New Cell Phones Review 2013

Best Z10 apps

The Guardian's thrown caution to the wind with this one, going all-out to create a native BB10 app that isn't a mere port of an existing app or a simple mobile web site wrapper.

The paper's app is instantly at home on the Z10, featuring a custom BB10 styled UI, a clean layout, integrated sharing tools and the option to use it in landscape mode if you'd rather more closely approximate the feeling of struggling with an actual broadsheet.

Book Reader

The official Amazon Kindle app for BB10 is a rather sad and sorry port of one of the older iterations of the Android app, so it's not particularly useful for showing off the best of the format.

It's left to indie products like Book Reader to add style and functionality to BB10, including support for EPUB, MOBI, FB2, TXT and CHM format books, making it a powerful tool for enjoying your DRM-free reading library on the go.

ClipMan Clipboard Manager

Download it from Open WhatsApp

Best Z10 apps

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to doing serious stuff on a phone is managing your clipboard content.

Even in BlackBerry's latest OS it's pretty fiddly to copy and paste text between apps, making this clipboard manager an essential for looking after your text snippets.

It monitors all text fields, populating a database with your words, presenting the option to miraculously save the day by searching for text you've previously entered - which you can then fling out through email or other apps via BB10's usual sharing tools.

OpenWA

The maker of Open WA (previously known as OpenWhatsApp) is a little bit angry with BlackBerry, claiming it courted him, encouraged him to create a version of WhatsApp for BB10 -- then went cold on the idea and refused to publish it on the BB app marketplace.

So if you want to use this slimline and stylish take on the cross-platform messaging tool you have to install it yourself outside of the BlackBerry World app store.

But it's worth it, as OpenWS provides a vastly better experience on BB10 than the official WhatsApp BB10 app, featuring a slick, native design, integrated sharing, group chats and everything else that made WhatsApp such a winner.

Neatly

The official BlackBerry Twitter app is one enormous compromise, designed to work across numerous BB models and dumping some image links out of the app to the mobile web browser. It's pretty grim.

Neatly, however, is designed specifically for BB10, incorporating such posh UI features as a pull to refresh function, themes, threaded replies and more, all wrapped up in a layout that's right at home on the stylish Z10. It's a paid app, but your 75p investment gets you a much richer experience.

TuneIn Radio

The superb internet radio app's a must-get on BB10. It turns the phone into a miniature radio, offering access to tens of thousands of online streaming stations and podcast listings, along with location-based search results if you'd rather listen to the local traffic news from your regional station.

Radio channels that best fit your idea of what music should sound like can be added to a Favourites menu for quick access, plus there's a separate paid Pro version of the app that lets you record anything you hear to your phone's memory card.

Songza

Songza calls itself a "Music Concierge" service, the big idea being that it uses your location data to automatically populate a streaming music playlist with the tunes it thinks you might want to hear.

It's also part social network, with users encouraged to share tracks and playlists with others, plus it's free to download and listen to as much curated music as you like.

Conqu

One of the many life, task and note-taking apps we see around today; but this one has been designed with native BB10 support for full integration with BlackBerry's sharing tools.

Conqu's basically a posh calendar and to do list tool, letting you get seriously engrossed in creating a massive, tagged database of tasks and schedules, or simply use it as a list-making toy.

One clever touch is the way you're able to delegate tasks to others, should you have the required rank and clearance to be able to palm your jobs off on other people.

PlayCloud 10

A fully native BB10 file manager that goes several steps further than necessary by including support for cloud services and even FTP access for when sticking stuff on Dropbox is simply too easy a way of doing things.

The app lets you do complex file management stuff like copying and moving files between folders (complete with multi-select to ease the tedium of picking things out of lists), with social media sharing and remote printing making it easy to make your cloud objects tangible.

ReadItNow!

One of the better mobile reading applications out there right now, ReadItNow! is also a winner on BB10 thanks to featuring a native design that matches Blackberry's current layout choices.

For your £1.50 spend you get an article reader that strips the formatting from web site pieces and chucks the newly neat and readable text out to your phone, complete with the option to have everything save locally to your device for offline reading when there's no mobile data connection.

This one uses cross-platform reading app Pocket to power its system, so you need a Pocket account and you're ready to go.

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10 Best Google Nexus 4 Apps

Jun 17th 2013, 10:42

10 Best Google Nexus 4 Apps

The Nexus 4 has it all as far as most Android users are concerned. A gorgeous slim design, a sharp display, enough power and RAM to run games and Twitter with ease, and those critical sparkly bits on the back of it that give you something else to look at when you're done trawling your usual apps and feeds.

More importantly, being a Nexus device means it's always first in line for software updates direct from Google, so it always features the very latest pre-loaded apps and tools that other Android users have to wait for their makers to port across.

Currently the Nexus 4 is running on the 4.2.2 iteration of Google's mobile software, which is as new as it gets. We're also expecting Google to push out an updated version of Android quite soon, most likely version 4.3, over the coming weeks. But until then, get the most out of your current edition Nexus 4 by installing these ten top apps that further enhance Google's current Android flagship.

