 4K upgrade of the current PS4, rather than a 'next-gen' console. The keywords to take in from the PS4 Pro are 4K and HDR. The new machine allows game developers to include 4K resolution and High Dynamic Range options in their games, so expect the like of Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, God of War, Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn and more to look even better on a HDR-enabled 4K TV. You'll also be able to stream 4K content from Netflix and YouTube. Want to get the right TV? Then check out our cheap 4K TV sales and deals page. We've seen big discounts as Sony fights off the latest Xbox One X deals too.
If you're buying a PS4, you'll probably need a cheap PlayStation Plus deal too. PlayStation Plus (aka PS Plus or PS+) allows you to play PS4 games online, along with access to the Instant Game Collection, a bunch of free games for PS4, PS3 and Vita each month. The default price for a year is £50. We can do better than that though, so check out our selection of the best PlayStation Plus deals.
Need an extra cheap PS4 controller? Don't forget to check our Best DualShock 4 deals. Or maybe a cheap PlayStation VR deal? If you're still torn, maybe you'd prefer one of our Xbox One deals?
The death of Gartner's UC Magic Quadrant
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:00:32 +0000
Businesses, customers and resellers in the Unified Communications (UC) community have relied on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for years to help them understand which vendors are leaders in the industry and which are challengers in the space. However, in January 2019, Gartner announced that it would refocus its research and end the UC Magic Quadrant.
TechRadar Pro spoke with TetraVX's Director of Product Management, Kara Logo Korte to better understand how the UC marketplace has changed and why Gartner's decision to end the UC Magic Quadrant affects the industry as a whole.
This is the future of workplace communicationHow millennials are changing the communication landscapeFacebook is building a unified messaging system for businesses
Image Credit: Pexels
Image Credit: Shutterstock
We've also highlighted the best phone systems for business
Samsung Galaxy Fit release date, price, news and leaks
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:57:34 +0000
Update: Samsung itself has outed the Galaxy Fit ahead of schedule, showing a picture of the device and confirming the names Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Fit e. Plus we may see the tracker get announced tomorrow.
The Samsung Galaxy Fit could soon arrive and it might be one of the best fitness trackers of 2019 when it does. The truth is that we don’t know much about it yet, but based on the strength of the Gear Fit range, we’re somewhat excited by the prospect of it.
The Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro is currently sitting in our best fitness trackers list, and that’s despite it being a conservative upgrade on the Gear Fit 2. If the Galaxy Fit (which is likely to be the Samsung Gear Fit 3 in all but name) is an upgrade worthy of a whole new name then it could be very impressive indeed.
You'll find all the current rumors below, along with a wish list of what we want from the wearable and some educated guesses as to what it might feature and when it might launch. We'll also add anything new to this article as soon as we hear it, so make sure to check back regularly.
Cut to the chase What is it? Samsung's next fitness trackerWhen is it out? Possibly February 20, that's tomorrowWhat will it cost? Likely upwards of $199 / £209 (around AU$370) Samsung Galaxy Fit release date and priceThere isn’t any real release date news about the Samsung Galaxy Fit yet, but it - as well as the Samsung Galaxy Fit E - has appeared in an official Samsung app (detailed below), seemingly ahead of schedule, but strongly suggesting that it's coming soon.
We've also seen it listed in a Bluetooth certification, which is yet more evidence of an impending launch.
By far the most likely launch date then is February 20, as Samsung is holding an event on that date. The Samsung Galaxy S10 is expected to be the star of the show, but numerous other devices might make an appearance, including the Galaxy Fit and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active (or Samsung Galaxy Sport as it might be called).
You can watch the Galaxy S10 livestream from 11AM PT / 2PM ET / 7PM GMT or 6AM AEDT on Thursday 21. Alternatively, it might get announced at MWC 2019, which is a major trade show that runs from February 25-28.
As for the price, all we can do there is look at the current model. The Gear Fit 2 Pro launched for $199 / £209 (about AU$370), so there’s a chance the Gear Fit 3 will have a similar price.
Samsung Galaxy Fit news and rumorsThe main Samsung Galaxy Fit information comes from the image below, which was taken from Samsung's official Galaxy Wearable app. In other words, Samsung seems to have accidentally outed the device before it has been announced.
From the design, this looks similar to previous Samsung fitness trackers, with a rectangular screen and a likely silicone band, shown here in black. It also looks to have a color screen, as we'd expect.
Image credit: Samsung
Beyond the design, it also looks like two models are in the works, as the picture is labeled 'Galaxy Fit / Fit e'.
This isn't the first time we've heard these names. Samsung trademarked the name Galaxy Fit in May 2018.
That report came alongside the Samsung Galaxy Watch trademark, which turned out to be the name of Samsung's latest smartwatch, so even before Samsung more or less confirmed it, Galaxy Fit (rather than Gear Fit 3 or anything else) was our best guess for the name.
We've also previously seen a Bluetooth certification listing for a Samsung Galaxy Fit E, so the mention of that model in Samsung's leak is no surprise either.
So far there aren’t any other Samsung Gear Fit 3 rumors, but while we wait for more to roll in we can speculate on a few things. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Fit will probably have many of the same features as the Gear Fit 2 Pro, including a heart rate monitor, GPS and water resistance, along with a color screen.
What we want to seeWhile there aren't many rumors about the Galaxy Fit as yet, there are plenty of things we want from it, such as the following.
1. A simple setupSetting up the Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro is a clunky experience, thanks primarily to the need to download multiple apps onto your phone just to get the most out of it.
So for the Gear Fit 3 we’d like to see a simpler, more streamlined setup process that allows you to get properly up and running (literally) in a matter of minutes.
2. Better battery lifeWith limited usage you’ll get two to three days of life out of the Gear Fit 2 Pro and just one day with heavy use, which isn’t awful but certainly isn’t great.
While we’re used to charging our smartwatches daily, fitness trackers often manage to last a little longer, so we’d like to see an extra day or so added to the life of the Galaxy Fit.
3. A reliable barometer
The Samsung Gear Fit 2's barometer wasn't always accurate
One issue we noted with the Gear Fit 2 was that water could mess with the barometer, causing it to think you’ve walked up many more flights of stairs than you actually have.
We’re not expecting this to be an issue with the Samsung Galaxy Fit but we’ll certainly be disappointed if it is.
4. A reasonable priceWhile the Gear Fit 2 Pro isn’t wallet-weepingly expensive it did launch at a higher price than the Gear Fit 2, and that’s despite only being slightly improved and landing over a year later, so there’s a worry that the Gear Fit 3 could be a pricey wearable, but we hope Samsung keeps the price competitive.
5. Spotify pre-installedIt’s a small point, but despite Spotify (and specifically its offline mode) being one of the best features of the Gear Fit 2 Pro, it didn’t come pre-installed, even though a bunch of apps did, so we’d like to see the music streamer ready to go out of the box for the Samsung Galaxy Fit.
6. A refreshed design
The Samsung Gear Fit 3 could do with a design refresh
The Gear Fit 2 Pro has a fairly nice design, but it’s also pretty much exactly the same as the design of the Gear Fit 2, so we’d like to see Samsung freshen things up a bit for the Gear Fit 3, or even just give buyers a greater selection of colors to choose from.
7. A significant upgradeThe Gear Fit 2 Pro is an accomplished fitness tracker, but it’s only a small upgrade on the Gear Fit 2, so for Samsung to stay relevant and excite us we want some big upgrades from the Galaxy Fit.
That could take the form of new sensors, more metrics, greater accuracy, improved smartwatch features or any number of other things, but we hope Samsung does something to make it stand out.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active could also be on the way
Huawei P30 release date, price, news and leaks
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:53:07 +0000
The Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 Pro are set to be the next flagship smartphones from the Chinese brand, which has gone from strength to strength in recent years.
The Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro rivaled the likes of the Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9 Plus, Pixel 3 XL and new iPhones, and the P30 duo (or potentially trio) will certainly have the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus in their sights.
We say potentially trio, as Apple launched three new phones back in September, and Samsung is tipped to do the same on February 20, so we wouldn't be surprised if Huawei followed suit with a new trio of its own under the P30 name.
Huawei has even teased the arrival of the handsets, with a video posted on Twitter confirming the March 26 launch date for the "P30 series" - suggesting we'll definitely see more than one phone with the P30 name attached to it.
Update: The Huawei P30 launch date has been confirmed as March 26.
We want to see the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro continue to build on the momentum from 2018, and we’ve come up with a list of things that would help that happen.
But before that though, here’s what we know and suspect about the phone so far. Rumors are starting to roll in and we now have a good idea of what to expect from Huawei's next flagship.
Cut to the chase What is it? The successor to the Huawei P20When is it out? Launches on March 26What will it cost? Likely upwards of £599 (roughly $790, AU$1,070) Huawei P30 release date and priceThe Huawei P30 launch data has been confirmed for March 26 after Huawei made the announcement on its Twitter account.
That confirms the one release date rumor we saw before this, which pointed to an announcement in Paris at the end of March.
Note though that if you’re in the US you might not be able to buy it, as the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro didn’t land in the US.
As for the price, it’s likely to be at least as expensive as the £599 (roughly $790, AU$1,070) Huawei P20, but will likely land alongside an even pricier Huawei P30 Pro.
The P30 may undercut some flagships but it might not launch in the US. Image Credit: TechRadar
Huawei P30 design and displayHottest leaks:
Almost no bezelA 3.5mm headphone portA 1080 x 2340 screenOur best look yet at the possible design of the Huawei P30 comes from renders shared by @OnLeaks, who has a solid track record.
You can see some of these below. Note that the phone has a gradient color scheme on the back, which appears to be made of glass.
You can also see a teardrop notch on the front, tiny bezels, a triple-lens rear camera, a 3.5mm headphone port and no visible fingerprint scanner, suggesting it's built into the screen. That in turn might mean the screen is OLED, since most in-screen scanners don't work with LCD.
The headphone port in these pictures is slightly surprising, since Huawei didn't include one on the P20 range.
Shortly before those images emerged we saw some case shots, shown below, but these seemingly show the Huawei P30 Pro (rather than the standard P30) and include four rear cameras. That aside though they look similar.
As for the screen, on both the Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 Pro it could be a 1080 x 2340 one if leaked user agent profiles are to be believed. That would be a slight boost on the 1080 x 2240 screens of the Huawei P20 range.
Huawei P30 cameraHottest leaks:
A triple-lens cameraA 38MP or 40MP lensP30 Pro could have a quad-lens cameraWe've heard rumors that the Huawei P30 Pro might have a 38MP camera. Specifically, an unannounced Sony one.
According to another source the Huawei P30 will have a triple-lens rear camera, potentially with a lens of up to 40MP. It could also have a 5x lossless optical zoom and a 24MP front-facing camera.
And we've seen images of cases supposedly made for both the Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 Pro. From these we can see that there are seemingly at least three rear cameras on both models, with the Pro model also having a big flash unit.
The P30 Pro is also shown from the front in one image, with tiny bezels and a teardrop notch, which lines up with the images we've seen elsewhere.
However, it looks like the Huawei P30 Pro could have four lenses rather than three, as not only do some of the images above show that, but other reports also point in that direction. Additionally it might sport 10x optical zoom and an upgraded 3D sensor for judging distance and creating focus effects.
Elsewhere, Huawei's European boss Walter Ji has talked about the possibility of four rear cameras on a phone in 2019 in an interview with Android Pit. He also talked about the possibility of 10x zoom, though he didn't specifically say that the Huawei P30 would get either of these features.
Huawei P30 OS and powerThe Huawei P30 is sure to run Android 9 Pie, as not only is that the latest version of the operating system, it has also been specifically rumored.
We don't know anything about the core specs of the P30 yet, but we can also look at the Mate 20 (and Huawei Mate 20 Pro) for an idea of some of the likely specs and features of the Huawei P30.
For one thing, the P30 will probably have the same Kirin 980 chipset as the Mate 20 range. This debuted on the Mate 20 range and Huawei has previously used the same chipset on the Mate range one year and the P range the following year.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, as it will still be fairly new by the time the Huawei P30 launches and it's a good chip. It's the first 7nm Android one and it arguably has any other 2018 Android chip beat. Though of course it will be competing with the likes of the Snapdragon 855 by the time the P30 lands.
Huawei is also known to be working on both a folding phone and a 5G handset. Of those it's possible that the Huawei P30 will support 5G, but we doubt it will fold.
Huawei P30 nameAccording to Huawei's CEO the Huawei P30 will be better than the Huawei P20 Pro or the Huawei Mate 20.
That's hardly surprising, but what's more notable is that he referred to the phone as the P30. While that would have been our best guess for the launch name anyway, you can now take it as more or less confirmed.
What we want to seeWe expect to learn much more about the Huawei P30 (including whether it will actually be called the Huawei P21) soon, but in the meantime, this is what we want from it.
1. A sharper screen
The Huawei P20's screen isn't quite as sharp as we'd expect a flagship to be
Huawei has stuck with a Full HD+ screen on its P20 range, but with Samsung, Sony and others upping the resolution it’s time Huawei did the same.
