Billed as 'Weatherproof. Dustproof. Shockproof', this super-tough accessory lives up to its billing, though it's behind the cutting edge in terms of charging technology. Still, if you're the outdoors type (or keep getting drenched in the UK winter!) then this is probably the biggest in its category.
Maybe it's the stress of writing for AAWP or perhaps being the dad of a teenager, but either way I can really appreciate 'Relaxiness: Relax Music' when trying to get to sleep or even just having a quiet moment during the day. It's a beautiful Universal Windows (RT) app (not UWP, note, so it will run on Windows Phone 8.1 too), sounds fantastic and has everything you need to catch some sleep or just meditate.
Right. Pick an era. Olympian gods, done. Pick a game mechanic (or two). Tower Defense, RPG, done. Pick a freemium style. Twin currencies, daily rewards, outrageously high in-app-puchases, done. Stick it all in a mixing bowl and out comes Olympus Rising, arriving in UWP form for Windows 10, slightly behind implementations on iOS and Android.
Sometimes bigger is definitely better - yet in this case also slimmer. And while smartphones themselves have been getting rather too thin in recent times, power banks have remained necessarily bulky, usually because the internal Li-Ion cells are cylindrical. But what happens when you use phone-style 'flat' cells and arrange these to form a power bank? The PB-Y14 is the answer. Quad output, triple input, 20,000mAh, yet only just over 1cm thick. And yes, I said triple input.
Once upon a time, a developer had a vision. To create a podcatcher for Windows 10 Mobile that had no settings and no real UI - just search, add and listen. The result was OneCast UWP, but as it became more popular, settings and UI bits necessarily got added on, until the original structure became unbalanced and confusing. So the developer, Daniel Lam, went back to first principles and created a whole new UWP podcatcher, MyPodcasts - using the best of OneCast but also the full UI possibilities of a modern Windows 10 UWP application.
Now this is really something - a genuinely useful jack of all trades document conversion tool, the sort of thing that gets my tech heart excited. Or maybe that's just me being very geeky! PDF Conversion Tool is a premium UWP app for Windows 10 on all form factors (but which arguably works best on the phone, i.e. W10M) that can convert anything to PDF and PDF to, well, (almost) anything.
Taking its name from an XBox model's code name, of course, Scorpio Player is a new media player UWP for all Windows 10 hardware. From the XBox itself to Windows 10 laptops and hybrids to - yes - Windows phones. And, this being AAWP, I'm looking at it mainly on the phone. Summary? Immensely powerful and promising, but quite unstable at the moment, despite numerous updates.
It's... Google Play Music - on your Windows 10 Mobile phone! Which is an impressive accomplishment, dented only by the fact that I've been tracking this UWP application for over a year now and only now with the latest update has it become stable enough to recommend to others. Streaming music from Google's servers, just in case you'd put your music in that other ecosystem?(!)
A couple of years ago I looked at chess games for Windows Phone, looking specifically at playing against the phone's AI and not human opponents. I promised then that I'd do a follow-up or two looking at playing other people online - and here's the first!*
Gameloft has been a huge culprit in recent years for pushing out freemium tat, but they seem to be gradually reigning it in. War Planet Online: Global Conquest UWP is a full Continuum-compatible Windows 10 game for PC form factors and for Mobile and is both hugely ambitious and, for once, not too greedy with real world currency and in-app purchases.
