Having all these maps and navigation applications is all well and good if the sun is up or you are on a road, but what happens when you want to get off the beaten track? When you want to do less 'over there' and more 'out there'. When you look up into the star filled night sky, why not look up with Escape Velocity's Star Chart.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) is one of those specialist photography areas that 'captured' popular acclaim as software automated the process, making it accessible to hobbyists and casual users. A well-known mobile HDR app is HDR Photo Camera, which is available for the iPhone and Symbian (see our review on All About Symbian here). The company behind it (Intellsys) have now published a Windows Phone 8 version, which I now put through its paces.
I'm a sucker for a camera utility and, for once, not a silly set of filters - we're talking something interesting and unique here in Turbo Camera. Not perfect, as you'll see, but certainly worth grabbing if its two main features grab you - quick fire burst shots and time lapse videos. Both do work but are ultimately a little limiting and flawed.
Many years ago, your first PDA application would be a clock. As technology has evolved, and user expectations move on, the 'everyone has a go at this genre' application has become something that reviewers are used to. The current fascination in Windows Phone seems to be two-fold. The first is for weather applications with funky live tiles, and the second is for image editing and filtering applications (for the record, the start of 2013 is probably going to see a proliferation of lock screen wallpaper apps - you heard it here first). So let's have a look at another entry in that Parthenon... Lomogram.
It's a fair cop, Netflix isn't a new release on Windows Phone. In fact, it was one of the first, back in 2010. Yet a) it has been consistently updated ever since, and b) we've never (unbelievably) reviewed it before. Which is why, if you're fed up with Christmas TV fare, I thought I should point you in Netflix's direction on Windows Phone - it really does work very well indeed.
It's something of a rite of passage for a geek with a new computing platform - to run through every single Twitter client in search of 'the one', the application that does everything perfectly. This was me on Windows Phone, with my personal search ending with Twabbit - it's slick, it's customisable, it's fast and, somewhat reassuringly, it's not (compulsorily) freeware. Meaning that there's a developer behind it who's being rewarded for his efforts and is therefore likely to carry on developing updates and fixes as needed in the future.
Any busy metropolis is going to have a complicated public transport system that takes many months for those new to the city to understand. In historical times this meant lots of paper maps, guesswork, and leaving a lot of spare time. Now you have any number of public transport applications on your smartphone. Given the increased complexity of London, how well does London Travel handle the options? Quite well, actually!
Replicating the exact behaviour of something in the real world inside a smartphone is never trivial. Or even, necessarily, desirable. Yet this is what RC-AirSim: Model Airplane attempts - and succeeds wildly. The downside, as you might imagine, is that all the frustrations of the real world come over as well. This is part game, part simulation, part tech-demo for the developer's physics and graphics algorithms - yet I love it. Read on for why....
As the UK's national meteorological service, the Met Office has great name recognition and a reputation for accurate and reliable weather forecasts. Even with the plethora of existing weather apps, the arrival of an official Windows Phone 8 app from the Met Office is therefore something that's bound to gain the attention of UK weather watchers. In this review, we take a closer look to see if this is an app that's truly suited to the weather obsessed Brit.
"Surprise me!"A few moments later, my Windows Phone will pick out a tune at random and grace my ears with something wonderful from my collection (or The Proclaimers). That's 'Hey DJ!' in action, allowing your voice to be used to play your music. It works, it's useful, and it's a great example of third party apps filling in usability gaps.
