I decided to give R-Type a run on my iPhone just for old time’s sake and what a blast it turned out to be. Not only did it brings back memories of the hours I spent playing it on my Atari STE, but surprisingly it has proved to be just as captivating as it was all those years ago. It is still frantic, still frustrating, and gloriously long. Very few games make me want to come back time and time again to get through a level and I am still hankering for just one more go.

That’s all very nice, but the real story for me is how my 10 year old son greeted the game.

“This is too difficult!”

“Is this what you called fun when you were young?”

To say he has been struggling with the game is an understatement, and this for a boy who is way better than me at Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, Loopy Laboratory and countless other games. He is a bright kid, he cleared all of the levels in Loopy Laboratory in 1 day, but he struggles to cope with the challenge R-Type offers him.

And I am so happy that he is struggling because I can ramble on about how things were more difficult when I was young, you don’t know you are born etc. etc. It feels weird to reminisce about computer games, but we have reached that time where they are too old and difficult for some children today.

R-Type is an exception because the retro renaissance happening in the App Store has not always produced titles that are worth playing today. For example, the Commodore 64 emulator is going just too far back and the games are rubbish. However, I come away feeling slightly smug that some of the games from my day are slightly too tricky for my 10 year old son and that’s a good feeling. It feels even better to be playing the game on a phone 23 years after I first played it and to still be enthralled by the experience.

My Writing Nook is such a simple tool that it is easy to discount it as a one trick pony that could never compete with the more sophisticated multi-use services currently available. The simplicity is what makes My Writing Nook such a great tool to use though and this is why I have been using it every day for the past few week without fail.

It is a simplified writing environment that is accessed via www.mywritingnook.com and which is completely free. All you do is tap the icon to create a new document and away you go- you start typing and that’s about all you need to know to get started. The documents will be named from the first few words that you type and they are placed in alphabetical order in the right-hand column. Tapping one icon will remove that list to give you a completely clean writing area and you can email the finished document or save it to your desktop for reviewing later. There is a live word count which is hidden in the bottom right-hand corner and coloured icons next to each file which you can customise- this is the only form of organisation available.

It runs on Google’s Cloud setup and does sound rather dull doesn’t it? But, throw in an iPhone, iPad and Android app and the concept becomes interesting. You write whenever you want to and it syncs between multiple devices with the tap of an icon. The scope for this is immediately apparent because you have access to everything you are working on all of the time no matter what device you use. For example, you could write a couple of paragraphs on your iPhone when you are on a train and continue when you are back at your work computer. When at home you can continue on another computer and so the process continues.

It may sound just like Google Docs and it is in essence, but with the absence of lots of formatting options, complex file naming and tweaking and a clutter free environment that lets the words shine through. In my tests almost all mobile browsers work with the service as well so you don’t need a dedicated app to use it on your smartphone. It is one of a growing band of services that recognise that simplicity is the way forward and it works about as well as I could possibly hope for. Brilliant.

Click the image above to download the iPhone / iPad app.

This is a quick review of Dragon dictation. It will also be the only review I will post that I haven’t written. I am currently recording this on Dragon dictation and I have no intention at all of tidying up the spelling and punctuation I was delighted to follow.

I am speaking at quite a slow pace, but also very naturally and this is in my view the ideal conditions are tracking temptation to succeed. I have to say that I am impressed with the technology and have written a couple of articles using the software so far. Sometimes needed after I have finished recording my voice to tidy up the spelling etc, but on the whole thing really is able to speed up the work I need to.

As you can see some of the spelling and work hours are actually quite amusing and I believe that this is becoming a bit of a party game all ready for some. Despite the issues with regard to not getting to 100% accuracy it’s well worth the download and one that you should try to see if you can get used to. It’s strange feeling when you first start talking to your phone because the words don’t quite come out the same way as they do from a keyboard, but once this becomes habit from me I suspect that I may not be typing half as much in the future.

Some will see it as a gimmick and I can understand that, but on a serious note it really does work 95% of the time and from many people that’s the kind of technology that can really change their lives.

Available for the iPhone and iPad and other products available for BlackBerry etc.

When you first start to play with Fruit Salad there is an obvious comparison to Bejeweled that springs to mind. This is a good thing because Bejeweled is brilliant, but a bad thing because it could be seen as a clone and little more. To be fair it is more than a clone of Bejeweled and adds some extra features that are not obvious when you first play it.

It works by sliding fruits to create lines of three and is easily accessible the first time you play it. I was merrily sliding away on my first play and, dare I say it, not overly excited by the experience. This lack of excitement gradually fell away as I started to understand what to do and what was happening within the game. You see, there are features that pop up including when you match 4 fruits such as spins, wilds, nudges, blends and selected others which completely change what you are doing on a particular level. They can change the level to such a point that you feel like you are starting again and at this point the head scratching starts.

