CONTRIBUTORS: DAVID BAYON, BARRY COLLINS, TIM DANTON, SHONA GHOSH,
DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH, MONICA HORRIDGE, NICOLE KOBIE, DAVID HOLLINGWORTH, AND BOBBY MACPHERSON
There are hundreds of thousands of apps to sift through on the stores run by Apple, Google and Microsoft, and picking the right ones is no simple task – who wants to spend all day downloading, installing and testing apps? When you’re looking for a photo-editing app or mobile security software, you don’t want the newest or most popular release: you want the best. Our A-List apps represent the very highest quality and value, in 15 categories and across the five major platforms.
With so much variety on offer, there’s a niche app for every need, so our top pick in the various categories may not be quite what you had in mind. Our Recommended alternatives are also stand-out packages that are worthy of a download. Whether you’re looking for a productivity suite, a mobile browser or a different tool altogether, you’ll find something here to suit your needs. Our app choices cover free and paid-for options for tablets and smartphones.
PHOTO EDITORS APPS
Repix
Repix is a terrific app for those who like to have post-production fun with photos. Its chief selling point is a wide selection of brushes that overlay special effects on to your snaps. Many of the best brushes are held back for the $5.99 Master’s Collection, but there are plenty to enjoy for free. Our favourite freebie is Dotter, which turns portraits into Lichtensteinstyle pieces of pop art.
There are also brushes for adding glow smoke, solar flares, water drips and a flock of swooping ravens. It’s easy to ruin good photos with a barrage of effects, but used with subtlety the brushes give photos a glossy-magazine touch of elegance. They work particularly well on portraits.
There’s also a decent selection of photo filters that are a cut above the normal Instagram fare. Repix includes the standard controls over brightness, contrast, and saturation, as well as cropping tools and frames. Any changes made to photos are easy to undo, and options for sharing your retouched images are plentiful, including direct uploads to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Repix won’t please the photography purists, but anyone who fancies themselves as a digital artist will find a good range of tools with which to experiment here.
Over
Text overlaid on photos by generic photoediting apps tends to be crude and inelegant. Over, as the name suggests, is designed specifically for this task, and includes a selection of attractive fonts to make any typography across your images look stunning.
It’s great for designing poster-style motifs, and the app gives full range of control over the size, colour and positioning of text. A limited selection of photo-editing tools allows you to tint the photo to make the text have greater impact.
There’s even an option to create printable postcards and have them sent anywhere in the world – for a fee, of course.
PhotoFunia
Have you ever wanted to be on a billboard? Or have your portrait hung in a gallery? PhotoFunia offers a vast selection of special effects and filters to apply to your photos. By and large, the effects are applied with subtlety and aplomb, making it look as if your photo is on the frame on the windowsill or sitting on the side in the developing studio. (In fairness, some of the effects are plain naff, too. Drop your head onto Marilyn Monroe’s body? We’ll pass, thanks.)
Aside from photo manipulation, the app also includes a selection of text effects, so you can scrawl your name into wet sand, have your company name appear on a pin badge or have a chilling message daubed in cold blood on a wall. PhotoFunia is free and it works with almost every mobile platform around. Since it’s a cloud-based service, it requires an active data connection, however.
ALTERNATIVE CAMERA APPS
The camera apps shipped with phones and tablets are fairly rudimentary, offering little control over output. If you’re serious about mobile photography, consider a dedicated app. Camera+ ($1.99 for iPhone; $4.99 for iPad) is the pick of the bunch for iOS, offering a range of advanced tools to improve snaps, including independent focus and exposure points, a horizon leveller and the option to lock white balance. The stabiliser ensures that photos aren’t taken until your hand is steady, avoiding the motion blur that afflicts many smartphone snaps. It offers a high-quality selection of filters to apply after the snap’s been taken, too.
ProCapture ($4.39 for Android; free trial version) provides a selection of manual controls for Android tablet and phone users. The app offers exposure compensation and whitebalance controls, as well as an in-viewfinder histogram that allows photographers to check their levels. Wonky or dull compositions can be avoided by switching on the viewfinder grid or Fibonacci spiral, which helps you to line up horizons or place subjects in areas of maximum interest. Tools to help you take wide shots and panoramas are also thrown in, although the latter is a little too finicky for our liking.
