It’s very similar to Spotify in a way, as it allows you to stream the music you want to listen to, but also allows you to ‘cache’ them for offline listening. However, with no apparent limits on how long you can have them offline, the notion of ownership is up for debate.

The interface is clean and well laid out – the developer may not speak perfect English, but you can easily work out what goes where without too much hassle. You can create playlists and listen to things as you want to, and while the tracks you cache won’t play in the main music player, you can access them from the volume controls.

There’s a large, large chance that the clear fact this may not be legal means the app will disappear from the charts soon, and you can’t do things like easily download albums all at once. Plus a lot of the interface doesn’t respond to touch, which is irritating for navigation.

In short, it’s free music on the go for those that don’t feel guilty about piracy. We don’t condone such use, so if you want to be safe of course steer clear from apps like this.

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/amazing-music/8ede40f3-957a-4532-97d5-da5fd4d4b07e

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It’s a simple app that gets you straight into the watching and lets you simply while away the hours watching a mouse run away from a cat, who in turn is scared of his owner (who, watching it back, is ever-so-slightly stereotypical).

The interface is large, colourful and informative, giving you accurate information on your connection, the buffering and how far you are through the cartoon.

A range of wallpapers also add to the amazing fact this app is free – sure, it has ads at the side of the screen, but that disappears from your view when you get used to it.

In short, this is a brilliant app that we could only improve in one way: downloading the cartoons, but then we’d probably run into all kinds of legal issues, so sit back and get nostalgic… cartoons ain’t made like this any more.

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/tom-and-jerry/c75581da-4606-49fd-bf79-12e4cad47040

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This app is pretty self explanatory: you can download YouTube videos and watch them again later when you’re not so busy. However, while this is better than ‘Wallpapers’ (which seems to be made by the same app house but simply doesn’t work) it does have limited functionality.

For instance, you can only download videos you search for, meaning any of the featured offerings are just frozen and unable to be tapped by your fair digit.

There’s also the issue that you can’t actually see the current top-trending vids. For instance, there was no sight of ‘Gangnam Style’ when searching the most viewed music videos… hello, a billion views people?

And there’s the actual viewing interface: you can’t look at it in the main media viewer of your phone, meaning it has to be done in the app… and you can’t scroll through the movie you’ve downloaded.

In fairness, when it works it’s an acceptable app – but YouTube downloaded doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of JetVD on Android.

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/youtube-downloader/d71552fe-9076-4b71-8aa8-e9a52cd23cf6

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You do get a fair selection of effects for your money, from alien invasions and helicopter attacks to lightning strikes and sea monsters. Each effect has a few variations too, in camera angle, length and style, to help you find something that’ll work with your footage. Sadly, the effects are simply not realistic enough and should only be regarded as a bit of low-rent fun.

There’s no way to tailor the positioning of the effect either, making you conform to the app, rather than getting the app to work for you. It’s very much a case of trial and error to see if your movies have the raw ingredients to work with Cinefy’s effects.

We found the interface to be well designed being based on a simple tracks system. Tap the Video track to import your raw footage, and then tap Effects to choose a sequence from Cinefy’s library. You can also pick some music from your iPhone to add to your video. Like iMovie, all it takes is a few swipes and an edited movie is complete, but the lack of any real editing options is just as frustrating as iMovie’s dire selection of templates.

Cinefy feels like the gateway to a huge depository of fun effects, but if you’re never really in control, it’s just a bit of gloss that you’ll quickly get bored of. Another big negative is the hefty file size of the app, coming in at just under 1GB. Sure, there’s plenty of effects for your 69p, but they’re hardly sophisticated enough to warrant such a chunk of your iPhone’s precious capacity.

Download this app: Cinefy – Special FX Studio for iPhone

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Earthlapse combines three of the four things, letting you view time-lapse videos from the ISS on your iPad. Brilliantly, you can zip forward or backwards through them by swiping your finger (although this doesn’t affect the video’s speed permanently, but feels like it should).

You can also display the weather and time on the screen, so it makes for a great screensaver-type app.

We’d like a few more video choices, but it’s already a whopping 522MB, so maybe it’s best not to.

Download this app: Earthlapse for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

Taking a screen edge each (a limit of four players, obviously, at least until Apple releases a pentagonal iPad) you all hunker down around an iPad. One of you has a drum kit, the other a one-finger keyboard, and there are two guitars. How it all works in real time is hard to explain without giving it a go, but you soon become proficient within its limitations. But even with customisable sounds and instruments, everything you make does tend to come out sounding like BBC Radio 6 indie rock. For creating sweeping piano ballads, look elsewhere.