I started playing my first game at 11pm one evening and stopped at 1am. The odd thing is that I couldn’t put my finger on why I played for so long. It is not as obvious in its implementation as Bejeweled, but is rather a game that you pick up and start playing without thinking. The therapeutic attributes of this style of game are there and I find myself falling into my own sliding void as I tried, and tried, to beat my previous high score.

The goal is to create as much fruit juice as possible to progress to the next level and then you start again from scratch. The best thing about the game is the balance that has been built in between offering a challenge and helping you to sit down and just enjoy the experience. Graphically it is good, not stunning, but a game like this has to include personality in the presentation and that has without doubt been achieved with the minimalist approach to the individual graphics throughout the game.

I don’t know why I like Fruit Salad so much, but I am surely addicted and have played it countless times over the past week. It is one of those games that does not jump out at you when you view it on iTunes, but will gradually take hold of you over time and become one of your most played titles when you have a few minutes, or hours, spare. A bargain at £0.59 / $0.99.

Disclaimer: The developer of Fruit Salad does advertise on PDA-247, but such relationships never affect reviews on the site. To do so would make all of our content meaningless.

Available from iTunes for £0.59 / $0.99.

Lets Create! Pottery HD has been available for the past week and has received rave reviews from a number of websites. This morning it arrived on the iPhone and I felt the need to write up a quick review detailing my thoughts on this unusual game that grabbed me from the very first second.

It is beautifully presented and even on the relatively small iPhone screen it looks and feels just right to capture the full experience. There are few instructions included which is unusually a good thing because it forces you to look around and start hunting out the features. Making a pot is as natural as it could be the first time you try it, but don’t for one minute think that it is going to be a cakewalk. As you progress through the levels and attempt to make pots that customers have requested, you soon realise that it is not as easy as it looks.

Included in the game is the ability to sell your wares which gives you money to buy colours, brushed and some unusual designs with which to decorate your finished works. I have literally only been playing the game for an hour or so, but it is special and unlike anything I have tried before on a smartphone.

Pottery should be the most boring pastime in the world, unless you are the male lead in Ghost, but I now understand why people enjoy it so much. That may sound like a silly statement, but there is a genuine sense of relaxation as you try to create the perfect pot. The graphics and animations are pure quality and the way the screen reacts to screen movements add one more element of reality. The fact that there is progression built in subtly keeps you coming back for more.

I can’t quite find the words to describe Let’s Create! Pottery. It is a game, but doesn’t feel like one. It offers a challenge, but you never feel pushed into completing it quickly. It is completely original and maybe the start of something on this platform- what I can put into words is that it is far better than I expected and well worth the asking price. If you have an iPad the experience will likely be even more immersive.

Available from iTunes.

Now and again an app appears that completely changes the way I use my smartphone and Air Video Server is one such title. I have a 16GB iPhone 4, which is soon to be replaced with a 32GB model (long story)) and memory is tight thanks to the 5MP camera which is capable of taking decent photos and HD videos. Throw a few apps in, a decent sized music collection and you will soon find yourself down to 3GB or so. One type of content which is especially memory hungry is video and TV episodes and films can run well past 1GB, especially those that are high definition.

Air Video Server changes all of this because it is designed to stream video content from specific folders on a Windows or Mac desktop/laptop. Setting it up is simply a case of installing the app on your iPhone and then installing the server client on the desktop. The first time I tried it gave a very positive experience and they connected to each other immediately. I specified a folder where all of my videos were held and that was all I needed to do.

A list of all of these videos popped up and away I went. I simply selected a video file and it was available to play immediately. The performance was identical to playing a locally held video and so far I have not experienced any stutters or poor playback. The only difference is a few seconds wait when the video first loads up.

I was surprised to find that I could come back to a video after watching some of it and that it would resume from the last position I watched and even more so when I realised that the app can convert videos that are not natively playable on the iPhone whilst you are watching them; there is no wait while the video convert- you simply tap the ‘Live conversion’ button and away you go. There is a minimal performance hit when you first start each file, but it quickly settles down and is fairly smooth.

It doesn’t stop there though. A beta feature is currently in place which allows you to stream video from your computer over the internet to your iPhone, and this works as well. On 3G I managed to watch a 20 minute video without any issues and my only concern was the amount of data I was using. If you are stuck in a hotel with Wi-Fi you will still have access to as much of your personal collection as you want and everything works much better than I ever expected.

This isn’t a full review, but if you feel that £1.79 is a bargain to have immediate access to many 100GB’s of video on your iPhone then Air Video Server is for you. A simply brilliant piece of software.