TRANSPORT APPS
Tripview
Sadly, there’s no single national app for transport, so we’re going to go with what we know – and where we live – and pick the excellent Tripview app for getting around Sydney. It combines everything you could want for getting from A to B (via any alphabetic stop on the way) by bus, ferry and train. Even better for bus lovers, you can track buses in real time.
Google Maps
Google Maps remains the best choice for planning quick journeys, with routes incorporating car, bus, the Tube, train, tram, bike and foot. Google is stunningly accurate when it comes to finding destinations, too. With the best satellite views and turn-by-turn navigation thrown in for free, it isn’t hard to see why it’s the first app most of us install on new smartphones.
ingogo
Focusing on Sydney and Melbourne – for now – ingogo is one of the most convenient ways to book and track a taxi. The real draw of the app is that it’s something that works at the driver end, so you can track their approach and even communicate directly with them in case of any delays. It’s very handy!
EXERCISE APPS
Strava
Strava is the king of cycling apps. It can take any ride and turn it into a competition – brilliantly. It’s so effective at making league tables out of the most innocuous routes that, according to the media, we’re now a nation overrun by antisocial racers, risking lives to trim records, apparently. For most sane people, however, Strava is simply a great incentive to get back on the bike every day. Rides are tracked and stored, complete with detailed breakdowns; you can check full maps and statistics on www.strava.com.
The real fun comes in the challenging element – whether in beating your own personal bests or those of others in your area. You don’t even have to match someone’s entire ride to join in; just complete one of the thousands of short segments programmed in Strava’s database. Some of the more popular routes attract riders from far and wide for a crack at topping the leaderboard – not all in the countryside, which is what gives Strava its slightly controversial reputation. Strava is also available in a running version.
Zombies Run!
“Zombies detected!” It really shouldn’t work, but somehow you’ll come to crave and dread those two words as they trigger yet another 30-second sprint for survival. The fact that you’ll obey probably says more about the addictive challenge of run-tracking apps than it does about the voice acting in Zombies, Run!, but there’s no denying its popularity: half-a-million runners enjoy their One Direction interspersed with the wanton slaughter of zombies.
Adidas miCoach
The wide-ranging miCoach from adidas is one of the few quality iOS and Android fitness apps to make it onto Windows Phone. Its genius lies in its range: you can use it as a GPS tracker like any other mobile fitness app, but the optional accessories – from a heart-rate monitor to the X_Cell motion tracker – turn miCoach into a tracker for pretty much any sport or activity. It’s aimed more at the serious athlete than the sporadic jogger, but it’s free if you want to try it.
TV AND VIDEO APPS
TV & Movie Guide Australia
This was always going to be a tough section to fill. Thanks to the lack of access to the many great streaming services enjoyed in other regions around the world, we’re a little restricted when it comes to great streaming apps. In fact, we’re very restricted! Many of the big national networks have their own apps and channels, but there’s no one service that leaps out. So we’re going with something that at least helps you across all channels – a good TV guide!
Even then, it’s tough finding one that works on a number of devices. However, we’ve picked eBroadcast’s excellent TV & Movie Guide Australia for a couple of reasons. Sure, it’s restriced to Android (use OzTV if you’re an Apple fan), but not only do you get an excellent TV guide, with the ability to share television picks with friends, choose what channels you want to track from every station in Australia, but you can also keep across cinema times, too! You can find session times for all cinemas in the country, keep up to date with new releases and movie previews, and get access to iMDB and official movie websites. Not bad for a free app!
Vevo
A sort of MTV-on-demand, Vevo is a vibrant and varied showcase of music videos, live performances and concerts. You can browse through the smartly designed homescreen and click on a video to get going; Vevo will create a playlist of related material for you to leave running.
