iPad iPhone User Issue 103 2015

iPad Prol& MacBook Air iPad1Phone# Contents 3 Welcome... & News Features 9 Predictions for 2016 15 Best free iPad games 43 Best free iPhone games 78 Christmas gift guide Reviews 99 iPad buying guide 108 iPad Pro vs MacBook Air 118 Apple Pencil 2 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# Welcome... elcome to the latest issue of iPad & iPhone User, the only guide you need to the wonderful world of iOS. This month we've decided to take things a little easier. After all, Christmas is almost upon us and what better way to while away a few hours than playing a game on an iOS device. We’ve 54 of the very best free games for your iPad and iPhone. And if like us you still haven't finished, or even started, your Christmas shopping, we’ve a few geeky gift ideas in our feature on page 78. 2015 was a busy year for Apple, with the launch of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the Apple Watch and the iPad Pro. So what can we expect over the next 12 months? Turn to page 9 to see our predictions. We've also an iPad buying guide (page 99), which should prove useful if you are thinking of upgrading soon. Plus, we put both the iPad Pro and MacBook Air through their paces on page 108, and ask whether Apple’s king-size tablet can replace a Mac. We hope you’ve enjoy the issue. Feel free to send us your feedback via facebook.com/ipadiphoneuser or email rob_grant@idg.co.uk. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 3 iPad1Phone# Surfing \'m so happy you were able to go to the beach with us this weekend, That was a really fun day. I'm still finding sand all over the floor of my car. But | guess that's what | get for keeping my socks and shoes on. You guys, on the other hand, are total naturals out re there. If | didn't know any better, I'd think you were raised in Hawaii. | can't belleve how easily you got up on the surfboard. You're one of those annoying people who's good at Add Attachment 3€ shift A Send 3€ shift D Paste as Quotation 3 shift V Add Bcc Apple won’t make iPad/Mac hybrid Tim Cook rules out converged iPad and Mac pple CEO Tim Cook caused a minor kerfuffle recently while promoting the iPad Pro in an interview when he asked, “Why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?” The question baffled Mac users, and seemed to suggest that Apple might one day phase out the Mac — or combine it with the iPad to make a hybrid device similar to Microsoft's new Surface Book. Cook clarified the meaning behind his question in 4 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 95 iPad&iPhone# an interview with the /rish Independent, telling the newspaper that Macs and PCs are not the same. Dig on PCs aside, Cook said he understands that some people need desktops and notebooks, while for others, a powerful tablet like the iPad Pro will suffice. “We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,” Cook said. “Because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.” The differences between Mac and iPad chips are dwindling, as Apple’s A-series line gets more and more powerful. But that doesn’t mean an iPad will eventually replace a Mac, even if Cook now uses a Pro as his everyday work machine. “What we've tried to do is to recognise that people use both iOS and Mac devices,” Cook told the Independent. “So we’ve taken certain features and made them more seamless across the devices. So with things like Handoff we just made it really Simple to work on one of our products and pick it up and work on the next product.” Why this matters: Apple’s core business is hardware, and Macs remain a key piece of this. Mac sales were up 3 percent year-over-year in 2015 as the rest of the PC market continues to decline. While Apple wants to boost iPad sales by launching the Pro as an alternative to smaller notebooks, Cook made it clear the Mac isn’t going anywhere. ISSUE 95 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 5 iPad&iPhone# Apple acknowledges mysterious shutdowns Ge ome iPad Pro owners have noticed some o> “®t, Strange behaviour in their new 12.9in tablets. wad Normally when you charge a device, unless the battery has completely died, the screen remains responsive. But some iPad Pros are completely freezing, then dying, after a recharge. Apple knows about the problem, but hasn’t said why it’s happening. There doesn’t seem to be a real fix for it, either — at least not yet. The company published a support document on Thursday advising Pro users to force restart their tablets to bring them back to life, but that’s not really a long-term solution, because the issue is ongoing. 6 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# iPhone’s ‘panic mode’ New mode will let you lock out personal information f you carry around sensitive information on your iPhone, you could soon have one less reason to panic. Apple has filed a patent to activate ‘panic mode’ when unlocking your iPhone using a designated finger. Once your iPhone is unlocked using the secret panic mode method, the device would automatically limit access to personal information, reset the device altogether or activate preset actions. Since Touch ID can register several different fingerprints, the patent suggests that iPhone users could designate a specific fingerprint to unlock the iPhone in ‘panic mode’. This would then make your ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 7 iPad&iPhone# left thumb your secret ‘panic finger’. According to the patent, using this finger would alert your iPhone you are in distress or in an emergency situation, and your phone would respond accordingly. Panic mode would give iPhone users a new range of security settings when forced to unlock their devices using Touch ID. For example, an iPhone in panic mode could be set to automatically take photos of the assailant and send them along with your GPS coordinates to the authorities securely over iCloud. Another panic mode scenario could have your iPhone send out distress signals to nearby iPhones. The panic finger could also be used to unlock an iPhone and immediately have it place an emergency call. Why this matters: Apple’s patent filing suggests that panic mode could be a way for users to keep their private information secure in the case that their iPhone is being stolen. With all the different emergency scenarios presented in the patent, it’s easy to think of other quick actions that can be implemented to improve the safety of iPhone users all over the world. For example, how about activating a panic mode setting to secretly place an emergency call to 911 that instantly provides your name and location without you having to utter a word. But just because Apple has filed this patent, however, doesn’t mean that this technology will be coming to the iPhone 7 It just means that if another phone-maker implements this technology in the near future, Apple can take them to court and say they thought of it first. 8 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# Predictions for 2016 What we can expect from Apple in the upcoming year ow. What a year it’s been for Apple. The iPad Pro, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Beats 1 and, of course, the Apple Watch, have given us plenty to talk about over the past 12 months — and these releases do more than just hint at what might be coming up in 2016. Apple Watch Apple hasn't exactly bet the farm on its Watch. It was launched with appropriate fanfare, but the company’s played it slow and sure since then. In Store display areas are discreet, and overshadowed by its longer-established lines. Perhaps it realises that a fair few of us are waiting for the first revision. Expect that to come in 2016 — around April, when the original model will be 12 months old. If anything ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 9 iPad&iPhone# appears between now and then it’s likely to be another big-brand collaboration, like the one it rolled out with Hermes back in September. Jumping in bed with a sports brand like Nike — with whom Apple has worked before — would be a logical fit, and give Watch Sport more weight in the fitness arena. The first revision will almost certainly be an extensive upgrade to bring it in line with its most ambitious competitors, so we’re expecting an Apple Watch 2, rather than an iPhone-style ‘S’ variant. We’re also expecting it to be an entirely stand- alone device, along the lines of Samsung’s Gear $2, which connects directly to the cellular network, bypassing the Galaxy Phone entirely. This might seem illogical if you considered the Apple Watch to be a stealth marketing tool 10 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# for increased iPhone sales, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple has broken an explicit link between two core products to boost the sales of the newcomer. Think back to its original strategy with the iPod, which was to use it as a Trojan for the Mac (it required a FireWire-enabled computer running iTunes which, at that time, wasn’t available on Windows). Only when it produced a PC version did the iPod really fly, and change the company’s fortunes forever. Why do we believe it’s going to do that here? Aside from the need to compete with Samsung it’s because watchOS 2, which rolled out on 21 September, made it possible for the first time to run third-party applications directly, without using the phone as a data conduit. Building in full-blown phone-free comms is the next logical step. This will require some additional components — in particular a SIM card and associated circuitry — but advances made in the last 12 months suggest that shouldn't be a problem. The S1 processor in the current Apple Watch is built using the same 28 nanometer process as the chip in the iPhone 5S, which was current while Apple was closing Watch’s development cycle. Since then, we’ve seen both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s hit the shelves, and they use a considerably finer process, with their AQ processors built using a 14 nanometer process. Assuming Apple develops a new chip — likely called the S2 — for its second-generation Watch, it’s reasonable to assume that it will employ the same 14-nanometer process and, rather than slimming the wearable, use the reclaimed space to bolster its built-in features. ISSUE 103 » iPAD & iPHONE USER 11 iPad&iPhone# Other notable omissions from Apple Watch that could be addressed in the first revision are native GPS, additional health sensors and a higher capacity battery, not necessarily to deliver a longer work time, but to deal with the additional load of the bolstered range of sensors and comms. iPhone 7 We've already had an ‘S’ model since the last full update, so expect 2016’s iPhone 7 to be a more extensive revamp. Pundits are forecasting the death of the home button, which we don’t think many would mourn. Adopting soft buttons, as are common on Android devices, makes sense, and it would allow Apple to increase the screen size without bulking up the physical body. Conversely, it may reclaim the lost space to produce a smaller device with the same 16:9 aspect screen as it employed in the iPhone 5, 5s and 5c to tempt an upgrade out of anyone who was put off by the iPhone 6 and 6s’s wider, taller bodies. It would still need to accommodate a fingerprint reader, which is key to Apple Pay, but there’s no reason why this couldn’t be moved to the side of the case or sited by the earpiece, on the opposite side to the front-mounted camera. Building the iPhone 7 around an AMOLED screen — as used in the Apple Watch — would make sense on several fronts, as it’s less power hungry than the LCD technology Apple currently uses, can display more colours and is more responsive, but it seems unlikely that Apple will roll it into the iPhone any time soon. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, believes the company will persevere with LCD for 12 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 Y Messages iPad&iPhone# fr IPHONE 4:41 PM mn 03 Calendar Photos e | Messages Calendar * Photos Calendar Photos > ] seae Fe ¥ 4 A + - Xt Ma Maps Videos _ Reminders Stocks several years, and with Apple suppliers building new LCD factories in China to satisfy future demand, it looks like he could well be right. Alongside these headline developments, there will be a whole series of soeed bumps along the way as Apple extends and refines its offering. Apple Pay will be accepted in a wider range of headline stores, and the Apple Music — which is now available on Android — will inevitably expand. More importantly, Apple Music may prove to be the one thing that keeps the iPod on the shelves ISSUE 103 Camera Videos “© Gare Center Ganere Image: Martin Hajek »iIPAD & iPHONE USER 13 iPad&iPhone# (a Loud Places (feat. Romy) Jamie xx — In Colour NatWest 14 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 » @ N = . ¥ Pharrell Williams 9:41AM Connect 7 SS next year. If you’d asked us what we thought of its chances at the close of 2014, we’d have said ‘slim’, but 2015 saw _ Apple deliver the first proper update _ to the iPod touch in three years, and it's now providing another entry ramp for the firm’s £9.99 a month music subscription service. That alone means it makes sense to give it at least 12 months to prove itself. The same can’t necessarily be said of the nano and shuffle, which are each available in just one configuration and, without Streaming abilities, offer no Ongoing revenue source. iPad1Phone# iPad > 15:57 100% =) + Categories Featured AMAZING APPS & GAMES 50% OFF FOR A LIMITED TIME SS ¥ a A ~— = ‘ - oN d 4 Na Best New Apps i} Little Fox Tandem - Canva - BBC CBeebies Mallzee: shop PNP -~ Portable Sago Mini a 3 Coach Ti Animal Doctor Language Exc... ee oe iat - tate stree... North Pole 20... Sa Guitar Aq Books Education Photo fideo Gam oppir Entertainme Education £3 3.99 Music £2.29 £2 2 ° Best New Games See All : f aa e World of Tanks Star Wars™: Football Headshot One Button Square Rave Cube Rule - pnseinag Fingertali Generals Galaxy of Her... Manager Touc... Heroes Travel Games Split Second... Games Games Games Games Games Games £2.29 Games t Apps Featured Best free iPad games Fantastic free iPad games that won't try to rip you off Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer To the casual player Ascension seems not dissimilar to Magic: The Gathering — you build and play from a deck of cards, each of which depicts a warrior, magician or relic of some kind, and use these to slay monsters and acquire both points and further cards. What makes it a ‘deck builder’ (like the classic card game Dominion, or the more recent Star Realms — which is also free and also worth a try) rather than a collectible card game like Magic is the fact that all ISSUE 103 + iPAD & IPHONE USER 15 iPad1Phone# players start with an identical, very simple deck. You build your deck within the game itself. It’s all weirdly addictive, once you play a few times, and you needn't pay a penny if you don’t want to: various single-time payments unlock new sets of cards and suchlike, but the free offering is perfectly decent. And while some reviewers have criticised the mostly rough-seeming art style, we find it all rather beautiful. David Price Battle Golf Developer Colin Lane appears to be attempting to corner the market in ridiculous sports games. First, there was Golf is Hard, a side-on ball-thwacker 16 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad1Phoned that required you to hit a hole-in-one every time, because it’s clearly wrong and evil to walk on the grass. Then came Wrassling, a demented wrestling (of sorts) game that looked like it had fallen out of a Commodore 64. Now, Lane’s returned to hitting tiny balls with sticks in Battle Golf. Again, this one’s all about holes-in-one, but putting greens now emerge from a huge expanse of water. You tap twice (to set angle and then power) and hope for the best. Hazards include hole-blocking seagulls and occasionally having to carefully aim for the top of a giant octopus. Although perfectly fine in its single-player time- attack incarnation, Battle Golf comes into its own ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 17 iPad&iPhone# when the ‘battle’ bit is added via the same-device two-player mode. Players face off at opposite edges of the water and frantically race to five points. As a bonus, you can temporarily knock out your rival by Smacking them in the head with a ball, gaining you precious seconds to win a point without interference. There’s only one IAP: £1.49 gets rid of the ads, although these are unobtrusive and don’t interrupt your games. Only flinging your (ex) friend’s iPad out of the window when they get a last-gasp fluky shot to win 5 to 4 can do that. Craig Grannell Crossy Road You’ve probably already installed smash hit Crossy Road. If not, do so immediately; and while you’re waiting, here’s why it’s one of the finest freebies on mobile. First, it's dead simple and entirely intuitive. Imagine Frogger with isometric graphics and a single level that goes on forever. That’s perhaps not fun for the game’s protagonist, who must hop across endless busy highways, train-lines and rivers full of floating logs before inevitably being squashed/ drowning/ending up on the front of the 8:24 to Paddington. But it’s great for you, because it’s an endless, infinitely replayable challenge. And the controls — tap to jump forward or swipe to move in any direction — are pitch-perfect. Secondly, it looks gorgeous. The visuals are bright and cheery, to the point you won't be too annoyed when your critter gets splattered (or grabbed by a bird of prey when you dawdle too long). Finally, Crossy Road is the least obnoxious free- to-play title around, despite being packed full of collectables. Sure, you can pay IAP to get a new 18 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# S6o' character (of which there are many), but alternatively you can grab coins as you play, view an ad to swell your wallet, or even just do nothing at all and grin as the game generously lobs virtual cash in your general direction anyway. You can then try your luck on a one-armed bandit that will reward you with anything from a vampire that turns Crossy Road into a bleak landscape bathed in red, to ‘Doge’, whose antics are accompanied by lurid Comic Sans phrases. Craig Grannell Darkside Outer-space mining colonies have it tough. They’re Surrounded by orbiting chunks of rock and under ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 19 iPad&iPhone# constant attack from evil aliens. Naturally, you’d think The Company would send in a fleet of crack pilots to deal with such problems. Nope - it’s just muggins again, taking on all and sundry single-handed. The first thing that will strike you about Darkside is how stunning the game looks. As you fly over an asteroid’s surface, it effortlessly rolls beneath you, structures and rocks rotating away into space. The second thing you'll notice — very quickly — is that Space is really dangerous. Every rock you blast splits in two, Asteroids-style; enemy craft flit about, daring you to shoot them. Occasionally, you'll collect a power-up, but you’ll more frequently find your ship becoming one with the universe after having been 20 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# atomised. Rather generously, you get the pulsating arcade mode entirely for free. For the reasonable sum of £1.49, you can unlock Survival (one life) and Missions (100 varied objectives) modes; as an added incentive, this also unlocks smart bombs for your ship — ideal for when things get hairy. Craig Grannell Dumb Ways To Die We always encourage players of free iPad games to consider the question: “How are the developers making money out of this?” If you’re not paying directly, is their play to sell you in-app purchases, show you adverts, or harvest your data? Or are they just trying to grab a big user base before ‘monetising’ later? Some games, however, are created by non- profit, publicly funded or charitable organisations, and can be given away for free without any strings ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 21 iPad&iPhone# attached (except well-intentioned ideological ones, probably). Dumb Ways To Die was commissioned by Metro Trains Melbourne in order to raise awareness of railway safety, and a proportion of its macabre puzzles involve helping the characters avoid being Sliced in half by trains. But the makers didn’t feel the need to stick too closely to the brief, and the theme meanders off all over the place. It’s brilliant. It’s fun, and funny, and fast — each puzzle lasts just a few seconds, before you’re whisked off to the next. There’s not enormous depth, but it’s definitely worth a go. David Price Fold the World With iPads being all about pawing at a glass surface, some games have made a concerted effort to reconnect gamers with something that feels a bit more tangible and tactile. In Fold the World, you're exploring the Paper Kingdom, leading strange bouncing critter Yolo along pathways that shift and change underneath him, depending on how the paper puzzle is folded. On playing the game, it will probably come as no Surprise that Fold the World’s puzzles were initially fashioned out of paper, before being digitised and fine-tuned inside the computer. Such attention to detail is evident, and it means you never feel cheated. Although some of the puzzles are proper head-scratchers, with you folding the paper this way and that, there’s always seriously solid logic underpinning everything. (That each level is only as big as your screen makes it all the more impressive that the pathways Yolo can take become so deviously and deliciously complicated.) 22 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# For free, you get 20 levels of adventuring, which should keep puzzle fans happy for a good long while. Should you hanker for more papery goodness, two further sets of levels can be purchased for 79p each. (Note that the game also has a hints system, replenished using gems. Buying them isn’t necessary, and you can get gems for free by watching video ads.) Craig Grannell Gridrunner The original Gridrunner, which appeared on Commodore's VIC-20 (which had all of 3.5k of RAM to play with) back in the early 1980s, was a high- octane shooter that found your tiny ship inside a ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 23 iPad=1Phone# HIGH SCORE LIVES te He es ie. whe es) - an rs 30° claustrophobic single-screen grid, attempting to repel snake-like strings of droids weaving back and forth across the screen. When shot, they’d split in half, any dead pieces becoming time bombs. All the while, lasers roamed the grid edges, taking pot Shots. Survival wasn’t easy. Fast forward to Gridrunner on iOS, and everything’s ramped up further. The snakes, lasers and grids remain, but are joined by all manner of spacecraft intent on your destruction. Psychedelic and awesomely powerful (but temporary) power- 24 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# ups provide merely brief respite, in one of the most exhilarating and exciting shooting games available on any platform. Craig Grannell Halcyon Before he made whatever passes for the ‘big time’ in iOS gaming with SpellTower, developer Zach Gage’s creative approach arrived from a rather more arty direction; and never was he artier than with Halcyon. In theory, it’s a match game, but it’s also an instrument — your actions augment a generative soundtrack, making for unique compositions in every game. The matching itself involves coloured currents — triangles that move along horizontal strings. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 25 iPad&iPhone# You draw lines between the strings, so like- coloured currents meet, whereupon they plink and vanish. Everything ends the second two different currents meet, creating disharmony in Halcyon’s ordered world. There are 36 levels across four environments, along with two endless modes that dynamically adjust their difficulty, based on your Skills. The only downside is that this is a fairly old iPad game that hasn’t been updated since 2011. So you must skip past sign-up for a now- defunct gaming social network and also make peace with the lack of high-res graphics. But once you're immersed in the world of Halcyon, you'll be hypnotised for hours. Craig Grannell Lonely One It’s just a bearded guy and his pants against an endless number of distinctly strange putting greens in this oddball golf “em up. The aim is to get a hole-in-one with every shot. Fail three times and it’s game over. Land a direct shot and you get a life back; for some reason, excitable gnomes also celebrate your amazing playing. It’s a pleasantly noodly affair — a perfect lean-back side-on golfing experience. You drag a finger to draw an aiming arc, sliding to the edge of the screen if you need to cancel a shot. Occasionally, wind adds some complexity to proceedings, but it’s the strange- shaped greens that cause the most trouble, not least ones resembling animals or the head of a knight. As is seemingly law these days, Lonely One offers collectables. You get coins for successful putts, and 500 can be used to win a randomly selected character that may alter the game’s visual 26 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad=iPhone# eee e 309 appearance. You can also buy these outright if you wish, but there’s really no need. The game’s at its funniest with the beardy golfer in his trousers anyway. Craig Grannell Lunar Flowers We feel like lobbing a paintbrush at people who tirelessly argue about whether games are art; however, there can’t be any argument that some games are very artistic. Lunar Flowers is a case in point. Although it’s technically a puzzle game, it’s very slight; mostly, it’s more like an interactive journey, with you following the adventures of a princess in a delicate and beautifully illustrated moonlit world. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 27 iPad&iPhone# i aa on —— Although the visuals and audio evoke wonder, Lunar Flowers truly shines through the sense of exploration it affords. Even though the journey is linear and every moment and reaction canned, you need to discover how to move onwards. Only rarely is there any hand-holding, and your brain sometimes gets quite a workout when the puzzles become rather more abstract. Perhaps the only disappointment is the brevity of the journey — you'll reach the end within an hour or two. But along the way, you'll have ridden a dragon, drawn stars in the sky, and had a surprisingly intense battle against floating lanterns, while attempting to cross a river. Craig Grannell 28 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# a. WE VALUE YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO JUSTICE CORP AND Wa LOOK FORWARD TO THE CONTINUED EXPLOITATION OF wT. ir Ah ff Middle Manager of Justice Middle Manager of Justice is a superhero-themed base-building game in which the heroes are preening, stereotype-spouting goons who divide their time between punching thugs, watching TV and manning call centres. You’re abstractly their middle manager, working out where best to spend the squad’s pitiful income while assigning your heroes to dole out fist-based justice to assorted evil-doers. Utterly shallow, but the game is aware of that - which is why it works so well. Alec Meer Mr Dig We’re not sure what’s going on in Mr Dig. The story has a kind of 1980s video game logic, ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 29 iPad&iPhone# ta a-% where the titular Mr. Dig has “dug too deep’, unleashing monsters on the underworld; rather than ravaging humanity, said monsters are apparently kleptomaniacs and “took his stuff”. You must therefore venture underground in single-screen levels to liberate Mr. Dig’s fortune, which appears to mostly consist of giant gems and fruit. Usually, you’d expect this kind of game to echo ancient arcade titles such as Boulder Dash or Dig Dug in terms of how it plays, but that’s not the case here. Instead of the kind of frenetic 30 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# arcade fare that’s ill-suited to iPad, Mr Dig takes a turn-based approach. Yellow squares show where your digging hero can reach, and you tap to move. You must be careful to ttme movements to avoid roaming monsters, and also to leave a path back to the surface. The heroes here are apparently pretty good at leaping about, but they’re not blessed with jet-packs! The result is a charming, silly and surprisingly challenging puzzler that feels quite fresh, despite its chunky and clunky old-school visuals. Craig Grannell Only One is a silly fighting game with simple, retro graphics, entirely set on top of a circular plateau. il SCHR Slit ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 31 iPadiPhone# Villains continuously spawn and attack you, and it’s your job to slash them to death with your sword or push them over the edge. We recommend the one-off in-app payment — Ultimate Power — that gives you a permanent power multiplier and unlocks all the abilities, but you can have a great laugh without spending anything. David Price Sage Solitaire Developer Zach Gage asks why, when you have a mobile device that’s not the size of a table, most menu 3 Of A Kind - $3 $7 MULTIPLIER HINT PLEASE REMAINING TRASHES 32 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# traditional solitaire efforts ape the typical Klondike and FreeCell layouts, using tiny cards (in order to fit them all on the screen) and overly familiar strategies. His answer: a three-by-three grid, quite a bit of poker, and a virtual trip to Vegas. In the basic Sage Solitaire game, you score by removing poker hands. The better the hand, the more points you get. Strategy comes by way of a rule that states you must use cards from multiple rows for each hand. With the stacks at the top of the screen being taller than those at the bottom, the latter’s cards are best used sparingly. In addition, a randomly allocated suit is set as a multiplier, bestowing double points when one or more of its cards is used in a hand, and two ‘trashes’ exist to remove individual cards; one is replenished after each successful hand. The Vegas mode, unlocked on clearing the entire board three times, gives you a virtual bank account, awards cash prizes only when using the multiplier hand, and ups your overall payout multiplier on clearing piles from the top two rows. Subtly different strategies are required for success, hence the initial lockdown -— it’s very easy to otherwise burn through your limited funds. But once you crack Vegas and hit $800, you can try your hand at True Grit. There, once your in-game money’s gone, it’s gone for good. Note that there’s no horrible IAP to refill your virtual coffers. The game’s sole IAP (£2.29) exists purely to unlock two further modes (Double Deck and Fifteens), remove the (unobtrusive) ads, provide stats tracking, and give you achievements to aim for. Craig Grannell ISSUE 103 » iPAD & iPHONE USER 33 iPad&iPhone# Shooty Skies “A giant beaver is approaching, warns Shooty Skies, as your DJ cat in a biplane prepares for battle. The beaver begins spewing spinning axes and giant acorns, any of which would bring instant death. You drag your finger to make your plane deftly weave between these projectiles, admiring the beaver’s surprisingly awesome firepower - and, frankly, its ability to fly in the first place. Occasionally, you pause to charge your super- weapon, which lets rip the second you move. The beaver defeated, you mull over the fact that this strange scene isn’t even close to the weirdest you've experienced within this very flight. Shooty Skies, then, is a shooty game set in the sky. Think: old-school vertically scrolling blasters. But this one has a decidedly oddball bent. Strange cartoon characters in biplanes are attacked by 34 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# memes and angry technology (arcade games that fire joysticks; enraged cassette decks; demented robots). The aforementioned super-weapon mechanism adds a dash of risk-versus-reward (you're vulnerable when stationary, but can clear the screen with the weapon’s superior firepower). And everything’s wrapped in a gorgeous if familiar visual style you'll recall from Crossy Road. (The teams for both games had lots of crossover, note — this isn’t some third-rate knock-off.) As in Crossy Road, you can unlock characters using a prize system or real cash. But there’s nothing at all here that will ever pressure you into spending money. Shooty Skies is a generous and instantly playable game. Craig Grannell SHREDD Addictive in the classic ‘just one more go’ sort of way, striking-looking if not classically handsome, expertly honed and unapologetically simple, SHREDD (formerly known as dEXTRIS) tasks you with making two coloured squares follow a never-ending corridor without bumping into the jagged shapes in your way. There are only four possible ‘moves’: leave the squares to sit in the middle (press nothing); send them both to the left or to the right (press on either the left or right side of the screen); or split them, as in the screen image below (press with both thumbs at once). And then things simply get faster and faster. There are in-game adverts, which are mildly annoying, but the gameplay is strong and there’s a lovely old-fashioned feel to the way you'll find yourself chasing high scores; in no other iOS game ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 35 iPadiPhone# have | found myself so obsessed with the rankings on Game Center. David Price This first-person shooter — which has more than a hint of the classic nerve-fraying endless runner about it — offers no enemies to shoot except the pleasingly destructible glass and stone obstacles in 36 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# front of you, which you need to shatter before you run straight into them. The graphics are a triumph, as is the satisfying gunplay: your bullets (more like oversized marbles) describe looping trajectories and make a lovely racket when they strike home. Simple and fun. David Price Temple Run 2 Like the ubiquitous first game, Temple Run 2 is a simple ‘auto-runner’ in which you’re forced to make Snap reactions as your fleeing Indiana Jones-alike is propelled ever onwards at increasing speed: striving to dodge walls, fatal drops, spikey boulders and an enormous pursuing monkey-monster. Death is inevitable, as is having ‘just one more go. Alec Meer ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 37 iPadiPhone# hehehehe Ae hehe Ae) =—_ gare 77> ert! | =, Threes! Free Every platform needs its perfect puzzle game, and on release Threes! made its claim to be that for iOS. As with all brilliant examples of the genre, Threes! has at its heart a simple mechanic, which in this case involve merging cards within a tiny four-by-four board. But it’s the details that propel Threes! beyond the competition. The idea is to match numbers. Slide a blue ‘1’ into a red ‘2’ and they combine to become a single ‘3’. Two 3s make a 6. Two 6s make a 12. And so on. The 38 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# menu stats next 12 U8 , 192 _—_[S|]_ | wo vy 48 12 ,'92, 2u lL ——F., [Uh 2 12 24 6 Sw. SEE >: @ Snag is that every move you make slides every non- blocked tile on the board as well. If you’re fortunate or have planned ahead, this can result in several merges in one move; if not, you end up with a mess to clear up. And since after every turn a new card AA 768 enters the board in a random spot on the edge you swiped from, planning is key. It takes a few games for Threes! to properly click, but once it does, it never lets go. You'll be dying to see new cards (each is infused with a unique personality), and will soon spot how reaching higher- ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 39 iPad&iPhone# numbered cards boosts your score substantially. The free-to-play aspect is also generous: watch a video ad and you get three more games in the bank, which can be built up into a substantial reserve. This gives the game a fighting chance against a raft of inferior Threes! clones (most of which have 1024 or 2048 in their names) that litter the App Store, and sucked life out of the paid version of Threes! Our advice: stick with the original; you’ve no excuse now you can play for free. Craig Grannell Triple Town Triple Town’s premise is simple: you're building a town on a 6 x 6 grid filled with bushes and trees. You do this by grouping items into threes: three 4,995 pts Goal: 20,000 points 24% Store (tap to buy) ss) 2850 a place a bot 1,469 turns left 40 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# trees become a hut, three huts become a house and so on. Trap the game’s ‘enemies’ — adorable bears — and they turn into grave stones, three of which make a church. The whole thing is fresh, addictive and challenging: if you think you’ve seen everything Match 3 has to offer, you're in for a surprise. Alan Martin Two Dots Simple but addictive. Two Dots is all about tracing lines between adjacent dots of the same colour, thereby causing them to disappear and further dots to drop down from above. To pass a given level you need to eliminate a certain number of dots of each colour, along with additional elements such as anchors. It’s fun to play and beautiful to look at, but watch out for the clever catch: die five times and 27 8© 8© 868 ® MOVES 4/30 4/30 0/30 10 / 30 coedes ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 41 iPadiPhone# you'll have to wait for your lives to recharge... or pay to get more. That’s where they'll get the money, and if you have weak self-control, you may find yourself coughing up. Amy Moore Whale Trail It might not have the deepest replay value, but since going free-to-play Whale Trail’s charms have been harder to resist. It’s a one-button game, with a mechanic that’s close to Tiny Wings in reverse: tap the screen to fly upwards, release to swoop down. You need to avoid the clouds and collect fuel of some kind. It looks delightful, the gameplay is well-crafted and there’s a wicked soundtrack too. David Price Dye 11,134 Uy 42 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# <¢ Kies Best free iPhone games Brilliant games that won't cost you a penny AGRAV: Inertial orbit In the iPhone’s early days, it was the games that had you directly manipulate on-screen content that most excited. They felt like a slice of the future, rather than awkwardly trying to give you some kind of on-screen joystick. AGRAV takes the former approach, having you direct a tiny spaceship about the place by using your fingers to fashion black holes. It’s a beautifully simple system, but in practice AGRAV can be frustrating, purely because it’s so different. Initial tries will almost certainly find your craft smashed to pieces on hitting the edge of the screen, or zooming past the goal, in a manner that sets teeth gnashing. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 43 iPad1Phone# But once it clicks, AGRAV becomes a compelling game. Soon, you'll be carving out elegant arcs by touching the screen at precisely the right moment; a second black hole in front of the ship will urge it on, to beat time limits. Eventually, you'll be deftly avoiding obstacles, grabbing pick- ups, and learning the benefits of multitouch on the more complex stages. For free, you get 30 to tackle; a single IAP unlocks another 60 if these virtual black holes suck you in. Craig Grannell Another word game? Yes, but this one stars bears! Even better, it’s really, really good, and dead easy to get into. You start out with a board with some letters on. Tap out a word and the space the letters took up is immediately replaced by bears, which are instantly Surrounded by more letters. Added complications arrive in the form of countdown timers. Letters start out as green, and then if unused over subsequent goes turn yellow, Orange and then red. Ignore red letters at your peril, 44 jiPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# into rocks, blocking bears from expanding. You might wonder about the use of ‘expanding’ and ‘bears’ in that previous sentence, but we haven't erred — the bears in Alphabear really do stretch to fill available space. So you'll get tall and thin bears, weirdly wide and squat bears, and there’s the holy grail of the ‘filling the entire screen’ bear if you clear all of the letters. Mae At the end of a round, because they transform @ 1840pts such giant beasts result in huge scores and immense Satisfaction. There are some minor drawbacks to the bear- oriented antics. The game requires a constant internet connection for online sync, and there are in-game currencies — one essentially for ‘energy’ to enter new rounds and the other to skip ahead by more rapidly accessing treasure events. It’s there you discover especially rare bears with special powers that seriously boost your score in various ways when selected before a new round; but this mechanic serves more to over-complicate the game than improve it. ISSUE 103 » iPAD & iPHONE USER 45 iPad&iPhone# Still, for free, you can play a couple of really fun rounds per day, and there’s always an ‘infinite honey’ IAP (£3.99) if you can’t stand to wait for your next furry fix. Craig Grannell Bejeweled Blitz This ultra-moreish puzzle game takes the ‘match three’ mechanic and squashes it into minute-long blasts of dazzling colours and crazy point tallies. It’s astonishingly addictive. You have to swap coloured jewels within a grid, using simple finger swipes, so that three or more line up; the matched jewels will disappear and more will replace them. The tense gameplay, drip- feed of rewards and social-media integration combine to make a game that will expand to fill any time period available. Beneath The Lighthouse We’ve never been beneath a lighthouse. We’d always assumed it'd mostly be rocks. How wrong we were. It turns out that underneath a lighthouse — or at least this particular one — you find almost certain death, in the form of spinning rooms that 46 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# have spikes all over the place. If you’re a rotund boy trying to find his lost Grandpa and get the lighthouse’s light shining again, that’s a problem. What you get here, then, is an action puzzler, where through 3 a combination of | deft finger-work and a bit of brainpower you make your way Safely into the depths of the lighthouse. The clever bit is the controls. You drag the on-screen wheel to shift the circular rooms, and gravity gets your little chap rolling (or, as is often the case, hurtling) about. The other clever bit is the level design, which Starts off very slightly challenging, and becomes increasingly murderous as the game goes on. For free, you get access to everything, but there’s a lives system in play. Get killed three times during any level, and an extra set for that attempt only becomes available on watching an ad. That seems eminently fair, although those lives soon vanish — especially if you want to speed run through the game like a maniac, in order to win yourself shiny rewards. Craig Grannell ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 47 iPad1Phone# Blocky Highway Ah, the open road. In this case, the open road that stretches on forever, with nary a bend in sight. Still, it’s rather a busy road, with countless vehicles you must deftly avoid, because a single collision spells the end of your go. To drive the message home, even the slightest prang finds your truck hurled into the air, returning to the ground as a heap of twisted and blackened pixels. Dramatic! There’s not much originality here and the chunky visual style is overly familiar, but Blocky Highway is nonetheless compelling. You get a choice of touch or tilt controls, with the latter being a bit slippy and unwieldy, yet this oddly makes for a more exciting game. It’s quite something for your chunky vehicle to zigzag along a busy freeway, avoiding collisions by a hair’s breadth. Over time, the game adds to the challenge through various means. Roadwork occasionally and 48 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# abruptly blocks your way, and train tracks cross your path; in the latter case, the game offers a novel means to avoid speeding locomotives: huge pads that bounce you into the air. Other helpers infrequently appear, too — there’s a helicopter that for a short while lifts you above the busy road, anda truck you can drive on top of that gleefully bulldozes traffic out of your way. And when your game finally comes to its smashy end, you get a chance to graba few extra points by landing your bouncing wreck on other cars presumably driven by significantly more careful road users. Craig Grannell Breakneck It’s not the best of days. The world is occupied by hostile invaders, intent on hunting you down. Worse, you just Zoomed away in a spaceship clearly designed by an idiot. It never runs out of fuel, but has the steering capabilities of a cow on an ice rink. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 49 iPad&iPhone# And although it boasts a boost function - handy for keeping ahead of, say, ferocious aliens with massive laser cannons - it’s charged by perilously having your badly steering craft ‘graze’ flat surfaces. What this makes for, though, is an exhilarating video game. You blast through gorgeous 3D environments, avoiding obstacles in the desolate landscape, carefully timing boosts whenever your alien pursuer ventures a bit too near. Phantoms of your best and previous runs are displayed, so you can potentially execute a brilliant manoeuvre a second time round while simultaneously avoiding that less-brilliant move where you Slammed into a massive wall. We’d prefer Breakneck if the craft was more manoeuvrable — there’s no deft weaving and zigzagging here. Instead, you drift in a manner akin to the developer’s own endless horror runner, Into the Dead. Still, that adds strategy — the environment resets every day, and your craft’s inadequacies force you to find shortcuts and quickly learn the best routes. And when you’re approaching the end of a zone, boost tank empty, and your siren starts blaring about an imminent alien attack, this is one of the most exciting 3D avoid ‘em ups around. Craig Grannell Cally’s Caves 3 You'll probably be some way into Cally’s Caves 3 when you start to wonder what the catch is. “Surely,” you'll say, “the developers haven't given me an expansive and beautifully designed — if frequently frustrating and challenging in an old-school kind of way - platform game with oodles of blasting.” At least 50 iPAD & iPHONE USER « ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# BVvvevy 134d ‘ly ; : > SWAP WEAPON that’s what we said, cursing our thumbs whenever we died, and wondering at what point the game would lock up and start demanding money. As it turns out, the developers are hardcore gamers and have no truck with terrible monetisation. Therefore, you get unobtrusive ads on static screens, and are otherwise left to your own devices. And the game is excellent. The backstory involves Cally’s parents being kidnapped for a third time by an evil scientist. She therefore resolves to rescue them, primarily by leaping about the place and blowing away all manner of adversaries using the kind of high- powered weaponry not usually associated with a young girl with pig-tails. Level layouts are varied, and weapon power-ups are cleverly designed, based around how much you use each item. The one niggle is the map, which is checkpoint-based — it’s a bit too easy to find yourself replaying a trio of levels ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 51 iPadiPhone# again and again to get to a place further along in your journey where you can restart. Still, that merely forces you to take a little more care, rather than blundering about the place, and to breathe in the delicately designed pixellated landscapes. And should you decide you want to throw money at the developers, there are optional IAPs that unlock new game modes, or a load of coins if you want to splurge in the in-game store without working for your money. Craig Grannell Capitals We do like agood word |°***°O2 UK * sii % 98% Gt game, and Capitals is a @ rar Of gy VET Y GOGG Wigre Gane, craiggrannell VS CarbonGlacier There are echoes here & ‘ound 7 of Letterpress, in the sense that Capitals so) RU | N ER < combines Risk-style land-grabbing with the need to create ae@a@e, words from a jumble €> Cn } O of letters. However, iD @ > p while Letterpress for the most part benefits el Ww players able to fashion Ly) O lengthy words, Capitals > The game plays out on a hexagonal grid, either with two players using the same device or V is more about where the x J letters you choose to D use are located. r > €> 0: eee 52 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# battling it out online thanks to a Game Center match- up. All letters on the board can be used to create a word, but only those attached to your territory flip to your colour on submitting a move. The important thing is to keep your capital surrounded by territory rather than letters. If you don’t and your rival’s move includes letters adjacent to your capital, it’s captured. They then get a free turn, and since the objective of the game is total and utter annihilation, that extra move is often enough to gift victory. For no money at all, Capitals is one of the best games around for word-game nuts, although we'll admit to being a smidgeon miffed about the ad model; in miserly fashion, it only gives up a solitary game for every advert watched. Still, since a game can often play out as a days-long tug of war, the ads are hardly a huge drain on your time for what you get in return. Craig Grannell Does Not Commute Does Not Commute starts with a simple driving challenge: get from point A to point B before the timer runs out. (The car runs automatically: you just tap the left or right side of the screen to steer.) But as soon as you achieve this, the game rewinds time and asks you to repeat the trick, driving a second vehicle on the same course. Only this time you need