So for the Huawei P30 we want a QHD resolution. There’s probably no need for more than that, but given the likely large screen size a resolution of around 1440 x 2960 really would make a difference.
2. Bring back the headphone jackMany phones – including the Huawei P20 range – are now ditching headphone jacks, but we’re still not convinced the tech is at the point where everyone will be happy to go wireless, so we’d like to see this brought back for the Huawei P30.
It’s unlikely to happen as it could be seen as a step backwards, or as admitting that removing it was a mistake, but it would be nice.
3. Wireless charging
All flagships should really support wireless charging
While the Huawei P20 range has good battery life and fast charging it lacks wireless charging, which is a feature we’d expect to see come as standard on flagship phones.
So hopefully it’s something that the Huawei P30 - or at least the Huawei P30 Pro - will offer. There's reason to suspect it might, since the Huawei Mate 20 Pro does.
4. Three cameras on all modelsHuawei has only just moved on to triple-lens cameras with the Huawei P20 Pro so we’re not in any hurry for that to change, but we do want to see three lenses on the standard Huawei P30, rather than the feature being reserved for the P30 Pro.
And while we definitely don’t need more than three lenses on the back we would like to see some improvements to them as well, perhaps for example improvements to the AI scene recognition.
5. An in-screen fingerprint scanner
Building the scanner into the screen would give the P30 a big selling point
The Huawei Mate 20 Pro and Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS have an in-screen fingerprint scanner, and even the Honor 10 (made by a Huawei sub-brand) has an under-glass scanner, so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the Huawei P30 had an in-screen scanner of its own.
And it would be a good thing too, since it’s the sort of high-tech feature that would help the phone stand apart from many other handsets, not to mention allowing it to keep the bezels small without resorting to having a scanner on the back.
6. A top-end chipsetThe Huawei P20 range uses the Kirin 970 chipset, which is high-end, but it’s older and less powerful than the latest Snapdragon and Exynos chipsets.
For the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro we’d really like Huawei to use a brand-new chipset that makes its debut on those phones and can truly compete with the best around, rather than what it will probably actually do, which is equip them with the slightly older Kirin 980 chip that first appeared in the Huawei Mate 20.
7. No notch or bezelsLike so many of 2018’s phones, the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro each have a notch in the screen, and while you can somewhat hide it with software we’d rather there was no notch at all.
But we don’t want a strip of bezel either, instead we want a truly bezel-free front. If Huawei does build the fingerprint scanner into the screen on the P30 then it could be well on the way to achieving that, so it’s possible, though it will need to hide the likes of the front-facing camera somewhere too.
Check out the best phones you can buy right now
The best free iPhone apps of 2019
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:48:06 +0000
You've got an iPhone, and have ventured into the melee of Apple's App Store, which has well over a million apps.
Great news! Many of them are free. Not so great news! You've got to sift through them to work out the very best. Fortunately, that's what we're here for, listing them here.
Our selection’s sorted into handy categories, so whether you need a no-cost photo editor, translation app, sat-nav or anything else, you can just jump straight to the relevant category.
Click through to the following pages for each category, but first check out our free iPhone app of the week below, and make sure you give this page a cheeky bookmark so you can keep up with our latest free iPhone app pick every seven days.
Free iPhone app of the week: Tankee
Tankee is a video-streaming platform designed for kids who want to watch videos about gaming. It strips out social networking and comments, and also – crucially – has a real person watch every video that’s made available.
The downside is that this limits Tankee to a few hundred hours of content (although this is growing all the time); but you can at least know the videos will be age-appropriate, and algorithms won’t make horrific recommendations after your kid has delved into some Minecraft tips.
Everything can be browsed for free, right from the off. Create an account and your child can choose an avatar, save favorites, follow channels, and hammer smiley buttons at lightning speed when they like a particularly good bit of a video.
The best free iPhone video editors and animation appsThese are our favorite free iPhone apps for quickly editing videos, GIFs and Live Photos, and for creating stop-motion animation.
Enlight Pixaloop enables you to animate your photos. This is achieved through you manually drawing ‘path’ arrows to define the direction of animation, and setting anchors to keep other areas of your image rooted to the spot. Tap the play button and you get something akin to a cinemagraph – only based on a single still image, rather than dozens of shots or a video.
Whatever you create can be exported to Photos as a video (sadly, there’s no animated GIF option), but there’s plenty more you can add first, including camera wobble, overlay effects and automated moving skies. Some of those features work better than others, but the entire package is a great way to bring your photos to life. Note that there’s subscription IAP lurking, although you don’t need to pay to get a lot out of this app.
Moodelizer is a one-trick pony – but it’s quite a trick. It enables you to add custom soundtracks to videos – and all you need is a single finger.
You select a genre, and ‘rehearse’ playback by dragging your finger around the square viewfinder. Move up to increase the music’s intensity increases and move right to adjust variation. You can perform rehearsals using the viewfinder or with an existing video loaded from your Camera Roll.
Just messing about with the audio alone is fun, but it all properly comes together when making a video. Now, when you’re shooting yet another clip of your cat being mildly amusing, Moodelizer can add much-needed excitement by way of rousing club music or head-banging guitar riffs.
Vue is a video editor whose initial incarnation was an odd mix of intriguing and ridiculous. In short, it was designed to give you six seconds of fame by snapping an ultra-short video comprising three shots.
Fortunately, Vue is relaxed a bit now – and all the better for it. The app still prefers brevity, but will allow movies of up to three minutes in length and can load existing videos from your iPhone, too. Once your miniature masterpiece is done, it’s possible to add filters and stickers, overlay subtitles, and mess around with zooming and adjustment sliders.
The app still feels a touch rigid compared to the likes of Clips, but Vue’s sense of focus and style – along with the sharing network that underpins everything – makes it worth checking out.
Clips is a video-editing app geared towards making content for sharing on social media. To that end, it eschews convention (widescreen, standard titles, typical editing tracks) and attempts to infuse plenty of fun into a streamlined, straightforward editing process.
You can record directly in the app or import existing videos. In either case, you can overlay stickers and live captions that appear as the subject speaks, and apply filters for a different look. Posters serve as a replacement for titles, helping with pacing and context in a way that’s much more interesting, animated and editable.
For iPhone X users, there’s an extra treat: animated 3D selfie scenes. These can transport you into a number of stylized landscapes, including neon cityscapes and ships from Star Wars. The effect is mesmerizing to the point where the app’s worth picking up for selfie scenes alone.
Squigglish! is a very silly drawing app, on account of the fact that its brush strokes wiggle. There’s quite the variety on offer, too, from thick, snaking, gloopy lines that just jiggle a little, to spiky electrified offerings that give the impression that your artwork has just been jabbed into a socket.
Given its oddball toolset, you’re probably not going to use Squigglish! as the basis for some highbrow iPhone art. But because you can import a photo, it’s perfect fodder for making yourself or a friend look vaguely ridiculous, with some silly blue hair, a pair of wibbly glasses, and the kind of animated mustache Dali would have killed for.
Naturally, your tiny animated masterpiece can be exported to GIF or a movie.
Motion Stills aims to help you do more with the Live Photos you shoot on your iPhone. Apple’s own Photos app, of course, provides options for adjusting how these images animate – but this Google offering does far more.
On giving the app permission to view your photos, it will display a scrollable feed of pictures that animate as you browse. This alone makes Motion Stills worth a download, not least because the app applies stabilization technology to your Live Photos, eradicating wobble.
But with a few quick swipes you can quickly select a number of Live Photos, which can then be transformed into a tiny movie. Alternatively, you can turn Live Photos into collages, or add text and emoji to your favorites. In short, Motion Stills feels like the Live Photos editor Apple forgot to make itself.
If you lack the patience for working with full-on stop motion apps, but nonetheless fancy yourself as a mini-Aardman, Loop by Seedling is just the ticket.
You shoot frames using your camera, and can handily overlay your previous photo in semi-transparent form, to ensure everything is properly lined up.
Once you're done, you can play your photos as an animation, where tools are available to adjust the frame rate, add a filter, and mess about with grid collages, creating a Warhol-like animated GIF to share.
The interface is a bit opaque – quite a lot of controls need to be 'discovered' before you become comfortable with using this app.
But once you know where everything is, Loop becomes a smart and efficient way to create charming miniature animations; amusingly, it also works within Messages, so you can reply to friends with a tiny movie should you consider the written word passé.
If you like the idea of editing home movies but are a modern-day being with no time or attention span, try Quik. The app automates the entire process, enabling you to create beautiful videos with a few taps and show off to your friends without needing talent - surely the epitome of today's #hashtag generation.
All you need do is select some videos and photos, and choose a style. Quik then edits them into a great-looking video you can share with friends and family. But if your inner filmmaker hankers for a little more control, you can adjust the style, music, format and pace, along with trimming clips, reordering items, and adding titles to get the effect you desire.
Cementing its friendly nature, Quik offers a little pairs minigame for you to mess about with while the app renders your masterpiece. And there's even a weekly 'For You' video Quik compiles without you lifting a finger.
If you used to sit there at school, doodling flick-animation masterpieces in the corner of your jotter, Animatic is the iPhone equivalent. You use simple tools to scribble on a small canvas, and then build your animation frame-by-frame.
The app uses a basic onion-skin approach, meaning you can see the previous few frames faintly behind the current one, ensuring whatever you draw doesn't lurch all over the place. Once you're done, you can adjust the animation speed of your creation and export it to video or GIF.
Given that you're scribbling with what amounts to the iPhone equivalent of felt pens, you won't be crafting the next Pixar movie here. But Animatic is fun, a great way to get into animation, and a useful sketchpad for those already dabbling. The app also includes a bunch of demos, showcasing what's possible with a little time, effort and imagination.
We're big fans of iMovie. Apple's video editor for iPhone is usable and powerful. In our lazier moments, we also really like Replay, which takes a bunch of videos and edits them on your behalf. But there are times when you hanker for a middle ground, and that's where Splice fits in.
Getting started is simple — select some videos and photos to import (from your Camera Roll, or online sources like Facebook and Google Photos), along with, optionally, a soundtrack. Name your project, choose an orientation, and the app lays out your clips. These can be reordered by drag and drop, and transitions can be adjusted with a couple of taps.
If you want to delve deeper, individual clips can be trimmed and cut, and you can apply effects. Several filters are included, as is a speed setting, and the means to overlay text.
These tools perhaps won't worry the Spielbergs of this world, but a few minutes in Splice can transform a few random iPhone clips into something quite special — and all without a price-tag or even any advertising.
See how a free VPN app can help keep your iPhone more secure The best free iPhone sketching and design appsOur favorite free iPhone apps for drawing, sketching, painting, layout and animation.
Paper is a sketching tool based around jotting down ideas quickly. Your drawings are stored in little digital notebooks, which you can open and flip through. Tap a page and you can scribble with a finger or stylus using the app’s selection of brushes.
There’s a smattering of additional handy tools in the free version, most notably the ability to add text notes to any picture, and the means to export a note or book. However, some features sit behind monthly IAP, including photo import, copy/paste, and auto-correct when drawing geometric shapes and lines.
Despite these limitations – and the app rather oddly reorienting your sketches on iPhone when you return to browsing – Paper remains one of the most pleasing apps of its kind, not least if you retain a fondness for real-life versions of the little notepads the app depicts.
WhatTheFont is a tool for identifying typefaces, and it’s extremely simple to use. You can either load an image from your iPhone or take a photo using the app. It figures out where all the words are within a few seconds, or you can drag out a selection yourself. You then tap on a selected word, and the app scoots off to find matches.
The likelihood of perfect matches is slim – it depends on having a very clear image to start with, and the font being available on the MyFonts service – but during testing, the app was bang-on several times. Even when it wasn’t, it offered up something that at least captured the flavor of our original font.
Whether you’re a jobbing designer or someone who puts together the odd newsletter, WhatTheFont is an excellent freebie.
Canva is a graphic design tool for the rest of us. It’s not going to send professionals scurrying for the shadows, but with its mix of templates, filters, and editable design elements, it gives the average iPhone owner a fighting chance of working up an invite or poster during a lunch hour.
Layouts are smartly targeted and categorized, and move beyond typical posters, greetings cards and flyers into social media territory (Twitter headers, Instagram posts and blog posts), and even business (cards, logos and presentations).
You can import photos, add text, and fiddle around with a wide range of drag-and-drop elements before sharing directly to social media, or saving your work to your iPhone.
For anyone who wants to design something for their burgeoning home business, or just for fun, Canva is a great place to start.
Arty initially resembles yet another filter app – and, to be fair, it does have a bunch of filters lurking that can turn a photo sepia, or make it so vibrant that your eyes hurt. But this one’s mostly about its other tools, which have been carefully designed for jobbing artists working with real-world media.
There’s a grid, and various image-tweaking settings to fine-tune a photo for the magic bit, which is comparing your photo with whatever’s lurking under your iPhone’s camera.
So if you’re in the midst of making a lifelike drawing from a reference photo, your iPhone can now be a handy guide to see how you’re getting on, rather than a tool primarily for procrastination.
