Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Apple : Best e-commerce platform of 2019: get an online store now!

Apple : Best e-commerce platform of 2019: get an online store now!

Best e-commerce platform of 2019: get an online store now!

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:28 AM PDT

The rise of the web has allowed countless businesses to reach a wider market. Not only that, it has given rise to countless new online-only businesses, fueled by the exponential rise of mobile connections.

It's not surprising, then, that one analyst claims that the SMB e-commerce platform market will break the billion dollar barrier.

There's no doubt that the web provides a huge opportunity for companies, but it’s important for organizations to make the most of that opportunity. In order to sell your products or services online, your website has to be appropriately equipped.

Building an online store from scratch is a mammoth task, and fortunately, an unnecessary one. Today, there is a huge variety of e-commerce platform packages from which to choose. 

Most e-commerce platforms will provide businesses with standard functionality such as the ability to showcase products in an online catalog, take payments online, manage customers and provide with after-sales.

Others will provide more sophisticated functionality, such as online marketing features, the ability to manage or integrate with in-store systems and the provision of APIs.

Which e-commerce software is best for your business depends entirely on your specific requirements. If you're an online-only outfit, then POS integration won't be necessary, but you may get a lot of business from overseas, in which case foreign currency support would be a requirement.

In this article, we’re going to highlight some of the best e-commerce platforms available right now, before moving on to consider other options you might want to explore in terms of creating your own e-commerce solution.

The best e-commerce platform packages

Shopify is perhaps the most well known e-commerce platform available. It was set up in 2006 by founders Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake who, as the story goes, felt that there wasn't a simple-to-use e-commerce platform available and so built their own. The company claims that: "You don't need to have any technical or design experience to easily create a beautiful online store." 

According to Shopify, it's possible to get one of its online stores up-and-running within minutes. Users can choose from a wide range of templates, or they can design the look and feel of their store themselves. It accepts a comprehensive range of credit cards, has Level 1 PCI compliance and 256-bit SSL encryption for security, and it offers 24/7 support via phone, instant messaging or email.

The platform provides a full CMS with which users can manage the functionality and layout of their online store. Users can manage their store on-the-go using Shopify's mobile apps, and the platform itself is fully responsive, meaning the store will be optimized for visitors regardless of whether they access it from a desktop computer or a mobile device.

Shopify also offers users unlimited hosting for their stores, in-depth analytics of how visitors are using the store, and functionality for marketing such as SEO optimization, a discount and coupon engine, gift cards and email marketing tools. You can test out Shopify with a 14-day free trial.

best e-commerce packages

Bigcommerce was established in 2009 and promises to "support your business, not just your store." In addition to offering support via phone, instant chat and email, it also offers articles and videos to help with e-commerce, and access to a team of e-commerce experts who can provide advice and guidance about online selling. Their experts are qualified in both Google Analytics and Adwords.

Like Shopify, Bigcommerce provides a variety of templates and themes to help stores look their best and get up-and-running quickly. Alternatively, users can design their own store or use Bigcommerce designers to do so. The platform incorporates a full-featured CMS that allows users to run an entire website, rather than just a store.

Users can benefit from detailed and flexible product management, optimized search engine rankings, along with a variety of integrated marketing tools and analytics. Payments can be accepted via 40+ pre-integrated gateways and shipping details can be customized as per the business's requirements. As of late, some new features have been added like support for Amazon Import and Link and Shopping in Instagram Stories. The platform offers automated order processing, flexible tax rules depending on where orders are made and shipped, and support for multiple currencies. You can test out Bigcommerce with a 15-day free trial.

best e-commerce packages

Volusion has been around for almost two decades, having been set up in Texas over in the US in 1999. The company touts its platform as being an "all-in-one e-commerce solution", and offers a free 14-day trial (no credit card required).

As with other e-commerce platforms, users are offered a variety of templates from which to choose, and can also customize templates if they so wish. Should a more complex design be required, Volusion offers a custom design service that can incorporate branding and a firm's social media presence.

The platform provides the site and product management tools you'd expect, marketing functionality for SEO, social media, and affiliate outlets, along with emails and order management functionality for fast order processing, accepting payments, tax calculations and POS integration.

In addition to its platform and associated services, Volusion offers apps from its partners, support for users and a knowledge-base for help with e-commerce. Users can draw upon blog posts, guides and webinars. As of October 8th 2018, there are no more transaction fees.

best e-commerce packages

CoreCommerce was set up in 2001 and focuses on providing e-commerce services to small and medium-sized businesses. The company places an emphasis on simplicity and transparency, promising that its platform is easy-to-use and that customers will not fall foul of any hidden charges.

Perhaps CoreCommerce's most unique aspect is that all of its features are offered to all customers regardless of what plan they are on. Price plans are determined by the number of products, the number of email addresses, the amount of bandwidth and the amount of storage required by the user (and higher-end plans also benefit from additional support).

As with other e-commerce providers, CoreCommerce offers functionality for store design, product management, order processing and marketing. Of its headline features, the platform offers unlimited product customization options, a built-in blogging engine, and secure hosting that is provided by Rackspace and comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. You can try CoreCommerce out with a 15-day free trial.

best e-commerce packages

Having been founded in 1997, 3dcart is the oldest of our featured providers here. It was set up with a view to incorporating as many of the most requested e-commerce features into one platform as possible.

The company says it has six core values by which it operates: ongoing innovation, good service, simple solutions, fostering trust, keeping employees and customers happy, and stimulating prosperity amongst employees and customers.

Some of the platform's innovative features include a module that users can install to offer gift-wrapping, a purchase order system, the option of running a loyalty program and the ability to offer recurring orders. Many of these features are very specific, meaning that stores can be highly tailored to the needs of each business.

Stores can be designed using one of the many templates offered by 3dcart, or users can design their own store. A quick edit bar means that making changes to the design of a store is simple. Product images are fore-fronted with 3dcart's auto-zoom feature and products can be sold via Facebook with its store integration. As with some other platforms, users can blog directly from 3dcart and tools are provided for setting up coupons, sending newsletters and affiliate marketing.

In addition to its platform, 3dcart offers a number of professional services. Users can request help with SEO, PPC, shopping feed management, social media, Facebook ads and conversion consulting. Help can also be provided to ensure that a user's store is set up to the highest standard. Services such as site cloning, setting up custom tracking, data migration and training are offered.