to contend with another driver on the road: yourself, following whatever route you just took in the first car. This repeats until the screen is dangerously and hilariously full. There are lots of neat touches: the funny Snapshots of each commuter’s life and why they’re in a hurry; the reckless jumps and shortcuts that ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 53 iPad&iPhoned you re heavily encouraged to use in order to avoid traffic, but which nearly always end in disaster; the desperate rush to beat the clock and pick up the timer-boosting powerups; and, best of all, the challenge of adapting to a vehicle that handles completely differently to the previous one, all within a space of seconds. This is a free game, though you can’t save at any of the checkpoints until you upgrade to the Premium version, which costs £1.49. David Price Down The Mountain You might detect a whiff of Crossy Road (above) when first laying eyes on Down The Mountain. It has similar cartoonish, cuboid, colourful characters. There’s instant death when you mess up. And there’s a hint of Crossy Road’s collector mentality, in you gradually amassing a bunch of misfits to guide down the seemingly infinitely high hill from 94 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# hell. But there any similarity ends, because iw Down The Mountain is simultaneously much YOUR AVERAGE simpler and far trickier than Crossy Road. It’s much easier in the sense of the controls. Like Crossy Road, there’s old arcade game DNA in Down The Mountain, but it’s a Q*bert field of isometric cubes, rather than endless Frogger. But whereas other characters on the mountain have free movement, you don’t — you can only bound downwards, to your left or right. The tough bit is everything else. The mountain is chock full of deadly hazards, such as bounding cars, spikes, lava blocks and ravenous beasts. Some tiles temporarily reverse the controls, while others poison you, leaving mere seconds to find an antidote. Down The Mountain then becomes a bit overwhelming, with you having to juggle all kinds of tasks and dangers. Games are short. Yet if you persevere and get yourself into ‘the zone’, it becomes a thoroughly addictive experience; and even if you get frustrated, the game’s charming nature always draws you back for one more go. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 55 iPad&iPhone# (There’s IAP here, but it’s all avoidable. If you’d like to reward the devs, though, 79p removes the unobtrusive ads, or gets you four keys that can be used to unlock crates that award you new characters. Keys are otherwise found on the mountain.) Craig Grannell Hill Climb Racing Hill Climb Racing is an excellent time filler which you can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice. Better still, it’s an excellent free time filler. You spend the game driving a 4x4 up hills, across bridges, down hills and then up more hills. Along the way you collect coins and fuel. Drive too slowly and you'll run out of petrol; drive too quick and you'll flip the vehicle over. There’s just a brake and accelerator, but you must use these controls carefully — and mastering them is tremendously rewarding. Before long you'll be ASMP ADO TIN. 9310T) Ps am ; is) OLrnumve 56 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# beating the steep hills you previously thought impossible. Using coins you can upgrade your Starting vehicle and unlock new ones. You'll quickly realise that to unlock most of the levels and vehicles you'll have to use the in-app purchases to buy coins rather than earning them, but it’s perfectly possible to play Hill Climb Racing without spending any money at all. Jim Martin Jetpack Joyride In this delightful cave flyer, your disgruntled lab- assistant character steals a machine-gun-powered jetpack (don’t ask) and takes flight through the lab’s never-ending string of long, tunnel-like rooms. As you jet or run along, you need to avoid electrified barriers, lasers and missiles while collecting coins. The mix of responsiveness and acceleration is just about perfect, the comical graphics raise it above most offerings in the genre, and the extras — ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 57 iPad1Phone# including a superb array of vehicles — make Jetpack Joyride a true standout. Dan Frakes KANO We’ve played KANO a bunch of times and still have absolutely no idea what’s going on. We know what we have to do, but this is otherwise a game of strangeness. The gameplay, then, involves colour-matching. You control a platform at the foot of the screen, which has four coloured tiles. It can be spun with a finger, and stops with a prod, in a pleasingly tactile manner. The aim is to match the colour of a bouncing and endlessly transforming gurning 3D being when it lands. At first, KANO is mind- numbingly easy, but that doesn’t last long. Within a minute or so, the bouncing increases to manic pace, and you'll eventually miss a match. At that point, the tile disappears, leaving a hole into a lava pit; you'll then meet a furious fireball, which when it appears must be steered into the lava rather than allowing it to collide with 58 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# any remaining coloured tiles. Now and again, there’s a little bonus section, where you grab coins in space, boosting your points tally. The game continues until you’ve only one tile left, at which point you’re awarded with a score and get to have a bit of a breather. Rather amusingly, the sole IAP (£2.29 for ‘premium’) adds a ‘turbo mode’ at double speed. Frankly, we’re not sure we'd be able to cope. Craig Grannell Letterpress In this alarmingly addictive puzzle game, you and your opponent take turns to use the letters in a five-by- five grid to build a word, thereby causing the tiles you use to change into your colour. At game end, whichever player has turned more tiles to his or her colour emerges the victor. Serious fun for word game fans. Lex Friedman Los Aliens The little critters in Los Aliens know how to make things hard for themselves. They're very much into exploring new worlds, but also create rigid rules about how to do so. For some reason, they can only move about like knights ona chessboard, working their way around grid sectors by way of L-shaped leaps. As they go, they dump fuel required to power their spaceship. Should a complete line be built vertically or horizontally across the current zone, the ship blasts forwards; ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 59 iPad&iPhone# do this enough times, and it heads into orbit, ready to zoom to a new planet. As you work your way through the game, it merrily lobs new curveballs in your direction: limited moves or limited time; the requirement to collect native species; teleporters; and more. The visuals are vibrant, and the game’s mechanics feel quite fresh, even if this is fairly Standard puzzle fare. There are ads and timers lurking, as you might imagine. But if you play a little every day, the former won't irk, and the ads can be blasted into space by way ofa single £1.49 if they begin to grate. Craig Grannell Mr. Square It’s very easy on firing up a puzzle game to be dismissive, noting that you’ve seen it all before. You might think that on downloading Mr. Square, but what this game lacks in originality, it makes up for with dozens of enjoyable puzzles, and a tendency to never outstay its welcome. The idea is to ‘paint’ every tile on the floor. The Snag is that Mr. Square is seemingly on ice, and will slide until reaching a barrier of some sort. Furthermore, any painted tiles transform into walls 60 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# that cannot be crossed a second time. You must therefore plan ahead, figuring out a path that won't leave you stranded, with one pesky unpainted tile taunting you from across the screen. Two smart ideas propel this basic concept onwards. First, the game’s divided into chapters, each of which throws something new into the mix - teleporters; one-way routes; a clone that copies your every move. Secondly, you can make and share levels of your own, or try those that other people have made. Most surprisingly, this is all offered entirely for free. Although you can buy coins to unlock chapters early, there’s really no need, because 150 are generously given out on completing a level; and if tempted, you can get 100 more at any point by watching a video ad. Craig Grannell New Star Soccer It’s a testament to the brilliant gameplay that even football haters will get something out of this. You're a striker starting out in non-league football and aiming for the big time. On the pitch, you’re tasked with setting up and scoring wonder goals. But the game also deals with non-match activities: ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 61 iPad1Phone# training, selecting clothes ENCTAND TT and kitting out your house in ITALY 2 a load of tat. Alan Martin Nono Islands With its 3D viewpoint and tap-based controls for hopping about, Nono Games initially feels a bit like Crossy Road got mashed into Temple Run with a fork. But you soon realise that this jungle expedition is something else entirely, and it has more in common with old-school platform games that demanded you to memorise a course and zoom through it as fast as possible. Each of the shortish levels has you navigating a Small patch of wilderness on a ‘clockwork’ island, along narrow paths surrounded by death. You tap to move forward one step, swipe left or right to move forwards and in the relevant direction, and swipe back to move backwards. You must take care to avoid getting eaten by a leaping shark, poisoned by a scuttling spider, or falling into the fetid swamp water. Timing is key. What’s especially smart about Nono Islands, though, is how it can be approached in various ways. If you like, it’s possible to carefully pick your way through each level — and doing so is relatively simple. But really it’s all about time-attack scores, especially if your friends are playing. You'll want to get to the end of each stage as rapidly 62 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# as possible, and that means implementing a precise series of taps and swipes to shave fractions of a second off of your time. For free, you rather generously get access to everything. You can also buy five checkpoint tokens for 79p or unlock all checkpoints for £2.29. Checkpoints mean you don’t have to replay previous levels should you fail, although tokens can also be found within the game itself, and Nono Islands gives you one free attempt, and another after a few more minutes. Craig Grannell Pac-Man 256 The original Pac-Man was a bit broken. If you had magic thumbs and could somehow reach the 256th level, you’d be confronted by a massive glitch. The right-hand side of the screen became all messed up, with no way through. Until now, that is. In Pac-Man 256, you get to venture beyond the glitch. What’s there, it turns out, is a kind of endless hell for the yellow dot-muncher. Pac-Man gets to traverse a never-ending maze full of spooks, eating pills until he finally comes a cropper. He can't linger for long, either, because the all- consuming glitch is always in hot pursuit. Fortunately, Pac-Man has ways of fighting back. Power pellets from the original game are present and correct. Eat one and the ghosts turn blue, enabling you to gobble them down for extra points. New power-ups are also dotted about, and these ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 63 iPad&iPhone# become more powerful the more you play the game. lf you ever thought, during the original Pac-Man, that it would be a better game if the rotund hero could spew laser death from his maw, then you'll be a happy camper here. Craig Grannell Pangolin A physics-based puzzler in which you bounce a cute little creature around a level and try to get him to the goal with as few shots as possible. Sort of like crazy 64 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# golf played in mid-air with a scaly animal instead of a ball. We like this a lot, and the basic game is free. It’s probably worth shelling out for the extra levels, though. David Price The Path To Luma It’s not hard to spot the underlying message here, what with this game being sponsored by a US energy company big on selling green energy: clean energy is a very good thing. In fact, in Path to Luma, clean energy is so good that it’s capable of bringing back to life seemingly dead, abandoned planetoids. Planetoid-saving isn’t quite