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Portal 2 preview
Brink preview
Electricpig: Men at work!
Best iPhone apps of all time: Top 100
Doctor Who: free MMO incoming
Free Amazon Kindle planned?
Kinect hack + 3D printer = 3D you!
Blackberry PlayBook Android apps plans outed on video
Gmail crash: thousands lose their emails
Apple: Jonathan Ive quitting for the UK?

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 09:00 AM PST

In today’s gaming climate of big-budget first-person shooters and third-person adventures it’s not often you’ll hear of a feature length puzzler being among the year’s most wanted games. Portal 2 isn’t just any game. Portal 2 is the follow up to developer Valve’s brilliant original mind-numbing Portal adventure – a title held in universal acclaim. We spent some time with Portal 2 ahead of its April 22 release. Read on for our hands-on impressions.

The original Portal was renowned for its unique puzzling adventures. Players created oval-shaped portals from which to teleport themselves from one location to another in a game that saw players become the subject of an experiment conducted by AI unit GlaDOS (Generic Lifeform and Disk Operating system).

Portal 2, from what we’ve played and seen certainly looks like it won’t disappoint eagerly-awaiting fans. It’s different, yet at the same time incredibly familiar. The humour is still there too. The signs are that Portal 2 will be just as likely to tickle your funny bones.

Portal 2’s setting takes place hundreds of years after the first adventure. You’re in the same place – the Aperture Science labs. The formerly sterile looking lab has fallen into disrepair.

The tiled walls show cracks and have gone mossy. Formerly sturdy platforms now hang by their hinges. Pools of murky water nestle on the once pristine tiled floors. “It’s been a long time,” GlaDOS, in her effortlessly ominous sounding voice welcomes us.

Before you get there you begin in what looks like a hotel bedroom. It’s immediately clear you’re part of a continuing lab experiment. You’re first told to look up, then down, then to stare at a painting on the wall while listening to classical music. It’s a form of relaxation, you’re told.

The feeling is that of taking part in the oddest, most deranged medical examination you’ve ever had.

Enter Wheatley – a webcam-lookalike robot voiced by Office director and Extras co-star Stephen Merchant. Wheatley is the first being you come into contact with. We won’t spoil what he tells you, but Merchant’s voice acting is brilliant.

His almost clumsy-sounding British accent seems to complement the manic happenings all around you as he tries to make sense of the surreal situation.

Check out our Best PS3 games Top 5 now

Soon the floor starts shaking. Huge cracks tear apart your room. It soon appears that you’re not in a bedroom, but a container suspended on a rail. It’s utterly chaotic. You have no idea what’s going on as the container bobs and weaves like an unsteady ski lift towards its destination – the Aperture Science labs.

As more cracks start appearing you can see you’re in a huge chamber with other such compartments scattered stacked as high as the eye can see like some twisted IKEA warehouse. Your container soon crashes into the decayed labs.

You go into a lift. “Smooth Jazz will be deployed in 3…2…1.” Portal 2 features all the eccentric charm of the original. The monotone voiceover of GlaDOS is just as unnerving, yet welcoming.

You then find yourself in what looks like the exact same type of test room as the original Portal, complete with the same radio. As you walk past a mirrored surface it becomes clear that, yes, you are reprising the role of female protagonist Chell. Though you’re still left unsure of why you are where you are.

Onto some Portal style puzzles. As usual you’re broken in with a series of not too tasking puzzles. The first is a matter of pressing buttons to make portals appear in a certain location to let you enter a door to the next task.

We won’t go through every puzzle we played, but they gradually increase with more difficulty as more variables are introduced. It’s not long before you get the Portal gun. Instead of bullets, its projectiles create a single blue portals that gets replaced every time you make a new one. You walk into a blue portal, and you exit through an orange one.

You’ll need said Portal gun for the rest of the puzzles, many of which, as you might expect involve moving weighted cubes into switches by creating Portals in floors, walls and ceilings.

For those unfamiliar with the original, you can use these portals to literally walk through walls. Moving through a portal at high speed or velocity will propel you through it at the same speed you entered, making impossible jumps possible.

One of the most entertaining tasks involved having to move a cube onto a platform by pressing buttons that launched said cube into the air via a platform to avoid it falling into the water and having to start over. It wasn’t the most complex, but it was enough to show that the puzzles of Portal 2 will feel just as rewarding to accomplish.

With more goodies in store such as liquids you can paint the floor with to solve cube-shaped conundrums, bouncing platforms, Portal 2 co-op play and more in a setting more eerie than the first the puzzles on offer should offer plenty more variety than what we got to play.

Portal 2 will test your imagination, multitasking talents, timing, your aim with the Portal gun, and most of all, your patience.

You will laugh, you may toss the controller in anger or scratch your head in disbelief until it bleeds, but that’s what made the original so gratifying. On recent evidence Portal 2 should be the same.

Out April 22 2011 | £TBC | Portal 2

Brink preview

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 07:00 AM PST

Brink may not be on everyone’s radar, but it deserves to be mentioned as one of the most anticipated shooters of 2011 alongside the likes of Bulletstorm, Killzone 3, Crysis 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. Brink is full of neat gameplay ideas and multiplayer innovation from the team that brought us Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Quake Wars. We got to play Brink ahead of its May 20 release. Read on to hear how the shooter is shaping up.

Developed by Splash Damage and published by Bethesda Softworks, Brink is an online shooter that can also be played offline and feel as much like a campaign-driven game in both solo and multiplayer modes.