Alternatively, you can call up the search engine and hunt down individual artists or tracks and start building your own playlists. Videos are occasionally interspersed with ads, but they’re not too intrusive. If you’re of a certain vintage, don’t be put off if you don’t recognise any of the artists on the homescreen; Vevo is a treasure trove of live shows from British acts from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
TED TV
An antidote to Made in Chelsea, The Only Way is Essex and all the other breathtakingly dumb shows clogging up the airwaves, TED offers a huge library of fascinating lectures on a remarkable breadth of topics. You will, for example, find F-Secure’s security expert Mikko Hypponen giving his twopence on the NSA’s surveillance of the internet, alongside Annie Lennox giving an impassioned talk about why she’s an activist for HIV/AIDS.
The Inspire Me button is a key part of the app. Punch in the type of lecture you fancy – for example, “inspiring”, “ingenious” or “funny” – and how long you have to watch, and the app will automatically create a playlist to fill the time. Talks can also be downloaded to your tablet or smartphone for offline viewing, so you can store them up for long journeys. With new videos added on a regular basis, it’s one of those apps that’s worth returning to.
EBOOK READERS APPS
Kindle
We could pretend we’re trendy and devour our fiction on an obscure app you’ve never heard of, but let’s not kid ourselves: most of us already own Kindle devices, so our ebook purchases are in Amazon’s cloud locker. There are lesser, but still important, reasons for using the Kindle app. It works everywhere – phone, tablet, PC and Mac, even in your browser – and your progress is synced automatically between all of them, which makes it incredibly convenient for reading on the move.
You can highlight, bookmark, look up and share passages, too. Amazon’s X-Ray, when it’s supported, is a great tool for tracking characters and adding context, and text-to-speech lets you listen rather than read. You may prefer Google Play Books or Apple’s iBooks, but Amazon has the popular vote. We wish the company would open up and support different ebook formats, but we have to admit its lock-in is keeping us in the fold.
Comics
With more than 40,000 titles from Marvel, DC and many more, comiXology’s hugely successful Comics app lets you read the latest Walking Dead on your phone or tablet. You may think reading a comic on a phone would be a nightmare, but Guided View zooms you smoothly from pane to pane, rather than leaving you to squint at the full page. Automatic syncing across your devices means you won’t lose your place, either. All in all, it’s a comic-lover’s best friend.
Wattpad
Unlike other stores full of bestsellers, Wattpad is a community built around aspiring authors, many of whom self-publish on the site. The quality varies, but the app has a big cheerleader in the form of Margaret Atwood, who posts notes and excerpts from her novels and encourages new writers.
MUSIC
Spotify
Spotify remains the go-to music-listening app, largely because no convincing rival has come along to knock it out of the park. There are features now standard to most streaming services, such as offline listening and radio, but a couple of extra features put it a cut above.
There’s a newly added Discover section for music recommendations, which is designed well for touchscreens and idle browsing. You can also follow friends signed up to Spotify, provided you’re willing to connect it to your Facebook account. Streaming goes up to a high-quality 320Kbits/sec for paying subscribers.
There are drawbacks, however. Licensing restraints mean Spotify’s catalogue isn’t as complete as we’d like, while storing playlists offline gobbles up smartphone memory. It’s easy to clear out songs, but using the app regularly means it will require a spring clean every now and then.
Bloom.fm
Bloom.fm is a beautifully designed radio app that lets you play as many songs as you like for free and borrow a set number for a fee as little as £1 per month. The recommendation and artistdiscovery tools are clever and attractive, making Bloom.fm an excellent budget contender.
Google Play Music
Play Music falls short of Spotify on features, but it’s an excellent free option, especially for those fully wrapped up in the Google ecosystem. You can store 20,000 of your own songs in its cloud for free or pay £10 per month to stream from its library. The Listen Now function suggests tracks based on your listening history.
COOKING APPS
BigOven
BigOven is the ultimate app for hyper-organised foodies, bringing together a recipe database, a day-by-day meal planner and a digital shopping list.