With 8bit Painter, you can pretend a couple of decades of technology evolution never happened, and create digital images like it’s 1984. On firing up the app, you select a canvas size – from a truly tiny 16 x 16 pixels, all the way up to a comparatively gargantuan 128 x 128. You’re then faced with a grid and a small selection of tools.
There’s nothing especially advanced here – this isn’t Pixaki for iPhone, and it lacks that tool’s layers and animation smarts. But you do get the basics – pencil; flood fill; eraser; color selection – needed for tapping out a tiny artistic masterpiece.
And, importantly, you can pinch-zoom the canvas for adding fine details, and export your image at scaled-up sizes, so it’s not minuscule when viewed elsewhere. For a freebie, this one’s pretty great.
Adobe apparently has no interest in bringing full Photoshop to iPhone, but the brand’s focused Photoshop-branded apps offer a smattering of the desktop product’s power in the palm of your hand. Adobe Photoshop Sketch is a drawing and painting tool, designed for anyone who fancies dabbling in natural media.
Select a canvas and you can work with virtual pens, markers, acrylic, ink and watercolor. Acrylic is nicely gloopy, and watercolor can be realistically blended as it bleeds into the ‘paper’. A layers system provides scope for complex art, and stencils enable precision when required.
For free, the app’s hard to beat; and for Creative Cloud subscribers, work can be exported to layered PSD for further refinement in full-fat desktop Photoshop.
Back in 2009, Jorge Colombo did some deft iPhone finger painting using Brushes, and the result became a New Yorker cover.
It was a turning point for iOS and suitably handy ammunition for tech bores who'd been drearily banging on about the fact an iPhone could never be used for proper work. The app sadly stagnated, but was made open source and returned as Brushes Redux.
Now free, it's still a first-rate art app, with a simple layers system, straightforward controls, and a magnificent brush editor that starts you off with a random creation and enables you to mess about with all manner of properties, from density to jitter.
Developer Pixite is best known for its eye-popping filter apps, and so Assembly was quite the surprise. The app is all about building vector art from shapes.
Individual components are dropped on to the canvas, and can then be grouped or have styles applied. It feels a bit like the iPhone equivalent of playing with felt shapes, but you soon realise that surprisingly complex compositions are possible, not least when you view the 'inspirations' tab or start messing about with the 'remix' projects.
For free, you get loads of stuff to play with, but inexpensive IAP unlocks all kinds of bundles with new themed shape sets to explore.
It's interesting to see how far the App Store has come. Time was, Apple banned apps that gave you the chance to build prototypes. Now, Marvel is welcomed by Apple, and is entirely free.
Using the app, you can build on photographed sketches, Photoshop documents, or on-screen scribbles. Buttons can be added, and screens can be stitched together.
Once you're done, your prototype can be shared. If you're not sure where to start, check out existing prototypes made by the Marvel community.
The best free iPhone camera apps and photo editorsOur favorite free iPhone cameras, photo editors and filter effects apps.
sok-edit is a collage app that doubles down on immediacy. Instead of neatly aligning photos to a grid, it’s the digital equivalent of hacking photos to bits with scissors, and sticking them on other photos for purposes of amusement and creativity.
The app is tactile and noisy. You drag to cut out elements, which can then be rotated, resized, cloned and flipped. Most actions come with sound effects. It’s all a lot of fun.
The only minor snag is if you have too much fun – in the sense of using three layers – you have to watch an advert to add another object, or plump for the ‘pro’ IAP. Mind you, even the latter is a mere US$0.99/99p/AU$1.49, which seems like a bargain for unlimited collage larks.
Visionist has quite a lot in common with Prisma, in that it’s using neural networks to transform photos into something resembling art. The main differences with Visionist are that it affords you a level of control Prisma does not, and it doesn’t drown you in IAP and endless filters.
In fact, you get just 10 (60 more sit behind a one-off US$1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 payment), but even those have a range that can turn the dullest snaps into something pretty amazing.
This is largely because you can adjust abstraction levels and how images interact; there’s support for Portrait images (and depth data is retained during export); and styles can be mixed and merged. It’s a world away from Prisma’s more simple interaction.
For bringing a little artistry to your photos, Visionist is well worth a download, then, whether you stick with the free version or plump for the IAP.
Infltr started out as a photo filter app for people who considered choosing filters too much effort. You simply dragged your finger across the screen, and the chosen filter updated live. Simple. Fast. Random.
That tool still exists, but today it’s just one of several in a photo editor that increasingly has much in common with Snapseed. Now you can make all kinds of adjustments, from fiddling with brightness through to subtly altering perspective. Edits are non-destructive, and can therefore be reverted or changed later.
There are some limitations unless you’re willing to subscribe: no HD export, only saving three custom filters (rather than an unlimited number), and the odd locked tool. But the free version is nonetheless a must-have for iPhone photographers who fancy a great toolset with a dash of chance.
DailyFocus wants you to spend five minutes every day becoming a better photographer. This is achieved by way of super-fast lessons – short videos that outline how to succeed regardless of what you face when armed with a camera. (We’re not kidding – at the time of writing, the day’s lesson was about lenses, but an upcoming one was “capturing eggs and bacon in motion”.)
The app gamifies your viewing, listing a daily streak total, and offering further encouragement by way of optional notifications – although be mindful those are sent 24 hours after you last used the app.
Also, DailyFocus emphasizes the ‘daily’ bit. There’s no archive – miss a video and it’s gone for good. This is likely because DailyFocus is in part a teaser for a CreativeLive subscription; but for the camera-curious and pro photographers alike, it’s a fab freebie too.
Retrica is a camera app designed to bring creativity, randomness and character to your iPhone selfies and snaps. It’s packed full of filters, which can be manually added live or to existing photos – or randomly if you want to try your luck by prodding the shuffle button.
The filters are varied and interesting, and you can add blur and vignette effects. You can also quickly create multi-shot collages, which are automatically stitched together on a grid. There are GIF and video options too.
Perhaps inevitably, the app has its own a social network, and may as well scream “We really want to be Instagram!” Still, even if you never sign in, Retrica is a superb freebie iPhone camera.
Snapseed is a photo editor that marries simplicity and power. At its most basic, it can be a tool for loading a photo, selecting a filter (referred to here as ‘looks’), and exporting the result. But it’s when you delve into the app’s tools and stacks that its true potential becomes clear.
The tools menu, while a bit cluttered, offers a huge range of options for adjusting your photo. You can crop, adjust perspective, edit curves, and add all kinds of filters and effects.
But stacks are arguably Snapseed’s best component. The stack is where your edits live, each of which can be updated at any time.
This offers far more flexibility than editors that ‘burn in’ each change you make. Furthermore, you can save any combination of edits as a custom look – and use stacks to deconstruct pre-loaded ones. Brilliant stuff.
Sticky AI is all about selfies. Shoot one (or a short video, by holding the shutter button) in the app, and Sticky AI will instantly remove its background – often with a frightening degree of accuracy.
You can then get to work, resizing and rotating your beautiful face, slapping on a text label, mucking about with colors and filters, and then sharing the result to your social networks of choice.
It’s naturally geared a bit towards the self-obsessed, but there’s plenty here to like: the technology’s mightily impressive, for one, but also Sticky AI neatly hangs on to your previous edits, so you can at any time peruse your collection and make a change to a favorite snap.
Bricks Camera is a novelty camera app that will strike a chord with anyone who has an affinity for plastic building blocks.
The app’s essentially a live filter. Through its camera, the world’s transformed into a universe of brightly colored ‘bricks’, the size of which you can adjust with a swipe. Hold down the shutter and you get a short video rather than a still. Also, if you’re not feeling the vibe in live mode, you can import a photo instead.
Your blocky masterpiece can be saved or shared – unfortunately only with a three-brick-wide watermark. If that bugs you, a one-off $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 IAP banishes watermarks for good. Regardless, this is an entertaining (if admittedly slightly throwaway) camera freebie.
There’s no getting around the fact that Emolfi is ridiculous – but it’s also a lot of fun. Self-described as the “first empathic selfie app”, it has you take a photo of your face, whereupon the app’s wizardry attempts to figure out your mood. The app then cuts out the background and adjusts the rest of the image accordingly.
If you’re feeling happy, you might be surrounded by bubbles and sunshine. If you’re angry or scared, you’ll get something that looks like a horror movie, or a massive spider on your face with your eyes animating towards it in worried fashion.
It certainly beats yet another app unconvincingly transforming you into characters from fantasy and comic-book movies.
If you wonder what your iPhone would be like if graphics technology hadn’t moved on from the age of the C64, Famicam 64 can enlighten you. This camera app uses live filtering to replicate the visuals you might once have seen on a classic games system – or other old-school kit like oscilloscopes.
Filters can have their properties adjusted, and you can add text, retro-oriented stickers, freeform scribbles, and borders to a photo, before sharing the results.
Note that some options are limited in the free version, and output adds a Famicam 64 banner to the bottom of the image. You can get rid of all that with the PLUS IAP ($0.99/£0.99/AU$1.99), but in either incarnation, Famicam 64 is a fun, quirky, usable way to do something different with your camera.
Although creative giant Adobe doesn’t seem keen on bringing its desktop software to iPhone in one piece, we’re nonetheless getting chunks of its power reimagined as smaller, more focused apps. The idea behind Adobe Photoshop Fix is to enable you to rapidly retouch and restore photos on your iPhone – using the power of Photoshop.
Some of the features aren’t anything outside of the ordinary: you get commonplace tools for cropping, rotation, and adjustments. But Photoshop Fix has some serious power within its straightforward interface, too, as evidenced by excellent vignette, defocus, and color tools.
The best bit, though, is Liquify. Using this feature, you can mash a photo to bits or make really subtle changes, depending on the subject matter. And if you’re facing a portrait, you can specifically fiddle with features, in a manner usually associated with high-end PC software.
Following in the footsteps of MSQRD, FaceRig enables you to embody a virtual character by controlling it with your face.
Everything happens entirely automatically – you just select a character and background, gurn into the camera, watch a seemingly sentient floating hamburger mirror your very expression, and have a little sit down to think about the terrifying advance of technology.
For those not freaked out by the hamburger to the point that they hurl their iPhones into the sea, FaceRig provides plenty of characters, unlocked using tokens earned through regular use or bought using IAP.
You can also snap and share photos of your virtual visage, or record entire videos where you pretend you’ve turned into a sentient goggles-wearing raccoon, an angry dragon or a slightly irritated-looking turkey.
Prisma wants to turn your photos into tiny works of art. Doing so is almost disarmingly simple: shoot or select a photo, crop your image, and choose an art style. (Options in the vast library of filters range from classic paintings through to comic book doodling.)
The app within a few seconds then transforms your photo into a miniature Picasso or Munch, and it’s instantly better than most of us could ever hope to achieve with Photoshop.
On trying Prisma with a range of imagery, we found it almost never comes up with a duff result, thanks to some insanely smart processing. But if you find the effects jarring, a slide of your finger can soften your chosen filter prior to sharing your masterpiece online.
The best free movie and entertainment apps for iPhoneOur favorite free iPhone apps for having fun, whether reading, coloring or watching TV.
Night Sky initially resembles every other astronomy app. Hold your iPhone in front of your face to view celestial bodies that are in a particular place, or rather more lazily scroll about the heavens with a finger. You get chill-out music, constellation illustrations, ‘time travel’, and information pages.
But Night Sky differentiates itself in how you can interact with objects. Double-tap a planet and it’s plucked from the sky and can be explored in isolation on your screen, or examined more closely by moving around it in AR. This works for constellations, too, enabling you to better understand the distance between component stars.
Add subscription IAP and you get an AR grand orrery, sky tours, and more; but even for free, Night Sky is an absolute must for budding astronomers.
Clarity Wallpaper makes it a cinch to create beautiful wallpapers for your iPhone’s Home and lock screens. The name comes from the app’s tendency to output artwork that improves the legibility of content above it.
Of the available options, Gradient has you choose two colors and decide on the direction of the gradient, while Blur has you take a photo or picture and assign a blur level. Mask allows you to overlay a color-to-transparent gradient atop an image, and Frame is designed to place a framed portrait over a blurred background.
Some frame controls sit behind a $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP, as does a ‘magazine’ of curated wallpapers, but even if you stick with the free version, this is our favorite app for quickly creating sleek and effective wallpaper for iPhone.
Pocket is a read-later system – time-shifting for the web. It’s designed to stop you clicking links all day, planning to read everything later, and then realizing at some point you have dozens of unread tabs.
With Pocket, you simply share pages to it from Safari (or on a desktop browser use the Pocket bookmarklet). When you have a data connection, open Pocket and it will quickly download everything. When reading, articles are stripped of cruft, leaving a mobile-optimized, reader-centric view.
Should you not be keen on the default set-up, it can be tweaked: fonts and colors can be adjusted, and there’s text-to-speech when you need to delve into articles eyes-free. Archives can be searched; and should you run out of things to read, Pocket has a Recommended tab you can check out to find something new. Perfect fodder for your daily commute.
JustWatch solves the problem of where to watch something. That might sound strange, but this is a common problem with modern television viewing – many shows are available on demand, but that’s no good if you’ve no idea what service they’re running on.