In Brink you play as one of two sides called “Resistance” and “Security” fighting in a city called The Ark. The Ark is a refuge for tens of thousands of refugees divided in order to maintain order. Chaos reigns. Disease and famine has taken over, leading to unrest and civil war – hence a city on the brink.

It sounds like a prerequisite for all-out action, but the way in which Brink goes about its business, Brink offers more than that.

Brink, we were told will deliver an experience that will blur the lines between single player and multiplayer. Brink is divided into a series of objectives to complete. We didn’t get to play the single player mode to compare, though we did get plenty of online action in against fellow game journalists at the event.

We were assured that the online mode will have the same quality that the single player mode does. Splash Damage’s lead writer for Brink, Edward Stern said to us “You go online and everything changes. Quality does not drop [in Brink].”

Before diving into a game you have the option to Survive the Ark or Escape the Ark. We chose Save. Even in multiplayer, each task is accompanied by a cut-scene detailing the objectives and why you must complete them. The sequence displayed differs dependent on what team you’re on. It’s the developer’s effort to ensure online play feels as salient to the story as possible, even during online play.

The first mission we played had us guarding some form of bomb transport. Once the bomb was transported the aim was to defend the objective. The ability to play with freedom stood out here more than anything.

Holding the up directional button brings up a dial displaying different objectives. You can continue with the task at hand or choose any from a handful of alternatives.

With your opponents shooting at you when defending your objective it’s tough to get anything done. It’s a constant cycle of shoot, kill, die, respawn and repeat. So it’s worth capturing an outpost that, when nabbed gives your team more health. Simply select to capture the outpost on the dial while the rest of the players are occupied elsewhere. Working as a team is key, but sometimes taking the initiative is just as vital.

How you play may depend on which class you choose. There are four: Medic, Solider, Operative and Engineer. Each have their own abilities.

Medics can offer health buffs to players to boost their health, and revive those on the brink of death. Soldiers carry chaff grenades, have unlimited ammo and can replenish the ammo of teammates. Operatives can hack into computers, disguised as the enemy and plant mines. Engineers can build turrets and repair vehicles and structures.

One exciting addition to multiplayer is how the scoreboard ranks players. Players are ranked on XP rather than kills – encouraging good teamwork as opposed to personal glory hunting. It lends a genuine team ethic to gameplay.

As a Medic you could easily spend a session constantly reviving your teammates and still top the scoreboard for being such a good team player, as we (to blow our own trumpet) did in a mission that required us to escort an injured man to a safety point.

XP can be used to purchase new abilities for each class or Universal abilities to use across all classes ranging from the ability to scavenge dead enemies for weapons to boosting your existing firearms, and too many more to name. Stern told us that, despite the wealth of possibilities to power up your skills, only the best players that put the most effort in are rewarded.

Another area that impressed was the enormous scope for character and weapon customisation. Gun tinkering offers plenty of opportunities. You can change the magazine, sight, give it handles for increased accuracy, equip grenade launchers to it and lots more. We’ve rarely seen as many weapon tinkering options as we have in Brink.

Likewise, character customisation doesn’t just affect the look of your character. It affects how you play. Choose a puny body type and you can forget about equipping the game’s big guns, like the Minigun, which quickly became a favourite.

On the other hand the lighter your character, the nimble they will be, because when navigating characters, gameplay takes on a Parkour style, letting players climb up walls and seemingly impossible to reach ledges by just running towards them without having to press an extra button.

Used properly it gives you more strategic ways to play. Players can also slide on the floor to dodge bullets. Both manoeuvres work well and are great for getting out of trouble.

Splash Damage believes that by adding Role Playing Game (RPG) features such as levelling up, upgrading weapons and all sorts of customisation opportunities players will always find new ways to enjoy playing Brink for a long time.

From what we saw in just an hour there are plenty of ways to play. Brink’s biggest success may lie in that and its ability to, not force, but encourage players to work as a team like not too many have done on consoles (Brink will also release on PC).

Throw in players and teams attempting to tactically outdo each other and Brink could do great things. Brink’s biggest obstacles? Crysis 2 (out 25 May) and Duke Nukem Forever (3 May) will be launching in the same release window. Shooter fans will have some tough purchasing decisions to make in the coming months.

Out May 20 | £TBC | Brink The Game Official Site

Electricpig: Men at work!

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 04:35 AM PST

If you’re wondering why there’s not the usual regular update of tech news and features on the site today, it’s because Electricpig has been sent in for a bit of a digital MOT, and will be in absentia until tomorrow. You can still look at the site, and catch up on anything you’ve missed recently (like our coverage of the new MacBook Pro, or our Angry Birds cake), but we won’t be able to post new content.

We're updating the site so that it should run more smoothly for you, and we also need to carry out some essential maintenance while we're at it. We'll be back online by 7am tomorrow morning, when we'll be posting as usual. Thanks for your patience!

In the meantime, why not have a go at the Angry Birds Competition: there's only two days left to enter!

Best iPhone apps of all time: Top 100

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 04:02 AM PST

The last time we wrote our top 100 iPhone apps, it was 2008. That’s a long time ago, and since then, two iPhones have been released, and developers have been pushing the envelope of creativity and becoming ever more essential. So we thought it was about time we overhauled our list. Read on for our best ever top 100 iPhone apps.