In addition, 3dcart can provide SSL certification. Hosting is guaranteed at 99.9% uptime and 24/7 support is provided via phone, email or online chat. You can test out the service with a 15-day free trial.

best e-commerce packages

Also consider:

Alternative means

If you don’t want to go the route of using an off-the-shelf package, what other options are available for you to explore? That’s what we’re going to look at in the second half of this piece…

Many serious businesses have taken to eBay these days


Is eBay right for your business?

Opening its doors in 1999, eBay UK now has over 14 million users, with over 10,000 people using the site for a business that is their primary means of income. It's not just about people selling unwanted goods - businesses have used the simplicity that eBay offers to set up lucrative operations. Even the larger brands such as Argos, Debenhams and House of Fraser are using eBay to sell online.

With sophisticated tools now available you can be up and running with your store in just a few hours. The eBay Seller Centre has all the information you need. Each store is managed via eBay's familiar user interface, and there are a number of eBay-provided tools to help manage, track and promote your shop once it's established.

Using eBay as the platform for your business could be ideal if your business wants to sell goods on a fixed price basis. The complete integration of the PayPal e-payments system into eBay takes care of this essential component of your store.

The key with eBay is to look closely at the costs involved and also the transaction fees that PayPal charge before moving forward and setting up your own store.

How to create your own e-commerce solution

Of course if you want complete control over every aspect of your new online store, building each page yourself will be the best course of action. Hiring someone to code your website is one option. If you decide to do this follow these steps:

  1. Ask the company for live examples of their work to look at
  2. Write a detailed brief of the site you want created. The more detail the better to avoid confusion
  3. Ensure you understand the price you are being charged and how many revisions this price includes
  4. Always have a signed agreement or contract before work commences
  5. Ask whether the designers will host your site and if you will be able to make updates yourself or if all updates must go through the design agency at an additional cost
  6. Ask for the copyright of your design to be assigned to your company, as your website is an important part of your business' intellectual property
  7. Put into your contract, details of how the agreement can be amicably dissolved if things go wrong

Choose a website design from Template Monster


You also don't have to build your site completely from scratch. Buying a template can give you all the basic pages your site needs. You can then either modify them yourself using an application like Dreamweaver, or hire a coding expert to make the changes. Website templates are available from a number of vendors including Template Monster.

If you already have a website and want to add e-commerce functionality, this can be easily achieved with a number of applications including:

Final advice

Whichever route you decide to take when building your website always remember:

  1. You need to ensure your store can be easily updated and managed.
  2. Good professional web hosting is vital to ensure your site is always available.
  3. Look for payment and shopping carts that are intuitive and efficient to use.
  4. Customer service is king these days. Businesses shouldn't just efficiently take customers' money, but should also properly support them.
  5. Make sure that your store is fully integrated with all the leading social media sites.
  6. Put security first – shoppers are now more comfortable buying online, but always ensure your site uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) which is now the industry standard for online payments.
  7. Above every other consideration should be your site's visitor experience. Don't forget your competitors are just a mouse click away in the world of e-commerce. 

Setting up your online store should be approached carefully and diligently to ensure you put a professional and efficient site live. Internet shopping continues to expand. Make sure your business doesn't miss out on a sales channel that shows no signs of slowing down.

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The best LG G6 deals in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:17 AM PDT

It's almost game over for the LG G6. Despite the quality of the handset offering a genuine alternative to those flagship phones from the likes of Samsung and Apple, the G6 never really got going. Sales started strong enough, but tailed off quickly. And now that the LG G7 ThinQ is here, it seems like nobody really wants LG G6 deals anymore.

Which honestly feels like a shame. As we say, this is a good mobile phone. In fact, it's a very good mobile phone. A high quality, stylish handset with a pin-sharp screen and water-resistant casing. There isn't much not to like about this splendid Android phone.

And now is a brilliant time to buy. The release of the iPhone XS and XR have knocked the prices of older devices way down and the company's innovative LG V30 caused some fantastic prices to emerge on the LG G6. You can now get it for under £600 for the two year term, which is frankly as cheap as chips for such a good handset. We've even seen tariffs that cost as little as £18 per month!

So if you're not bothered about LG G7 ThinQ deals and know that it's the G6 for you, then check out our comparison table below to make sure you're getting the best price on the market.

See also: Samsung Galaxy S9 deals | Samsung Galaxy S8 deals | Best iPhone deals | Mobile phone deals | SIM only deals | LG G6 review

Make no mistake, the G6 is a great phone from LG. Its recent predecessors haven't really taken the fight to Samsung and Apple, but the LG G6 is a flagship phone to be proud of. The dazzling 1440 x 2880 screen is a particular strength and you immediately feel on first use that your handling an Android device no less premium than the Samsung Galaxy S9. And, to be honest, the newer LG G7 ThinQ doesn't move things on massively either.

Read TechRadar's full LG G6 review

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How to claim on gadget insurance

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:11 AM PDT

Has the worst happened and your precious tech has been lost, stolen or broken? Sorry you've had to go through that hassle but if you're here, take hope...we're guessing you must have been sage enough to obtain gadget insurance, and now is the time to cash in on your forward planning. From here on out you can enjoy the path to getting a shiny new gizmo to replace your dearly departed digital device.

So it's time to get your claim in, which means carrying out the correct process so the replacement kit can be with you as quickly and easily as possible. Here's everything you need to know to make that happen, fast. 

What can I claim for on gadget insurance? 

This is a pretty broad list and includes all the basics you'd imagine but do bear in mind it will vary from insurer to insurer, so it's a good idea to make sure that you get the correct gadget insurance for your needs at the outset.

Generally speaking it should cover you for loss if you've misplaced your device – presuming you've not left it somewhere silly like on a table in a pub and gone to the toilet. Theft, accidental damage and mechanical breakdown are also generally insured. But that will all be detailed in your policy documents and schedule.

But as you'll see from the Ts&Cs, not everything is covered...

What gadgets and claims doesn't gadget insurance cover? 

Sorry if it sounds like we're dodging the question, but it entirely depends on your policy. Often scratched, dents and other superficial damage can't be claimed for. And many insurers won't cover refurbished and second-hand tech.

It's probably easiest to point you in the direction of your policy documents or our dedicated advice on what gadget insurance doesn't cover.

What steps do I need to take to claim on gadget insurance?