When searching for something specific, the app will list where it can be streamed or bought as appropriate. If you have the relevant app installed, you can head there with a tap. If you’re looking for something new, Popular and Browse tabs give you plenty of options, which can be quickly filtered by various criteria, and individual items can be stashed in the WatchList until later.
Given how decentralized television has become, JustWatch feels like a must-have install – a single, coherent tool for finding content from a range of providers.
Feedly bills itself as a smart news reader. For old hands, it’s an RSS client. If you’re still making a confused face, it’s an app that enables you to subscribe to website news feeds, which then pipe headlines directly to your iPhone.
The net result is a kind of curated newspaper. You get content from sources you know and trust, and because stories are listed in order of publication, you’re safe in the knowledge that you won’t miss anything – unlike the semi-randomized avalanche of content that afflicts social media feeds.
The reading experience is clean and simple too – just text and images for sites that provide full articles within feeds, and a built-in browser for those that don’t. And when you find something that’s just too good to keep to yourself, there are plenty of sharing options.
IKEA Place is ultimately a virtual catalog for the chain of furniture stores with a predilection for massive blue buildings, but it also happens to be an app at the forefront of augmented reality, showcasing the future of shopping.
Select a piece of furniture and you can place it in your room. The app will also enable you to point your iPhone’s camera at a product elsewhere and find something similar on the store.
This could be considered aggressive marketing, but with a little thought, you quickly realize how useful the app can be, even if you’re not planning on buying anything.
If you’re wondering whether a second chair or bookcase would work in your room, use this app to give you an idea rather than bringing something home and then finding that it doesn’t fit.
Letterboxd is a social app for people who love films. Sign in and you can see what friends have been watching, bellyache about the latest Hollywood blockbuster that totally offended your viewing sensibilities, and comment on other people’s reviews.
Or if that fills you with horror, you can ignore the social bit entirely, and just use Letterboxd as a really savvy movie tracker. Search for films and add them to your watch list; once you’ve seen one, give it a rating. That way, you won’t end up 30 minutes into a cinematic disaster before realizing you’d already suffered through it before.
Two apps for the price of none, Letterboxd is pretty great whichever way you use it.
Notcho is one of the cheekier apps on the App Store, and would have perhaps best been named “Notch? NO!” In short, it’s designed to hide the divisive iPhone X notch. It does this by making clever edits to wallpaper, adding curved corners that hide the notch within a black bar.
The wallpaper creation bit is pretty good, with various fit options, and the option to stick with straight edges or less pronounced corners, if you don’t want to ape the iPhone X’s curves. Bizarrely, you can also add the notch back in if you want to.
Saved wallpapers do have a watermark unless you stump up for a one-off $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 IAP, but otherwise this is an essential app we wish could somehow extend to the rest of iOS.
JigSpace is an education app that reasons we learn things better in 3D, on the basis that this is how we experience the real world. And that’s a good point. It’s all very well to learn how a car’s transmission works by reading about it, or even pore over an exploded illustration in a book. But being able to fiddle around with a real engine is much more helpful.
This app isn’t quite that level of magical, but it does use iOS’s augmented reality smarts to project various objects onto a flat surface. These can then be explored and fiddled around with, in a manner that hints at the future of anything from repair manuals to textbooks.
And even though you’ll perhaps exhaust the items on offer fairly quickly, JigSpace is a nicely immersive educational experience while it lasts.
WLPPR is a wallpaper app that’s apparently not keen on vowels. But what it lacks in letters, it makes up for with beautiful satellite imagery, which you can save to Photos and later apply to your home or lock screens.
Unlike many wallpaper apps, WLPPR has been crafted with care and respect. Every image has a credit but also explanatory copy regarding what you’re looking at. You can bookmark favorites for later, apply a custom blur, and download imagery in standard or ‘parallax’ sizes.
Neatly, there’s a preview mode, too. Tap the eye icon and you can load a realistic-looking home or lock screen to see how your wallpaper would look. Not convinced? Swipe to get the next one.
Note that WLPPR is a freemium app, with IAP for extra photo sets; but for free you get dozens of high-quality pics – more than enough for most – and even more if you’re happy to spam your social media feed one time.
With its large display and the Apple Pencil, the iPad seems the natural home for a coloring app like Pigment. But if you fancy doing the odd bit of coloring-in when you need to relax, Pigment’s great to also have installed on the device you always have in your pocket.
Even on the smaller screen, it excels. You get quick access to a set of top-notch coloring tools, and a range of intricate illustrations to work on. Sure, buy a subscription and you gain access to a much bigger range; but for free, you still get an awful lot.
Amusingly, the app also offers options for staying inside the lines. By default, Pigment automatically detects what you’re trying to color and assists accordingly – but you can go fully manual if you wish!
Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia is an app for browsing Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia that makes all paper-based equivalents green with envy. It’s the official app by Wikipedia and is easily the best free option, and only rivaled by one paid alternative we’re aware of (the rather fine V for Wikipedia).
Wikipedia gets the basics right: an efficient, readable layout; fast access to your browsing history; a home page full of relevant and potentially new articles. But it’s all the small things that really count.
Save an article for later and it’s also stored offline. Finding the text a bit small? You can resize it in two taps.
Also, if you’ve a fairly new iPhone, 3D Touch is well-supported: home screen quick actions provide speedy access to search and random articles; and when reading in the app, the Peek gesture previews a link, and an upwards swipe displays a button you can tap to save it for later.
Although most fans want to cheer on their soccer team by hollering from the stands or, second best, yelling at a TV in a pub, that's not always possible. When you're otherwise busy, Onefootball is a great means of keeping track of your favorites.
The app's a cinch to set up. Choose your teams, allow Onefootball to send notifications, and then let the app work its magic. On match days, you'll be notified of every goal, which, depending on your team's fortunes, may make you thrill at or dread hearing the notification sound.
If you at any point need a little more detail, venture into the app and you'll discover everything from live tickers to customized news feeds.
eBay needs no introduction. But if you’ve just clambered free from a pile of boxes that fell on you in the mid–1990s, then: 1) probably tidy up a bit more often, and; 2) you can likely offload some of your junk on eBay.
Although originally designed for the desktop, eBay’s a far more pleasant experience on the iPhone. You can zip through searches of its vast marketplace, and get notifications when auctions are nearly up or when you’re outbid.
Selling’s a breeze, too. If your item has a barcode, scan it, take a photo of the item, and you’re good to go. Just be mindful that buying’s even easier than selling, and so don’t end up filling your home with more unnecessary tat the second you manage to offload some.
The best free health, diet and exercise apps for iPhoneOur favorite free iPhone apps for forming great habits, cooking, exercising and meditating.
Enjo is a wellness app designed for adults, framed as a chat app. The idea is to help people remember good things whenever they are feeling down.
The app starts off by engaging you in basic conversation. It will initially ask if you’ve got a partner, but will subsequently interrogate you about ways in which you keep stress at bay, and things specific family members did that you loved.
You’ve probably by now clocked the mechanics: the app effectively builds a database of content it can serve to you in context when you’re feeling down. Naturally, this isn’t a replacement for therapy, but as a slice of mindful reflection, using a modern style of communication we all know so well these days, it hits the spot.
Oak - Meditation & Breathing is a relaxation aid with no time for complexity and price tags – two things rivals often revel in, despite how they can (ironically) increase stress levels. Here, you choose between three options: meditate, breathe, and sleep.
The three breathing exercises provide techniques for unwinding and boosting alertness. Meditation options cater for beginners and old-hands alike, with guided and unguided sessions across a range of durations. And if you can’t switch off in bed, a guided breathing session helps you fall asleep.
Oak’s sense of elegance and focus is what sets it apart. This is an app that cuts to the chase, and immediately gets you on the path to a better you. And the Growth area helps keep you there, with tracking, stats, and achievements.
Tasty gives you a modern spin on cookery apps, through a splash of color, and a large dollop of video.
It starts off much like any other iPhone app: you can filter searches to specific dish types and dietary requirements; all the while, lush photography of tasty treats attempts to lure you in. But when you open a recipe page, Tasty dispenses with convention by immediately showing how the dish is made – in super-fast fashion.
These tightly edited videos are like cookery TV with all the cruft removed, and they beat photographic stills because they show elements of technique.
Smartly, although you can check out vanilla step-by-step instructions, it’s also possible to view individual steps alongside a relevant video clip. This should ensure you won’t go wrong and cook up a culinary catastrophe.
Smiling Mind is a straightforward, approachable meditation app that wants you to slow down a bit and embrace mindfulness. It starts off with a simple exercise that introduces the concept, before getting you started with short practice sessions. But if you’re already familiar with this kind of thing, you can jump right into a range of programs.
As you use the app, it urges you to input how you feel, and tracks your progress over time. Also, along with providing programs for adults, the app offers exercises designed for children.
Most importantly, though, everything about Smiling Mind feels calming, from the stylish interface to its lack of a price-tag. Whereas rivals go for wallet-thumping subscriptions, Smiling Mind is by a non-profit; it’s intent only on relieving you of stress rather than money.
Habitica is a to-do list tracker. But before your eyes glaze over, Habitica does something very different in this particular app category, transforming boring lists into a game.
The idea is that you input all the things you need to sort, including one-off items and daily goals. As you check off tasks, your little on-screen avatar gets powered-up, acquiring armor, pets, skills, and quests. Get some friends suitably invested and you can battle monsters alongside them – or just keep everyone honest.
In short, this app makes productivity fun. And while there’s some satisfaction deleting an item from a boring bullet-point list, it’s a lot more interesting when taking the trash out results in your tiny hero beaming with delight at their shiny new sword.
Sweat Deck reimagines exercise routines as a deck of cards. You assign exercises to certain suits, and lob in a couple of ‘jokers’ for good measure. The app then has you define how many cards/reps you want to try your hand at.
The app’s semi-random nature keeps you on your toes (or hands and back, depending on the exercise). If you draw a three of spades, that might mean three squats; then a nine of diamonds could mean nine push-ups. It’s a novel interface that’s a bit different from other iPhone exercise apps.
Sweat Deck could do with a way to switch cards other than tapping the screen (shouting perhaps), but you can always use prodding your iPhone as an excuse to rest for a few seconds, having suitably worked up a sweat by that point.
There are plenty of ambient noise products on the App Store, designed to help you relax, or to distract you from surrounding hubbub. TaoMix 2 is one of the best, due to its gorgeous interface and the flexibility of the soundscapes you create.
You start off with a blank canvas, to which you drag noises that are represented as neon discs. These can be recolored and resized, and positioned wherever you like on the screen. A circle is then placed to balance the mix, or flicked to meander about, so the various sounds ebb and flow over time.
For free, you get eight sounds, can save custom mixes, and can even import your own recordings. Many dozens of additional sounds are available via various affordable IAP.
If you need some ambient noise around you, White Noise+ proves an excellent app for blocking out distractions. The free version offers a small selection of sounds to soothe your soul – white noise, rain, wind, thunder, and wind chimes.
To create some ambience, you simply drag one or more noise icons to an on-screen grid; the items towards the top play at a higher volume, and those towards the right become more complex in nature. Happen upon an especially pleasing combination and you’re able to save your mix for later use.
The app smartly includes built-in mixes to provide a little inspiration – and to showcase a wider range of sounds that’s available via IAP. A single $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 purchase also removes the ad bar, unlocks a sleep timer, alarm, and dark mode, and allows you to fiddle with the 15 additional sounds – in both the bundled mixes and also your own creations.
But whether you pay or not, the combination of excellent sounds and a modern, usable interface make White Noise+ a best-in-class product on the iPhone.
You might not associate taking medication with a hip and cool iPhone, but technology can be a boon to anyone with such requirements. Round Health offers great pill tracking and dosage notifications – and it doesn’t do any harm that the app also happens to be gorgeous.
It’s split into three sections: in My Medicine, you add medications, and for each you can define a name, strength, individual doses, and schedules based around reminder windows of up to three hours. In Today, you view and log the day’s medication.
Flexible preferences enable you to set up cross-device sync, push notifications, and to export data - and reminding users to refill will be a real help too.
That the app is free is generous, given the job it does – and how well it does it. Also, the system is flexible enough that Round Health might work as a reminders system for other repeating tasks, albeit one in which jobs are labelled as ‘taken’ rather than ‘done’!
The science of sleep is something few people delve into. But you know some days that you wake up and feel awful, even if you think you've had a decent night's sleep. Sleep Cycle might be able to tell you why. It analyses you while you sleep, using sound or motion, and provides detailed statistics when you wake.
Additionally, it'll constantly figure out what phase of sleep you're in, attempting to wake you at the best possible time, in a gentle, pleasing manner.
That probably all sounds a bit woo-woo, but here's the thing: this app actually works, from the graphing bits through to helping you feel refreshed and relaxed on waking up.
Runkeeper has been around since the App Store’s earliest days, and has gradually transformed from a then-magical means of tracking runs using your iPhone’s GPS, to a combination of personal trainer and community, providing everything you need to keep yourself fit.
It still does the basics very well. Head out for a run (or a walk or cycling session), and the app will provide a clear view of your training in real-time. (And we mean that: the stats are in large enough type to see from across the street.)