Table of contents:

Essentials
Productivity
Games
Books, music news and entertainment
Health and fitness
Travel
Photo and video tools

Essentials
Amazon UK
Free
The Amazon app can be very dangerous. search for an item, and just like the site you can have ordered it and have it winging its way to you, wherever you are. It’s also got a barcode scanner, which will look up the item on Amazon, and tell you the Amazon price. The app still manages to cram in lots of data, with ratings, descriptions and other prices and items still displayed. Essential for bargain hunters.

BBC
Free
Auntie’s app needs no introduction. For keeping up with breaking news, and sports results there’s little that does a better job of bringing it all together. Don’t forget that you can customise the BBC app, so that you only get news you’re interested in, and there’s email, Facebook and Twitter integration to share what you’re reading.

eBay
Free
Never be out-bid on an item again, with the power of eBay's iPhone app in your pocket you can keep track of auctions, bid while you're away from your computer and be alerted if a cheeky competitor pips you to the final blow of eBay's digital gavel.

Facebook
Free
A must-install for anyone with an iPhone and an account on the world's largest social network, Facebook iPhone app is a dream to use, letting you do pretty much anything you can in front of a web-connected PC. It'll even dish up chat on the go, so you can tap out messages to mates while they're sat at work, and you're… on the train in to work.

Met Office
Free
Weather: in detail. This tells you what to pack for your holidays, and whether you'll need a scarf when you leave the house. Get an hour by hour breakdown, complete with sunsets and sunrises and meteorological maps.

PayPal
Free
Putting the Paypal iPhone app in your pocket means you'll never have to nip to the cashpoint again. You'll simply be able to borrow tenners from your mates, and put the money in their bank account from the comfort of your iPhone! Either that, or it'll let you keep track of payments for items bought on eBay.

Skype
Free
Skype’s been floating around on the iPhone for ages, but its power to make free calls over VOIP has been ramped up recently by the ability to run in the background in iOS 4 (So you can, you know, receive Skype calls). If you’ve got an iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4G meanwhile, you can make video calls with Skypers too, which is one in the eye for Apple-only FaceTime.

Tesco Groceries
Free
Tesco Groceries, like the Amazon UK app, has a barcode scanner, but this isn’t for price checking, it’s to add things to your shopping basket, whether it’s some particularly nice vino your mate has rolled out for dinner, or the posh chocolate you just finished on a Friday night on the sofa. The idea is to let you manage your shopping list and shopping cart for online groceries from your iPhone.

The Trainline
Free
A must have for anyone wanting to buy train tickets on the go, get them cheaper with The Trainline. With the app you can plan a journey, buy tickets, check up on your account details, and set your home station. Allow the app to use your location, and it will instantly find your next train home.

Twitter
Free
The official Twitter app is the best Twitter app for iPhone, and needs no introduction. The Official Twitter app can handle more than one twitter account. It deals with all the things the online site can do, including lists, follows, unfollows, and profile edits.

Productivity
Analytics Pro
£3.99
Analytics Pro gives a super detailed view of your site analytics, and you can pretty much do anything you can on the full site, from setting date range, to drilling down into any area of content, visitor, goals and traffic analysis. Export to text or a PDF and shoot it over the air to a printer using AirPrint.

Auto Trader
Free
If you’re shopping for a new set of wheels, the AutoTrader app should be your go to place – none of that print mag nonsense. The AutoTrader app has a search function to find a car near you, plus phone numbers and a “Garage” function that means you can save the listing to chase it up later.

Battery Doctor
Free/59p
Smartphone batteries are notorious for not lasting more than a day, and conking out before you get home if you've had a heavy day on the mobile. Battery Doctor does what the percentage display on your iPhone can't: it shows you how much life you've got on your iPhone in hours and minutes.

Boxee Remote
Free
If you’ve got a HTPC with Boxee on board, or the dedicated Boxee Box from D-Link, you need this in your life. This smart remote connects over Wi-Fi, giving you two ways to control all your media from your sofa. You can use traditional on screen buttons, or clever gestures, so you needn’t even take your eyes away from the screen.

Brother Print & Scan
Free
Printers are boring, and generally never seem to work. This cuts out the middle man and sends and receives from your printer direct to your iPhone. All you need is a compatible brother printer and you're good to go.

Bump
Free
Bump is some super nifty new app tech that means that simply by knocking your smartphone together with another, you can swap details in a smartphone data smooch. It works between operating systems too, so you can have an unlikely romance between an Android and an iPhone, iPad, or even an iPod touch.

Dragon Dictation
Free
Those with transatlantic accents will find this app more responsive than those of us with strong regional twangs, but if you’ve got screen fatigue, or RSI from too much typing, this free app will give you a well earned rest. Speak into the phone, and this app will convert it in to speech. Perfect for penning your New York Times best seller on. It’s easy to skip through and correct the bits it gets wrong, and replace words, then just send it via email.

DropBox
Free
The ultimate file sync service, Dropbox lets you sync files across devices, meaning you can edit and save a document that’s in your Dropbox folder, and those changes will be made across anything with Dropbox, your PC, Mac or iPhone. It’s also a quick way to send and receive files, and to export files to other iPhone apps.

Evernote
Free
If you’re looking to document your life digitally, Evernote should be your best friend. This is the don of mobile note taking, which lets you make text notes, audio notes, take quick snapshots, pin files together, and pack it away neatly into a digital filing cabinet. Hit save, and that note will sync across all the devices you use Evernote with, be that your Mac, PC, iPad, iPod touch or even your Android phone.

Instapaper
£2.99
Instapaper lets you mark links for reading later, which syncs all your other devices hooked up to your Instapaper account. What makes this invaluable though is the Twitter integration: link your iPhone Twitter app with Instapaper and you can save URLs in tweets for reading later, with one click. Essential.

