EACH WEEK, WE highlight five apps that are worth downloading for your smartphone and tablet. There are a lot of apps released on a daily basis, but not all of them are worth paying attention to.
This week includes a better way to organise your contacts and stay up to date, a brilliant NES-style shoot-em-up, and a AR translator app that everyone should own.
Table Tennis Touch
For: iOS
Cost: €3.59
- The premise mightn’t be the most amazing thing ever (especially if you avoid sports games like the plague), but you’ll be missing out on some serious fun.
- Table Tennis Touch allows you to play in tournaments, play career mode, and other mini-games, in what is a very well-crafted game.
- Serves, swings and smashes are all done by swiping your finger, making it easy to play but hard to master.
- The drawback is older iPhones or iPads (iPhone 4s or iPad 2 is required at least) will struggle to run it because of graphical demands so keep that in mind before you download.
- For everyone else, it’s a brilliantly designed game and well worth your money, even if you’re not interested in table tennis.
Yakuto / Vimeo
Black
For: Windows Phone
Cost: Free
- There is no shortage of photography apps out there, least of all for Windows Phone users who are spoilt for choice.
- Black puts a twist on the traditional photo taking by including numerous black and white filters for you to play around with.
- The developers have recreated seven different films such as Kodak 400TX and Ilford HP5. All you need to know is they’re all different enough to help improve specific photos.
- The app also includes editing tools like curves (which adjusts the tone of a specific part of the photo), vignette and fade. If you didn’t think you could do much with black and white photos before, think again.
- If you’re familiar with traditional B&W analogue film, this will let you capture similar photos without requiring a traditional camera. For everyone else, it’s another way to jazz up your photos.
Addappt
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- It can be tough keeping contact details up to date. There’s always someone you know who’s changed their number or details without you realising it.
- Addappt aims to replace your traditional contacts list by updating whenever your friends change their contact details on their phone.
- It’s more flexible than the traditional contacts app, allowing you to group contacts by location, company, or title.
- Of course, there’s group messaging and emailing directly through the app too, should you require it.
- If you find the idea of updating your contacts list a pain, or haven’t updated it in a while, give it a go.
Kero Blaster
For: iOS
Cost: €4.49
- If you’re a gamer, chances are you will have heard of Cave Story, and rightly so as it’s one of the best indie games created.
- Studio Pixel’s latest game is Kero Blaster, it’s another shoot-em-up but just as fun and as charming.
- Taking control of a bipedal frog (because why not?), you make your way across a number of strange levels blasting everything in site. It’s just as fun as it sounds.
- Its real joy comes from the controls. How it handles shooting – it lets you control the direction while it auto-fires – works incredibly well and movement is smooth.
- It’s not as long a game as you might expect, but you’ll be playing it again as soon as it’s finished.
Word Lens
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- Let’s get this out of the way first, Word Lens isn’t a new app, but it’s was recently made free (Google purchased it last weekend for those wondering why), and so is essential if you’re going abroad.
- Word Lens is an augmented reality app that can translate text into your native language.
- Even better, it doesn’t even require an internet connection to work, making it even more useful.
- It works better when you’re translating standard text, it has a bit of difficulty recognising stylised text but the majority of public signs and notices are written normally, this won’t be a major problem.
- Windows Phone users should go for Bing Translator which offers the same features.
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