Let me start this review by explaining why satellite navigation is so important to me. It is a technology that has benefited my life more than many others which are designed to make tasks a little easier and to bring more fun to our down time. Prior to satellite navigation every long journey required lots of map studying, guesswork as to how long each journey would take and the added dangers of continually referring to a map on the passenger seat. And I shouldn’t forget the inconvenience of traffic jams which were a regular occurrence on my journeys; I live 10 minutes from the M25.

It all came to a head one day when my wife and I decided to take our children to a local farm for the day a few years back. It was the middle of Summer and baking hot, but the drive would not be a problem because it was only a 20 minute journey. Because of this I decided not to take my TomTom. Big mistake. We hit some traffic as we turned onto the M25 from the M23 and just sat there. One whole hour later we had moved about fifty feet and as you can imagine I was starting to fear the worst. Considering we only needed to be on the M25 for 1 junction this was getting more than a bit silly.

After about 2 hours nature was calling and I was in a bit of a situation. In desperation I drank the last of the water from the only bottle we had handy and used it as an impromptu (uncomfortable) toilet. At this exact moment the lady in the car in front decided to get out of her vehicle and wander over to us. She leaned down by the window, I pushed the button to open it slightly and exclaimed “For God’s sake. Can’t a man go to the toilet in the privacy of his own car?!?” She walked to the vehicle behind us. It was getting tense in the car by now and the children were bored, irritable and generally annoying to be near. My wife was bored, irritable and generally annoyed to be near me and so we carried on waiting. Incredibly the lady returned to our car, looking very excited, and I wound down the window again. She said “Do you know what’s happened?” Dramatic pause. “There’s been an accident. That’s why we are stuck here!” She beamed at imparting this knowledge onto us. “No sh*t Sherlock! Not for one minute did I think we had been stuck here for 2 hours because of an accident. And there was me thinking it was because of the light rain shower we had this morning. Of course there’s been an accident you stupid woman!” She walked back to her car.

Now, I was feeling quite bad at this point; I needed the toilet again, I was hot and bothered, the kids were crying, I had upset a stranger and my wife was blaming me for deciding to go to the farm in the first place. To cut a long story short we eventually started moving (slowly) after 3.5 hours at which point some people started to use the hard shoulder to make their getaway. Two police cars moved to the hard shoulder to stop them, but then the traffic on the inside lane left a gap, and so we drove as fast as we could through the gap to get to the next junction. I didn’t care that the police were there; after 4 hours I would have sold my house to be free from that awful motorway, the awful baking temperature and the Sunday that should have been a pleasant day out.

If only I had taken my TomTom and used the traffic service. Such a simple thing to do, but I didn’t and our day was ruined. For a year afterwards my son was petrified of getting stuck in long traffic jams, and so was I.

You don’t need to have suffered a traumatic traffic event to need decent navigation and traffic management though because these do offer some advantages you may not have thought about previously. They save time, fuel and hassle and can also make any journey a lot safer. I am a big advocate of satellite navigation and always want the best. The question is, has TomTom managed to create the best iPhone navigation experience on the market?

The list of features included is long indeed and so I will not cover everyone of them, but if you want to know what you get for your money take a look at this page. OK, I will stop talking about myself. It’s time to look at the app itself.

Pricing

Let’s get the pricing out of the way first. At the time of writing TomTom UK & Ireland costs £42.99 on the iTunes app store and the HD Traffic option will set you back £22.99 for a year’s subscription.

Co-Pilot Live UK & Ireland retails for £19.99 plus a further £19.99 for a year’s traffic. NAVIGON MobileNavigator British Isles varies in price, but seems to settle at around £40 plus £14.99 for a year’s traffic, £1.19 to use postcode searching (you what?) and £6.99 for 3D Panorama View. Navmii GPS UK & Ireland costs £19.99 with no traffic option currently available. NDrive was retailing for a crazy price on the App Store until Apple used the infamous kill switch and removed it from people’s devices. I remember asking myself how NDrive could be sold at such a low price when the cost of licensing maps is considered? I guess I now have my answer…

Reference links-

Co-Pilot Live review

Navmii GPS UK & Ireland review

Looking at the above prices the TomTom offering looks expensive and the actual difference comes in at an average of £20 extra if the traffic options are taken. It is an obvious disadvantage in a market that has more consumer users than when GPS software was popular on Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian. Users of older smartphones would pay for the best solution, but the iPhone market is different. Anything over £0.59 can cause complaints and TomTom is taking a different path to the rest at this time which takes some balls. However, this approach mimics the path Apple is making; better quality components will result in a higher price and TomTom’s job is to convince potential consumers that it is offering a better solution. Ultimately I have to judge if TomTom for the iPhone is worthy of the higher price tag when the others offer similar features, at least in the spec sheets.