There are a few simple steps to take to make this process easy. The key here is to make sure you get this done within 48 hours of the loss or damage happening - that will make things much easier in the long run, and is even a requirement of some tech and iPhone insurance providers.

In the case of theft you'll firstly need to report that to the police by calling 101. You will then be given a crime reference number that you'll need to note down so you can pass it on to your insurer.

Then follow these steps:

1. Call your insurer on the claims number. This can be found on your policy document but if you don't have that you can easily find it online with a quick search.

2. Have details of your claim to give over the phone. This will be what happened to cause the loss or damage. This should be done over the phone without the need to fill out any forms, in most cases.

3. You may be asked to send in some supporting documentation. This may include a proof of purchase – if you don't have that, a credit or debit card statement may do to show you bought it, or even a photo of you with the gadget to prove you own it.

What happens after I've applied to make a claim?

Some insurers, depending on your policy, may remind you that you have to pay an excess to claim on your policy. 

Claims are generally settled within two working days. That means you'll hear if you have or haven't qualified to receive cover within that time.

If you do get cover you'll either be sent a replacement device, have yours repaired, or be sent the value in cash or cheque form. 

Will making a claim affect future premiums?

In some cases the insurer may ask you to pay off the rest of your policy in order for you to claim. Failing that the claim may end your cover meaning that one replacement or repair ends the contract of cover.

You will then need to apply for more cover for your new or repaired device. If you opt to get cover from the same insurer again then it is likely that you may be charged more because you have made a claim.

This is a good reason to check out our best gadget insurance guide to find the best possible cover price for your new gadget insurance policy.

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The best Samsung Galaxy S7 deals in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:09 AM PDT

The Samsung Galaxy S7 may now be over two years old but it is by no means a bad device. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is a great handset for bargain hunters. You've probably seen the insanely-great Samsung Galaxy S9 or Note 9 or even Samsung's newest Galaxy S10, but then also seen the prices and decided to see what else is on offer. Bag a Galaxy S7 deal and you'll get a fantastic phone for a reasonable price.

2016's Galaxy S7 - together with the bigger S7 Edge - is still a very good handset in its own right, sharing a lot of the battery management power and camera smarts from its successor the Galaxy S8. You can see a potted review under our top handpicked deals below and it's soooooo much cheaper than the newer Samsung smartphones.

You can easily get away with bills in the low twenties. Or, if you're prepared to part with around £50 at the outset, you can even get them below the £20 mark. And big data deals now come cheap, too. Excellent value when you consider that the S7 used to be one of the best phones around. You will notice though that the majority of deals still going for this device are on EE, it seems to have knocked all other competing networks off the list.

Also consider: Galaxy S7 Edge deals | Galaxy S9 deals | Galaxy S8 deals | Galaxy Note 8 deals | iPhone deals | Best SIM only deals | Galaxy S7 review

samsung galaxy s7 deals

The Galaxy S6 definitely left some room for improvement and, thankfully, Samsung tinkered and tweaked the design to make one heck of a successor. The Galaxy S7 is iterative perfection -  it doesn't reinvent the wheel, but Samsung clearly listened to the feedback and criticism to create a stand-out device.

Read TechRadar's full Samsung Galaxy S7 review

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The best Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus deals in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:07 AM PDT

It wasn't that long ago that the Galaxy S8 Plus was the big dog in the Samsung yard. It was the go to Android phablet for any looking for a bigger phone for a good six months or so after its release in 2017. With the S9 Plus, Note 9 and Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus deals all now available, the S8 Plus has been slowly replaced. But Galaxy S8 Plus deals are still well worth a look - possibly now more than ever.

A year might have passed since its release, but the S8+ remains one of our absolute favourites, especially as the Galaxy S9 Plus doesn't offer much in the way of massive improvements. The S8 Plus is a way more affordable alternative to its successor, as well as to the Galaxy Note 9 and iPhone XS Max.

If that's got you sold, then you'll want to hear a little about pricing. We have the full rundown of the best Galaxy S8 Plus deals right here in our comparison chart, with the cheapest prices from the major networks - EE, O2, Vodafone and Three - including sub-£25pm tariffs that have really got our pulses racing.

The prices on the Galaxy S8+ are lower than ever, but if they still look a little rich for your blood, then you can buy the smaller Galaxy S8 for less or head over to our best mobile phone deals page for something completely different. If it's the Plus-sized screen that you need though, then we'll find you the best S8 Plus deal here.

See also: Galaxy Note 8 deals | Galaxy S9 Plus deals | Galaxy S8 deals | Samsung phone deals |  iPhone 8 Plus deals | Mobile phone deals | SIM only deals

If you want a huge Android phone with market leading specifications, an incredible display and a superb camera, then the Galaxy S8 Plus is a must for your shortlist. The price will be a bit cheaper than some of the newer flagships but it still holds a lot of the same features

Read TechRadar's full Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus review

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The best iPhone 7 Plus deals and UK contracts in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:00 AM PDT

This plus sized iPhone from Apple was launched alongside the iPhone 7 in September 2016. Until the iPhone X landed, we thought it was the best iPhone on the market, with big improvements on the camera and battery fronts from previous large-screen iPhones.

If you're looking for a big screen iPhone that won't break the bank then the 7 Plus could be a good fit. Prices fell very nicely on the advent of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and it is far cheaper than the big iPhones like the XS Max - if you go for the earlier iteration you could even end up paying around £300 less than it costs to get the newer massive iPhones. 7 Plus prices can now be found for less than £30 per month.

If you're dead set on grabbing this huge iPhone now, then to help you navigate we've got a handy comparison tool which is designed to help you zero in on the cheapest deals. Underneath that we've chosen what we think are the best value options overall for the biggest networks out there. And if you still need some persuading, we've added a brief review of the iPhone 7 Plus to the bottom of the page.

See also: iPhone 8 Plus deals | iPhone 8 deals | Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus deals | iPhone 7 deals | iPhone 6S Plus deals | Mobile phone deals

Top 5 best iPhone 7 Plus deals this month:

Unlike some other sites we don't manipulate the order of these deals for commercial gain, so the handpicked deals below really are the best iPhone 7 Plus deals for EE, O2, Three and Vodafone right now. Don't forget - if you're looking for something a little different, our comparison widget above is the perfect way to sniff out your perfect deal. This page is for the best iPhone 7 Plus deals in the UK, but if you're after Australian deals, check out the best Australian iPhone 7 Plus deals page. 

iphone 7 Plus deals

There's no denying the iPhone 7 Plus's brilliance - just look at the fantastic cameras, supercharged performance and waterproof design. But that doesn't disguise the fact that it doesn't build massively on the iPhone 6S. If you want true innovation, you'll have to pay the extra for 2017's iPhone X.