There are more than 250,000 recipes to search through, putting to shame the limited selection on expensive celebrity-chef-branded apps. The recipes are of variable quality, since they’re usergenerated, but a rating system sifts out the best ones. The real strength of the app is its ability to organise every step of the cooking process. After you find a recipe you like the look of, you can assign it to a particular meal – such as Thursday’s dinner – then tap to add any missing ingredients to a shopping list. Recipes can be scaled up or down easily, and the “grocery list” is automatically organised by aisle to save you running back and forth in the supermarket. You can also add your own recipes; in the free version, you’re limited to 25.
Paprika Recipe Manager
It’s easy to lose track of recipes you’ve found across different websites, so the Paprika Recipe Manager is a great concept: open any food site from the in-app browser and click Save Recipe to import it into your digital cookbook. It’s attractively designed and intuitive, although it has trouble with recipes on lesserknown websites. Once added, recipes can be easily assigned to a meal planner or added to a shopping list. There’s no way to search recipes added by other users, so you’ll need to put in some work initially to make it useful.
Evernote Food
Evernote devotees have long used the note-taking app to store recipes and lists of restaurants, which led to this food-orientated offshoot. “Memorable food moments” can be saved, along with geolocation data, notes and photos. Even if you don’t feel the need to remember what you had for dinner last week, it’s useful for keeping track of your favourite dishes. The app also lets you search for nearby restaurants and add them to a to-do list.
NOTE-TAKING APPS
Evernote
Evernote has become the app to beat in the note-taking category, overtaking Microsoft’s OneNote, although both are excellent tools for keeping your thoughts organised. Evernote lets you clip websites, make text notes and attach photos or audio to files. It’s easy to search, and it syncs across all of your devices, so it’s always to hand. Once you’ve used it to organise ideas for a project, plan a holiday or simply keep your thoughts in order, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Note-taking doesn’t really capture the full capability of Evernote, however. For example, it can be used to archive your photos and search them by the text in the images – a handy tool if you use your smartphone to take snaps of presentation slides or other documents for future reference.
Evernote has added a host of specialised tools to its stable – such as its Evernote Food app, above – that extend its utility even further. Penultimate is a free iPad-only handwriting tool or taking notes or making sketches, while Skitch lets you make notes on top of images or Google Maps – ideal for sending directions.
OneNote
It’s easy to lose track of recipes you’ve found across different websites, so the Paprika Recipe Manager is a great concept: open any food site from the in-app browser and click Save Recipe to import it into your digital cookbook. It’s attractively designed and intuitive, although it has trouble with recipes on lesserknown websites. Once added, recipes can be easily assigned to a meal planner or added to a shopping list. There’s no way to search recipes added by other users, so you’ll need to put in some work initially to make it useful.
Outline
Outline+ is similar to OneNote – and compatible with it, making it a good replacement if you’re not keen on Microsoft’s note-taker for the iPad but want to keep using it at your desk. It’s similar to its rivals in that it allows you to take notes, annotate images and highlight text, but it has a slicker design and syncs with major cloud storage systems, including SkyDrive, Dropbox and Box. Outline+ also works with SharePoint, a handy feature for business users who prefer to take notes on their iPad. Unlike OneNote and Evernote, however, it isn’t free, and it’s only available on Apple’s tablet at present.
PRODUCTIVITY APPS
Microsoft Office 365
There are many reasons not to pick Office 365 as our A-List productivity choice. The Android and iPhone “Office Mobile for Office 365” apps are designed only for phones and have limited capabilities. There are no versions optimised for iPads or Android tablets, with Microsoft’s official advice directing people to Office Web Apps. Plus, it’s expensive. So, why have we picked it? It boils down to one thing: if you need to do heavyweight work, there’s no escaping Office. And if you want a guarantee of compatibility – so the changes you make to a document on the move won’t mess around with your formatting – it’s the only choice. We’re impressed by how seamlessly it works, too. You can create a presentation on your main machine and make quick edits on your mobile device, for example.
For the growing number of Windows Phone users, mobile versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word are all included by default, and integration with SkyDrive is seamless: all your changes are made to the cloud-hosted version of the document, which is then synced with any other devices linked to your SkyDrive account. While edits on a phone are inevitably limited compared to those made on a PC, it’s impressive how much you can get done on a tiny device. The fact these apps are also included if you subscribe to Office 365 Small Business Premium or Home Premium – which includes Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel, Publisher and Access – make it the strongest contender here.