But it’s the other features that make Runkeeper really special: training plans; iTunes integration; custom challenges for friends; and a stopwatch mode for indoor activities and workouts. Unfortunately, it can’t actually do the exercise for you – so you’ll still have to work up a sweat yourself.
The best free iPhone apps for kids and toddlersOur favorite free iPhone interactive experiences and learning aids for toddlers and children.
Wonderbly Story Time Books is an iPhone take on a personalized illustrated children’s book. The story centers on a child’s magical quest to find their forgotten name, and each letter has its own beautifully realized miniature adventure.
In fact, each letter has more than one scene, which means there’s no duplication even if your kid has the unlikely name ‘Daaaaavid’. The only minor snag on iPhone is the text is sometimes a bit small. You can use a zoom gesture, but the second you let go, the page snaps back into place.
Still, should you want to free your book from the confines of your iPhone, you can order a printed version. And should you want to revisit previous adventures in digital form, they remain stored inside the app.
Peek-a-Zoo doesn’t look like much at first, given that every scene essentially features simplistic cartoon animals atop a flat slab of color, but you soon appreciate how much imagination has gone into this basic setup when you watch a child using the app.
It’s all down to the questions, which challenge a toddler to find the right animal. They’ll be asked things like who’s dressed up (which character has the hat), who’s winking, or who’s trying to hide. That last one makes brilliant use of the minimalist graphics, ‘hiding’ an animal by matching its body to the game’s background.
It’s all very sweet-natured, and has surprising range given how simple it is. That’s something to appreciate – a free children’s app that’s free from cruft and ads.
Toca Tailor Fairy Tales turns your child into a designer and stylist. On selecting a character to clothe, they can then drag and swipe to give them a beautiful new outfit.
Well, ‘beautiful’ might be a stretch. The mix-and-match nature of the app offers equal potential for eye-searing garish fashion disasters. This is especially true when you delve into the materials section, zooming and rotating textures, or adding new ones by way of the camera.
Garments can be adjusted in other ways, too – tap to switch to a different type, or drag to change something’s length. Last of all, there are accessories to give the model a perfect final touch – or a very silly hat.
Laugh & Learn™ Shapes & Colors Music Show for Baby is an interactive experience designed for very young children. Level 1 should be approachable enough even for a six-month-old you’re brave enough to arm with your worryingly expensive iPhone; they can tilt and tap to make shapes appear and bounce around the screen.
Level 2 is squarely designed at toddlers. The app chirps “Let’s put on a show!” as shapes dance and jump about on the screen. This is augmented by jaunty earworms that will burrow into your skull, while your tiny human makes their own live remix by prodding at a colorful piano keyboard. It’ll drive you bonkers, but the smile on that little face will be worth it. Probably.
Lego Creator Islands might seem like an odd choice for inclusion here, since parents would most likely sooner see their children playing with plastic bricks rather than virtual ones on an iPhone. But when the real thing isn’t available, this official game does the business.
It all takes place on the titular islands, which you explore to collect bricks that act as a kind of in-game currency. These can then be used to acquire Lego sets that are constructed with a few deft taps.
The selection is fairly small, but even so you can over time build a rather nice set of islands, featuring houses, roaming animals and dinosaurs, and vehicles blazing about the place. Also, there’s no chance of getting a plastic brick embedded in your foot.
Green Riding Hood subverts a much-loved fairy tale, re-imagining Grandma as a hip yoga teacher, and having the Big Bad Wolf gradually learn how tasty healthy food is. Which might all sound a bit like brainwashing for tiny people if the story bit wasn’t so well designed.
Each little scene in the book is interactive, so you can tap animals to make them exercise, have the wolf angrily lob a bone into the forest, or – our favorite – fashion a cacophony as the animals try to wake a dozing granny with whatever objects they have to hand.
Beyond the book, you get some recipes and stickers for free. If all that takes your fancy, IAPs unlock exercise and dance routines – but, really, just the fairy tale bit alone makes this one very much worth a download.
The best free music and audio apps for iPhoneOur favorite free iPhone apps for playing songs, listening to podcasts, making music and being a virtual DJ.
djay is an app for budding DJs who want to spin some virtual vinyl. Launch the app and you can convince yourself that you’re a perfect mix of Martin Garrix and David Guetta, slamming amazing tunes into your ears, while fiddling with a mixer, looping, EQ, filters and effects. Alternatively, you can just fire up the app’s Automix feature and let it get on with all the tricky stuff.
With Spotify and iTunes integration, it’s not hard to find things to play, although the interface on iPhone is a touch fiddly for full-on DJ work (rather than entertainment for a wannabe). On that basis, we’d exercise caution before grabbing the feature-rich pro-subscription.
That said, if you’ve got an external DJ controller, djay for iPhone can feasibly become a vital – and portable – toolkit component even for the pros.
Wilson FM reasons there an awful lot of podcasts, and it’s tricky to find great new ones to listen to. It therefore packages hand-picked individual episodes in the format of a magazine.
A new issue of Wilson FM arrives every week, and each one is designed to be thematically and culturally relevant. It’s also a handy way of branching out from your usual listening bubble, and delving into the likes of entertaining science, the meaning of words, and cracking cultural mysteries.
The player itself is basic, and not a patch on the likes of Overcast. But that’s not the point of Wilson FM. It’s here to help you discover new things, and if you chance across a really great show, you can always copy its link and subscribe to it elsewhere.
Beatwave wants to simplify the process of creating music. You tap notes on to a grid, which explode in color like digital fireworks when the playhead hits them. You can keep adjusting your loop live, or add depth by overlaying loops of different sounds, including drums.
For an app that looks so simple, and with vibrant blasts of color not usually associated with music creation tools, there’s surprising depth here, with sliders to tweak sounds, drum generators, and auto-chords. Veterans, though, may miss the original’s more approachable square grid play surface, which echoed Yamaha’s Tenori-on.
The only other downside is the sounds you get being a touch limited. Still, there’s enough range for what’s ultimately a musical sketchpad; and if you want more, the ‘pro’ IAP US$9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99 adds several extra sets.
Yousician helps you to master a musical instrument or sing, but without that feeling like a chore. To that end, it often resembles a video game.
When you’re learning piano, the interface depicts scores and keyboards with bright colors to help guide your eyes and finger, but the app really comes alive when you’re learning guitar. It turns into something like Guitar Hero, only you’re using a real guitar and the app is cunningly teaching you how to play.
Things start with the basics, but before long you’re strumming and picking with the best of them. The only big limit in the free version is daily play time. Grab a subscription if you fancy learning more rapidly.
Bandcamp might seem superfluous in a world of Apple Music and Spotify, but for anyone who enjoys venturing further afield to find new music, it’s a must.
The service is chock full of indie artists, whose music you can delve into by way of the Bandcamp Weekly radio show, or by browsing the app’s news feeds. Most albums enable you to preview a few tracks in their entirety, and some are entirely free to play, forever.
If you want to go old-school and actually buy music, the Bandcamp website is a good bet. Purchases can be downloaded in a range of formats; and when you only have your iPhone to hand, you can stream what you’ve bought and watch as your personal music feed fills with related tracks you might also enjoy.
The iPhone version of GarageBand has always been ambitious. Aiming at newcomers and professionals alike, its feature set includes smart instruments that always keep you in key, multitrack recording/editing functionality, a loops player, and superb guitar amps.
But 2017’s major update takes things much further, with new synth Alchemy improving the app’s previously slightly ropey sound set. Smart piano strips have been expanded to all keyboard instruments, helping anyone to play perfect melodies.
And Audio Unit support exists to load third-party synths directly inside of GarageBand, similar to how plug-ins work on desktop music-making apps.
Because of these things, GarageBand is now even more suited to musicians of all skill levels – although be aware on smaller screens that the app can be a touch fiddly, what with there being so much going on.
Plenty of apps claim they can get you making music in seconds, but Figure really means it. The app's heritage helps, as it comes from Propellerhead Software, creators of the legendary Reason and ReBirth.
In Figure, though, working on loops and beats is stripped right back from what you'd find in those complex PC apps; instead, you tap out drums, and slide your finger around to fashion monster bass and playful leads.
Sounds can be tweaked or swapped out entirely at any point. Once you're done, finished tracks can be uploaded and shared online. For serious musicians, there's even Audiobus support.
Sometimes with apps, it's the seemingly little things that make a big difference. With Overcast, for example, you get a perfectly decent podcast app that does everything you'd expect: podcast subscriptions; playback via downloads or streaming; a robust search for new shows.
But where Overcast excels is in attempting to save you time and improve your listening experience. Effects (which can be assigned per-podcast) provide the smartest playback speed-up we've heard, voice boost for improving the clarity of talky shows, and smart speed.
The last of those attempts to shorten silences. You won't use that setting for comedy shows, but it's superb for lengthy tech podcasts. As of version 2.0, Overcast is free, and betters all the other iOS podcast apps that also lack a price tag. (Should you wish to support the app, though, there's an entirely optional recurring patronage IAP.)
On the iPad, Novation Launchpad is one of the best music apps suitable for absolutely anyone. You get a bunch of pads, and tap them to trigger audio loops, which always sound great regardless of the combinations used. This isn't making music per se, but you can get up a good head of steam while imagining yourself as a futuristic combination of electronic musician, DJ and mix genius.
On iPhone, it shouldn't really work, the smaller screen not being as suited to tapping away at dozens of pads. But smart design from Novation proves otherwise. 48 trigger pads are placed front and centre, and are just big enough to accurately hit unless you've the most sausagey of sausage thumbs.
Effects lurk at the foot of the screen — tap one and a performance space slides in, covering half the screen, ready for you to stutter and filter your masterpiece.
As on the iPad, you can also record a live mix, which can be played back, shared and exported. This is a really great feature, adding optional permanence to your tapping exploits.
Apple's Music Memos is all about getting music ideas down — fast. You launch the app, hit record, play your guitar or piano, and your riff is safely recorded, rather than vanishing from your head the moment you see something vaguely interesting outside.
Smartly, the app provides additional toys to experiment with. There's a tuner, and during playback, you can add automated electronic bass and drumming. The virtual instruments attempt to match tempo and energy with whatever you recorded (and with some success, although more complex inputs can confuse this feature to an amusing degree).
Music Memos also tries to transcribe the chords being played; its accuracy is questionable beyond the basics, but not bad as a trigger when you later want to learn how to play your own spark of inspiration.
Usefully, you can fling recordings at GarageBand and Logic (bass and drums going along for the ride as separate tracks).
Less usefully, you can sing into the app, and still add bass, drums and chord transcription, for some kind of madcap tech-based cacophony of awfulness that we felt entirely compelled to try in the name of a thorough review. Expect our effort to (not) trouble the charts shortly.
The best free office and writing apps for iPhoneOur favorite free iPhone web browsers, calculators, password security tools and writing apps.
LastPass has a lot in common with Apple’s iCloud Keychain, which comes baked into your iPhone. You get a place in which to securely store website login/password details and payment information. This integrates with Safari, and also – from iOS 12 onwards – with third-party app sign-in screens.
The main advantage of LastPass over Apple’s solution is that it’s available for Android and Windows, meaning you can use your passwords on whatever system you wish. But also it includes secure notes, and custom form filling options, which prove handy as well.
Because LastPass can be used alongside (rather than instead of) iCloud Keychain, it’s worth a look regardless, not least given that its editing and browsing interface far betters Apple’s. And although there’s a premium tier, the free version will be enough for most.
Drafts 5 describes itself as the place “where text starts” on your iPhone. That’s quite the claim, but the app really does excel if you work with words.
The efficient interface makes it a breeze to work on structured text with Markdown, glancing at a live word count as you go. A customizable keyboard row provides speedy access to Markdown tools – or anything else you fancy stashing there for easy access.
Once you’re done, you can keep your documents in Drafts, where they remain easily searchable, and can even be added to from the Apple Watch app. Or you can send them elsewhere by utilizing a range of actions. Splash out on a subscription and you unlock even more power; but for free, Drafts 5 is an astonishing bargain for anyone in the market for a top-notch iPhone text editor.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser is a web browser that reasons privacy shouldn’t be an optional extra. Instead, it doubles down on giving you control over your personal information as you browse the web, regardless of what you’re doing.
By default, tracker networks are blocked, encryption is forced whenever it’s available, and searches use DuckDuckGo, which never tracks you. Should you finish doing something confidential, you can prod a single button to erase your entire browsing history – easy. The browser can also give you details on any site’s privacy measures, and show improvements it’s made on your behalf.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser’s simplicity and standalone nature mean it might not be a total replacement for Safari, but it’s worth installing as a back-up browser – or even just if you fancy checking out the privacy credentials of sites you enjoy using.
RememBear puts a friendly, furry face on password management. Getting started is simple, as is inputting website usernames and passwords. Everything you enter is fully secured behind a master password – or Touch ID if you have a compatible iPhone.
The app can integrate with Safari for iPhone, but has its own built-in browser too, should you want to keep certain passwords and activity away from prying eyes. There’s also cross-device sync so you can use your logins across Macs, PCs, and Android devices.