Read more in TechRadar's full iPhone 7 Plus review

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The best Apple Watch apps we've used in 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:00 AM PDT

It’s been an interesting year for Apple Watch apps. In the spring it seemed as if the Watch had lost its sparkle, with many big-name apps either languishing or being pulled from the Watch altogether. The problem wasn’t that Apple Watch apps are a bad idea, though. 

Far from it, as our selection here demonstrates. It was that sometimes, apps were designed to answer the wrong question: “could we make a Watch app?” but not “should we?”

Now, the Apple Watch is onto its fourth generation, and the aptly-named Apple Watch 4 is proving pretty popular - so that's why you're probably here checking out the new apps. In fact, it's one of the best smartwatch options out there, and now we're at the fourth generation it's becoming a particularly accomplished smart option for your wrist.

Our favourite apps, the apps that are still here after a bumpy year, both should and could have been made. They exist because they’re useful, or because they’re entertaining, or because they make your life that little bit better. 

In this round-up you’ll find apps for podcasting and procrastinating, for getting fit and getting stuff done, for messing around and for sorting stuff out. 

Before you get into our list remember to head into the Apple Watch main app on your iPhone - that's where you'll see a list of the apps already installed on your phone that can also be transferred to your Watch. If you see any you like the look of here, you'll need to download them to your iPhone first.

And make sure to check this article weekly, as we'll add a new app each week, highlighted below.

Apple Watch app of the week: Grocery - Smart Grocery List

It’s hard to get excited about grocery shopping, we know, but we’re all in favor of any app that makes it easier to ensure we actually get the things we need when we go shopping. Now in version 2, Grocery does just that.

As you’d expect from the name it’s a grocery list app, but this particular app is built around Apple’s own Reminders, so it’s easy to access your lists and to share them online with others. It features Siri support so you can say things such as “Add eggs to my grocery list”, and you can create Siri shortcuts for groups of items – which is handy if there are specific ingredients you tend to buy together for particular meals.

One of the cleverest features is the way Grocery analyses your shopping: as you tick off items it remembers the order in which you did them, so the next time you hit the shops your list will be in an order that reflects where things actually are in the shop rather than the order in which you remembered them. It does this on a per-store basis, and the different stores can be geofenced so that your Watch knows exactly where it is and where to find what you need.

Best Apple Watch apps for fitness and running

There's no denying that the main thrust of the Apple Watch since the second model is for fitness: it's packing GPS, heart rate, water resistance and improved sensors to make the most of the fact people like to work out with this thing - it even connects to gym equipment.

This list of Apple Watch fitness, running, wellbeing and health apps are nearly all must-have - if you're going to do one thing with your new Watch, use it to become a healthier you in mind and body.

Fabulous - Daily Motivation

We were going to write about this ages ago but we couldn’t be bothered. Boom boom! If you’re struggling to get stuff done, Fabulous hopes to help.

It’s an odd little app that does a little of everything: health tracking, yoga, exercise advice, mindfulness, dieting and psychology. It’s based around making little but significant changes to your life: helping you clear your head or work your abs, tracking your health or fitness goals and reminding you to stay hydrated.

If you’re watching your weight the app also has a weight loss program inspired by the Atkins and HCG diets. The app claims to be based on “major scientific studies” but of course you should always seek medical advice before embarking on any diet.

The bulk of the work happens on the iPhone app, with the Watch app as a simple companion reminding you what to do and enabling you to tick off the items on your daily schedule. As is often the case with fitness apps, the main features are reserved for subscribers: to access the personal coaching feature you’ll need to pay a monthly or yearly subscription.

Attain by Aetna

Would you be willing to share your fitness data with your healthcare provider in exchange for the odd reward? That’s what Attain appears to be about. We say “appears to be” because in order to get it you need to be an Aetna customer and sign up for the app via its Attain By Aetna website.

The app is designed to make health recommendations, such as telling you when it’s time to get flu shots or refill your prescriptions, and to help you live a fitter, healthier life. Data will be encrypted and shared with both Aetna and Apple, but it isn’t currently used to make decisions about your coverage or the cost of your coverage.

The app provides a range of fitness targets based on your age, sex and weight, and it enables you to score points by achieving those goals. You can achieve goals based not just on steps taken but on activities such as swimming or yoga too.

As anyone who’s watched dreadful game shows knows, points mean prizes – and in this case those prizes include “gift cards from popular retailers” and even a brand new Apple Watch. We’re willing to bet it will take more than a quick run around the block to qualify for that one.

ActivityTracker Pedometer

We’ve covered ActivityTracker before, and it’s had some significant updates since we last looked. In addition to support for the Apple Watch 4, the latest iPhones, iOS 12 and watchOS 5, it boasts four new complications for the new Infograph watch face and an updated engine to more accurately record activity times.

As before, the main app is designed to track your activity without using your phone or watch’s GPS features, so it’s less demanding on battery life. It uses your device’s motion processor to record and calculate steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burned, distance traveled and active time, and you can see how well you’re doing on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis.

You can also import your historical data from Apple’s Health app so you’re not starting from a clean slate of data.

If you subscribe to the Pro version for a modest $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$7.99 it offers complications for instant stats on your Apple Watch and synchronization of steps between iPhone, Watch and the Health app. Pro users can also move data from one iPhone to another. Whether you subscribe or not the Watch app gives you an overview of the last hour, day and week in the form of attractive and effective graphs.

Slopes

Late in 2018, Apple introduced improved snowboarding and skiing tracking for the Apple Watch Series 3 and later. That’s been a boon for snow apps such as Slopes, which can use the improved APIs to gather more useful information than ever before.

With Slopes you can track your speed, vertical, distance, lift vs trail time and more, getting the information you need right now on your wrist and sharing that data with the iPhone so you can analyze it later.

Slopes is very clever. It automatically detects runs and lifts, it can replay your runs in 3D with heat maps showing your speed on each bit of the run, and it even integrates with your photo library to automatically display photos you took on your skiing or snowboarding trips. The app also integrates with the Apple Health app, recording details of your workouts and the calories you’ve burned.