Apple iWork
Apple surprised us by bundling iWork with new iDevices, but even if you upgraded an older iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to iOS 7, many of the apps that it includes – including Numbers for spreadsheets, Pages for documents and Keynote for presentations – are worth the outlay.
Numbers, Pages and Keynote all include templates to help the creation process, and Apple has introduced some nice touches – such as function shortcuts accessed via Numbers’ onscreen keyboard – to make what power is available easy to access. Refreshingly, the templates are customised for the UK rather than pushed over from the US, so that’s handy for Australian users.
However, existing users of Pages and Numbers should be wary of upgrading, with many users complaining that they can’t open documents created in the old version.
OfficeSuite Pro
Ever since Google took over and – frankly – ruined Quickoffice, Android users are better served by OfficeSuite Pro.
As with any third-party office suite, don’t expect formatting to be immaculately preserved if you’re importing fancy documents or presentations saved in Microsoft Office formats. Although in our tests, it did an excellent job of preserving a complicated Excel spreadsheet It also boasts an above-average selection of editing and formatting tools, and creates smart-looking graphs from spreadsheets.
It’s compatible with a range of cloud computing services, so you can easily save your work to Dropbox and SkyDrive – the latter of which is, of course, now fully integrated into Microsoft Office itself, making it easy to pick up on the desktop where you left off on your Android device. There’s a seven-day free trial available to give it a test run before stumping up a tenner.
REMOTE DESKTOP APPS
When you’re on the move, it’s a pain not having all your files to hand – and it’s always the one you need most that hasn’t been synced to your cloud storage. All is not lost if you’ve installed a remote desktop app, which will allow you to access your files and control your PC when away from your desk. Windows 8 Pro has such a tool built in, but for those with rival tablets, there are other options.
TeamViewer is a well-known desktop-to-desktop client, and also has free mobile apps for Android and iOS tablets. The standard app lets you navigate the host PC via your touchscreen, and removes the background wallpaper to cut down on graphics
processing. LogMeIn also carries over its remote desktop system from PCs to mobile, offering a free basic app for iPad users. Android users have to pay for access, however.
SOCIAL APPS
Tweetbot 3
The recently updated Tweetbot is still the best Twitter client we’ve come across, although its developers have started to cash in on that status. The recent version 3 update was little more than an iOS 7 reskin, and even removes a couple of handy features – such as triple-tapping on tweets to reply – yet they cheekily decided to charge afresh. That said, it’s still smartly presented and feature-laden, with options to mute users for a particular period of time, a wysiwyg-style tweet composer, and a hugely useful auto-suggest for sending messages to the people you follow. Better still, tweet timelines are synchronised, so you can pick up where you left off when switching from iPhone to iPad – although, again, you have to pay for both. It’s a must-have, but there’s nothing to convince us to upgrade from the old version. There are separate versions for the iPhone and iPad, plus a dedicated Mac edition, so you can use it across your Apple devices.
Redditting
Navigating the morass of news, memes and endless discussion threads that comprise Reddit is no mean feat, but Redditting does a brilliant job of boiling it down. It effectively turns Reddit into an RSS reader, allowing you to browse your favourite subreddits, filter out sources or contributors, and read the source article beside the comments in split-screen. The setting that allows you to filter adult content could make Reddit palatable at your place of work.
Flipboard received a significant makeover last year, allowing anyone to become their own “magazine editor”, curating content from websites and other social networks and sharing it with the public at large in a smartly presented, flickable virtual magazine.
It remains one of the few apps to neatly collate posts from different social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, providing a onestop shop for those looking to catch up on their friends’ activity, be it posts to news articles, status updates or recent photos. Unlike many rival apps, it also now supports tablets and laptops running Windows 8.1.