as simple as flicking a switch, though. You must direct SAM — a Sustainability Augmentation Model — about the place, finding and repositioning solar batteries, utilising wind power and so on, manipulating the very planet with your fingertips. There’s quite a lot of hand- holding, and we can't imagine it'll take that long for most players to blaze through the 20 levels on offer. It’s also a title that doesn’t at any point meet its haughty description of being “a memorable story of heroism and the revitalisation of a civilisation”. What it is, though, is a really fab little puzzle game with a lovely soundtrack and some great visuals. We admit to going ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 65 iPad&iPhone# “ooh” the first time sun beams exploded down to clean up one of the game's tiny worlds. And perhaps we are now thinking a bit more about installing solar. Still, that’s got to be better than a game trying very hard to get you to gorge yourself on chocolate. Craig Grannell Platform Panic Platform Panic certainly has a lot of platforms in it, but you'll be doing the panicking. The premise is something something heroes abducted something, which ultimately results in you taking on some kind of quest that involves inevitable death after valiantly navigating your way through a number of dangerous rooms. Movement is swipe-based — your little hero auto-runs and you swipe left or right to head that way or up to jump. For the most part, timing is crucial, because if you collide with a single hazard, game over. What makes Platform Panic a cut above, though, is the huge number of rooms and hazards, their smart design, and how they’re fired your way. Each room on your journey acts as a miniature puzzle to be bested and committed to memory. On encountering something new — pipes that suck you in and blow you out elsewhere; hero-frying lasers; huge spiked wheels — you'll likely be horribly killed. But the next time you face the 66 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# room, you'll be ready for it and add a point to your tally - well, unless it’s flipped the other way round, in which case you'll probably die again. With rooms being presented broadly randomly, Platform Panic is endlessly replayable. It’s also mobile-friendly, given that games are typically over inside a minute or so (unless you're a platform-game genius, in which case two minutes). IAPs are lurking, but they’re of the non-hateful variety. £1.49 nukes the ads, and you can also buy coins, which can be spent on continues or characters. Three quid nets you 5,000, which is enough to buy every single character and still have change for a handful of continues. Alternatively, you can collect coins as you play, since each room has at least one. Craig Grannell Run Sackboy! Run! Run, Sackboy! Run! (free) is a mobile spin-off from the Sony game LittleBigPlanet, a four-player side- scrolling affair that builds upon the approachable Super Mario run-and-jump formula while also allowing players to build their own levels. It’s certainly streamlined by comparison: it’s a strictly single-player affair, lacks in-depth character customisation and level creation, and does away with manual player movement. In other words, it’s an endless runner on a platform that has loads of them. But Run, Sackboy! Run! has an ace in the hole: being ridiculously charming. Even a simplified, free-to-play take on the LBP series can bring wide smiles to your face as you leap across colourful chasms, collect bubbles and avoid the goofy-looking monster on your tail. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 67 iPad1Phone# And despite the silly tone, it actually proves to be pretty challenging. You can jump and dash forward via taps and swipes, respectively, and you'll need to use both at times to overcome long stretches of spikes, or to recover when you’re about to hit an enemy. As the speed picks up, it becomes harder to anticipate obstacles ahead, which amps up the difficulty level. And it’s free, of course. And and so long as you're cool with probably never unlocking some of the pricier costumes — which cost an extravagant amount of in-game currency — there’s plenty of entertainment to be had here without spending a penny. Andrew Hayward Seashine There’s a disconnect between the aesthetics of Seashine and its gameplay - and this initially makes for a rather strange experience. The game takes place in the inky depths of an unnamed ocean. Your tiny luminescent jellyfish has a glow that offers the only light to penetrate its surroundings. But the light is fragile and in constant danger of being 68 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad“iPhoned extinguished. Every flick you make propels the gelatinous protagonist in the relevant direction. But as soon as you're beyond the cosy starting point, a life bar rapidly depletes. The jellyfish must seek out plants or creatures to eat, which keep the lights on for a few extra precious seconds, thereby enabling further searching. There’s naturally a food chain in operation, though, and so you're both predator and prey; you're never far into your journey before being pursued by a fish with a mouth full of extremely nasty-looking razor-sharp teeth. Games therefore tend to be fraught, stressful experiences, at odds with the tranquil underwater burblings, tinkly soundtrack and gorgeous visuals. But there’s a palpable sense of excitement when you manage to escape through a tiny tunnel a fish cannot squeeze through, or grab a morsel to eke out a few extra seconds of life. Seashine does enable you to cheat death through the use of life-extending stars; unsurprisingly, these can be bought using IAPs. We’re unconvinced about this part of the game, though -— it feels like cheating, and quickfire visits to the abyss work more nicely on mobile. We might have been convinced to part with cash for a noodly endless ‘zen’ mode, however. Craig Grannell ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 69 iPadiPhone# Shibuya Grandmaster Shibuya Grandmaster feels a bit like someone thought Tetris was a bit too complicated and then smashed the resulting stripped- down well puzzler into a match- three game. Consequently, you re tasked with managing Slabs of colour as they float down from the top of the screen, and placing them into a very limited number of boxes. The aim is at the very least to create matches. If two matching Slabs are touching, they'll acquire a diagonal line and a tap removes them from the well, leaving more space. But doing this and no more results in a rubbish score — Shibuya Grandmaster wants you to have a strategy and take risks. Over time, then, you must figure out how to rack up bonus points by managing blocks so you can create larger towers of the same colour, or remove a bunch of combos at once. It’s a smart juggling act made all the more devious through the game's rank- based reward system. If you want to progress, you'll need to practise and you'll fail often; but Shibuya Grandmaster is oh so satisfying once it clicks. In fact, we’d argue the original Shibuya (from way back in 2010) was a cruelly overlooked App Store classic, and so we're delighted to see this follow- up, in all its beautiful high-res glory. From an IAP standpoint, it’s almost absurdly generous: you can SLY 3sJO3S GBaagat a = nD m mM = Ss A 3 i R L 70 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# play as much as you like, forever; but if you want to Support its developer, buy a new background (79p each) or ‘everything forever’ (£3.99). Craig Grannell Skiing Yeti Mountain Slalom games are as old as the hills — snowy or otherwise. They existed on the earliest home computer systems, and so Skiing Yeti Mountain is hardly a rolling snowball of innovation. Nonetheless, through some great design and humour, developer Featherweight Games has managed to craft an essential mobile freebie. The basics of the game are much as you'd expect: zigzag your way down wintry slopes, passing on the correct side of gates (left of red and right of blue), and try very hard not to embed yourself in a tree. The controls only require a single finger, which you move horizontally to adjust how far to weave. Initial ham-fisted attempts at progress gradually give way to elegant swooshing about, along with heart-in-stomach moments as you zoom, inch-perfect, between a couple of trees. Throughout, a cast of misfits adds some personality to proceedings, telling tall tales, getting surprise-eaten by Yetis, and in one case providing the only example on iOS of an in-app @ ad Sting we've ever laughed at. | Craig Grannell ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 71 iPad1Phone# Sk ryovcally on seeing the name 85 ‘ Ketchapp, you know what you're in for: simplistic endless fare that’s like a cheap snack - briefly satisfying but ultimately throwaway. Sky is different. The basic premise is nothing new, but everything’s put together so well that it becomes Surprisingly compelling. In Sky’s minimal isometric world, a yellow square moves along a zigzag track, gobbling dots. In its way: grey squares that must be avoided. A tap a sends the yellow square into io res rok he: gaa the air. A second tap while airborne results in a double-jump, for avoiding larger sets of grey squares. Where things become interesting is on entering green tents that are dotted about. These ‘clone’ your square, which results in multiple iterations working their way along several tracks. All jump as one, but in combination they hoover up dots far more quickly than a solitary square. Sky becomes a tense juggling act to ensure as many squares Survive for as long as possible, before they again merge. As you play, there’s a pleasant noodly piano- based soundtrack, and the visuals look so polished you imagine they’d squeak on dragging a finger over them. A single IAP lurks (£1.49), for turning off the ads (which appear as a strip across the bottom of the screen). Craig Grannell 72 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# Sling Kong We should be having a good old grumble about Sling Kong. Fundamentally, it does nothing especially Original. It borrows the ‘catapult something across the screen’ mechanism from a dozen iOS mega-hits and then welds that to an endless vertical climber. Angry Doodle Fling, perhaps. The thing is, we can’t stay remotely mad at Sling Kong, because it does everything so well. Its little characters have this oddly bewildered look about them, as if they’re as surprised as you that they’ve suddenly been dumped in an absurdly dangerous endless deathtrap. Their demise is always gleefully cartoonish and icky — fur flying when a monkey meets a saw blade, or an octopus splattering across the screen on suddenly finding itself between two large pieces of wood that have a particularly violent meeting. The controls are superb, feeling nicely tactile as you drag back your little animal and let go to ping it across the screen. And the environment is the kind of chaotic nightmare that keeps you on your toes, ensures games are Suitably short, but doesn’t hit you so hard that you won't want to immediately have another go. ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 73 iPad&iPhone# One of our favourite moments in Sling Kong is its prizes section. Gather enough coins and you send your little critter to get a serious headache, bouncing around a pachinko machine. Given that most other developers have had an imagination failure since clocking Crossy Road’s ‘random gift’ model, it’s great to see something a bit different when trying to win a new character. Craig Grannell Spaceteam Glorious multiplayer fun, this — and the multiplayer part is essential. It’s one of the few iOS games out there that you cannot play on your own. Each member of the team sees a wonky-looking sci-fi dashboard on their screen, with a variety of read-outs and bizarrely labelled dials, buttons and levers. The screen will tell you to do something — “Set sprocket to 6”, to take a random example. If the sprocket dial is on your screen, all well and good; but most of the time, it'll be on someone else’s, meaning you need to tell them what to do. In no time at all you’re all shouting nonsense at each other, and the world is a wonderful place. Dan Moren Tiny Heroes In this appealing fantasy-themed take on the tower defence game, you take the role of the 74 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# mad architect who sets out to shred and perforate any would-be adventurer who dares to loot his dungeon’s precious treasures. Waves of cartoonish heroes wander in, then meet a swift end by spinning blade, concealed spike or caged monster. You'll have to plan for several kinds of heroes, from tough knights to crafty thieves, and balance between planning ahead and spontaneous fire- fighting. Jason Tocci Vainglory offers some of the best visuals seen on the App Store. It was used as a showcase for the iPhone 6 handsets’ power — not to mention the power of iOS 8’s Metal graphics tech — when they were first unveiled, and you should bear this in ISSUE 103 » iPAD & iPHONE USER 75 mind when considering what hardware to run it on: it’s compatible with iPhone 5s and up on the Smartphone side, although it goes back as far as iPad 2 on the tablet. The game spotlights three-on-three team-based action with (and against) fellow online players, and each squad must work together to take down enemy turrets and destroy the crystal at their Opponents’ base. The free-to-play design thankfully puts no limits on gameplay: you can play as much as you wart, but only with the certain free characters offered at any given time. If you want to use a non-free warrior, youll have to pay a one-time fee with in-game currency. It’s a remarkably fair and fun free game that doesn’t penalise players who opt not to shell out. Andrew Hayward 76 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# Watercolors If simple, attractive puzzles are your thing, take a look at Watercolors. You have to swipe across various blobs of coloured ‘paint’, moving them around the level and mixing them with other colours where necessary. The idea is to colour all the nodes in the correct colour with the lowest number of ‘brush strokes’ possible. It’s a relaxing, neatly realised game and there’s very little pressure to spend money on additional level packs — although you may well choose to do so once you've completed the free offerings. David Price 4 Kdged star eee * LEVEL 37 ee xe Ky) 3 We 4 ©2/3 Vv 6% € ow D sx? > ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 77 iPad&iPhone# Christmas gift guide The best new Apple-related tech we've seen this year hristmas is rapidly approaching, which means gift-buying season is upon us. We know how difficult it can be to find the perfect gift for everyone, so here we've rounded-up the best new Apple-related tech we've seen throughout the year. This year, Apple has launched the iPad Pro, iPad mini 4, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, as well as a new MacBook and a brand new Apple TV. That means there are plenty of new accessories and peripherals to choose from, whether you’re looking for something fun, something practical, something fashionable or something to keep your sparkly new Apple devices safe. We’ve got cases, battery packs, Storage devices, speakers, headphones, quirky 78 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# gadgets and more in our Christmas Gift Guide 2015, So read on to get some gift inspiration. In-ear headphones: RHA T10i Price: £149.95 The design of the RHA T10i headphones and quality of materials used scream “premium”, especially the hand-made steel drivers. The drivers themselves are a little rough around the edges per say, but we think this adds to the overall design and personality of the product, rather than detracting from it. That’s not all though, as the T10i features a gold plated, reinforced, oxygen free copper cable that should help to improve overall sound quality and help the cable last. The headphones come with a total of 10 sets of tips (including two sets of memory foam tips and 2 sets of double flange tips) to help find the perfect ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 79 iPad&iPhone# fit for your ears. As well as a large number of tips, the T10i also comes with three custom drivers — one for reference, one that boosts treble and one that boosts bass. There’s always a worry that using bass enhancement will ruin the treble and mid-range, drowning in a sea of bass. We didn’t find this to be the case with the T10i and overall, the headphones produced a great level of clarity and a satisfying sound. On-ear headphones: Bowers & Wilkins P5 Series 2 Price: £249 from Amazon The Bowers & Wilkins P5 Series 2 headphones are visually gorgeous, with a black and silver combo crafted from aluminium and sheep leather for maximum comfort, with soft cups that feel easy on the ears while helping to keep external noise out. 80 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# The headphones come with an iOS-specific wire that allows you to control media playback, and a built-in mic means you can take calls and even access Siri without getting your phone out of your pocket. The P5 Series 2’s boasts a drive unit similar to those found in Hi-Fi speakers (according to Bowers & Wilkins anyway) which produces a drive unit with more precise and controlled movement, improving sound quality. The sound produced by the P5 Series 2 can be described as ‘open’ and ‘spacious’ with powerful levels of bass. Bluetooth in-ear headphones: Earin Price: €180 (£130) Earin is a relatively new company to the scene, established in 2013 and funded via a Kickstarter Campaign. The idea was to create simplistic ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 381 iPad&iPhone# wireless in-ear headphones that looked great and, most importantly, had no wires — an idea that was extremely popular, as the campaign was funded and two years down the line, Earin is finally available (be it in limited quantities). Earin is small, measuring in at 14.5x20mm and weighs just 3.5g, making them the smallest wireless in-ear headphones on the market. The main difference between Earin and its competitors is that many companies that produce wireless in-ear headphones have to include an extra part that rests around your neck, holding all the tech (Bluetooth receiver, battery, and so on) while Earin has none of that. The ear-buds are stored in a small metallic capsule that’ll wirelessly charge them whenever stored, providing you with fully charged wireless in- ear headphones whenever you need them. Despite the small size, Earin doesn’t disappoint when it comes to audio quality. The earbuds are manufactured with two dedicated amps that drive high-precision speakers, providing detailed sound with excellent mid tones, a clear high end and a tight bass. We were blown away with the quality of the earbuds, especially when paired with the (supplied) memory foam tips that provide a decent level of noise cancellation. There’s also an iOS and Android app available that lets you fine-tune your Earin experience, allowing you to tweak elements like bass and balance, as well as being able to keep an eye on how much battery life they have left. The only issue? Due to such high demand, Earin is currently being sold in batches from the Earin website (earin.com). You can head over to the site 82 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# now, sign up and receive an email when the next Sale is due to launch. Bluetooth speaker: UE Boom 2 Price: £169.99 Ultimate Ears’ UE BOOM 2 is the second generation BOOM, bringing with it a number of improvements when compared to the original (and hugely popular) UE BOOM. The main selling point of the UE BOOM 2 is its 360-degree audio, providing truly room filling audio and waving goodbye to the speaker audio ‘sweet spot’. It’s not just audio projection that makes the UE BOOM 2 the speaker that it is though, it’s shock and dirt proof with IPX7 rated water resistance, meaning it’ll survive any journey you take it on. The UE BOOM 2 also boasts a 15-hour battery life, has a 100ft wireless range and can connect to two devices at once, providing a musical switch- over without having to disconnect from the speaker and stop the music from playing. It helps to make listening to music a more sociable experience, rather ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 83 iPad1Phone# than having one person deciding what'’s played. Users can also download the UE BOOM app to tweak the EQ of the speaker and even pair up with a second UE BOOM 2 for a true stereo experience. It’s available in a range of colours, from a rather modest black and grey to a more outlandish orange and purple combo. The best part about the UE BOOM 2 is that the company is constantly updating the speaker and adding new features, all of which can be installed via regular OTA updates, making the speaker future-proof. Bluetooth speaker: Denon Envaya Price: £99.99 The Denon Envaya Mini is a gorgeous little Bluetooth speaker ready for use with your iPhone, iPad or Mac. lt measures in at just 20.9x5.4x5.1cm, but it weighs a surprisingly hefty 558g, which makes it a little less portable than we’d like. But where this speaker really excels is the audio, so there’s a bit of good news for you. It boasts dual 40mm full range drivers with a 40x83mm passive radiator, which produces both crisp sound and impressive bass, making it a favourite of ours . 84 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# Bluetooth speaker: iClever |C-BTSO2 Price: £20.99 iClever’s IC-BTSO2 is one of the best cheap Bluetooth speakers we've tried. It looks great and it’s affordable. It’s surprising just how much sound emanates from this tiny zinc-alloy box. Given that you can easily fit the 64.5x64.5x70.1mm 261g iClever in a single hand, the 5W speaker hidden inside does a much better job than we should reasonably expect from such a portable speaker, both good on bass and free from distortion at high volume. The 5W speaker inside the iClever offers bedroom-filling sound that is much louder than what’s available from your phone, tablet or laptop, although its meshed- top design forces it to throw audio upward rather than around the room. With Bluetooth 4.0 technology it also boasts good range (up to 33ft), and we experienced no dropouts ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 85 iPad&iPhone# walking room to room with paired phone in hand. If your mobile device doesn’t support Bluetooth you can instead use the Bluetooth Wireless Speaker’s AUX connection, and a cable is included in the box. Digital compact camera: Fujifilm X-T10 Price: £499 (body only) The X-1T10 is Fuji’s entry-level X-series interchangeable lens camera, but, thanks in part to solid-feel metal build and rangefinder-like dials, sure doesn't feel like it’s been compromised in order to arrive at its affordable body-only price tag. Part of the reason for the X-T10’s solid feel when gripped are its die-cast magnesium top and base plates, though arguably the real attention grabbers are those triple rangefinder-style top plate dials controlling shooting mode, exposure and sensitivity. We also get the relative luxury of a 2.36 million-dot 86 iPAD & iPHONE USER : ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# resolution electronic viewfinder complete with comfortable-feel eye cup. But the fact that the 3in back screen also tilts meant we often ended up referring to the larger 920K-dot resolution LCD for shot composition instead, as it obviously affords a wider range of framing options. While there are plenty of manual controls for those who relish getting hands on, an auto mode switch lever provides the option to disengage brain and point and shoot with a simple flick. The camera’s performance here is consistent and resulting images are both detailed and colour rich. It’s worth noting that you’ll be only purchasing the body for £499, with the most affordable kit lens option being the XC16-50mm lens, which can be picked up for an additional £100. Alternatively, the variation that includes a standard 18- to 55mm lens will set you back £710. All kit lenses are black. As any first time Fuji X-series purchaser will be buying into a whole new camera system with the X-T10, you'll want to know there are currently 19 Fujinon X mount lenses directly compatible with the camera at the time of writing. In short this is our current ‘go to’ compact and proves a jack-of-all- trades option for anyone wanting DSLR-like results, without DSLR bulk. Mac accessory: Apple Magic Keyboard for Mac Price: £79.99 Apple’s Magic Keyboard is a must have for die- hard Apple fans. The Magic Keyboard offers an upgrade from Apple’s last wireless keyboard both in terms of design and technology utilised. While ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 87 iPad1Phone# - _ “< = — oe - — - ~é ne ee = ~ > - > ~~ Pe — - ——e << = _ — > +“ - — eee or <—. a >. <<’ a . 