As with many sport apps the core version of Slopes is free but there’s also a premium subscription that introduces extra features. Here that means live run-by-run breakdowns, unlimited run and lift stat breakdowns, premium maps and even virtual 3D mountains to show you where you’ve been. An annual pass is a very reasonable $19.99/£12.49/AU$17.99.

Strava

Strava is one of the most popular running and cycling apps around, but it’s always required you to have your phone or a non-Apple smartwatch to track your travels and record your vital statistics. Not anymore.

If you have an Apple Watch 2, the Strava Apple Watch app can use its GPS to record your run without requiring you to strap a phone to anything. The interface isn’t as pretty as the iPhone app’s interface, but when you’re running or cycling that doesn’t matter: the information you need is presented cleanly enough and the app is simple and straightforward to use.

The main app is free and offers essential features including distance, pace, speed, elevation and burned calories, and there’s a premium service for $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99 per month or $59.99/£54.99/AU$89.99 per year that offers more detailed post-exercise analysis, live performance feedback and personalized coaching - although not through the Watch.

However, if you’re someone who uses the premium features like Beacon on the main app, you might not find Strava on the Apple Watch to your liking compared to using it on the phone.

Nike Run Club

The ongoing love-fest between Nike and Apple continues to bear fruit: the latest iteration of the Nike Run Club app introduces some welcome improvements. 

It now integrates with Siri Suggestions, which means the app can now suggest good times for a run based on your previous runs (the feature is off by default so it won’t nag you if you don’t want it to), and there are new Apple Watch complications including one for the Infograph face that shows how far you’ve run this month.

There’s hardly a shortage of running apps in the App Store but Nike’s budget is a bit higher than most, so the app feels a lot more premium than many others. It tracks and stores all your runs thanks to your Watch’s built-in GPS, enables you to listen to audio guides as you run, offers a range of challenges to keep you motivated and has good social sharing features, so you can turn your friends into cheerleaders. 

It’s very well designed and the Watch app doesn’t sacrifice substance for style: while visually it’s very attractive it also shows all the information you actually need as you’re pounding the pavements. It’s a really good running app.

ECG

  • Pre-installed
  • Free

Apple’s much-heralded ECG app has finally arrived. It’s available for free to Apple Watch users and should automatically appear in your list of available apps as part of the watchOS 5.1.2 update, but you’ll only get it in a select few territories: the US, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam.

If you really, really want the app and you don’t live in any of those places you can get around it by changing the system region to one of the countries where it is available, although of course that will affect the other apps on your Watch too. For users in the UK it may be the only way to get the ECG app for the foreseeable future.

The app itself is simple and potentially life-saving. You simply put a finger on the Digital Crown, wait 30 seconds and the app analyzes the electrical impulses in your body; this enable it to detect some cases of atrial fibrillation. The emphasis here is on ‘some’: the app can generate false positive results, and it’s no substitute for a real doctor. However, by detecting issues that may otherwise go unnoticed it’s a useful thing for your Apple Watch to offer.

Cardiogram

We’ve written about Cardiogram before: it’s a very valuable health tracker that enables you to see how your heart is working over time, and which enables you to look for spikes related to what you eat, how you exercise and whether you’re particularly stressed at work. All you need to do is wear your Apple Watch, which checks your heart rate every five minutes. Cardiogram then crunches that data to give you an insight into what your body’s doing.

What’s interesting about Cardiogram now isn’t the app itself, but the partnerships that are starting to emerge.

In the US, Amica Life and Greenhouse Health Insurance are offering life insurance for Cardiogram users with any version of the Apple Watch: simply use the Cardiogram app and you can be eligible for up to $1,000 (around £775/AU$1,400) in accidental death cover for 12 months, with the option to purchase up to $50,000 (roughly £39,000/AU$70,000) more from within the app. $1,000 isn’t a lot in the great scheme of things, especially in America, but it’s a lot for free.

You don’t have to share data either, the insurers bet that people who use Cardiogram are more likely to take steps to improve their health than people who don’t.

As with most health things, such partnerships are subject to regulatory approval, and the Cardiogram partnership is currently available in Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana and Georgia. Expect more states and more partnerships soon.

MySwimPro

This is a tale of two apps, depending on which version of Apple Watch you have. If yours is a first-generation model then it’s a useful but limited way to track your swimming stats: the first-gen watch shouldn’t be submerged, so you shouldn’t wear it while swimming.

However, if you have a second-generation Apple Watch (Apple calls it the Apple Watch Series 2) then you can take it into the pool - and that makes MySwimPro a much more useful application. You can log your workouts while you’re still in the water, and you can also follow the app’s workouts to set goals and monitor your heart rate during your swim.

Once you’ve dried off you can pick up the iPhone or iPad app, which syncs data from your Watch and enables you to see your progress in much more detail: miles swum, hours spent swimming, top times for specific distances and so on.

You can share your triumphs online, or you can just watch videos showing how other swimmers do particular types of workout. It’s probably overkill if you only do the odd couple of laps at the gym swimming pool, but if you’re serious about swimming it's worth wearing on your wrist.

Nike Training Club

Nike and Apple are best friends forever, so it’s not a huge surprise to see Nike unveil another Watch app. This one’s really good, too. Describing itself as “your ultimate personal trainer”, Nike Training Club has more than 180 workouts covering strength, endurance, mobility and yoga, and they’re all free. There are daily personalized picks based on your previous activity, flexible training plans to help you achieve your fitness goals, and tips from top trainers.

The app splits jobs between phone and Watch. The former is where you do the planning and tracking; the latter is what you wear while you’re actually working out. By necessity as well as design that means focusing only on the information you really need right now, such as your heart rate and how many reps you still have to do before you can undo all your efforts with some cake and beer.

The app is by no means unique in its combination of Watch and workout tracking, although it does have Nike’s immediately recognizable and individual visual style. But what’s significant about this app is that none of its many workouts are hidden behind in-app purchases or pricey subscriptions. Everything in the app is free.

Round Health

The longer we’ve had our Apple Watches, the more we’ve come to appreciate simplicity: while the App Store is full of apps that offer all kinds of features, the ones we actually use every day tend to do one thing very well. Round Health is that kind of app: it’s designed to make sure you take your medicine, and it does so with the minimum of fuss. You can also have it as a complication, so you know exactly what you need to take next.