MailChimp
Free
Managing e-mail lists on the move has never been so fun, or easy. Mailchimp lets you send tons of e-mails without hassle, and if you’re out and about with your iPhone you can even add friends to your list there an then! Get reports on the progress of your mailouts, and see how many willing recipients you’ve racked up!

Mappiness
Free
Mappiness is part of an enormous research effort from LSE, which is collecting reams of data about what makes people happy. This isn’t just one way contribution either, this nifty UI asks you to rate how relaxed, awake and happy you are, where you are, with who, and what you’re doing. It’ll then feed you back analysis of your results, show you a graph of your happiness over time, and tell you what, statistically, you’re happiest doing, where and with who.

Osfoora
£1.79
Twitter’s official iPhone app (based on Tweetie) continues to get better and better, but if you’re not down with it, this is one of the best paid for iOS alternatives. It caches tweets for offline reading, lets you edit your profile from within the app, and best of all, has a superbly convenient homescreen with all the most used actions a tap away.

Percentages
59p
Hands up who isn’t a bit rusty on basic GCSE maths? Nobody? Then you’ll be wanting to get percentages pronto. This app does the simple task of working out percentages when your brain doesn’t want to. Work out the percentage of a number, the percentage conversion of a fraction, or the percentage difference between two numbers.

Remote
Free
Remote is essential for anyone with an Apple TV, or in fact, with iTunes. Remote links across your Wi-fi network, so you can control what’s playing from anywhere in the house, and use the QWERTY keyboard to type out titles on Apple Tv instead of inputting the text.

Rightmove
Free
Rightmove is a boring but completely essential app if you’re looking for a new pad to call your own. It uses your GPS location to tell you about properties near you, so you can wander round your locale of choice, checking out the houses, then put a call in to the estate agent to book a viewing on the spot. It’s not just for buying – the Rightmove app lists houses up for rent too.

Sonos Controller
Free
If you have a Sonos system, you can hundreds of pounds by skipping the pricey remote and using your iPhone instead. We’ve used both the CR200 remote and the free Sonos iPhone app extensively, and the experience is exactly the same: quick search through your library, and an easy way to control multi-room audio.

Soundlevel
Free
Gloriously lo-fi app that measures the sound volume of where you are. It's particularly enjoyable if you're at a really loud gig/club, and stood next to the speakers. Watch the shape of minimal techno.

Speedtest.net
Free
Speedtest tests the Wi-Fi connection you're hooked up to, through download speed, upload speed and pings. It's essential if you're a heavy data user, and can help you decide where's best to settle yourself before you start a data onslaught: the cafe with the 0.2Mbps Wi-Fi or the pub next door that's pushing 8Mbps.

Tumblr
Free
The Tumblr app lets you update your Tumblr straight from your phone, and gives access to the dashboard too. Be aware, there’s one thing it won’t do: create photo galleries. Aside from this though, it’ll do anything the full Tumblr will in terms of what you can post: audio, video, links, quotes and photos (one at a time).

TV Guide
Free
TV Guide is designed to give you at a glance tv listings, without having to skip through menus and channel listings. You can also book a reminder to alert you when your favourite show is about to start, and it lists shows for Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media, Freesat and Tiscali. It’s also cached, so even when you’re not online you can still get to the last bit of info you were looking at.

WhatsApp Messenger
£0.59
WhatsApp Messenger gives you BlackBerry Messenger style chat with everyone in your phonebook – the twist is it’s cross platform, so you can natter with friends rocking Androids, Symbian and BizzackBerry phones too. Works like a charm.

Vouchercloud
Free
Voted the UK number one money saving app by the times, Vouchercloud gives you money off cafes, restaurants, and coffee, and uses GPS to find the deals that are closest to you.

Travel
AroundMe
Free
AroundMe lists the closest cafes, bars, petrol stations, cashpoints to you, plus hotels, hospitals and other essential locations. It will list or map them all, tell you how far you are away from the closest, and map the route too. A hook up with Wikipedia means you can also have a look at entries for your nearby spots: famous pubs, hospitals, and the cashpoint where some Z-list celeb once threw up infront of a pap.

CoPilot Live UK & Ireland
£19.99
Forget TomTom on your iPhone: it costs too much, and what would happen if you decided to switch to Android on the next upgrade? No: far better to go with the equally impressive and shockingly well priced CoPilot Live for iPhone, which provides voice turn by turn navigation as you drive all over the country – or Europe if you’re so inclined. Excellent.

Layar
Free
Layar is the must have augmented reality app. Hold up your screen, and you can download free and paid widgets that will show you anything from the history of the canal you’re stood by to the constellations you're seeing in the sky.

London Cycle
Free
Find a Boris bike when you’re out and about with this map of London, noting all bike locations and how many bikes are available at each spot too. This is one of about a small clutch of similar apps, which all use the same information. Pick which one has the best UI for you.

Toptable
Free
Top table works across the UK and Europe. It’ll give you free booking and contact details for the scran joint of your choice, and there’s also reams of offers, so you should never have to pay full price again. I’ll get this one darling…

Tube Exits
59p
For the efficiency obsessed, Tube Exits is a must. Tell it where you’re going, and it tells you exactly what carriage to get into on the tube so that you’ll be near the exits when you get to your destination, and won’t get caught up in the front line of wheely suitcases, half assembled prams and briefcases on your way out into the light.