Setting Up

Installing TomTom is not a process worthy of many words; you buy it from the App Store and it installs. How dull is that? Seriously, this is where the iPhone eco system shines and it’s all over in a matter of minutes. I was surprised at how quickly the app loaded up when I first tapped it; many navigation apps take an age to load, but TomTom is quite swift in this area and it popped up in approximately 4 seconds. The initial screen is a simple map and you may wander what you need to do next. One tap on the map brings up a listed menu which is fairly long; Navigate to, Route options, Mute sound, Day Colours, 2D Map, TomTom Traffic, Advanced planning, Browse map, Help me, Manage favourites, Call POI, TomTom News and Change settings. Many of these options have sub-menus as well which is an indication of just how much is included. If you go to the last option, Change settings, you can delve even deeper, but a tap on Advanced here brings up some hidden settings. They are on/off radio buttons to disable IQ Routes, Traffic, GPS Enhancer and Lane Images- my tip is to leave them all set to ‘on’ because they make a big difference to the overall routing experience.

Some of the menu options are ordered in a strange way which is a little hard to fathom at first. For example, with the ‘Navigate to’ option searching by Postcode is 8th in the list which is bizarre to me. I would say that postcode searching is very popular and should be near the top, but the options here are as complete as you will find elsewhere in the software. You can find destinations in almost any possible way; by contact, POI, coordinates, points on a map, Google local search and the list goes on and on. It is impressively complete and so far has proved very reliable for me. The one area of concern are the points of interest which are on the whole accurate, but at other times way out. I remember searching for a Pizza place in Co-Pilot while sat 100 feet away from my local Pizza Hut- it came up with the nearest one being 16 miles away. On TomTom I tried a search by POI (can’t remember what for, but there was one locally) and I was offered a POI in Paris, France! POIs are historically a bit hit and miss on all navigation systems so I am not overly concerned about this particularly because the Google Local Search works so well.

I won’t go further into the menu options because it would start to get boring, but I will say that the options are incredibly complete and, on the whole, logically set out once you are used to the occasional quirk. One option I liked was the ability to share a route- simply tap the menu options and a detailed list and map will be emailed to the contact of your choice. Within this email is a link to open the route in TomTom- clever stuff and potentially very useful.

The First Trip

Once I had input my destination I was ready to test TomTom out properly. It was a 100 mile trip from Crawley to Bournemouth on a Friday evening which is notorious for traffic issues and so I expected problems. I decided to follow the route exactly as TomTom wanted me to and was surprised by the results.

On more than one occasion we ended up on different roads to ones we have used before in the many, many times we have driven to Bournemouth and it seemed as though the IQ Routes system was working well. It took some time for me to adjust to the way roundabouts and turnings are displayed on the screen; at first it appears as though you have a long way to travel before a turning, but the screen will show a short distance. This is at odds with every other system I have used, including standalone TomTom units, but after a couple of trips the benefits became clear- it offers an incredibly accurate view of where you are and when you need to turn which is especially useful in busy areas.

An alert popped up on the HD Traffic bar advising that there was a 2 minute delay 69 miles ahead. 2 minutes? There was no way on Earth it could be that precise, but sadly I did not get the chance to test it on my first trip because the delay had disappeared by the time we got there. As it happens the trip was traffic free and all in all I was very impressed with the way TomTom managed alerts, safety cameras and directions. Alerts were offered which included place and street names and this simple addition makes a big difference when you are travelling through a town for the first time. The selection of voices are also very natural and at no point did I have trouble understanding what was being said. All in all my first experience of using TomTom on the iPhone offered a glimpse of what to expect, and I was now expecting great things.

HD Traffic

The HD Traffic claims to be the best in the business and so I plumped down a further £23 to test it out. After some time with Co-Pilot I have started to lose confidence in the system because of a few recent times when it alerted me to traffic which moved away hours before and another time when I got stuck for over an hour with no warning at all.

The day after my first trip I had a chance to test it and the results were remarkable. During a short journey we were alerted to a 5 minute delay in 0.70 miles. This was a surprise to me because every other traffic system I have used has ignored towns and only managed to monitor motorways and A roads. Anyway, we reached the point of delay and there it was- a stream of traffic in front of us. As we moved along the delay dropped consistently down to 3 minutes and then eventually to 1 minute. We sat in the traffic and I said to my children, jokingly, that the traffic would be gone in 10 seconds. The traffic disappeared after 12 seconds (bad TomTom- 2 seconds out) and we were on our way again. This was a little bit weird to me because this level of traffic management is science fictions to anyone who has used other systems, but it has happened time after time since in my testing. It is not always as accurate as the above example, but the most it has been wrong so far was by 1.5 minutes during a particularly troublesome M25 trip.

TomTom HD Traffic has, so far, performed way ahead of my expectations and is as accurate as is possible with such a free flowing problem as traffic. I already have the utmost confidence in it and it is easily worth the extra £23. A remarkable service.