However, if you just want to have a bit of fun creating music with your mates, everything you need is here. Then, once you’ve finished recording, you can export it to iTunes or Mail.

Download this app: Rockmate for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

You can basically think of it as Sky Movies on demand, though presumably Sky is avoiding calling it that in the hope of attracting non-Sky subscribers. Anyone can enjoy its catalogue, but it’ll cost you £15 per month, a steep increase over the £5 LOVEFiLM charges for just streaming.

What you get in return is a much more up-to-date catalogue for the most part – one that frankly puts Netflix to shame in terms of its modernity, and bests LOVEFiLM, too.

Even brand new films are available, for a paid rental fee that’s roughly equivalent to iTunes Store rentals in SD. In terms of comprehensiveness, it doesn’t quite match Netflix – criminally, there’s no Godfather, for example – but it’s the newness that wins points.

Browsing the catalogue is very similar to the Netflix app in that it’s rows of scrollable movies sorted by category, though you get slightly less on-screen at once here. It’s very clean and easy to follow, though, with large clear writing.

The video quality is fairly high, though you get occasional artifacts, even on great connections, and streaming begins quickly once you choose to watch something. There are problems, though. There were a bunch of films that just wouldn’t play – we got an error that explained nothing, but they failed however many times we tried. Others worked fine, but you want to be able to play whatever you like if you’re paying £15 per month. And sadly, but possibly predictably, AirPlay output isn’t supported for video – just audio. It’s a complaint you’re probably tired of reading, and we’re definitely sick of making, but it’s a situation that’s holding back what should be a killer feature for all entertainment apps on the iPad.

The range of films available on NOW TV will draw fierce envy from Netflix and LOVEFiLM subscribers – Sky’s app is leagues ahead in the UK – but the price is just too high for us, especially considering it only includes movies and not TV, and it’s not all that deep a library. It’s possible that we’re being unreasonable, and the only reason it gets such desirable films is that the price is high. In many ways, it doesn’t matter – when the competition costs only a third, we’re inclined to put up with a older catalogue.

Download this app: Now TV UK for iPhone and iPad

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From the beautiful textured artwork to the soundtrack from original narrator Peter Robbins, each page is brimming with charm and detail. Behaving like a pop up book, the characters leap onto the page and then animate across it to tell the story of Linus and his search for the Great Pumpkin. There are also several hidden games within the story, including pumpkin carving and piano playing with Schroeder. You can also create your own avatar and Halloween costume to become part of Lucy’s Halloween Party.

Although it might lack a bit of depth for older kids, the loving attention to detail and beautiful sounds and textures that fill the app make it a real treat, especially for those with an attachment to the original.

Download this app: It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

Of course, all the hard work, creativity and technical innovation that went into producing the 3D-ness is lost once you put the video onto an iPad, so immediately much of the visual impact and excitement of the original broadcast is lost here.

Happily and unsurprisingly, the warmth, charm and erudition of Attenborough is more than enough to make every clip a delight. You wouldn’t buy this <i>instead of</i> the series on DVD or Blu-ray if you want to watch the whole series – those will feature all three 50 minute episodes plus a making-of when they’re released in mid-July – but there’s certainly enough here to engross, including about 10 minutes of footage that’s exclusive to the app. All the videos are included inside the app, so although it eats up nearly a gigabyte, you don’t have to be connected to the internet to watch them. Annoyingly, you can’t skip around the video; the standard iOS movie controls are absent.

The navigation is simple enough; you can pick, by tapping icons on a tree, whether to start learning about a subject area or ecosystem, or to explore locations at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew where the programme was made. There are occasional glitches, where slide-up panels can get hidden behind navigation elements, and there’s one button that doesn’t have any content linked to it, but it’s generally simple enough – and that missing content link will be fixed one way or another in the next update.

Whether you like being able to jump in and out of different subject areas, presented in part with chopped-up bits of video from the original broadcast, rather than being led along a narrative path in a linear programme or book is a matter of personal taste, though for our money, we’d have preferred at least the option of ‘just let me watch the programme in a single block’.

Regardless, Attenborough remains a joy, and this app is a pleasant way to dip in and out of exploring the plant kingdom – some people, though, will prefer just to buy the series.

Download this app: Kingdom of Plants with David Attenborough for iPad

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BeatSpiral’s the latest attempt; it presents you with a colourful circular interface and enables you to build up loops from chopped-up samples. A nice idea that doesn’t really come off; the interface isn’t at all intuitive and makes it difficult to edit with any real finesse, the supplied samples aren’t very good (although you can add your own if you can be bothered), it lacks filters and effects, and changing the tempo shifts the pitch of your tune.