TubeMap
Free
TFL still doesn’t have its own iPhone app, or any other app for that matter, In its place, make sure you have TubeMap when you’re traversing this country’s fine capital. TubeMap coes complete with live updates and a journey planner.

Zipcar
Free
With the Zipcar app, you can find and book a Zipcar in a few minutes flat. Search by your favourite location, look up where you’re headed, or just look for the nearest one to you. Sort by vehicle, and even honk the horn of your reserved car remotely so it’s easy to find.

Games
Angry Birds
59p
Needs no introduction, currently fighting to be the franchise to rival all franchises.

BubbleFREE
Free
A brilliant iPhone game that takes the age old past time of popping bubble wrap, ports it to iOS, and makes it into a contest. Just how many can you pop in the allotted time? Takes the satisfaction of that snapping sound and adds the thrill of competition to it.

Canabalt
£1.79
8-bit addictions start here. Canabalt involves you, a little suited gent, streaming across the night sky, in crude black and white pixels. Controls are limited, click to jump, and go for as long as you can. Proof that the simplest ideas are often the most appealing.

Chaos Rings
£7.49
While we sit and wait patiently for Square Enix to port Final Fantasy 7 to the iPhone already, here’s another epic RPG to get your teeth into. This iOS RPG looks gorgeous, even on pre-iPhone 4 models, and is filled with puzzles and clever turn based action. There’s also plenty of replay value since there are several teams to take control of.

Chu Chu Rocket
£1.79
Remember how before you got an iPhone the Sega Dreamcast was the greatest gadget you ever owned? Relive Sega’s super nova of a console with a port of the perfect Chu Chu Rocket puzzle game: place arrows to guide the mice away from the evil cats and into the rockets. It’s like Lemmings crossed with Hungry Hungry Hippos, and it comes with insane Wi-Fi multiplayer too!

Cut the Rope
59p
Proof that the iPhone has created a whole, great new genre of gaming: this casual puzzler is fintuned to the iPhone’s touch controls, and can be played for as long or short a time as you like. The premise is simple, if a little odd: cut the various ropes attached to a candy inside a cardboard box to make it fall in the mouth of an expectant green alien. Collecting all the stars and dodging all the traps and physics defying obstacles however, is another matter entirely. Both fiendish and adorable.

Doodle Jump
59p
This is the underdog to the Angry Birds sovereignty – a game that has sold ridiculously well, but not enough to beat the Angry Birds. The dinky design is still the most appealing part of DoodleJump, where you make the doodle creature jump up and up, on platforms and with jet packs if you find them. Watch out for the holes in the paper though!

Finger Balance
59p
The description for Finger Balance almost sounds like a spoof: a ream of awards and top spots is followed by the description: “”test the dexterity and stability of your fingers by balancing a ball on a rod.”" That’s the game. Sounds dull right? Try it once, you’ll be hooked.

FlickKick Football
59p
Cast your mind back to the days before annual FIFA console releases. Remember how fun tabletop football games were? This cheap iPhone game is awash in nostalgia. You flick with your finger to pass and shoot all over the pitch. Now comes with online multiplayer too.

Flight Control
59p
Flight Control and Harbor Master tap into the same basic instinct – the pleasure of putting things in the right order. In Flight Control you’re a dinky air traffic controller, and you have to make sure that all the planes get into land safely, without any colossal air tragedies. It’s proved so popular it’s now available on the Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Move as well.

Fragger
59p
If you’ve played Angry Birds (and if you haven’t, where have you been?) you’ll instantly grasp the concept of this super cute game: lob grenades at enemies kicking back on the level, and explode them until they’re deaded. Great fun, and new levels are added all the time.

Fruit Ninja
59p
You’re a ninja, controlling your trusty, scythe like katana with your fingers. So it’s only natural that somebody throw fruit up in the air for you to cut, then lob the occasional bomb in to mix things up. Yes. An utterly addictive game with a simple premise, that ramps up the difficulty at just the right pace for you to keep coming back again and again.

Game Dev Story
59p
The iPhone App Store is stuffed full of quick fix casual games, but Game Dev Story feels much more substantial for such a low price. Playing like a geeky cross between Theme Hospital and The Sims, you control a game development studio, trying to create the hottest new title and adapt as new consoles come along. Sounds niche? Well if niche means absorbing, consider us outsiders.

geoDefense
£1.19
Look past the American spelling and straight into the eyes of these super retro vector graphics. geoDefense is some awkward lovechild produced from the neon joining of Asteroid and Every Extend Extra Extreme. There’s 30 levels, and you can play your own tracks in the background to soundtrack your arcade game fun.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
£5.99
A perfect port of the excellent, most definitely adult, Nintendo DS game. Rockstar’s created an enormous 3D city for you to explore, stuffed full of missions, violence, and hilarious cut scenes. Make no mistake: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is absolutely massive, making it one of the very best iPhone apps for longevity and value for money.

Harbor Master
Free/£1.19
Parking a boat might not sound like much fun, especially when you’re only virtually parking a boat, but there is more than one Electricpig that’s had quite an addiction to this iPhone game. You are the harbour master in a busy harbour, and you have to make sure all the boats get to their docks safe and sound. Simple as that. Try it, you’ll see.

I Love Katamari
£2.99
One of the best computer games ever made benefits from the iPhone’s gyroscope. This version is much shorter than the full game, but there is the added extra of free rolling, where you roll to your heart’s content, sucking up toreadors, beer bottles, hippos and rainbows.