On The Road Again

In the past two weeks I have undertaken multiple trips using TomTom on an iPhone 4 and to date have not suffered any issues at all. The traffic service is exceptional and the routing has been spot on. Bristol is a town that causes much confusion on many navigation systems, but this version of TomTom handled it with ease. It’s useful in any review to find problems, but I admit to struggling here.

One feature that worked particularly well is the music integration. Using it with an FM Radio tuner, I found the onscreen controls easy to use and the blend of instructions and music to work well albeit with some disturbance on some channels. It is difficult to judge exactly how well a solution like this works because I was using a low quality FM transmitter, but the experience was interesting and from a software point of view, the TomTom music integration worked very well.

Conclusion

I expected this review to be much longer, but I hit a roadblock (excuse the pun) when it came to describing performance. The features are all in place and the traffic system is brilliant so that only leaves performance to take up the bulk of the words. The problem I found was that I never lost signal once, turnings had no delays and all audible instructions were clear and timed perfectly. Every part of every route was accurate and it felt like coming home to an old friend.

From my very first experience of GPS I used TomTom for many years and only recently moved to Co-Pilot because I was offered a review copy which stunned me with its quality. As time wore on, however, I noticed a few small glitches and so decided to try TomTom once again.

No product is perfect, that is impossible. However, when I compare this app to the other navigation solutions available for the iPhone platform and even to standalone GPS systems I struggle to see where it could improve. It is a remarkably complete piece of software that has been designed with the user in mind every step of the way. I wouldn’t change anything about it…

Available from iTunes for £42.99.

A long time ago, way before the world realised that mobile devices could play games and organise people, a company called spiffcode released a game called Warfare Incorporated. Those of us who owned Palm T3’s at the time were blown away by the depth, graphical quality and all around greatness the game brought to the mobile platform. We had seen nothing like it before and it ate up batteries quicker than seemed possible. We did not care; it was brilliant and as refreshing to mobile games as the iPhone was to the smartphone industry when it was announced.

I cannot think of a complex mobile game as perfectly balanced as Warfare Incorporated or one that offers excitement continuously over long periods of time. I am writing this article because I decided to revisit an old friend today and downloaded it for my iPhone. Three (3!) hours later I have stopped playing the game for a short time until I ‘need’ to jump right back in and have another crack at the enemy.

I am not great at strategy games because I do not have the patience to play them, but like the opportunity to think about what I am doing while under pressure and this is where Warfare Incorporated excels. There are times when you will be frantically building new vehicles, soldiers and towers to protect your base and others where you have to carefully consider the entire structure of your base. If you take your time and think about what you are doing you just may be able to pull off a victory, and in some levels you need to think about every possible scenario to have a chance.

The game is extremely fluid and at no point do you feel like you are solving a puzzle, at no point do you feel like you are repeating steps and at no point do you want to put it down and do something else. You are presented with a story mode in which you have to solve every more difficult levels and this builds into a clever storyline which is not contrived and which flows nicely to give you a genuine sense of achievement at the end.

The real beauty of Warfare Incorporated is that this is not the end. There are literally hundreds of add-on missions created by players that you can download and play at will. Some are pure fun, but some are vicious in their difficulty. The forum at the developers website is a good place to learn how to author missions and also to get help and the community is still quite vibrant after all of these years.

All I can say is that if you have not tried the game, spend a few pennies and see why I am so positive about the experience. It is ludicrously priced on the iPhone and also still available for Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Without doubt one of the greatest mobile games ever created.

More details at www.warfareincorporated.com.

If, like me, you own a Wi-Fi only iPad you may feel constricted at times as to what you can view online with that gloriously large screen. It is a problem for me sometimes when I am away from home with work and want to read a long web article on the iPad. Wi-Fi is either non-existent or costs too much in a hotel so I tend to read the articles on my iPhone. Not any more though.

Blue Route 3g Web Share is a clever solution that needs to be installed on an iPhone and an iPad (you only pay once though) and one which allows you to use the iPhone data connection to view web pages on an iPad. It doesn’t currently do this in real time, but uses a fetching method; load a web page up on your iPhone and Blue Route will automatically move it to the iPad. This is especially useful for long web articles that benefit from the bigger screen and so far I have not had a single problem with the setup.

Connecting the two devices (effectively creating a mini server) takes a matter of seconds; turn on Bluetooth on both devices and follow the instructions to get them talking to each other. When you load up a web page in Blue Route it automatically starts fetching the content on the iPad and this can be done for as many pages as you like. This present dual advantages in that not only do you get a constant form of web access on your iPad, but also offline viewing in a similar way to InstaPaper.

There is nothing more frustrating that having an iPad and no web connectivity and Blue Route is a good start at removing some of the barriers. It displays the web pages perfectly and is one of those apps that just sits there waiting to be used when the time is right. Once you start it may be difficult to stop because it is very easy to build up a large repository of offline viewing on your iPad when it would have been impossible before.