There’s less scope here than in the likes of 1Password – RememBear is only for website logins and payment cards, not things like notes and servers. Still, its focus and friendliness make it a great choice if you’re not already using a password manager – or if you are, but fancy something simpler.
Cake Browser is a mobile-centric web browser that wants you to skip right to dessert. Instead of presenting you with a list of search results, Cake immediately displays what it thinks is the most relevant page, while others load in background tabs. You then swipe between them (though you can still access a traditional results list by swiping from the left).
There are great ideas in Cake, not least the buttons that trigger searches specifically for video, images, news, and shopping.
The downside is that the search engines and sites Cake uses aren’t configurable, and the results it provides aren’t always what you want. Even so, that sense of surprise, and not always heading to the same old places, makes Cake worth a look – even if you stick to Safari for the bulk of your browsing.
Pages is a fully fledged and fully free word processor for your iPhone. Word processing might not be top of your list of iPhone-related tasks, but this great app might just change your mind.
Pages includes a wide range of templates, such as reports, letters, cards and posters. Although you probably won’t want to create and edit an entire magazine on your smartphone, Pages is user-friendly, with an efficient interface that’s suitable for banging out a first draft of a letter, leaflet or poster while you’re on the train.
Thanks to iCloud sync, whatever you create in Pages can be opened on a Mac or iPad running the app. If you’re resolutely iPhone-only, you can export your work in a range of formats, including PDF and Microsoft Word. If you’re really rocking it old-school, you can even send it to an AirPrint printer.
PCalc Lite is a version of leading iOS calculator PCalc, aimed at people who aren’t keen on spending money. In terms of functionality, it’s more stripped back than its paid sibling, but the app’s guts are identical.
What this means is PCalc Lite is undoubtedly the best free traditional calculator for iPhone. It’s fast, responsive, and friendly, and bundles a small set of useful conversions for length, speed, temperature, volume, and weight.
If you want to bolt on something from the paid version, IAPs exist, such as for multi-line support, or extra conversion options.
When iOS 11 arrived, Apple’s built-in calculator proved buggy, leading to people scrabbling around for an alternative. With PCalc Lite installed, that need never happen to you.
Documents by Readdle is a file manager, document reader and PDF editor. From a documents standpoint, the app wasn’t made redundant by Apple’s Files; rather, it nicely supplements it.
This is because Readdle’s app can connect to remote servers, such as WebDAV, SFTP and shared network drives. In-app document management is sleek and simple, and support for Locations in Files means you can via Apple’s app access whatever you’ve stored in Readdle’s.
From a productivity standpoint, Documents is handy as a reader for all kinds of files, like Microsoft Office documents, images, movies, and PDFs. With the last of those, you can also search and annotate, making this app an ideal addition to your freebie iPhone toolkit when you need to do work on the go.
Scanbot Scanner App is, suitably, a scanner for your iPhone. This might seem unnecessary now Apple’s Notes app includes scanning functionality; and, indeed, Scanbot and Notes do have some overlap. Even so, we reckon Scanbot is very much worth a download.
First and foremost, having a separate scanning app is more efficient. Rather than fiddling around setting up a new scan in Notes, embedding imagery, and then sharing your scans, Scanbot has a sleeker user flow.
It also seems faster than Apple’s app when it comes to scanning – for which you can scan single or multi-page documents, and then apply effects to the end results.
Scanbot also has an upgrade path, for those who want more. Pay and you gain access to automatic cloud uploads, PDF editing, document encryption, and OCR. But even for free, Scanbot deserves a place on your iPhone.
The best free productivity apps for iPhoneOur favorite free iPhone apps for being more productive with reminders, to-do lists, flash cards, timers, keyboards, conversion aids and automation.
Bring! offers a new spin on shared shopping lists. Although you can create a straightforward shared text-based list in Reminders, Bring! opts for large colored buttons adorned with icons. Not only are these easier to spot when you’re in a busy supermarket with a basket on one arm and a toddler on the other, they’re also a mite simpler to tap.
Beyond this, there’s all kinds of smart stuff going on. Color-coded rings on items change from green to orange to red when the product is getting closer to running out. For items where you want something very specific, you can add notes and a photo.
And when you fancy letting everyone know you’ve made changes to a list shared with many people (for example, in an office), ready-made messages can be sent, saving you the hassle of crafting one yourself.
Shortcuts is Apple’s redesign of the well-regarded Workflow app, which aims to streamline your day by automating common tasks.
Apps of this ilk have a history of being geeky and impenetrable, but Shortcuts is the friendly face of automation. In the Gallery view are dozens of pre-made workflows to download, which perform actions like calculating tips, figuring out how long it’ll be before you’re home, and logging aspects of your routine.
Actions can be added to your Home screen as pseudo-apps, and triggered from Today view or by using Siri voice commands.
For a fully custom experience, there’s an editing view to dig into. You can tweak existing downloads, or start with a blank canvas, adding actions using a drag-and-drop interface. On an iPhone Plus models or iPhone XS Max, this works particularly well in landscape, with an iPad-like dual-pane interface.
Bundler hugely speeds up and simplifies the process of creating and sharing ZIP archives on an iPhone. As long as the apps you want to share something from support the standard iOS Share sheet, they’ll work with Bundler. Select your document, tap the share button, and you can then send the file to the displayed ‘bundle’, or create a new one.
Open up the main Bundle app and you’ll see your bundles. These can be renamed, as can individual documents within bundles. Usefully, many document types can be previewed inside of Bundle too, so you can check you’ve grabbed the right ones.
Once you’re happy with your selection, you tap the Share button and send the bundle to an app or cloud storage as a ZIP. It’s fast and far more efficient than other apps of this type.
Wunderlist is a hugely popular to-do list manager. It’s easy to see why: the app is simple to use, and yet provides depth and advanced features for those who need them.
You start by dumping your to-dos in an inbox, at which point you can organize them into lists, add deadlines and reminders, define sub-tasks for more complex projects, attach files, and set regular tasks to repeat. Unlike Apple’s Reminders app, reordering tasks (alphabetically, or by due date) is a cinch, and lists can be shared across a wide range of platforms.
All of this is entirely free (there’s a paid tier, but you’re unlikely to need it), so if you want a better to-do manager than Reminders but don’t fancy splashing out, this is the app to go for.
Meteor is an internet speed tester designed for human beings. It eschews complex information – and even advertising – and instead provides you with straightforward, colorful buttons and readouts.
An inviting ‘Start Testing’ button kicks things off, whereupon the app sets about checking your internet connection’s performance, a little meteor animating on-screen as it does so. Once the tests are done, speeds are scored, and are subsequently available from the History tab.
Meteor also attempts to estimate how well your connection would fare with popular apps and games, six of which can be added to an ‘app performance’ bar. These values should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt, but this freebie nonetheless impresses for being a no-nonsense, user-friendly, ad-free way to check internet connectivity.
Apple’s pre-loaded Clock app has a perfectly serviceable timer – but you only get one countdown at any given moment. MultiTimer, as its name might suggest, gives you multiple timers that you can set going simultaneously.
On launching the app, you’ll find six timers already set up. Each has a different color, name and icon. Tap a timer and it starts, tap again to pause, or double-tap to reset. Easy. Long press and you open the timer’s options, so you can adjust its default time, label, color, icon and sound.
You also have plenty of preferences to delve into, including adjusting the default workspace. Should you want extra workspaces – or a custom layout – grab the $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 MultiTimer Pro IAP.
From the brains behind game-like language-learning app Duolingo comes Tinycards. The aim is to enable people to memorize anything by way of friendly flashcard sets.
Duolingo itself offers a number of sets based around language, history and geography. Smartly, though, anyone can create and publish a set, which has led to hundreds of decks about all kinds of subjects, from renaissance art to retro computing.
The memorizing bit is based around minutes-long drills. You’re presented with cards and details to memorize, which the app then challenges you on, by way of typing in answers or answering multiple choice questions.
Some early teething problems with typos and abbreviations (for example, stating ‘USA’ was incorrect because ‘United States of America’ was the answer) have been dealt with by way of a handy ‘I was right’ button. Just don’t press it when you don’t really know the answer, OK?
The idea behind Cheatsheet is to provide fast access to tiny chunks of information you never remember but really need to: your hotel room, your car's number plate, Wi-Fi passwords, or, if you're feeling suitably retro, the Konami code.
Set-up is pleasingly straightforward. Using the app, you add 'cheats' by selecting an icon and then typing your info nugget. When you've got yourself a number of 'cheats', they can be reordered as you see fit. Once you're done, the entire lot can be displayed on the Today widget or an Apple Watch.
Cheatsheet saves some features for a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 'pro' upgrade - a custom keyboard, an action extension, some of the icons, and iCloud sync. But the free version is nonetheless useful and generous, along with making really good use of the Today view on your phone.
We keep hearing about how important coding will be to the future of everything. That's all very well, unless code makes about as much sense to you as the most exotic of foreign languages.
The idea behind Lrn is to gently ease you in. Through friendly copy and simple quizzes, you gradually gain confidence across a range of languages.
For free, you get courses on HTML and CSS, along with introductions to JavaScript, Ruby and Python. You can complete any course for $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49; but even if you don't pay anything at all, you'll get a lot out of this app if you've an interest in coding but don't know where to start.
Dropbox was a big deal in the early days of iOS. When Apple refused to provide access to a file system, Dropbox became a surrogate, and was supported by a great many apps. But you might ask if it has a place now Apple offers Files.
The answer is yes. Dropbox can act as a Location within Files, which is great if you use Dropbox to share folders with people running various systems. But the standalone Dropbox app also excels: it can quickly scan receipts and whiteboards to PDF; you can use it to edit Microsoft Office documents; and it’s possible to comment on files to share feedback with a team.
For free, you get 2GB of space. If you need more, Dropbox Plus gives you 1TB for $9.99/£7.99/AU$13.99 per month.
SwiftKey reasons that you could – and should – be typing a lot more quickly on your iPhone’s keyboard. Mostly, it achieves this by freeing you from the drudgery of having to tap individual keys or even bother stabbing at the prediction bar – instead, you just lazily swipe about in the vague direction of the keys you want.
During your early days with the app, this occasionally results in some comical typos, but pretty soon you end up swipe-typing at speeds you’d never thought possible.
And beyond the keyboard’s AI smarts, there’s customization to delve into, including custom themes and colors, enough emoji to choke a hippo, and some very handy bilingual support for when you need to quickly switch between languages.
The thinking behind Slack is to free teams from the drudgery of email. It's essentially a real-time messaging system, where people have group conversations based around user-defined hashtags, or send private messages to one-another.
Support for inline images, videos and Twitter-like summaries boost pasted content, and the app integrates with cloud storage from the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.
It's worth noting that while Slack is clearly aimed at businesses, it works perfectly well as a means of communication for groups of friends who aren't thrilled about storing their personal insights and details on Facebook.
We're told the 'S' in Vert S stands for 'speed'. This is down to the app being an efficient incarnation of the well-regarded Vert unit converter.
The older app had you browse huge category lists to pick what you need, but Vert S is keener on immediacy. There's a search, but the app's core is a Favorites page, where commonly used conversions are stored.
Tap one and you enter a basic calculator, enabling you to convert between your two chosen units, which can be quickly switched by tapping the Vert button. (Note that currencies are behind an IAP paywall — $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 for 'Vert Pro' — but conversions for other units are free.)
The best free iPhone weather and travel appsOur favorite free iPhone apps for mapping, sat-nav, translation, learning languages, weather forecasts, currency conversion and holiday planning.
Thunderly is an entertaining and unique weather app with a penchant for storms. Fire the thing up, and you get a photorealistic Earth you can spin beneath a finger. Zoom in and you can go hunting for storms.
The app provides a number of options for enhancing the experience. It emits blasts of thundery noise, and can rumble your iPhone. Entertainingly, it’ll also use the flash to simulate lightning. If you zoom right into your location, you can measure how far away a storm is by prodding a button when lightning strikes, and then a second time when you hear thunder.
Naturally, Thunderly isn’t a replacement for a traditional weather app, but as a free download, it’s an entertaining diversion if you’ve an interest in weather.
Google Translate is like having an entire crew of translation staff in your pocket. When online, it can translate text and conversations between dozens of languages, giving you a fighting chance at a to-and-fro in a foreign tongue when you’re stuck for other options. Favorite words and phrases can be saved, to build up a personalized phrasebook.
But the real magic comes by way of the camera. Point Google Translate at some text and as long as it’s reasonably legible, it will attempt to translate it live, into your chosen language. You’re not going to be reading a book in this manner, but when you’re abroad and staring quizzically at a menu or the ingredients on a food packet, Google Translate can be a life-saver.
Koins is a rare currency converter that appears to have been designed with humans in mind. Rather than you dealing with a utilitarian ‘afterthought’ interface, you instead get something akin to a futuristic, playful calculator.
Yes, we know, playful isn’t usually a word you’d associate with this kind of app, but it’s fun to hear the bloops and bleeps as you tap out numbers and choose your currencies.
Naturally, Koins has more serious features, too: you can squish the keyboard for one-sided use (or use the app in landscape), and sync data via iCloud. However, if you want to check out how currencies have performed over time, you’ll need to unlock the premium version with IAP.