BROWSER APPS
Opera
Opera’s mobile browser comes in two flavours: Android users get the full Opera Mobile, while iOS and BlackBerry owners get the slightly less featurepacked Opera Mini. Whichever you choose, you get a clean and friendly interface, with a one-touch sharing feature for sending URLs to friends, and a convenient Save Page tool that grabs copies of pages for you to read offline.
The Android edition also features a convenient integrated download manager, which lets you pause, resume and rename downloads within the browser. What really sets Opera apart is its “off-road” mode, available on both platforms. This lets you route your browsing through a proxy server that automatically compresses every web page you visit. The result is that pages load faster, and your mobile data usage can be slashed by as much as 90%. Plenty of browsers promise to save you time, but switching to Opera could actually save you real money.
Chrome
ecosystem, Chrome seamlessly picks up your bookmarks, passwords and history from your desktop browser, giving you a similar experience across any device you log in to. It supports unlimited tabs on even the smallest screens, and its “incognito mode” lets you browse without leaving a trace. You can also send pages from your PC to your phone or tablet with a single click, which is handy for sending yourself directions.
Maxthon Cloud Browser
Windows Phone isn’t blessed with a huge range of browsers, but Maxthon beats IE hands down. For one, you can switch between tabs with simple swipe gestures, and you can jump to your favourite sites using a Live Tile-inspired Quick Access page. Best of all, if you use Maxthon’s browser on the desktop, your bookmarks and other data are automatically synced, just like with Chrome.
NEWS READERS APPS
Zite
There’s so much to read online that it can be tough to decide what to click on next. Zite fixes this by learning what you like to read and pulling suggested stories into one place. It’s the perfect app for weekend mornings, giving you an overview of what’s going on in the world and digging up intriguing stories at the touch of a button. It’s like a personalised magazine made by people who know you well and want to keep you happy.
The app lets you select a few topic categories, then tracks what you read, suggesting similar stories and topics. You can give stories a thumbs up or down to get more or less of the same, and if you particularly dislike a certain publisher, you can block them – that’s right, imagine a world without The Guardian/Daily Mail (delete as required).
Zite also pulls in content from blogs and other fringe news sources, offering a wider selection of viewpoints and chances to serendipitously stumble across something not normally on your reading list. Articles you like are easy to share or save for later reading, including offline.
Most stories are pulled directly into the app, with Zite reflowing the text and images cleanly and stripping out ads and other guff. You can also adjust the font and other settings to make it easier to read on your device of choice. Not all publishers allow their content to be pulled in, however, meaning every now and then you’re yanked out of Zite and onto a web page; a warning message would be nice.
Pocket is the opposite of Zite, allowing you to save articles you find online to read later. If you’re scrolling through Twitter, for example, rather than clicking “favourite” to bookmark it, click the Pocket icon to save it to the app. Pocket pulls in the text and photos, stripping out the rest for easier reading, and saves it for offline access.
Perhaps the best feature of Pocket is the way it connects to your browser. As you go about your day at your desk, click the Pocket extension to save interesting stories; they’ll be sent to your tablet or smartphone ready to read on your commute home – even if your travels take you offline. Pocket can also be used to bookmark videos, although YouTube doesn’t support offline viewing. The app integrates with Zite and other suggestion tools, too, letting you save the stories they turn up.
Digg
Digg’s app isn’t so concerned with what you want to read, instead highlighting articles and videos that are trending – the “must-reads” everyone else is talking about.
Of course, much of that content you probably won’t be interested in, so you can finetune it by selecting topics from art to technology to warfare. You can also choose specific sources – we highly recommend www. pcauthority.com.au – which lets you mix popular stories with those you normally check when you’re online. You can also connect social accounts to share stories you find, and use bookmarking tools – including Pocket (see left) – to save them for later.
Content can be read directly from the publisher’s website or pulled into a strippeddown, easier-to-read format. Digg’s app is a beautiful-looking return to form for the classic website.
MESSAGING APPS
Viber
Viber combines the best of rival services such as Skype and WhatsApp. It’s free, and allows you to send messages and make calls for free to other Viber users.