Whether it’s vitamins or medication, most of us have had that “did I take it today?” thing. That’s no big deal if you’re just topping up your vitamin D in winter, but for people taking birth control or who have serious and/or chronic conditions it’s often very important to take certain medicine at certain times.

With Round Health you can set simple but persistent reminders that make sure you take what you need to take, and it supports more complex medical regimes involving multiple medications and schedules as well as tracking when you need to renew your prescription.

The term ‘life-changing’ is bandied around a lot to describe rather ordinary apps, but Round Health is a great way of helping you stay on top of your health.

Lifesum

Like many health-related apps, Lifesum really wants you to take out a subscription: that’s $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year, though it sometimes runs a 30% off promotion. The core app is free, though. Its goal is to help you think about what you eat and what activity you do and to make positive changes to make yourself healthier.

On the iPhone, Lifesum enables you to count calories and track your meals, discover healthy recipes and track your progress towards your goals. It works with other apps too, so for example if you’ve got a Fitbit or use Runkeeper it can get data from them.

On the Watch it’s a much simpler affair, urging you to stay hydrated, showing your progress towards your resting, moving and stretching goals and doing everything through a kind of little Tamagotchi character.

It pulls data from the Apple Health app as well as the Lifesum app to ensure you get the widest possible picture of your intake and activity, and you can add data as well as view it: for example, you can take a note of what you’re eating via the Watch app and then enter more details on the iPhone later. Unusually there isn’t a Watch complication, but the app does tie in with the Watch’s notification system to keep you updated.

Headspace

If you’ve ever felt that life is just that bit too busy or stressful, Headspace could help. It’s based around mindfulness, which is all about getting you to feel calmer without too much effort. In fact, it’s the opposite of effort: mindfulness is about taking a break from the rush.

The Apple Watch app is part of a wider offering for iPhone and iPad: it acts as a reminder and a coach, urging you to pick an exercise and focus on it for the allotted time. It also has an SOS mode for when things feel too much and you need help instantly. But it’s the main app that does most of the work, with daily mindfulness exercises and sessions designed to help with everything from workplace stress to sleep problems.

It’s very well done but one thing that might raise your stress levels is the cost: while the app is free to try it really needs a subscription to unlock its most useful features, and that subscription is $12.99/£9.99/AU$19.99 per month or $94.99/£74.99/AU$149.99 per year. That’s an auto-renewing subscription too, so you need to disable that in iTunes if you don’t want it to recur automatically.

WebMD

Medical apps don’t just exist to persuade you that your mild headache is terminal brain cancer. They can help keep you healthy too. While WebMD does indeed let you compare your symptoms with various illnesses and conditions to scare yourself silly, that’s not the most interesting thing about it or its Watch companion app.

WebMD enables you to detail your medication schedules, with dosage information and the option to be reminded of what you need to take and when you need to take it. This can be in the form of a notification, or you can have it as a Watch face Complication so it’s right there in the middle of the display.

It can also remind you of any prerequisites, such as whether you need to take your medicine with food or on an empty stomach. It’s the sort of simple but very useful thing the Apple Watch does well.

Over on the main iPhone app there’s plenty more to discover. You can read up on the side effects and precautions of specific pills or patches, find out if you need to go hiding from the flu or just catch up on the latest health and wellbeing news from various credible sources.

HeartWatch

How’s your heart? If you don’t know the answer, this app can shed some light. It might even save your life, as it did for James Green: the app alerted him about an unusual spike in his heart rate, and it turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. If it weren’t for the alert, Green might well have died.

You don’t really need more of a sales pitch to justify spending three dollars on staying alive, but HeartWatch isn’t a one-trick app. It pulls information from the Watch’s heart rate sensor to track what it’s doing when you wake, when you sleep, when you work out and when you just go about your day.

The reason for the different types of activity is simple: you don’t want your app warning you about elevated heart rate if you’re doing something designed to elevate your heart rate, an issue that used to drive us daft when exercising with our Apple Watch set to the defaults.

It won’t work without the Health app installed - that’s the route by which it gets its data - but you can also import data from other health apps if you use other kinds of connected health monitors.

One Drop Diabetes Management

We’re increasingly intrigued about HealthKit, Apple’s framework for health monitoring apps: we’ve already seen apps that can warn of rare but potentially lethal heart conditions, and now we’re seeing a whole host of specialist apps that can integrate with specific monitoring hardware to help with particular conditions. As the name suggests, this one’s for people with diabetes.

One Drop makes Chrome, a Bluetooth blood glucose meter that’s sold as a package with testing strips. If you have the meter the app gets information from each test, but if you don’t it’s still a useful app to help monitor your diabetes.

The app enables you to log your activity, your food intake and your medication and to share that information with HealthKit and the Health app (if that’s what you want to do). As ever the main iPhone app is where all the detail is, with the Watch app taking care of quick data recording and progress notifications.

The iPhone app builds on the basics with a database of foods’ nutritional information, historical data, insulin pump data and the ability to schedule reminders for your medication.

WorkOutDoors

If your idea of good exercise involves going far from the madding crowds, you’ll like WorkOutDoors. It’s a workout app that’s based around vector maps that you can easily rotate and zoom, tracking your location and your progress.

It uses the Watch’s GPS (if you have a GPS-enabled Watch) so there’s no need to take your phone on a hike, cycle or snowboard run, and features such as breadcrumb tracking, custom points of interest and customizable stats displays enable you to make the app truly your own.

In a nice touch you can export your workouts from the iPhone app in GPX format, which can be imported into many other workout apps and sites.

It’s very, very well thought out. For example, something as simple as the stats display is available in a variety of sizes to suit different kinds of activity (not to mention different levels of eyesight).

It makes good use of color-coding to make routes crystal clear, waypoints can provide extra information such as directions, and the map automatically rotates as you move so you’re always sure of the right direction. It’s a brilliant app for pretty much any outdoor activity.

Streaks

The trick to living better isn’t to damn near kill yourself on a treadmill and then give up after a few weeks. It’s to make smaller, lasting changes to your life, changes that you can and will actually stick to. And that’s what Streaks offers.

Whether you’re trying to eat more healthily, exercise more or break a smoking habit, Streaks enables you to track positive and negative habits. It offers a range of reporting tools so you can see exactly how well you’re doing, and you can track up to 12 different tasks at once.

They needn’t be exercise or eating tasks: you can remind yourself to walk the dog, study, take vitamins or practice a musical instrument. It’s good to see wheelchair users included in the default tasks list too.

