Collapse takes a game genre that's been around for a long time, grafts on a cute cartoon hero with a little quest for adventure, and hopes that's enough. It's not. Collapse might be value for money at 49p, but at £2.29 (in the UK marketplace, your country may vary) it's not got enough depth to justify the price.
One of the big stars of the Mango update to Windows Phone 7 is the mobile version of Internet Explorer. The ninth major iteration deserves a closer look, but the strength of the built in browser means that it's unlikely that you'll be looking for an alternative. Even if you did want to move, the biggest alternative, Opera, isn't yet available for Windows Phone. For long time Opera users though, you can get to something more important. Your bookmarks.
Glow Artisan brings some rather deep thinking to Xbox Live, with colour mixing, optional time limits, limited moves and one hundred puzzles to re-create. If you've got a touch of the obsessive in your puzzler genes, then Glow Artisan is going to keep you busy for a long time.
Here's a great idea - take the basic Bing Maps and hijack them for calculating taxi journeys and estimating that ever-present worry about what a taxi will cost from A to B. It's only for Great Britain and I did note a pretty big caveat, but the amounts calculated to seem reasonable, based on real world fares. TaxiRoute GB is produced with polish and is certainly worth a 'trial' download.
ilomilo is a 3D puzzle game featuring the game's two main characters, ilo and milo. The problem is that they always seem to get separated, and they don't like this, so your job is to help them. This involves puzzling your way around a 3D maze using on-screen and accelerometer controls.
There are a lot of sharing options inside Windows Phone, but what if you don't run your online stuff on Twitter or Facebook? Many people, including myself, have our own blogs running the WordPress software, so the addition of a WordPress client to Windows Phone is a no-brainer download for many. It just misses the mark to make it feel awkward, but does enough things right to ensure it stays on my smartphone.
How do you get information onto your Windows Phone? Music, pictures and video are easy enough, but what about the smaller details? How about text you find online when on your deskbound computer? Or a handy website or information you need to get in a mobile? Well here comes Send to WP7 and it's wonderful.
I've often contended that mobile app stores are stocked with content that, to be frank, could do with some quality control. Happily, there are also a few applications which ride high above the rest, with interface that's nigh-on perfect and oozing class - International Snooker is one such, for Windows Phone, offering a genuinely realistic environment, a terrific interface and gameplay that's pitched just right.
It has always been the test of a computing platform, even mobile ones - is there a decent flight simulator? iOS and Android have X-Plane, Symbian has H.A.W.X. (which is a bit 'gamey', but still....), now Windows Phone has Infinite Flight. Even on 2010 hardware it offers decent performance and a thoroughly enjoyable (and fairly accurate) flight experience, from a Cessna up to the (recently mothballed!) Space Shuttle. Yes, there are a few gaps and glitches, but this is one heavyweight 'game' that's receiving regular updates, so I'm optimistic for future aerial excursions.
Smartphone loudspeakers are a mixed bunch, many are good enough while some make us wonder why manufacturers bothered to fit them in the first place. If you like to use your phone as a boombox, external speakers are definitely the way to go. However, some of them are so bulky or elaborate that they rather defeat the object of using a converged device. The XMI X-Mini II mini speakers might just offer a compromise of compactness versus quality and power. Read on for our review and photos.