The fact that I can find little to write about Blue Route is the biggest compliment I can offer it. For anyone who owns a Wi-Fi only iPad and an iPhone Blue Route is a must have app that will come in handy time and time again.

Available from iTunes for £3.99.

I don’t play many games on the iPhone. Words with Friends changed that and now I have another addiction. The game is Slay.

It is a turn based, hexagon winning war game that is delightfully simple yet deep. It’s very easy to pick up and play but the levels get very challenging as you move into the game.

Essentially you have a landscape that is split between several powers with each owning small areas of land. Your job is take over the whole landscape in a fashion similar to the board game “risk”. The more area you control, the more money you have and so the better army you can afford. The first level of army are peasants who can only take unprotected land. Two peasants make a spearman who is much more powerful. After that you have knights and barons that are very powerful but also cost a lot to keep and so you best have plenty of land to look after these guys. There are rules as to who can move where based upon the power of pieces. If you can make ground so that you cut your opponents land in half then this can have a dramatic effect on their army as you effectively “starve” their army. The rules are simple yet complex enough to make the game chellenging and thought provoking.

I managed to pick this up for free a few days ago when it was on sale and I’m delighted by that. However, it is definitely worth a fee. If this sort of games interests you at all, take a look – I think its very good.

What I’d love to see added is an online multiplayer mode similar to words with friends. That would be great.

Football games have been the holy grail of games developers for years and we occasionally see titles which almost capture the real elements of the game. Pro Evolution Soccer is the best one on gaming consoles, in my opinion, and others such as Fifa do a good job as well. The problem is that it is a very difficult sport to recreate and I do wonder if anyone will ever manage to do so successfully.

On mobile it is even harder because of the obvious screen size and control limitations and there have been a series of football games that fail to hit the mark. The iPhone Fifa efforts are really poor and I struggle to get any enjoyment out of them at all. Others have tried and failed with only X2 Games stepping up and creating an admirable effort with X2 Football 2009.

It was with much fanfare that X2 Football 2010 was recently released and many paid money to get the experience as quick as they could and it was worth it, sort of. X2 has improved the visuals, made the game faster and apparently tweaked the AI to make the game play much more realistic.

When you first start the game it does smack you in the face with the visuals; weather and the player motions are cleverly recreated and you do get a sense of the pitch size which is unusual in most football games. The commentary is not too bad, but does get somewhat repetitive over time. You can play friends via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or online and the multiplayer options work quite well although I did see some stuttering when my son played me on his iPod Touch. I used the stuttering as my excuse for losing quite badly…

Anyway, I started my first tournament as Scotland, which I always do, and started to enjoy the experience as I became accustomed to the various controls built in to the game. Like any football game practice makes a huge difference and I soon found myself scoring quite often, but also letting in the occasional howler as Scottish football teams tend to do.

The more I play the more I feel the same about the game. I suspect that if I were to spend a great deal of time playing it and understanding every nuance of the controls and strategy then things may changes, but despite being the best mobile football game every made it still suffers from the same problem as the others. You never quite feel as though you are playing a proper game of football- too many attacks consist of the same moves and the same goes for defence. If you want the best mobile football game available this is the one to buy. If you want a football game that recreates the real thing I suggest you hang on for a few years until someone makes one.

UPDATE: Since writing this review, I have been playing the game a lot more and have enjoyed some very challenging matches. I am changing my thoughts and now believe it to be a must buy if you want some serious mobile football. It’s not perfect by any means, but it is very, very good.

Back in the day when I was 15 years old, my parents bestowed upon me a gift that would make the weekly Woodwork classes at school bearable. It was a watch (Casio I think) that could play a simple racing game which involved dodging oncoming cars- that’s it. It did little else apart from tell the time, but I was king of my class for a few short weeks until the buzz died down. The year was 1985 and to play a game on a watch was the equivalent of Microsoft squeezing Windows 7 onto a watch today. I fondly remember that game and am sure that if I played it again now I would be hugely disappointed at what I thought was great at the time. Fortunately I don’t need to do that and can look to Hit ‘n’ Run for the iPhone instead.

I had seen the game mentioned on a few sites, but initially dismissed it as too simple to be capable of providing a long term challenge. Two minutes after I bought it I was hooked, and so was my son, and so was my wife. We all know that simple games can provide the most enjoyment of which Bejeweled, Doodle Jump and WordPop! are prime examples, but Hit ‘n’ Run takes an idea from the 1980’s, adds a twist to it and for good measure a wonderful soundtrack alongside near perfect 3D graphics.

