Another of the star UWP applications for Windows 10, i.e. for phone, desktop, XBox and more, Torrex has in fact never been covered on AAWP, partly because of the associations with (ahem) dodgy illegal/pirated downloads. But torrent technology is being used to deliver all sorts of large downloads, many of which are 100% legal, so I feel justified in highlighting the application here. It's stunningly and lovingly coded - if you have any awareness of the world of torrents and have a Windows 10 Mobile smartphone then grab this with both hands.
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.
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?(!)
I can't believe it took me this long to find Video X Player Pro in the Windows Store. I blame Microsoft - for making (what is now) 'Films & TV' good enough, and the VideoLAN folks for making VLC temptingly good. But the former has a fatal flaw and the latter is fatally buggy (in my continued testing), leading me to look at this old but still updated video solution for both Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile.
I'm always a bit wary of third party web browsers - they're never as efficient and speedy as the tightly coded native alternative (e.g. Edge), unless they pull tricks like content compression and ad blocking. Coc Coc Browser (I'm omitting the Vietnamese character embellishments) is clean and modern but isn't as fast as Edge, confirming my suspicions. However, it's still noteworthy for its fledgling Extension support - with a first party video downloader ('Savior') the headline advantage.
The ongoing saga of keeping a secure database of passwords, serial numbers, reference data, and so on.... on Windows Phone, or, in this case, Windows 10 Mobile. If you've been following over the years then you'll be interested in this latest review, for KeePassWin, a UWP app for Windows 10. It's not yet the real McCoy though, as I shall explain...
I have to wonder why it's taking Microsoft so long to implement its much anticipated 'cloud clipboard' - but then I review something like Connected Devices and the complexities start to hit home. You may remember that I've already reviewed Hand Off UWP, from a different developer, which had everything but clipboard operations sorted. Clipboard copying here mostly works, plus you get local file sharing, which turns out to work well too, and Connected Devices is absolutely free. What's not to love?