World Clock Time Widget does what you’d expect from its name, enabling you to set up a world clock that’s visible at a glance in Today view.
Setup is straightforward. Tapping a + button gives you a list of locations. You can type a place name to rapidly filter the list, then tap an item to add it to your clocks. Locations appear in order from west to east, although you can rearrange them manually.
The widget shows your first four clocks in Today view, but can be expanded to show more. Neatly, you can also move the clocks forward and backward by hourly increments. It’s a pity you only get a digital view – analog clocks are only available within the app – but otherwise this is a solid freebie.
Trips by Lonely Planet is an app for sharing travel experiences – or just reveling in the journeys made by others. It’s a bit like a travel-oriented Instagram mixed with a smattering of travel guide and blog. If you like gorgeous photography and a touch of commentary for context, it’s a must-have install.
New top picks are regularly showcased on the app’s Home tab, and you can favorite those you like, and/or follow the authors. Annoyingly, there’s no search, but you can delve into themed categories, such as ‘cities’ and ‘adventure’. (Think of it more like a magazine than a website and you should be fine.)
When you have an adventure of your own, you can upload your own story. The layout options are a bit basic, but the app is really easy to work with, making for stress-free sharing.
Google Maps is an app that’s been a mainstay in this list for years – and it’s easy to see why. Although Apple’s own Maps app has hugely improved since launch, Google Maps retains the lead in almost every way. It’s superb at locating points of interest –whether you’re looking for a distant town or local restaurant – and offers robust public transport suggestions.
Beyond that, it just proves handier than Apple’s app. Street View is great for virtually scoping out a location, looking for landmarks that might prove handy during a drive. You can draw a route to measure the distance between two places.
And best of all, you can download maps to your iPhone, transforming Google Maps into a free sat-nav equivalent that works entirely offline.
Google Earth simply gives you our planet in the palm of your hand, and encourages you to explore. You can manually rotate and zoom, search for specific locations, or take your chances with the dice icon, to check out somewhere random.
Wherever you end up, Google Earth provides local photography and information, becoming something of a virtual tour guide. Places others have explored nearby are provided as cards, which prove genuinely useful for giving crowdsourced points of interest or recommendations.
This concept reaches its logical conclusion with Voyager – a selection of journeys you can take to some of the world’s most amazing sights, from ancient wonders to modern ones like Kennedy Space Center.
Google Earth’s visual majesty is lessened on the smaller screen, but it’d be churlish to scoff at an app that in an instant provides access to so much of our planet.
Lingvist is a language-learning app that claims to be able to teach you at light speed. Naturally, that’s hyperbole, but Lingvist nonetheless has a methodology and interface that gets you going in your chosen language (French, Spanish, German, and Russian are supported) at serious speed.
Mostly, it’s about plugging words into sentences, in a drill-like fashion. Imagine interactive flash cards thrown your way in quick-fire fashion and you’re there. The underlying algorithm tracks words you’re finding tricky, and in-context explanations for things like verbs pop up as and when they’re needed.
Will Lingvist make you fluent in hours? Probably not. But as a refresher, or even a first step in learning a foreign tongue, it’s the best freebie around on iPhone.
Today Weather provides a sleek, elegant take on weather forecasting, marrying modern design, usability, and a slew of data.
Set a location and you get current conditions below a supposedly representative photo. (The photo is, frankly, a bit rubbish but can fortunately be disabled.) Scroll to delve into predictions about the coming hours and days, and details about UV index and pressure, the chances of imminent rainfall, air quality, sunrise/sunset times, and what the moon’s up to.
Sadly, these components can’t be rearranged, and anyone who wants a rainfall radar will have to pay for it. But these drawbacks shouldn’t stop you downloading what’s a great freebie weather app.
Also, Hello Weather has a trump card in its data source menu, which lists conditions and temperatures from five different providers. If one regularly seems better than the others, you can switch with a tap. Nice.
Billed as ‘your smart travel guide’, Triposo elevates itself above the competition. First and foremost, it’s comprehensive. Whereas other guides typically concentrate on a few major cities, Triposo drills down into tiny towns and villages as well, helping you get the best out of wherever you happen to be staying.
50,000 destinations worldwide are included, complete with information on bars, restaurants, hotels, tours and attractions.
Beyond that, the app is easy to use, and it optionally works offline, enabling you to download guides on a regional basis. This is perfect for when you’re ambling about somewhere new, without a data connection. And if you’re unsure where to head, Triposo can even build an editable city walk for you too.
One-time darling of the digital check-in crowd, Foursquare in 2014 reworked its app to focus entirely on local search. Although this irked fans who'd been there since the beginning, it's hard to criticize the app we've been left with.
On iPhone, you start with a search field, beneath which sits a handy list of relatively local places of interest. Tap an item and you gain access to a photo gallery, basic details, and a slew of reviews.
In the main, Foursquare is quite obsessed with food, drink and nightlife, but the 'fun' and 'more' categories house plenty of additional places to visit, from gig venues and cinemas to rather more sedate options like parks and historic sites.
Filters and 'tastes' options within the app's settings enable you to further hone down recommended choices, and anything you fancy reminding yourself of on a more permanent basis can be added to a custom list.
There's a tendency for weather apps to either bombard you with facts or try to be too clever with design Hello Weather, by contrast, simply wants to get you all the weather information you need, but nothing you don't.
This focused approach doesn't mean Hello Weather is an ugly app. On the contrary, it's very smart, with a clean layout and readable graphs. Mostly, though, we're fond of Hello Weather because it eschews complexity without limiting the information on offer.
The single-page view is split in three, covering current conditions, the next few hours, and the week's forecast. If you need more detail, a swipe provides access to things like sunrise/sunset times for the current day, or written forecasts for the coming week.
It’s worth noting that some functionality lurks behind annual IAP, such as real-time rainfall estimates and multiple weather sources. But as a free no-fuss weather app, Hello Weather is hard to beat.
Citymapper is a travel aid that wants to help you get around big cities more easily. Unlike Google Maps, it doesn’t work worldwide, instead carefully selecting places that get coverage. But if you live in or visit one of the supported cities – which include London, Paris, Berlin and New York – Citymapper is an essential download.
The app will quickly zero in on your location. When you need to get somewhere else, Citymapper makes it easy to compare all of your options in real time.
But it’s the smaller features that properly cement its place on your iPhone: watching buses move about a live map; advice about the best train carriage to take; and real-time alerts when you should get ready to disembark – great when you’re dozing at the end of a busy day.
The Weather Underground app (or 'Wunderground' to your iPhone, which sounds like an oddly dark Disney film) is one of those products that flings in everything but the kitchen sink yet somehow remains usable.
Whatever your particular interest in the weather, you're covered, through a slew of 'tiles' (which can be moved or disabled to suit) on a huge scrolling page.
At the top, you get a nicely designed tile detailing current conditions and showing a local map. Tick and cross buttons lurk, asking for input regarding the app's accuracy. During testing, we almost always tapped the tick — reassuring.
Scroll, though, and you find yourself immersed in the kind of weather geekery that will send meteorological nuts into rapture. There are rainfall and temperature graphs for the next day and hour, along with simpler forecasts for the week.
You get details on humidity, pressure and dew point. Sunrise, sunset and moon timings are presented as stylish animations. You can investigate local and global webcams and photos, and then head to the web if not satisfied with that deluge of data.
Weather Underground is funded by non-intrusive ads (which you can disable annually for $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 if you feel the need), and is easily our favourite free iPhone weather app; in fact, it even rivals the best paid fare on the platform.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active release date, price, news and leaks
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:37:23 +0000
Update: Samsung's own Galaxy Wearable app has leaked the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active. Read on below to see everything we've just heard about the upcoming smartwatch.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch is notable for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that it’s a highly capable smartwatch - in fact, it's number one in our best smartwatch ranking - and it doesn’t run Wear OS or watchOS, relying instead on the Tizen operating system.
With a stylish design, long battery life and loads of tracking skills it does enough to compete with any wearable running those better-known operating systems, but it isn’t perfect by any means, so we’ve come up with a list of improvements that we want to see on the next Samsung smartwatch.
Originally we wrote these expecting them to be improvements we'll see on a Samsung Galaxy Watch 2, but since then we've heard rumors of a product called the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
You'll find what we want to see as well as everything we've learnt so far about Samsung's next smartwatch. That includes possible release timing, price and features.
Cut to the chase What is it? The next smartwatch from SamsungWhen is it out? Maybe tomorrow (February 20) or later in 2019What will it cost? Probably at least $329 / £279 / AU$499 Samsung Galaxy Watch Active release date and priceThe Samsung Galaxy Watch landed on August 9, 2018, alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, so there’s a fair chance that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 2 will land in or around August 2019, possibly at the same event as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.
Before that, we're expecting to see the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active that will likely sit alongside the Galaxy Watch range.
The Watch Active has been spotted on Samsung's own official Galaxy Wearables app suggesting it'll be ready to launch alongside the Galaxy S10. We're expecting to hear about that phone on February 20 at a special launch in San Francisco.
That's tomorrow, and it's set to take place from 11AM PT / 2PM ET / 7PM GMT or 6AM AEDT on Thursday 21. We also have a guide so you can learn how to watch the Galaxy S10 livestream where we may see the watch unveiled.
However, there’s no guarantee of that and there are no exact release date details yet.
There aren’t any price rumors yet either, but the Samsung Galaxy Watch launched for $329 / £279 / AU$499 for the 42mm version or $349 / £299 / AU$549 for the 46mm model, with prices going up if you want a version with LTE. So we’d expect the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active will cost at least that much and it may cost more.
Image Credit: TechRadar
Samsung Galaxy Sport or Galaxy Watch Active?The next smartwatch from Samsung is unlikely to be called the Galaxy Watch 2 - that's probably a name reserved for a follow-up to the original watch and we'd expect that to launch late in 2019 or perhaps even later.
Rumors initially suggested it'd be called the Samsung Galaxy Sport, but we've now seen consistent leaks - including Samsung's own website - that suggests it'll be the Galaxy Watch Active.
It suggests an adventure-led design with a more rugged look, and it may eventually be the final name of this next Samsung wearable.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active news and rumorsThere aren’t yet any whispers about the Samsung Galaxy Watch 2, but there are lots of renders seemingly showing the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active. That may show us Samsung's next smartwatch as well as give us a hint of what to expect on the Galaxy Watch 2.
First up, we have the most important leak that was spotted on the company's own Galaxy Wearables app. It also showed off the Samsung Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Buds headphones.
That also matches a render spotted by 91Mobiles, meaning we're almost certain this will be the design of the new watch. The renders show it'll have a round design, chrome body and two circular buttons on the right hand side of the watch.
It also confirms the company won't be including a rotatable bezel on this device, like there was on the Galaxy Watch.
It's not currently clear if the company would offer up two different sizes like it did for the Galaxy Watch.
Giving credence to the leaks above, we've also seen the below render provided by Tiger Mobiles that shows the same design but in three different colors.
Image Credit: Tiger Mobiles
Those are blue, black and rose gold to go alongside the silver variant,
The earliest leaked renders showed a hint of the design as well, which you can see below. The main change being that the bezel is smooth rather than toothed and looks like it might not be rotatable.
The two buttons on the right edge are also a different shape, which matches what we've seen in later leaks.
Then there's also a quick look at the user interface the company will be using on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
A leak from SamMobile has suggested Samsung will be revamping its software to keep it in line with its relatively new 'One UI' look used in a beta on the Samsung Galaxy S9 and expected to feature on the S10 series.
Exactly how it will change isn't clear, but below you can see a screenshot of leaked watch faces we currently expect Samsung to include on the new atch.
Image Credit: SamMobile, via Android Authority
We don't currently have a clear idea of the spec to expect.
Looking into the future, it’s very likely that Samsung is also working on the Galaxy Watch 2. We can take some educated guesses as to certain features that it may have.
For example, it’s sure to retain most or all of the features found on the Samsung Galaxy Watch. That includes GPS, a heart rate monitor and NFC, along with tracking for various sports, sleep and stress.
It’s also likely to have a circular face and a rotating bezel, especially as the likes of the Gear S3 also have those things.
Image Credit: TechRadar
What’s less certain but still very likely is that the Galaxy Watch 2 will run Tizen. Samsung has been using Tizen on wearables for a while and although a move to Wear OS was rumored for the Galaxy Watch, no such change happened in the end.
It’s possible that Samsung will switch to Wear OS for the Galaxy Watch 2, especially as Google’s smartwatch operating system has a healthier app ecosystem. But there are plenty of reasons to like Tizen and Samsung hasn’t shown any real sign of giving up on it.
What we want to seeThe Samsung Galaxy Watch is a great smartwatch but one with plenty of room for improvement. The following seven features are things we’d really like to see on the Galaxy Watch Active or Galaxy Watch 2.
1. More third-party appsThe Samsung Galaxy Watch runs Tizen, rather than one of the big-name wearable operating systems, and one downside of that is that there are fewer apps available than you’ll find on Wear OS or watchOS.
So by the time Samsung launches the Galaxy Watch 2 we’d like to have seen it work with developers to get key apps like WhatsApp, Google Maps and Facebook Messenger on the platform.