DashClock Widget

Best Nexus 4 apps

One of the new additions within Android 4.2 that Nexus 4 owners can enjoy is the ability for some widgets to be installed on the lock screen, with the lock screen itself scrolling from left to right like the phone's actual desktop.

DashClock Widget replaces the default clock, also letting you select from a list of additional extensions that add more data to the lock display.

You can have your emails incorporated there, the weather, battery status, upcoming Calendar entries, SMS messages and more, all in a stylish, Android-like layout. It's the Nexus advantage in full effect.

SphereShare.net

The Nexus 4 doesn't have the best physical camera in the smartphone world, but it does have Google's most feature-packed camera software -- including the impressive PhotoSphere tool that lets anyone create Street View style 360-degree panoramas by walking around in a circle and letting the phone stitch together the results.

Problem is, these PhotoSpheres are large, difficult to share and are usually only viewable through Google+, which is where SphereShare.net comes it. It lets you browse PhotoSpheres taken by other Nexus 4 users on your phone, giving you an instant gallery of staggering panoramas to leaf through and drop into.

Photosphere Live Wallpaper

If you have been so absorbed by the act of slowly rotating on the spot to categorise your surroundings you want a constant reminder on your Home screen, install this.

It lets you set a PhotoSphere as your wallpaper, using left and right swipes to scroll it roughly in time with the screens it sits behind, and the phone's motion control sensors to move your "head" up and down.

Relive that great view or a 360-degree panorama of your bedroom with ease.

Chrome Beta

The Nexus 4's very latest Android OS already comes with the excellent mobile Chrome browser built-in, so the only way to get an even more bleeding-edge, nerdy web experience is to install Chrome Beta.

It's a separate, standalone app, which Google uses to test new functionality with understanding users who don't mind the odd glitch. It means you get new features first, which is one of the big reasons people invest in Nexus devices in the first place.

Feedly

Best Nexus 4 apps

If your Nexus is your mobile news hub, you'll no doubt be gutted that Google's decided to close its Reader RSS feed tool by the summer of 2013.

This leaves a massive chasm in the world of desktop and mobile RSS reader apps, with few alternatives offering such a seamless RSS experience.

Fortunately, Feedly's just about there when it comes to matching Google's old Reader in terms of cross-platform reading, article syncing and sharing, plus it comes with a vastly superior design that borrows heavily from the stylish news aggregators like Flipboard and Google's own Currents app.

Twilight

This is a weird one, but it might change your life. Or at least change the sleeping part of it.

Twilight makes some very believable claims about the blue spectrum of light emitted by mobile screens, suggesting it's these that tell our brains it's the middle of the day -- despite the fact we tend to stare at our phones in the darkness before going to bed.

By eliminating the blue light from the screen output this app supposedly alleviates the effects of looking at a bright light in a dark room, helping your brain realise it's dark and therefore bedtime. In short, it might help you sleep better if you're in the habit of using your phone before bed, in return for using a red-tinted display.

WeVideo

The Nexus 4 comes with stacks of filters and frames for making the best of still shots, but the video editor is stupidly simple, only letting users trim clips to create shorter versions of your pre-recorded films.

WeVideo adds loads more options to editing movies on the Nexus 4, letting users drag and drop videos onto a timeline to create long-form edits, add filters, drop in images and MP3s for use as a soundtrack, create titles and much more.

Google ought to buy it for a few hundred million and make it a standard thing.

Cinemagram

While Android users wait for Twitter's developers to release a version of video sharing app Vine for Android, there's this stylish alternative to practise on.

It's pretty much exactly the same as Vine, letting users record short clips, live, with the press of a button to start/stop recording, which are automatically compiled into tidy, looping edits, and chucked online to share through social sites.

There's some social network stuff built in too, but it's best used as simple a simple way to share small video files.

Dextr Email Beta

Best Nexus 4 apps

There are plenty of third-party email apps competing for installation on your Nexus 4, plus the onboard generic Email option that comes as part of Android 4.2 is certainly worth using, too.

But this one's different. It syncs with a Gmail account and replaces Google's mail tools, giving you a simpler interface built around threaded messages that pop up in a modern Android-inspired layout.

A friend system lets you sort the humans from the automated notices that plague modern email, hopefully making reading messages less of a chore.

CloudMagic

Make sense of that mass of social networks, email providers and cloud services with Cloud Magic, which lets you search through all of them in one go.

The first task is the not insignificant chore of opening the app and separately signing in to everything again, but climb that mountain of tedium and you can then use its interface to search your Google account, various social networks, Microsoft's mail systems, Evernote files and more, all through one little search box.

Do it often and you have to pay for increased access, but the occasional rummage is free -- and there's a lock screen widget for ease of access, too.