Viber requires your phone number and an activation code to get started, then scans your contacts list to see if any of your friends are using the service. You can then send messages to individuals or groups, and make calls (although there’s a charge for ringing non-Viber users from the app). The call function, plus a cleaner experience, puts Viber ahead of WhatsApp, but it’s worth keeping track of storage and data consumption – voice messages, calls and conversation threads can quickly gobble up your space and allowance.
WhatsApp is the Android and iOS answer to BlackBerry Messenger, allowing you to send notes to friends or groups of friends at no (or little) cost. The app is free to use for a year, then requires a small annual subscription. It’s hugely popular, so it’s likely a good chunk of your contact list will already have WhatsApp, making it a cheaper way to send video, picture and international messages than SMS.
GroupMe
GroupMe offers similar group messaging features to WhatsApp – but it offers one advantage, despite its smaller userbase. The service is owned by Skype, which means its Windows Phone app is updated at the same pace as the iOS and Android versions. It lacks some of their features, but GroupMe may be a good option for Windows Phone users waiting patiently for other apps to update.
MOBILE SECURITY APPS
Trend Micro Mobile Security
Unfortunately, no computing platform is completely safe from malicious code, and Android’s free and open philosophy is ripe for abuse. The good news is that Trend Micro’s free security scanner detected a stellar 99.5% of Android malware – without generating a single false alarm and without harming battery life or performance – in independent tests carried out by www.av-test.org.
This means you have nothing to lose by installing it. As a bonus, the package includes a privacy scanner for Facebook, which can warn you if you’re sharing more personal information than you mean to. It also comes with 50MB of cloud backup for keeping your mobile files safe, and advanced tools are available for $US29.95.
It isn’t only Trend Micro’s excellent performance that makes it our top choice for mobile security. Its clear and friendly interface adapts automatically to suit a phone or tablet display.
Norton Mobile Security
Norton does an exceptional job of intercepting malware – www.av-test.org gave it a 99.6% rating. The paid-for edition isn’t cheap – it costs $US29.99 – but it does plenty. As well as spotting malware, it can back up your contacts, block unsafe websites, lock your phone if the SIM card is removed, and even remotely take a photograph of whoever’s using your phone – useful if it gets pinched. You can install it on multiple devices, too. A handful of features work on i OS as well as Android, although the iPhone version is, at the time of writing, much more basic.
ESET Mobile Security
ESET’s mobile security software will protect you from malware for free; upgrade to the premium product for a yearly fee and it safeguards your privacy as well. You can choose to block certain contacts at certain times of day, block the last number that called, or audit your device to see if any installed apps or connected networks may compromise your privacy. If your phone is stolen, ESET’s app can control it remotely, even if an unrecognised SIM card is inserted. It’s available only for Android devices, but that includes Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, too.
CLOUD APPS
Dropbox
Dropbox is so useful we genuinely don’t know what we’d do without it – indeed, it helped us move a stack of screenshots from mobile devices to our desktop. It’s simple to share a folder with friends, plus there’s a host of handy mobile features, including one that allows you to automatically save to the cloud any photos you take with your smartphone. This keeps your handset storage clear and moves your photos out of the phone-only ghetto.
However, there are many rivals to Dropbox, and its allowance of 2GB of free storage is starting to look stingy. While it offers free upgrades of 500MB every time you convince a friend to sign up, it would take ten friends to reach SkyDrive’s 7GB. And while it’s truly crossplatform, easy to use and full of useful features, so are other cloud storage providers. What makes Dropbox the winner is its integration with absolutely everything – we use it to store and transfer files without even thinking.
SkyDrive
If you’re using a Windows 8 tablet or Windows Phone device, odds are you’re already using SkyDrive as your cloud client, but there’s benefits to it on Android and iOS, too – especially if your email service of choice is Outlook.com. Its integration rivals Dropbox’s in general, and betters it on Windows 8. In addition, SkyDrive comes with 7GB of free storage.
Bitcasa
Bitcasa offers 10GB of free storage, but if you upgrade then your storage space is “infinite” – or, more realistically, as much as you can use. Like its rivals, it offers handy tools to automatically back up pictures and videos from mobile devices, and it makes it easy to keep selected files available offline for constant access.