Where Streaks really shines is in its integration with the Health app, which enables it to pull data to use for monitoring suitable targets you’ve set. That reduces a lot of the form-filling of similar apps, and it’s particularly effective if you’re trying to work on good healthy habits or eliminate unhealthy ones, or both.

There’s a Complication too, so that you don’t forget your goals, and the whole thing is customizable so that you can get it just-so.

Elevate Dash - Brain Training and Games

We’re not convinced by the supposed science of brain training - it’s a sector that makes bold claims based on very flimsy evidence - but there’s no doubt that spending time learning or practicing useful things is better for you than mindlessly swiping through trivia on Twitter.

Elevate claims that its brain training app will “improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence”, and it does so by setting little tasks for you: choosing the correct meaning of words, calculating percentages and so on.

Correct answers earn points, and you can track your progress on the main iPhone/iPad app as well as on your Watch. The Watch’s small screen means the games you get are very simple ones, but that works well when you’re on the move.

The app is free and lets you play 4 mini-games. If you want to access the full selection of 40+ Elevate games you’ll need your iPhone or iPad and a subscription to the premium membership package, which is $4.99/£3.99/AU$7.99 per month or $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year.

If you could do with a boost to specific skills - working out restaurant tips, perhaps, or improving your vocabulary - then you might feel that’s well worth the money.

Peak - Brain Training

From a team of developers, psychologists and neuroscientists, Peak is a great app for keeping your brain active. The Watch version offers three games, ideal for the smaller screen. Some of these seem simple at first, but they quickly become more challenging.

There are workouts to test memory, focus and problem solving – all of them fun, engaging, and the ideal to while away the daily commute. 

Runtastic Six Pack Abs Workout

If you've been meaning to get that six-pack tummy but just don't have time to go to the gym, this iPhone app has high-quality videos of avatars performing crunches, situps, stretches and core twists that you can do in your own time on your bedroom floor, say.

Initial workouts with Runtastic are free, more come as in-app purchases. And if squinting at your precariously perched iPhone isn't doing it for you, the Watch app means you can see an animation on your watch, with vibrations on your wrist to start and end a set. It's easy to use and works well. Now you'll have to find another excuse not to work out.

MyFitnessPal

Information is power and if you're trying to lose weight, calorie tracking is a good way to stay focused. MyFitnessPal works out a daily calorie allowance based on how much weight you want to shed. Eat a meal and your allowance is spent, take exercise and you earn credit.

The Watch gives you a running total of remaining calories and how that breaks down into protein, carbohydrates and more. It can integrate with your steps total so you don't have to add those manually. It's simple but convenient and helpful.

Walkmeter GPS Pedometer

If walking's your thing, Walkmeter helps track your every step, showing your perambulations on a map and generating detailed graphs. The Watch app has clear data reporting and you can start and stop a walk from your wrist using the Watch's Force Touch actions.

Apple's own Workout app does a lot, but this app has more detail and the mapping detail on the iPhone is great. The app is free but for full Watch performance you need to upgrade to the Elite version for $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99. There's a lot here, including training plans and announcements as you hit targets or distances.

CARROT Fit

You may know CARROT from its weather app, which combines Dark Sky-style weather forecasting with sarcasm and lies. But CARROT wants to make you unhappy in many other ways - and what’s better for a sadistic AI than being in control of a fitness app?

Enter CARROT Fit, which takes a somewhat unusual approach to motivating you to get healthier and lose weight.

CARROT promises to “get you fit - or else”. To achieve that it offers a dozen punishing exercises (more are available via in-app purchases) accompanied by threats, ridicule, bribes and the occasional compliment.

It’s rude, crude and much more entertaining than trying to complete the rings on Apple’s own activity tracker, and we’re pretty sure it’s the only fitness app that rewards progress with cat facts. But there’s a proper fitness tracker in here too: it’ll track your steps and weight loss, remember your workouts and add data to Apple’s health app.

Most of the personality is in the main iPhone app, but the Watch alerts include such cheery prospects as “seven minutes in hell”. If you find getting fit or losing weight a little bit tedious, CARROT might be the, ahem, carrot that you need to get motivated.

Lose It!

If your Watch strap is feeling a little more snug than it used to, this app may be the answer: it’s designed to help you achieve your weight loss goals “without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.”

It tracks the calories you’ve consumed and the goals you’ve set, focuses on nutrition as well as overall calorie intake, works happily with other fitness apps and trackers and provides an online peer group where everybody encourages each other to achieve their ideal weight.

It also enables you to set exercise goals and focus on general wellness, so it’s not just about losing weight.

The Apple Watch app doesn’t replace the phone app completely - for example, you’ll need your phone handy if you want to use the barcode scanner to automatically record what you’re eating, and the team-based features such as group challenges are phone-based - but it’s a great way to focus on your goals, monitor your progress and keep your motivation no matter how sorely tempted you may be.

The program is $39.99/£29.99/AU$62.99 per year but you can explore the app for free without signing up.

Mount Burnmore

Fitness fanatics look away now: for those that find exercise really boring, and their get up and go often gets up and goes while they stay sedentary. Mount Burnmore could be the answer to that lethargy: it turns fitness into a game.

The concept is quite clever. Mount Burnmore depends on “active energy”, which it pulls from the Health app: the more calories you’ve burned, the more active energy you have in the game.

When you have sufficient energy you can attempt to solve the game’s puzzles, which involve finding routes around the titular mountain, collecting in-game items and smashing things with a pickaxe.

There’s a Complication that enables you to see your progress without launching the full game, and the app makes good use of the Digital Crown to help you navigate around larger levels later in the game. There are also leaderboards to compare with other players and in-game challenges to win freebies.

It’s bright, breezy and a bit brash, and we suspect it’s best suited to older children rather than grown-ups - although if you do give this one to the kids you might want to disable in-app purchases, as they can be used to buy in-game items.

Happier

Mindfulness, the art of focusing on being present and aware in the world instead of being constantly distracted by things and thoughts that don’t matter, isn’t something you’d associate with the Apple Watch. If you aren’t careful with your notification settings your Watch pings away merrily all day, interrupting countless trains of thought.

But the Happier app hopes to use the Watch to make you feel better, not more harassed.

The app itself is free, but it’s designed as a gateway to paid-for mindfulness courses. If you don’t go for them you can still take advantage of the app, though. You can tell the app how you’re feeling - we suspect “meh” is the most-used option - and it then responds with uplifting quotes to help you feel a bit more optimistic.