The premise is simple; you drive a car along a motorway (of freeway or whatever you call it where you live) and have to avoid hitting the other vehicles. However, if your car is red you need to hit as many red vehicles as possible at which point it will likely change to another colour and you then have to hit cars that correspond to your current colour. At times the action becomes frantic, but there is more. On the hard shoulders there are bonus targets that can turn your car into a ghost for a few seconds; here you can hit any car and not lose a life. Heavy traffic is another bonus that pops up, but like the ‘Speed up’ bonus it is far from a good thing. One useful bonus is the faster hard shoulder which means you can avoid as many cars as you like and keep up with the traffic. Normally moving onto the hard shoulder would slow you down and this causes potential crashes when you rejoin the main motorway.

Hit ‘n’ Run is a simple game moulded from the classic gaming days of the past, but one which has been brought bang up to date and it is as much fun as I remember my Casio watch to be all those years ago. HIGHLY recommended.

The iPhone GPS software market is getting crowded these days with all of the big names looking to dominate. Navmii is the latest name to enter the market and has immediately thrown down the gauntlet by offering the UK & Ireland version for just £19.99. Also available are a range of titles which cover specific states in the US which is a clever marketing technique for those travelling to a particular area and at £7.49 you are not risking a lot. Here is a quick rundown of the features included in the app-

Easy-to-use complete satellite navigation for your iPhone & iPod touch
Clear, easy to read maps for all devices (iPhone 2G & iPod Touch 2G also supported)
Complete Onboard solution – No Monthly fees & No Data charges
Option of viewing the map in either 2D, 3D or a safety screen
Fast route calculation and automatic re-routing should you miss a turn
Voice and visual turn-by-turn route guidance
Constantly update information about your journey: Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) and distance to destination
Speed limit warnings both on safety screen and map
Day/Night mode
1000’s of POI included

As you can see, all of the basics are covered that we expect to see in a GPS app in 2010. Those who require traffic may be dismissive, but the reliability of such features is often brought into question so it makes more sense to look at what navmii does, and more importantly how well it does it.

For those that need a basic navigation solution, Navmii will serve them perfectly well, but for those who want something more sophisticated it passes that line as well. It is rare to find a navigation solution that manages to fill the budget market and the more lucrative high-end market yet still keep the price nearer the budget side.

The interface is easy to view and works well in busy and sparse areas, but does lack the professionalism of TomTom and Co-Pilot. This may be a bias on my part because I am so used to the more expensive solutions and when I thought long about this I realised that it displays the roads around me very well indeed and thus I am most likely being far too harsh. The seed camera pop ups are clear and pushed off to allow the main view space and the way in which the data you need is ordered on screen feels natural after your first couple of trips. The various route views are useful, but I must admit to rarely moving away from the traditional 3D view on any system.

The menus are easy to use with large buttons that are a snip to tap in a hurry, but again the overuse of colours gives the impression of a solution that is less professional than it actually is. The fact is that Navmii includes a huge variety of options and the interface could be simplified to demonstrate that fact the first time you look at it.

The main focus of a navigation app should of course be navigation though and this is where Navmii really surprised me. I drove from Crawley to Manchester using Co-Pilot and was taken on my usual route which means a lot of hassle as I reach Manchester city centre. The next week I had to take the same journey again, but this time used Navmii. Everything was the same until I reached the outskirts of Manchester and 15 minutes was chopped off my journey. I am not good with locations and roads, hence my dire need for GPS, but in a number of tests Navmii has taken me on different routes which on the whole involved much less hassle.

The spoken directions are timely, but not as clearly spoken as some other solutions and the speed of calculation for long journeys is super quick. Points of interest are easy to find and they seem to be comparable to competing solutions. All in all I have struggled to find any major issues with Navmii GPS so far.

It claims to work with the iPod Touch using G-Fi which is currently on sale at $99, but this appears to be a US only product at the time. I must say that the way the app is displayed on iTunes could do with some re-wording to make it ‘very’ clear that you need to buy G-Fi to use an iPod Touch with Navmii.

When I consider the options available in Navmii and the performance it is up there with some of the best. When I consider the price, it heralds a new dawn for navigation software. It is a huge bargain at under £20 and should suit the needs of most iPhone owning drivers.

More details at www.navmii.com

Gran Turismo was the first driving game to gain worldwide recognition for offering more than just driving. It offered progression, longevity and somehow managed to squeeze in the thrill of a top class racer in the one title. I spent many hours hunched over my Playstation playing the game and then my children entered the world which put an end to the days of video game playing for long periods at a time. I have dabbled with a few driving games since, but none have offered an experience deep enough to keep me going for more than the occasional game, and then Gameloft released GT Racing: Motor Academy for the iPhone.

I bought it and played it twice and then largely ignored it for the next few weeks. It felt like an OK racing game with lots of menus to interrupt the action and that was that. Like so many iPhone games and apps, it was assigned to a lowly place on iTunes never to grace my iPhone again. One of the main issues I had was that it stuttered a lot on my iPhone 3G which effectively ruined the experience, but an upgrade to the 3GS offered me the chance to try it again in stutter-free mode.