2 the original Apple wireless keyboard was powered by batteries (which was frustrating when you were half way through typing a document when the battery died) the Magic Keyboard features a built- in rechargeable battery, which is charged via a supplied Lightning cable. The second new feature is the way that the Magic Keyboard pairs with your Mac. Where with other Bluetooth keyboards you’d have to head over to the Bluetooth preferences, search for the keyboard and pair with it, you need only plug the Keyboard into your Mac to complete the pairing process. If your battery does run out, you can keep the keyboard plugged in for use as a wired keyboard while it recharges. Aside from the tech, the Magic Keyboard is much thinner, lighter and compact than the previous generation wireless keyboard. The key placement has been slightly tweaked for better travel, and the mechanism under each key has been redesigned to feel more solid when pressed, even near the edges. This provides a fantastic typing experience for Mac users, and despite not having features like backlit keys or support for multiple connections, it’s a great keyboard — just slightly more expensive than we’d like. 88 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# Mac accessory: Logitech MX Master Price: £79.99 The Logitech MX Master is a contender for the most comfortable and enjoyable computer mouse we've ever used. The MX Master is wireless, offering a Standard Bluetooth connection as well as a USB that enables wireless support for those without Bluetooth connectivity. It can also switch between three Bluetooth devices with the flick of a switch. The MX Master utilises Darkfield Laser Sensor technology to achieve amazing levels of accuracy on almost any surface. While optical and traditional laser mice rely on irregularities on the surface to track direction and speed, Darkfield Laser Sensors use “the smallest possible detail to create a micro- road map of the surface so you get better precision on more surfaces, even glass” according to Logitech. Scrolling is also a joy with the Logitech MX Master. The precision wheel automatically shifts ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 89 iPad&iPhone# from the standard ‘click-to-click’ mechanical style to ‘hyper-fast-scroll’ depending on the scrolling speed. The two modes can also be manually switched by using the button conveniently placed beneath the scroll wheel. It also features a side-to-side scroll wheel where your thumb sits, allowing you to scroll from side to side with ease — a bonus for both graphic designers and web surfers alike. It lasts around 40 days on a full battery charge and only requires 4 minutes of charging to get a single day worth of use out of it. It has a battery indicator on the side so you'll never be caught out with a dead battery, and charges using Micro-USB. iPad accessory: Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard folio Price: £59.99 This modern offering from Logitech brings a full- sized keyboard integrated into a thin case for the iPad Air 2 (also available for the iPad Air and all iPad mini’s apart from iPad mini 4). The iPad Air 2 90 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad1Phone# clips into the case using magnets, making it easy to attach and remove at a moments notice. The angle of the iPad can also be adjusted, making it ideal for a variety of situations as many folios only offer a single propped-up angle. The Ultrathin Keyboard Folio also folds around to protect the screen of the iPad when not in use. It’s worth noting that the iPad Air 2 edition of the Ultrathin Keyboard Folio is much thinner and lighter than older models. We like the clickable keyboard and the keys are well spaced with good travel. The Ultrathin Keyboard Folio is a little more plastic- feeling than Logitech’s FabricSkin Keyboard, and it has more flex in it than we'd like, but on the whole the Ultrathin Keyboard is light, unobtrusive and a pleasure to use. iPad accessory: BrydgeMini for iPad mini 1, 2 and 3 Price: £99 You can’t ruin the slim form factor of the iPad mini 1, 2 or 3 with a chunky, ugly case right? Thankfully that’s not true with the BrydgeMini - instead of taking away some of the elegance of the iPad mini, it adds to the experience and transforms your tablet into a MacBook look-alike. In fact, they’re so similar that we even reached for a nonexistent trackpad. As with many keyboards designed for use with the iPad, the keys have been shrunk down. Usually this means that inaccuracies start to appear in your typing, especially when trying to type fast but with the Brydge, it’s just not the case — there’s great travel, and the keys feel solid when pressed. The only real adjustment we had to make was with the ISSUE 103 - iPAD & IPHONE USER 91 iPad&iPhone# shift button, which has a square button instead of the usual rectangular button. There’s no real surprise that it’s constructed from aluminium because it’s clear that Brydge wanted a keyboard that looked like it belonged with your (aluminium backed) iPad mini. The keys are black, made of plastic and feel great to type on — something that’s very important to look out for when looking for a keyboard. A welcome addition is a backlight keyboard, much like the MacBook Air and helps with typing in low-light conditions. It's designed so that your iPad mini slots into the hinges simply and easily and is held in place thanks to the friction caused by rubber inserts. The Brydge comes with shims that fit into the hinges for slight width adjustment between the iPad mini 1, 2 and 3. If you've bought the recently released iPad mini 4, hold fire — the existing Brydge won't fit, although the company are looking to launch an iPad mini 4 variation in January 2016. 92 iPAD & iPHONE USER = ISSUE 103 iPad Apple product: Apple TV (2015) Price: From £129 If you've got an Apple loving TV fanatic in your life, what better gift to buy than the new Apple TV launched in October 2015. What’s so different between this Apple TV and the Apple TV that has been on sale for the past few years? Without trying to sound too dramatic, it’s had a complete overhaul in every area apart from the design of the casing. The New Apple TV features tvOS, a brand new OS that brings advanced functionality to the once basic Apple TV. The main highlights include Siri Support, which allows Siri to perform the same tasks on your TV as it’s able to on your iPhone (with the exclusions of calling and texting, of course) with a few additional benefits. One of these benefits is universal search, which allows users to search for a genre, film or actor and receive results not only from iTunes but also the likes of Netflix. It also includes a dedicated App Store with not only standard apps, but games too, which turns the Apple TV into a aames console. complete with a =1Phone# ISSUE 103 + iIPAD & iPHONE USER 93 iPad&iPhone# Nintendo Wii-esque motion controlled remote that also features a built-in mic for use with Siri. The Touch surface of the remote allows you to swipe between menus in a similar fashion to how you'd use your iPhone, bringing a more unified Apple experience to the Apple TV Apple product: Apple Watch) Price: From £229 lf you’ve got an iPhone, why not combine it with a brand new Apple Watch? There are three variations of Watch to choose from, ranging from the Sport (cheapest) to the Watch (mid-range) and the Edition (high-end), but you’ll be glad to know that in terms of functionality, there’s no difference between the three. What can you do with an Apple Watch? It allows you to view and respond to your notifications 94 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# without needing to get your phone out of your pocket — in fact, you can even take calls directly from your Watch for those no-hands-free moments. It also features fitness tracking technology and a heart rate monitor for those that are health conscious. It'll track how many hours you've stood up for, how long you’ve exercised for and how many calories you've burned (along with step count, distance estimate, and so on) and displays it in an intuitive and user-friendly way — with rings. A full ring means you've hit your target, and is something that can be quickly glanced at throughout the day to provide an extra bit of motivation. Apps are also a huge part of the Apple Watch, with many third-party app developers offering Apple Watch companion apps and complications (or widgets) that can be displayed directly on the customisable watch face. Apple product: iPad mini 4 Price: From £319 Those in the market for a new iPad should set their sights on the brand new iPad mini 4, which launched in September 2015. Unlike previous iPad mini updates, the iPad mini 4 brings a thinner, lighter form factor and a number of internal upgrades that might make the purchase more worth your money. In terms of form factor, the iPad mini 4 is only 6.1mm thin, making it 18% thinner than the iPad mini 3, and weighs a lightweight 299g. Inside the iPad mini 4 you'll find Apple’s second generation 64-bit chipset, the A8 chip, which isn’t as fast as what you'll find in the iPad Pro but will ISSUE 103 + iPAD & iPHONE USER 95 iPad1Phone# handle gaming, video editing and browsing the web with ease. The cameras have had an upgrade too, featuring an improved sensor and an “Apple- designed image signal processor” in the rear-facing 8Mp camera, and the 1.2Mp front-facing FaceTime HD camera now lets in 81 percent more light, perfect for FaceTiming and selfie taking. Gaming accessory: Homido virtual reality headset Price: From £49 The Homido virtual reality headset aims to bring Virtual Reality to the iPhone, as well as a variety of Android and Windows Phone devices. The idea is that you slot your iPhone (even the 6s Plus) into the 96 iPAD & iPHONE USER + ISSUE 103 iPad&iPhone# front of the headset and is used as the headsets computer and display. The best part about using your iPhone in the Homido VR headset is that it makes the headset completely wireless, so you're free to enjoy your virtual world with no cables holding you back — and with the App Store, you’ve already got access to VR games. However, if you thought that the Homido VR headset was just a more expensive version of Google Cardboard, you’d be wrong. In our opinion, the Google Cardboard is only used to see whether VR is for you, and is in turn quite uncomfortable and offers limited functionality. On the other hand, the Homido boasts some pretty interesting features including custom-made VR lenses that offer a 100-degree Field of View and an adjustable IPD (distance between the lenses) as the gap between the eyes isn’t the same for everyone and can affect the overall experience. You also have the option of buying a Bluetooth controller along with the headset to bring true VR gaming to your iPhone. (Touch-based games won't work in Homido as you can’t tap the display while its being used in the headset). Gaming controller: SteelSeries Nimbus Price: From £39.99 The SteelSeries Nimbus is one of a few gaming controllers designed for use with the 2015 Apple TV, although it’s also compatible with Macs, iPhones and iPads — in fact, SteelSeries has an official Nimbus companion app for iOS users that lists charts of apps that are MFi (Made for ISSUE 103 - iPAD & iPHONE USER 97 iPad&iPhone# iPhone, iPad) controller compatible, turning your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV into a fully fledged games console. There’s a hat-tip to the Xbox One controller in terms of its design, with symmetrical analog sticks a la PlayStation and the addition of a Lightning connector for easy charging. As well as that, it features console-level features including pressure sensitive buttons, a menu button and a built-in rechargeable battery that'll last on average 40 hours on a single charge. It’s lightweight, sleek and is a must-have, especially for Apple TV users. In fact, a colleague said that the “Nimbus offers the best combination of feel, functionality and starting price” when compared to other MFi controllers available. You can’t argue with that really, can you? 98 iPAD & iPHONE USER - ISSUE 103 iPad=1Phone# iPad buying guide Here’s the lowdown on which model is right for you Oo you re in the market for a new iPad. Excellent choice — | couldn't live without mine. It's my companion when I’m catching up on news and email in the morning over tea, reading a comic book in the evening to unwind, or watching a movie while travelling on a plane. But these days, picking an iPad can be tricky. Apple currently sells five different models of iPad, with prices ranging from £219 to £899. There are ISSU