Infinity Blade
£3.49
Infinity Blade, the first game to use Unreal’s Epic engine for mobile, is a triumph. It’s utterly beautiful, with loads of gameplay: you take on various sword and axe wielding monstrosities in on the ramparts of a crumbling castle in a quest for revenge. So gorgeous, and it makes you wonder what games on an Apple TV would look like.

Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus
£3.99
Gameloft’s titles aren’t exactly original (Modern Warfare or Black Ops ring a bell here?) but nobody ports console hits to mobile quite like it. This first person shooter looks absolutely astounding, with brilliant gameplay, graphics, and great use of the tilty-whirly sensors inside of the iPhone. It’ll run just fine on older models as well so no-one need be left out of the fun. One of the best iPhone games yet? One of the very best iPhone apps full stop.

NBA Jam
£2.99
This old school, super silly basketball game is one of the best console ports we’ve ever played on the iPhone. Not only does NBA Jam retain all the absurd players with gigantic heads and over the top action, but the controls work perfectly, even on the iPhone's glass touchscreen, which until now we were ready to admit wasn’t as suited to action and sports titles as a gamepad. Buy it, you’ll have a blast.

Papa Sangre
£2.99
Papa Sangre is truly game changing. It’s built with binaural sound (3D sounds that’s recorded around a model human head, which gives every sound a location), and has no visuals, so you play with headphones, navigating sinister hallways, swamps and dungeons, avoiding hogs and reapers. It’s scary stuff, and not for the faint hearted.

Peggle
£1.79
Peggle was one of the few games you could play on an iPod before iOS came along, but it’s still holding up well even today. It’s like Bagatelle 2.0: you fire out balls in a bid to knock out all the bricks and bobbles chilling out on each level, Wallbreaker style. Simple to understand, but great fun and slickly presented. Who doesn’t like unicorns?

Plants vs Zombies
£1.79
PopCaps Plants vs Zombies is still one of the best iPhone games around. Protect yourself from 26 types of zombie with 49 zombie killing plants, across 50 gaming levels.

Pocketball
59p
Pocketball, like all the most addictive games, is simple. Guide the coloured balls into the right pockets. The fun comes with the way you do that – peg guiding lines, use and adjust gravity and watch out for nukes and boosters.

Sims 3
£1.79
Sims 3 is a massively boiled down version of the full game. Here you can get a job, make friends enemies and get married. You can’t travel outside the town, and there are only really three workplaces to choose from, but you can upgrade your house, get married, divorced and best of all, brag about your various skills.

Solipskier
59p
Solipskier is what real life skiing should be like, but never will be. Instead of navigating the slopes, you draw them, picking up speed and creating your own jumps. The simple graphics make your rainbow tail all the more exciting.

Books, Music, News and Entertainment
Answer Me This
£1.79
We don’t usually advocate paid for apps of podcast feeds, since you can always just get the podcasts synced straight via iTunes anyway. But frankly, if any podcasters out there deserve your money, it’s Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann, the presenters of this hilarious series. Stream any episode, and even ask your question from within the app.

Bloom
£2.39
Bloom is an ambient music creation tool created by legendary music producer Brian Eno and software designer Peter Chilvers. Proof that the iPhone isn't just about handy tools and distracting games, Bloom is utterly entrancing and will have you puzzled for hours.

Flixster
Free
Every film buff should have Flixster: watch trailers for the latest films, read the reviews and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. It also uses your location to find where a film is on near you, or to tell you what’s on at your local. Plus, iTunes integration means you can rent movies through the app, and it will also help you find somewhere to eat after you’ve been to the flicks. Brilliant!

FStream
Free
While the iPod nano is the only Apple device with an FM radio inside, this handy, free app solves your problems by tuning into radio stations over Wi-Fi and 3G. You can even record shows too, if that’s what floats your boat. Great for those who can’t or won’t get Spotify Premium.

Guardian
Free/£2.99/£3.99
The second iteration of the Guardian app brings in video, better footie results, live updates, and some practical bits and bobs like better integration of user comments, landscape mode and the ability to search across the full archive. It’s now subscription based, so you can buy in for £2.99 for six months, or £3.99 for 12.

iBooks
Free
Our favourite bit of iBooks isn't the enormous digital library of out of copyright reading, and free books, it's the fact that it opens and saves pdfs onto your iPhone. We can attest to this being, in a number of situations, a complete godsend.

IMDB
Free
The IMDB app can take full responsibility for solving many a pub argument, and helping to turn the phrase “it’s right on the end of my tongue” into one which is obsolete. IMDB gives access to 1.5m film and TV entries, and 3.5m people from the business. It even includes celebrity birthdays.

Kindle
Free
The Kindle app uses Whipsersync to sync your reading across devices, including the Kindle. It means you can read on the iPhone, then swap to Kindle when you're running low on battery, and back again, without losing your page, or any of the highlighting you're doing.

Last.fm
Free
Bored of the music on your iPhone or iPod touch? Get the Last.fm iPhone app and it'll dish up tunes through Wi-Fi or the iPhone's 3G connection. It'll even learn what you like, so personalised radio stations guarantee there'll always be a song you like just one click away.

Marvel Comics
Free
If you haven't got £400 to shell out for an original copy of Fantastic Four issue one, and equally don't fancy stumping up for the enormous anthology to art around on the train/bus/tube, then you can get it for just a couple of quid on the iPhone, along with a recommendations service, and a raft of free comics.