2. Better stress tracking
Image Credit: TechRadar. The Galaxy Watch tracks most things well, but not stress
The Samsung Galaxy Watch tracks a lot of things and mostly does a good job, but stress tracking is definitely a weak link.
While it’s available, it required us to manually measure our stress levels rather than tracking them automatically in our tests (despite claiming that it can do it automatically), and its accuracy could be questionable, since the data seems mostly based just on heart rate. So we’d like to see this feature overhauled for the next model.
3. Group challengesCompeting with friends can be a big motivator to get more active and handily the Samsung Galaxy Watch lets you do this. Your friends don’t even need a Galaxy Watch of their own – a Gear watch or the Samsung Health app will do just fine.
However, you can only challenge friends individually, rather than having a group competition. It seems like this would be an obvious and easy feature to add, so hopefully Samsung will.
4. Compatibility with more wireless chargers
Image Credit: TechRadar. The Samsung Galaxy Watch uses a proprietary charger
The Samsung Galaxy Watch charges wirelessly, but not just any wireless charger will do, you need a proprietary one that comes with it. This is inconvenient and if you’re ever without your charger means you’re likely to soon have a dead watch (though the Galaxy Watch at least has good battery life).
So for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 2 we want it to work with standard, everyday wireless chargers. That way if you’re at the office or a friend’s house without yours there’s at least a chance someone will have one you can borrow.
5. Big improvements to BixbyAnother downside of using Tizen rather than Wear OS is that the Samsung Galaxy Watch is reliant on Bixby rather than Google Assistant.
This is a problem, because Bixby is nowhere near as good as Google Assistant (or Siri or Alexa for that matter), with one particularly major issue being that it simply struggles to understand us.
While you don’t have to use Bixby to interact with the Galaxy Watch, it has the potential to be a major feature, but until it gets a lot better it won’t be.
6. Better iOS compatibility
Image Credit: TechRadar. Interaction is limited when using the Galaxy Watch with iOS
The Samsung Galaxy Watch works with both Android and iOS, but it’s definitely better with Android, because while you can read notifications on the watch when paired with an iPhone, you can’t reply to them or initiate communications, making it a lot more limited.
This may not be something Samsung can solve, as it would likely require a change on Apple’s end, but it’s something we’d like to see nonetheless, as it could make the Galaxy Watch 2 a real alternative to the Apple Watch 5, or whatever we’re up to by then.
7. Wider LTE availabilityThere are versions of the Samsung Galaxy Watch that support LTE, but only on select networks, which won’t suit everyone. For the Samsung Galaxy Watch 2 we’d like to see an LTE model available on more or less all networks, so it’s an option for everyone.
Don't want to wait for the Watch 2? These are the best smartwatches out now
Samsung Galaxy S10e release date, price, news and leaks
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:26:28 +0000
The Samsung Galaxy S10e launch date is tomorrow. February 20, where it's expected to appear alongside its more powerful - and more expensive - flagship siblings, the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus.
Update: A poster claiming to come from Samsung and showing off the Galaxy S10e in its rumored canary yellow hue has hit the web just a day before the launch.
However, the Galaxy S10e may be the most interesting of the three new Samsung phones, as it has been a number of years since the South Korean firm has produced a more affordable version of its top-end device.
You have to go all the way back to 2014, when Samsung announced the Galaxy S5 Mini, to find the last time it blatantly used the flagship moniker on a less high-end phone.
However now, in 2019, the proposition of the Galaxy S10e is likely to be very different, as it's tipped to maintain a premium look and feel, while cutting out some of the bigger features of the S10 to keep the cost down.
It's expected to go head-to-head with Apple's new iPhone XR, which itself offers a more affordable (but still not cheap) option to fans.
Early rumors reported the name of the handset as the Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite, but the majority of rumors recently all point towards the Galaxy S10e name - including Samsung's own website.
Meet the rest of the family: Samsung S10 | Galaxy S10 Plus Cut to the chase What is it? The affordable S10 variantWhen is it out? Launch on February 20, release may be March 8What will it cost? Probably similar to the iPhone XR Samsung Galaxy S10e release dateHottest leaks:
Galaxy S10e launch date: February 20Galaxy S10e release date: March 8The Samsung Galaxy S10e launch date is set for February 20, when Samsung will be holding one of its Unpacked events in San Francisco, California.
While we expect the Galaxy S10e to make an appearance on February 20, it likely won't go on sale for another week or two.
The main Samsung Galaxy S10e release date rumor so far points to a March 8 release date, in South Korea at least.
We've also heard it could land in Italy on the same day, while another source also talks of a March 8 release, so this sounds like a global launch date.
However, even more tellingly, Samsung has posted a pre-order page for the handet(s) it'll announce at its Unpacked event with a delivery date of March 8 - which fits nicely with the other Galaxy S10e release date rumors.
Samsung Galaxy S10e priceHottest leaks:
Galaxy S10e price: rumored €749 (around $850, £655, AU$1,190)One Samsung Galaxy S10e price rumor puts the cheaper model at $650-$750 (roughly £500-£585 / AU$900-AU$1,040), while a more extensive leak pegs the S10e price at a slightly higher €749 (around $850, £655, AU$1,190).
The currency conversions we've done here are direct, and the final price could be different (higher or lower), but we expect Samsung to adopt a similar strategy to the iPhone XR.
Apple's affordable iPhone starts at $749 (£749, AU$1229), and we wouldn't be surprised if the Galaxy S10e price followed suit.
Samsung Galaxy S10e design and displayHottest leaks:
A 5.8-inch screen1080 x 2280 and 438 pixels per inchA punch-hole cameraThe Samsung Galaxy S10e is set to be the smallest of the three new phones, with multiple leaks seemingly confirming this.
We've been given what appears to be a pretty good look at the handset, thanks to a leak from Evan Blass (below) which shows the Galaxy S10e in a protective case alongside its larger siblings.
What you'll notice is the Galaxy S10e appears to have just two rear-facing cameras - which has also been noted by other sources - and if you look closely, a 'punch-hole' camera built into the top right corner of the screen.
The Galaxy S10e (L), S10 (C) and S10 Plus (R). Image Credit: Evan Blass
The Samsung Galaxy S10e is rumored to come in a variety of colors, with one leak suggesting it will arrive in yellow, black, green, white and blue (with blue apparently arriving later).
That's been backed up by separate Galaxy S10e leaks, where a number of renders apparently showing the phone in different colors appeared online.
These images also show us the right side of the handset, where an enlarged power/lock key is rumored to house a side-mounted fingerprint scanner.
An older Galaxy S10e leak, which names the handset as the Galaxy S10 Lite, also shows a punch-hole camera in a screen which takes up the majority of the front of the phone.
This leak also pegs the screen at 5.8 inches, making it smaller than the rumored 6.1-inch S10 and 6.4-inch S10 Plus. We've also heard that the screen may have a resolution of 1080 x 2230 and a pixel density of 438 pixels per inch, as well as using Gorilla Glass 5 for protection.
If the Samsung Galaxy S10e display does turn out to be 5.8 inches, it would be the same size as the Galaxy S9 from last year.
The S10 Lite will more likely be named the Galaxy S10e. Image Credit: GSMArena/MobileFun
And just a day before launch, a leaked poster appears to show the Samsung Galaxy S10e in its full, yellow glory. While it's unclear if this particular image is legit, it does match the previous S10e leaks we've seen, other than seemingly being slightly more green, as you can see below.
The poster also suggests that the Galaxy S10e is a phone for 'everyone', which might mean an even more affordable price than expected.
Image Credit: GSMArena
The 5.8-inch Galaxy S10e screen has had more mentions, including Evan Blass who posted an image (below) of all three handsets, complete with screen sizes and model IDs, on Twitter.
However, a major difference here is the front-facing camera is centrally located, which goes against the more recent Galaxy S10e leaks which have it in the right corner.
It also mentioned the supposed development name for the Galaxy S10e - Beyond 0 - as well as the SM-G970F model number.
Before this though, all the way back in June 2018, we heard that Samsung was working on three S10 handsets, with the one codenamed 'Beyond 0' set to feature a 5.8-inch display and a single rear camera.
This probably isn't the Galaxy S10e. Image Credit: @evleaks
Samsung Galaxy S10e cameraHottest leaks:
16MP and 12MP dual-lens rear cameraSingle-lens front cameraAs we've already mentioned, most of the Samsung Galaxy S10e leaks point towards the handset coming with two rear cameras, rather than the three rumored for its siblings.
One report claims the Galaxy S10e will feature a 16MP ultra-wide f/1.9 lens and a 12MP variable aperture standard lens. Elsewhere we've heard that it could have a 12MP f/1.5 wide-angle lens and a 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens.
Another leak reveals a single-lens 10MP f/1.9 front-facing camera which, according to various render leaks, will be surrounded by screen on the S10e.
Samsung Galaxy S10e batteryHottest leaks:
A 3,000mAh or 3,100mAh batteryMay sport fast wireless charging and reverse wireless chargingThere's no conclusive information on the Samsung Galaxy S10e battery just yet, but it appears we're between two similar sizes - 3,000mAh or 3,100mAh.
One Galaxy S10e leak pegs the battery at 3,100mAh, but the source of this information doesn't fill us with a huge amount of confidence.
Elsewhere, we've seen a Galaxy S10e rumor which claims the handset will have a 3,000mAh power pack.
There are also reports that the Galaxy S10 will benefit from a boost to wireless charging speeds, with the handset being linked to wireless Quick Charge 2.0.
Whether or not the Galaxy S10e will also get this premium feature remains to be seen, but we wouldn't be surprised if Samsung opts to leave it out of the cheapest of the three phones.
Similarly, a reverse wireless charging feature has been rumored for the range (which would let the phones act as a charging mat for other devices), but don't be surprised if that too only makes it to the more premium models.
Samsung Galaxy S10e powerHottest leaks:
A Snapdragon 855 or Exynos 9820 chipset6GB of RAM and 128GB of storageSamsung tends to crown its new Galaxy S flagship with its latest chipset each year, and we expect the S10 trio to be no different.
The South Korean giant has already announced its new Exynos 9820 chip, and it's expected to land inside the Galaxy S10e, with leaks suggesting the phone will have the same chipset as its bigger siblings.
That's potentially good news for those considering picking up the Samsung Galaxy S10e, as it should provide similar performance to the more expensive handsets.
However, for those in the US the Galaxy S10e probably won't come with Samsung's Exynos 9820, with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 more likely to come in the trio of new phones.
Samsung has used a Qualcomm chip in its flagship handsets in the US for a number of years, and it appears to be the same case this time around.
While the chipset may be the same in the Galaxy S10e, it may only be available with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage according to a leaked benchmark and a spec slip.
While the S10 and S10 Plus are also tipped to come in versions with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, they may also be available in 8GB/512GB and even 12GB/1TB variants - something the Galaxy S10e won't benefit from.
That said, 6GB of RAM is still plenty and it's unlikely you'll be pushing the Galaxy S10e hard enough to require more, and the rumored 128GB of storage will be plenty for most.
Meanwhile, a different source claims the Samsung Galaxy S10e will come with either a Snapdragon 845 or 855 chipset and a choice of 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage.
Apple will have its answer to the Galaxy S10 ready in September
Samsung Galaxy S10e leaked poster hints at affordable price
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:02:38 +0000
We seemingly know just about everything about the imminent Galaxy S10 phones at this point, including the fact that there will be a Samsung Galaxy S10e slotting in at the bottom of the range. But if you needed any more evidence of its existence – and its place in the lineup – a new leaked poster should help.
Shared with GSMArena by an anonymous tipster, the image (below) shows the Samsung Galaxy S10e in Canary Yellow, a shade we’ve seen leaked before, although it looks a bit greener here.
Hints of green aside, the phone looks exactly like it does in other leaks, with a dual-lens rear camera, a single-lens punch-hole camera on the front, and minimal bezels. So this image could well be genuine, although as ever we'd take it with a pinch of salt.
The Samsung S10 range lands tomorrow, February 20The Galaxy S10 Plus will be announced tooWe're also expecting the foldable Samsung Galaxy XThe Galaxy S10e could be a high-end phone at a budget price. Image Credit: GSMArena
As well as the image, the poster also includes text, some of which reads 'Premium Fun. For everyone.' That makes it clear that the S10e is being positioned as an affordable alternative to the rest of the Galaxy S10 range.
It’s not clear exactly how affordable, though. Saying that it’s 'for everyone' suggests it might have a genuinely budget price, but with the rumored specs and features that seems likely.
Indeed, one price rumor puts the Galaxy S10e at €749 (around $850, £650, AU$1,200). Those are direct conversions, so they're unlikely to be accurate, but they might give us a ballpark idea, in which case the phone will be cheap only in comparison to the Galaxy S10 and Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus – it’s still likely to be a pricey phone in its own right.
We’ll know for sure soon, as the Samsung Galaxy S10e – along with the rest of the S10 range – is set to be announced tomorrow, February 20. We’ll be at the launch event bringing you all the news as it happens.
The Samsung Galaxy S10e will seemingly hit stores on March 8
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