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10 Best Samsung Galaxy S2 Apps

Jun 17th 2013, 10:25

10 Best Samsung Galaxy S2 Apps

The Galaxy S2 is a survivor. Samsung released what was the world's best Android phone by some margin in 2011, and the thing's such a Triple-A, five-star, double-thumbs-up stonker that many still use it today, despite mass peer pressure to upgrade to something else every six months.

Samsung's in the process of updating the Galaxy S2 to Android Jelly Bean too, meaning most owners should already have a vastly different and improved experience to the one the phone originally shipped with, refreshing and enhancing what was already a seamless and responsive smartphone.

On top of that, of course, owners have access to the wealth of innovation, tinkering and enhancements that come via Google Play Store, where all manner of apps can be bought and downloaded for free to breathe more new life into any ageing mobile.

So here are 10 top apps to help spruce up the Galaxy S2 further still and bring it nearer today's cutting-edge of Android.

Action Launcher Pro

Action Launcher

If you want to start by completely refreshing your Galaxy S II, installing an alternate launcher is the way to go. This replaces the entire user interface of the phone, meaning you instantly kiss goodbye to all of Samsung's TouchWiz interface tweaks.

Action Launcher also gives you an experience that's much closer to the feel of "stock" Android, should you fancy upgrading your S II from the ground up, replacing all of Samsung's fiddlings with the cleaner, more modern Android user interface.

Nova Launcher

For a more customisable way to refresh your Galaxy S II, try this one. Nova Launcher also removes Samsung's TouchWiz tweaks from the phone, coming with masses of options to edit the colours, styles and sizes of its icons and text.

Plus you're able to change extremely nerdy things such as the phone's folder content appearance and background, add gesture shortcuts to launch apps, scroll the floating dock's app shortcuts and much, much more.

Beautiful Widgets Free

It's also really easy to replace the old Touc Best Galaxy S2 apps hWiz widgets, if you're now a bit bored of looking at Samsung's take on the interactive Home screen tools.

The popular Beautiful Widgets has been doing this extremely well for years, offering a wide range of neat and stylish widgets to pop into you little mobile desktop. And now there's a limited free version available too, for money-free trialling of its approach to Home screen data.

SwiftKey Keyboard

The Galaxy S II arrived with both a standard Android QWERTY keyboard and the flashier Swype gesture input system installed. But rival gesture system SwiftKey is another option to consider, offering word prediction and gesture input – plus it has much more in the way of visual and layout customisation.

This includes some landscape display options that let you split the keyboard in half for easier use, loads of themes and its well-known ability to "learn" your typing style by analysing your texts and social media posts.

The free trial lets you see if it works for you for one month, after which you'll have to chuck some money at it to unlock the full release.

Camera MX

The Galaxy S II had the best camera on it by far back in the day (by which we mean two years ago), and the output from its 8-Megapixel sensor is still better and brighter than that of many of the cameras that come in today's new smartphones.

Get even more out of it by installing Camera MX, which, among many, many other features, includes a filter option that lets you create madly fashionable tilt shift images, making people look like toys and cars resemble matchboxes with Smarties for wheels.

It also adds filters to images live, as you take them, so you can set up a favourite effect and have it applied to your snaps by default with no post-production fiddling required.

Google Play Music

Best Galaxy S2 apps

Original versions of the Galaxy S II were sold long before Google's cloud-based music player existed, back when music had to be "transferred" to phones using cables and suchlike.

Now your tunes can by synced inside and from the cloud, with Google's player letting you pull tracks and albums to your phone by pinning them from the menu – or you can save internal storage space by streaming everything through a Wi-Fi or 3G signal.

It'll also sync playlists created on other devices, too, which is very handy if you have a tablet and/or another phone on the go using the same Google account.

Google Drive

Another app to benefit from a recent Google reorganisation is the company's Google Drive storage system, which now lets users access a whopping great combined total of 15GB of cloud storage, for free, through the app's uploading front end.

Primarily designed to let users create and edit Google documents on the go, it's now been transformed into the perfect place to dump your photos and videos too, should your phone's storage space be a little tight after two years of filling it with high-res pics and video from the S II's camera.

Lookout Security & Antivirus

One of these days, one of the Android virus scandals may turn out to be genuine, so best be prepared for any possible future tech apocalypse.

The Android Lookout app checks app installs for malware, but also looks through email attachments and web downloads for nasty files, which is a much more common way for infections to get on a mobile.

It also includes a Find My Phone section, which, once activated, lets you track your mobile, and comes with a remote locking tool to shutdown access should you suspect a criminal's trying to leaf through your personal photos and pull out the best for a Buzzfeed list feature on how stupid you look.

Google Keep

Google's Android developers are gradually assimilating features and ideas offered by its army of third-party app developers, with the mobile giant's Google Keep doing a decent job of cloning the many note-taking apps out there that let us capture any interesting thoughts that may come our way.

The app's most useful tool is its combination of a Home screen widget and voice recognition, meaning that with one touch you can record your Alan Partridge style "note to self" about that amazing thing you just happened to think up. It also syncs everything via Google Drive, for desktop access to your mobile activities.

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