Most damningly, you can have Propellerhead’s entirely better Figure for less than half the price.

Download this app: BeatSpiral for iPhone

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In Game your Video, you play a video from your Camera Roll or Photos app, with buttons at the bottom that apply effects, such as slow motion, or black and white, or echoing. You can also apply ‘Flavors’ to give your video an overall feeling, which changes which buttons get prominence and applies filters.

When you first run through a video, jabbing the buttons can feel fairly imprecise, but then you realise how easy it is to delete what you just did, and try again. There’s a little timeline on which you can see each effect you’ve applied, and just tap to get rid of them. You can drag the whole timeline to get to a specific point, and here you can apply your effect with precision.

It’s so easy and slick, you’ll be totally proficient in minutes. Unfortunately, you can’t apply two effects at once, and we wish there was a button for an instant replay. But when you consider the ability to ‘game’ live videos as well as recorded ones, alongside cutting parts out of videos and joining other videos together, and options to add audio effects, this is a far more serious video app than its title would suggest.

Download this app: Game Your Video for iPhone

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Review courtesy of Tap!

While it won’t let you continue playing Halo 4 on your smartphone or tablet while someone is grabbing the remote for the Homeland finale, you can use your secondary device as a slick, intuitive remote, view and queue Xbox Music, TV and film content and interact with games.

As Windows 8 landed on PCs, tablets, ultrabooks and laptops, the SmartGlass app surprisingly landed on Google Play before the App Store. Setting up simply requires signing in with your current Xbox account and within seconds information from your dashboard is dragged into the app with five home screens to swipe through.

First up is Bing Search, then there is the Home screen to view what is currently running on your Xbox. A Social screen displays your avatar and let’s you view fellow Xbox LIVE friends, messages and settings. Next up is the Recent screen to view games and content last viewed and it’s here where you can view achievements and refresh to see them in real-time. Last up is Discover which is essentially a recommendations area which is based on search and purchase history.

A menu tab is always display in the bottom right hand corner where you can return back to the Home screen, check privacy settings, refresh content and access the remote. If Kinect control is not your bag, you can now use your smartphone to navigate around the Xbox 360 dashboard using a series of swipes and B, X, Y buttons which are now represented as blotches on your smartphone screen. On initial play it can feel fidgety, but it responds well and is particularly impressive when used with the Internet Explorer 10 browser and works much like a standard PC mouse.

Gaming is where the most exciting potential lies but it’s currently only reserved for a handful of games which means you can create playlists to cut shapes to on Dance Central and view maps on Forza Horizon, however with our time with the latter, we were disappointed to find out that the maps integration was only available for Windows 8 devices.

This is only really the beginning of what SmartGlass is capable of and while we were impressed by the slickness and seamless integration of Xbox Music and video content, we struggled to see the fun of looking at in-game maps while trying to hold a controller at the same time. If you’ve got an Android smartphone and own a Xbox 360, it’s a no brainer really. The technology is only going to get better and more intuitive and the remote alone makes it worth the download.

Get this app: Download Xbox SmartGlass Android app now

You can also build up your library of songs by syncing your existing music collection from your computer, much like iTunes Match. The app itself is fairly easy to navigate, though it doesn’t present you with a lot of content on its home screens, and we wish that it had autocompleting searches, and that you could reorder search results. Still, we had no problem finding songs we wanted and adding them to our library.

That’s all well and good, but the main problem with this app is its lack of offline play. On mobile devices, this is essential, since you’re always at risk of losing a solid connection. For us, it puts Music Unlimited several steps behind its peers on iOS. Android users actually do have an offline option, so hopefully it will come to the iPhone (the lack of iPad client also grates), but its lack means that for £9.99 per month for the premium service, we’d head to Deezer, Spotify or Rdio instead.

Download this app: Music Unlimited for iPhone

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Equalizer Pro lets you make tweaks to any song in the iPod library on your device, or you can add OGG and FLAC files to it using iTunes (formats not supported in the main Music app). You can then create custom curve presets, and save EQ settings for a track (though this only worked on some tracks for us).

The great part is how powerful and easy to use the tools are. You can add as many curve points as you want with a tap, and move the entire soundscape up or down, or to the high or low end, with a swipe of your finger. As a music player, it’s not the prettiest, and it’s not as fluid to use as the Music app, but its excellent feature list elevates it.

Download this app: Equalizer Pro for iPhone

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Review courtesy of Tap!