McSweeney’s
£3.49
McSweeney’s is the American publishing house set up by Dave Eggers. Their app is one of the most simple, user friendly design out there, and if you’re a sucker for short stories and funny literary rambles then McSweeney’s is a must have. Often, the stories are the perfect size for a short train or tube journey. More enriching than Angry Birds.

SoundCloud
Free
SoundCloud is for listening on the go, but also recording. Use it to capture sounds when you’re out and about, or browse through your stack of things to listen to. Hook up with other people via Facebook and Twitter; share your recordings via email or publicly, plus scroll and comment in the waveform of the track. SoundCloud are promising more features will be added to the app as time goes by, so stay tuned.

Spotify
Free
The Spotify app is a must, but with one caveat: you need to have a premium account, otherwise it’s useless. With a premium account though, you can stream straight through your phone, just like you would do at home.

The Onion
Free
Choice headline from The Onion at time of writing: "Terrified FDA warns something makes bananas black after several days.". This is America's best spoof newspaper, always tongue in cheek, and always giving a moonie to the zeitgeist.

TonePad
Free/59p
Make like Little Boots with this fake Tenori-On synthesiser. You play via touch sensitive lights, which play in a beat. The best part: it's impossible to make this sound bad, because it plays to a rhythm, and you can add and remove elements as you go.

TuneIn Radio
59p
TuneIn Radio is an internet radio app that lets you tune into the world of global web radio broadcasts. You’ve got thousands upon thousands of stations to pipe into, with every genre catered for somewhere around the world.

Loopy
£2.99
Loopy is a musical notepad, where you can thumb out a beat track, hum over the top of it, beatbox into your iPhone and input whatever sounds you can think of making. Loopy takes your input and creates perfectly synced loops to build a track in just a few minutes.

WFMU
Free
America’s best loved, most travelled free-form radio has an iPhone app. Forget about that being a little out of character, and plunder the archives: dig up Murial’s Treasure, the now defunct calypso show, or tune into some oddball poetry. Whatever it is, you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s likely you’ll love it.

Health and fitness
iMapMy Run
Free
iMapMyRun syncs with your online account, so that you can track distamce, time, pace, route your run, and tweet your run in realtime. Your history is saved too, so you can see yourself improving at every step.

Pzizz Sleep
£2.99
Pzizz claims to help you sleep when insomnia has got you by the throat, and we can say that Electricpigs have used its soothing sounds to get over late lonely nights. It has a binaural beat, soothing sounds and hypnotic words that aim to help you drift into a soothing dreamless sleep, and the time is adjustable, so you can set it to play you anything from 10-60 minutes of sleepy sounds.

Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
59p
The Sleep Cycle alarm clock analyses your sleep patterns and wakes you up when you’re in the lightest sleep phase. In theory, this means you always wake up feeling refreshed, because you’ll never be dragged from the deepest depths of the land of nod by your alarm. It also tells you how well you’ve been sleeping, the average hours you get per night, and can be set to a 30 minute time frame to wake up on time.

Weightbot
£1.19
Weightbot will track your weight loss (on the condition you tell it the truth) and should spur you on to hit your targets. Set your goal, record your weight, calculate your BMI and watch your progress (or not) on a graph, which should give you the incentive to do better, whichever direction the graph is headed.

WhiteNoise
£1.19
If you have an inability to go to sleep without background noise, you’re not alone. And no, it’s not just you and Wayne Rooney. White Noise has managed to sell an app for precisely this reason. White Noise is packed full of soundscapes and background noises to help you drift off to sleep, from oceans crashing to the sound of an air con unit humming. Whatever gets you off to sleep, this should be your one stop shop.

WiScale
Free
Working in conjunction with Withings’ Wi-Fi scales, this neat app grabs your daily weight (synced to the cloud by the high tech weighing scales) and lets you track your weight loss (or gain, if that’s your bag) without remembering to diligently jot down your progress each day. It’ll recognise multiple people too, and track your fat and lean mass automatically.

Photo and video tools
Air Video
£1.79
Got a hoard of downloaded video on your computer? Chances are, most of it won’t play natively on an iPhone due to its limited format support. Air Video removes this problem entirely. The free server software for Mac and PC converts almost any format and container (MKV, AVI etc) in realtime, so after the shortest of pauses, videos play instantly, over the air and on your iPhone. Phenomenal.

Hipstamatic
£1.19
Everyone's favourite/least favourite camera iPhone app is the Marmite of camera apps. This is mostly down to the terrible title, which is accurate, but has doomed it to the hipster sinbin. Choose vintage camera effects and make your holiday look like it was spent in 1977.

iMovie
£2.99
You’ll need to have an iPhone 4 or new iPod touch for iMovie to work to its full potential, but imovie gives you the tools to edit your HD movie on the go, and publish it to YouTube or email it to absent friends, without having to go near your computer.

Instagram
Free
Instagram has become wildly popular, and with good reason: the copious quantity of filters let you spruce up your camera shots, vintage style, and then bung them online to your social networks of choice at incredible speed. There really is no reason not to try this out: this is one of the very best iPhone apps for social meejah types.

Sketches
£1.19
Sketches is like notepad, bastardised for drawing. sketch out pictures, jot down text notes with scrawled diagrams, input shapes from Sketches’ stock set, and zoom in to take a closer look at the Picasso you’ve digitally recreated, then file it under “masterpieces” on your Sketches corkboard.