Since that time I have played the game every day for at least 20 minutes and it has become my relaxation moment after a hard day’s work. Just one more race… Just want to get a higher licence, a faster car, more credits to improve my car. It goes on and on and on and is almost perfectly balanced to keep the player coming back for more.

As you gain your licences you can then enter races which correspond to the licence you have earned. The tracks are largely similar throughout, but there are 14 included such as Laguna Seca and Monaco and even rally and urban tracks for variety. As an example of the variety included, when you race on a rally track you have to skid around corners to succeed whereas you do not on standard race tracks. Snow and rain add to the mix on hardy levels and you have to constantly adjust your driving technique to win each race. Somehow each car had a different feel and when you reach the stage where you can purchase faster cars, there is a genuine sense of speed which is at times virtually scary.

You have to be careful how you spend the credits you earn though because it is quite easy to run out of funds as you progress, and this could leave you with an unmodified car that is unable to compete. At this point you either need to build up your credits again in earlier races or start again. The after market add-ons for each car make a tremendous difference if you buy the lot. They cost a serious amount of money, but can enable you to win a series of races where you gain even more credits and sometimes a new car for good measure.

Special invitation events are also included and the experience of driving a Ford Model T at just over 40 miles per hour is something I did not expect in the game. Indeed, there are more than 100 cars to buy and these are the real deal. When you get really got you can buy yourself a nice Bugatti Veyron, but I sadly haven’t got there yet. After a few hours of playing I am just over 50% of the way through the game and look forward to finishing it all.

Very few games have as much longevity and diversity built in, especially driving games, but GT Racing has it in spades. The fact that it is a mobile game is even more impressive and the price makes the whole thing better still. There are some minor quibbles such as sometimes having to move your iPhone from side to side at extreme angles, but with 6 player multi-player, YouTube replay posting and worldwide rankings I am struggling to find much wrong here. Oh, and various camera views plus different control schemes and…. The list never ends.

In my opinion GT Racing is Gameloft’s finest hour so far on the iPhone and I implore you to try it out for yourself.

The iPhone cameras are far from high-end in the smartphone world and lack the specifications many demand. There is no flash, no zoom and at only 3 Megapixels on the 3GS, it is unlikely to tempt serious photographers. However, this is the first smartphone that has a large number of photography related apps that work with the camera and this make the photography experience on an iPhone so much more than 3 Megapixels. Here are some examples of apps which can enhance your results-

ShakeIt Photo ($0.99 / £0.59)

ShakeIt brings back the world of Polaroid photography to the iPhone and does so effortlessly. It can grab a photo from the camera roll or library and convert it or create a Polaroid snap when you snap a picture. It actually offers some of the Polaroid experience as well because it will take the snap and then roll the photo down the screen with the classic Polaroid whirring noise. You then have to shake your iPhone to develop the photo. This is great and lots of fun, for the first three photos, and then you wish you could just take the snap and have the effect applied in a second.

The best way to use ShakeIt is to take a picture normally and then used it later on to add the effect. In my experience adding the Polaroid effect brings some life to a photograph that is often lost in the clinical digital photography world we so readily embrace today and is easily worth the extremely low asking price.

Take a look at the photos below- the one on the right is taken with ShakeIt and I think it adds a lot more life to the shot.

AutoStitch Panorama ($2.99 / $1.79)

AutoStitch Panorama is one of many apps which claim to stitch together shots to produce a panoramic view of what you can see, and on the whole it works very well. You simply take a few shots, moving slightly to the right or left each time, and then select the ones you want to use in AutoStitch. It will then go off and do its work and produce a stitched together snap covering the whole area.

Some ghosting is apparent and you do need to be as precise as possible to get a clean shot all the way across, but now and again a magical shot appears and makes it work the asking price. I suspect there may be better ones available which do a better job, but at the moment I am fairly happy with AutoStitch.

The photo(s) below was taken at Wakehurst Place in Sussex, England.

ReelDirector ($3.99 / $2.39)- 50% off at the time of writing

I have for a long time now made up home videos and photos of my children and stitched them together against a suitable musical backdrop to create a memory of an important event. The process on a Mac is seamless, but on a Windows PC it is painful to say the least. On either platform it can take a long time to create a quick movie and never did I expect to be able to accomplish the same task on a mobile phone.

ReelDirector does just what I have described above and enables anyone to make a home movie which brings together photos, videos and music. Throw in some fancy transitions and an interface which makes the whole process less of a chore and it is impossible to not recommend it. You cannot mix portrait and landscape media and the rendering times can be immense. For example, a clip with some music and 26 photos stitched together took more than 50 minutes to render!

If you are prepared to wait for the results once you have done the work, this is one of the most impressive iPhone apps available today.