And with Frankenstein, developed by Inkle, we get a good idea of where books can go on iOS. Author Dave Morris has completely reworked Shelley’s classic for the app, with readers being asked to make choices and ask questions that changes the plot. If you were a late ’70s or ’80s child (like this reviewer) it brings back fond memories of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books.

The look and feel of this app is lovely. It’s an immersive experience, with beautiful drawings accompanying the text. It’s also a lot of fun – asking questions and making choices adds much more to the reading experience. Of course, there are a finite number of plot variations, but it’s not a book app you’ll use once and be done with. The UI is interesting as well, offering navigation through chapters on the left, and scrolling text on the right. As you make your choices, text pops up from the bottom – further emphasising that you are dictating the way the story goes. On the iPhone version, the text fills the screen, but is the same in terms of the interactivity.

We’ve seen many interactive books, but Frankenstein, for iPad and iPhone is right up there with the best of them. What’s more exciting is the potential for this platform. We’re sure Inkle has a load more book adaptations up its sleeve, and we can’t wait to see them.

Download this app: Frankenstein for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

Community integration is slapped all over it, too: there are hundreds of video soundboards available for download, so there’s always something to play with. Putting together your own soundboards isn’t exactly child’s play, though. It’s fun, but disappointingly restricted.

There’s no way to trim the individual clips you make, so even when you’re using the nifty sound-triggered recording function, you may end up repeating yourself over and over to get the perfect noise.

You can, alternatively or in addition, pull in clips from other sets and mash up a slick combo. But since there’s a 12-clip limit whatever the content, and only one programmed loop in memory at a time, MadPad belongs more in the toybox than the toolbox. It’s a real shame — all that class and polish really does suggest more composition power than MadPad manages.

Download this app: MadePad HD for iPad

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That’s not to say it’s not a great storybook app, since it clearly is. It follows the adventures of Clara Button around the Victoria and Albert museum as she searches for a new hat. The story is primarily aimed at girls, but Clara’s little brother makes an appearance as well, usually causing havoc, to give the boys something to relate to as well (because most young boys prefer trouble to hats, don’t they?).

The illustrations all have a distinctive style, and you can tap on a lot of objects to get little animations of them spinning. However, a lot of the taps create little showers of small objects to appear and disappear, rather than do anything unique to the page, and after a while this effect starts to grate.

The author herself, Amy de la Haye, narrates the story very effectively and her rhythmic voice suits the feel of the app perfectly. Alternatively, you can also record yourself reading the story for your children.

Download this app: Clara Button and the Magical Hat Day for iPad

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It’s got that reputation as an easy-to-use portal for all manner of things available at, you’ve guessed it, the last minute. And while this app doesn’t have all the holidays and experiences the main site has, at least you can search for a number of hotels easily.

The UI is simple, entering the necessary details is easy and it’s a cinch to book the hotel on the go – perfect for when you’ve forgotten an anniversary.

The ability to look at Top Secret hotels, which are the really good ones for cheap, is a nice touch as well, plus being able to refine your search categories helps loads.

Overall, an easy to use if limited app – but if you’re looking for a getaway then download it, before forgetting about it for a year or two.

Download this app: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/2cff4089-18c8-4bb4-85ad-7230564caa46

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Well, not necessarily crazy, but things. When famous people do things. When people do things. Or say things. Why do we care about these people again?

You’ve got a great UI here though; loads of squares of info about these people going about their lives, saying things, doing things… it’s non-stop.

You click the square and a flashy animation will take you to a bigger picture of their face, where you can click again on the headline to see the full story. The animation is a bit slow to load though, and we’ve no idea why there’s the secondary click before the story.

The nice touch comes from the Live Tile updates – it’s a different ’sleb face each day, although you can customise the categories to those that you care about.

Why does this app exist again? Wait, Tulisa did what? That’s her cousin, isn’t it? Weird.

Download this app: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/5b827ee9-0dd8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e

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But if you’re sad, alone and can’t face another night wondering if it really could make you blind, this app will give you all the info you need on the latest films, DVDs coming out and what time any movie is on, where, and which is the nearest place to see it.

There’s also the option to pin films to the start menu, watch trailers directly in the app and pin your favourite theatres to a page for easy time access.

Rotten Tomatoes ratings give you the critics’ choice, and audience ratings through Flixster tell you what the masses think.

In short, an app that’s immensely powerful, so feature rich it will even tell you places to eat before the movie, and one that anyone who doesn’t always know what to watch should download. Now.

Download this app: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/7dc02baf-a7d6-df11-a844-00237de2db9e

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