GAMES APPS
Plants vs Zombies 2
It’s taken years for the sequel to the original Plants vs Zombies game, but it was well worth the wait. This free title offers all the simple charm of the original – earn sun, plant plants, kill zombies – but adds a new dimension, with supercharged plants (such as the melon launcher) and lots of side missions to play through. Available on Android and iOS, it’s an absolute gem, and a must-download for any self-respecting smartphone or tablet gamer – it will keep you engrossed for weeks.
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy IV first arrived in 1991, making this smartphone port of the Nintendo DS revamp a remake of a remake. The classic game has aged better than we have over that time: it looks better than ever, with smoother character models and a higher polygon count for backgrounds. The addition of touchscreen gaming for an RPG is ingenious: even menu-hopping becomes a tactile affair, and combat feels tense despite being turn-based. Too bad nothing can be done about the hammy story.
Halo: Spartan Assault
Halo is the Xbox’s best-known game franchise, and its less graphically ambitious transition to mobile devices is nonetheless a success. It has everything you associate with Halo: a variety of futuristic weaponry, vehicles to commandeer and an intelligencefree pack of comrades who need you to dig them out of a firefight. The top-down approach and touchscreen controls work well. Trying to flog in-app purchases after charging a fiver is gratuitous, but they aren’t necessary. Try the Lite version first.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Don’t be put off by the higherthan-average price – this is one of 2012’s best PC games, and it has transferred to the iPad without losing any of its greatness. Recruit and equip soldiers, then take them around the globe to battle the alien menace, before researching their technologies and adding them to your own expanding armoury. Updating and reimagining the 1990s classic, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is touchscreen, turnbased combat at its finest, and it offers tremendous replay value.
ilomilo+
A Microsoft Studios game that has migrated from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox Live and now Windows 8.1, ilomilo+ is a delightful little timewaster. The idea is to reunite ilo and milo by navigating the 3D level they’re trapped on opposite sides of. You alternate between both characters – using one to open trapdoors or create paths for the other – until they’re reunited. It’s clever and well presented, but perhaps too twee for some tastes. A two-player mode adds longevity.
Scrabble
Facebook has helped Scrabble break free from its parlour game image: the ability to play against worldwide opponents is a godsend for word geeks. Previously online-only, the latest app extends the experience to iOS and Android, with neat touches such as the Teacher, who reveals (if you request) what your best score could have been after you’ve played your letters. You now get an unofficial Elo rating to see how you compare against the world.
Drop 7
It seems crazy to choose a game from 2009, least of all one this simple, but there are few puzzle games with anything like Drop7’s perfect gameplay. It’s a matching puzzle, but skilled players plan several moves ahead, building chain reactions that can wipe the entire grid for huge bonuses – but rogue 1s and 2s always threaten to derail everything. It’s the perfect five-minute game, which is why we’re still filling journeys with it after more than four years.
Star Wars: Tiny Death Star
This is a divisive one. On one hand, this Star Wars reworking of the classic Tiny Tower is an amusing time sink that will swallow the lives of fans as they check in every few hours to restock cantinas and capture rebel spies. On the other hand, the fact it plays out in real-time means you’ll soon find yourself idly restocking cantinas and capturing rebel spies at work. It’s dangerous, but that’s the dark side for you .
Dots: A Game About Connecting
The iPhone excels at pick-‘emup-and-put-‘em-down puzzle games, and Dots falls firmly into that category. You have only 60 seconds to drag your finger over groups of the same coloured dots, with extra points awarded for creating squares and rectangles. Other modes give you only 30 moves, while an unlimited mode is a £1.49 addon. It’s a perfect commute-filler, and with online scoreboards that reset every week, there’s a real chance of fleeting international glory for high scores. Frequent updates with new game modes help sustain interest, too.
Despicable Me: Minion Rush
Current pinnacle of the running games genre is the superb Despicable Me: Minion Rush. Control Dave the Minion as he jumps, ducks and swerves obstacles, careering faster and faster down the road. Graphics are superb, gameplay is addictive – just watch those in-app upgrades.