Smilers (Royal Mail)
Free
This nifty app from Royal Mail lets you design and create your own set of stamps using your iPhone camera or photo reel. Stamps are a bit more than standard first class. For the pleasure of putting your image in the place of HRH, Royal Mail Smilers cost £7.80 for a sheet of 10 first class stamps and £13.95 for a sheet of 20.

TiltShiftGen
Free/59p
A tilt shift lens blurs the top and bottom of your photo, making everything look like you're shooting miniatures. It works best when you're shooting from a height, down onto a scene, especially if there's people in the shot too. This iPhone app does a fake version of what a £200 lens does on a DSLR.

VideoJug
Free
VideoJug is the ultimate How To app, with reams and reams of videos on how to learn to do such important life skills as moonwalking, and caring for lizards. Videos also come complete with text and instructions, so you won’t have to concentrate too hard on that plate-spinning video.

VLC
£2.99
Apple doesn’t want you to open any video files which aren’t H.264 encoded MP4 files. It’s just not down with it. Luckily VLC for iPhone totally is, happily playing through all your DivX AVI clips with ease. It’ll even open MKV files, though don’t expect them to be playable on anything less than an iPhone 4. Absolutely essential for long train and plane journeys.

Got any suggestions of your own, or ones we’ve missed off the list here? Drop your suggestions for best iPhone apps in the comments!

Doctor Who: free MMO incoming

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 03:25 AM PST

The Doctor Who universe is set to expand again with a follow up to Doctor Who: The Adventure Games. Doctor Who: Worlds In Time will be a free MMO with the goal of solving puzzles and challenges to save the universe. We’d expect to see plenty of Daleks, the sonic screwdriver getting a look in and, with any luck, lots of appearances by the Doctor’s assistant Amelia Pond.

Doctor Who: Worlds In Time is being developed by Three Rings, the brains behind pretty awesome MMOG Puzzle Pirates. Doctor Who: Worlds In Time is due later this year after Series 6 of the new Doctor Who kicks off.

Out 2011 | £free | Doctor Who

Free Amazon Kindle planned?

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 03:05 AM PST

Fancy a free Amazon Kindle? Speculation is growing again that Amazon may be considering flinging Kindles out for free. Back in October 2009, John Walkenbach observed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate with such unwavering speed that he forecast that a free Kindle is due to arrive by November 2011.

Kevin Kelly reports that he mentioned that observation to Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, in August last year and received an interesting response: “He merely smiled and said, ‘Oh, you noticed that!’ And smiled again.” Why does that matter? Because Amazon looks like it’s testing a free Kindle future out already…

In January, Amazon offered a Kindle to every Amazon Prime customer. They didn’t offer a free Kindle but Amazon Prime subscribers were able to ask for a refund if they didn’t like it and still keep the device. That suggests Amazon could have been testing the water for its free Kindle plans. A free Kindle in time for Christmas? That could help in Amazon’s battle with Apple and iPad 2 for the ebook market. We’d love to see that.

Out TBC | £free | Amazon (via KK.org)

Kinect hack + 3D printer = 3D you!

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 02:44 AM PST

This may be the coolest Kinect hack yet. Combining Microsoft Kinect with a 3D printer, Joris Peels from i.materialize revealed the tool which scan people can create miniature 3D reproductions of them. The set up was put together by Karl Willis from Interactive Fabrication and its set to get improviments in resolution in the future to make the models more realistic. See the system, dubbed Fabricate Yourself, in action after the break…

Out now | £TBC | i.materialize (via Boing Boing)

Blackberry PlayBook Android apps plans outed on video

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 02:28 AM PST

Rumours that the Blackberry PlayBook will play nice with Android apps have been rattling around recently and a video has emerged showing an almost official confirmation from RIM that plans are afoot.

Recorded at Mobile World Congress, the video shows the Blackberry PlayBook and a RIM rep can be heard saying: “We will also support Android apps when we release the Dalvik engine on top of QNX.” The Dalvik engine would allow Android apps to be run on top of the native QNX OS on the Blackberry PlayBook. Take a look at the video after the break and let us know in the comments: should RIM allow Android apps on the PlayBook?

Out TBC | £TBC | RIM (via BGR)

Gmail crash: thousands lose their emails

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 02:01 AM PST

Big and bad news for Gmail users. The Google email service suffered a serious issue over the weekend with thousands of users losing years worth of messages, attachments and chat logs after a period of significant downtime.

Gmail reports via the Google App Dashboard that “less than 0.08%” of users have been affected but that percentage actually works out to be quite a significant number of people, around 150,000 Gmail users.

Google has not offered any definitive guidance for Gmail users but says: “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

That’s not quite as reassuring as we’d like. Let us know in the comments if you are one of the Gmail users who got burned this time and if you’ve got a Gmail back up solution, recommend it below!

Out now | £free | Gmail

Apple: Jonathan Ive quitting for the UK?

Posted: 28 Feb 2011 01:25 AM PST

Apple could have real trouble on its hands: Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design supremo, is rumoured to be planning a move to the UK and Apple’s board is apparently not happy. The Sunday Times carried the rumour this weekend reporting that a friend of the family had spilled the beans. Ive and his wife are said to be planning a move to England to raise their children and send them to British schools.

While Ive wants to stay on at Apple, the report suggest the Apple board isn’t happy and that he’d not be allowed to remain as Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design if he commuted from the UK to California. Ive has $30m of Apple stock options ready to cash so he’d cope if he had to leave Apple but could it? Will the future beyond iPad 2 and iPhone 5 look bright without Ive? Let us know in the comments.

Out TBC | £NA | Apple (via The Sunday Times [paywall] )