It can pop up to remind you to take a meditation break, and you can dictate a positive thought to a private journal or to the Happier community. That’s not as daft as it sounds: there’s some evidence that keeping a journal of positive things can boost your mood over time.

Just be careful what and how you share: one iTunes reviewer says that they were able to locate their private journal with Google.

Best Apple Watch sleep apps

It's worth noting that there aren't a lot of apps for sleep tracking, as the Apple Watch can't really last overnight on battery.

That said, there are some clever apps to do it, and many people are now on their sequel Apple Watch and can even have one for the day and one for the night - so sleep tracking with your 'Night Watch' is possible.

Sleep Watch

The massively improved battery life of the current generation Apple Watch makes it much better for sleep tracking: you can now wear your Watch in bed, pop it off while you get ready for work or school and leave home with a full charge for getting on with your day.

And that means there’s been an influx of new sleep apps, many of which take the basic idea of sleep monitoring and add additional reporting and insight.

When you use Sleep Watch you’ll get used to the daily question, how well rested do you feel? The app tracks that as well as your heart rate and the quality of your sleep to give an indication of how good or otherwise your sleep has been.

It offers daily sleep briefings (we’d love an abusive CARROT-style AI for the days when the report clearly says we’re knackered) and trend analysis, and it highlights whether your heart rate is dropping normally during rest - a potential warning sign if it isn’t.

It’d be good if we could also add blame, such as a heavy night out causing us to get up all through the night, but maybe that’ll be in a future version.

Best Apple Watch apps for music, podcasts and audiobooks

Pandora

  • Pandora
  • Free (requires Plus or Premium subscription)

Spotify isn’t the only streaming music giant to bring offline listening to the Apple Watch. If you’re in the US (the service isn’t currently available to international listeners) Pandora does it too. It has released a brand new app that enables you to listen offline, and rate and control your music without having to reach for your phone.

The app itself is free, but you’ll need a paid-for Plus or Premium subscription to use it: like Spotify, the free tier doesn’t support offline music. Offline listening requires watchOS 5 or later. Plus subscriptions are currently $4.99 per month and Premium subscriptions are $12.99.

The updated iPhone app brings support for Siri Shortcuts, and it also integrates with the Messages app so that you can send and receive songs without leaving the Messages app. There’s even an Apple TV app that uses the same subscription.

Pandora is a good way to get hold of not just music but podcasts too. Discovering new content, whether music or podcasts, is simple thanks to a good selection of recommendations and playlists, and if you go for the Plus subscription you can create unlimited personalized stations as well as up to four stations for offline listening.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts is a firm favorite among podcast users, with 8 years of constant improvements under its belt. Now in its seventh incarnation, it’s one of the best ways to stay on top of your podcast pile. It’s also eminently sociable with support not just for the Apple Watch but for Chromecast, Sonos, CarPlay and AirPlay.

Although the app is perfect for beginners, there’s a lot here for serious listeners, including excellent filters, automatic downloads, listening history and extensive notifications.

Version 7 enables you to listen to individual episodes without subscribing, streamlines the user interface, has excellent archiving that retains your playback history and supports Siri Shortcuts. There’s been a big effort to improve discovery, so the app makes it much easier to find new podcasts it thinks you’ll like as well as the podcasts you’ve found for yourself.

As with other apps of this ilk most of the heavy lifting is done by the iPhone app, with the Watch app there to provide access to the features that make sense on your wrist: playback control, of course, but also speeding the podcast up or down, trimming silence and boosting the volume. You can see what’s next, browse new releases and scroll through the podcast charts too.

Spotify Music

At last! Spotify finally makes its way to the Apple Watch with an app that does everything you might expect it to do. It plays music! It pauses music! It connects to other devices via the magic of Spotify Connect! It gives you playlists! It has a shuffle button!

The one thing it doesn’t do, though, is stream: the music you hear via your Watch is coming from your iPhone, not directly to the Apple Watch. We’d expect that to change in future versions of the app. It hasn’t been optimized for the larger display of the Apple Watch 4 either, so it looks a bit odd on the most recent models.

We’re big fans of and subscribers to Spotify: its catalog is enormous and it’s enormously sociable too, with apps for every conceivable platform. Being able to pay once for an ad-free subscription that works on your phone, tablet, Watch, TV, console and in the car is a fantastic thing.

While the ad-funded version isn’t too annoying we think the higher quality and convenient offline listening features (already available on iPhone but coming soon to the Watch app too) of the paid-for Premium version are well worth the money.

djay 2

We’re big fans of Algoriddim’s clever DJ app, and it’s a particularly fun thing to have on your iPhone: its clever algorithms and straightforward interface make it easy to mix like the pros, its Spotify Premium integration means your DJ box is almost infinite and its Automix feature does a really good job of working out the best places to transition and the right fades and effects to apply.

But sometimes you want to take part without necessarily firing up the full djay app on your phone, for example if you’re in party mode and want to quickly change tracks or just show off a bit.

Enter the Apple Watch app, which enables you to DJ in much the same way as you would if you were a giant in a world of really tiny people: don’t expect to do much scratching, but you can fade from one track to another, pause and sync, add special effects or turn Automix on and off. It’s effectively Apple Music’s watch integration brought to the world of DJing, and that means it’s an absolute hoot.

The watch integration is little more than a remote control, but that’s okay: the main app is really clever and enormous fun.

Overcast

If you love to listen to podcasts and you don’t already have Overcast, you’re in for a nice surprise: it’s a superb app, and its Watch integration is particularly well thought out.

In addition to the usual controls and lists of shows and episodes, it gives you quick access to two really useful features: Smart Speed, which can make the podcast play more quickly without turning into Alvin and the Chipmunks; and Voice Boost, which can make indistinct speech noticeably clearer and compensate for podcasters who can’t pick a single spot in front of the mic.

If you’ve ever strained to hear something only for the host to move closer to the mic and nearly blow your eardrums out, you should be rushing to the App Store already

Overcast is free, or $9.99/£8.99/AU$12.99 without the ads. We’d recommend going for the ad-free version, because while the advertising isn’t too invasive this is an app that’s been put together by people who really care about the end user experience, and paying for the full app is a great way to ensure that they’ll keep on caring. 

Castro Podcasts

The Castro podcast app has been around for a while and has developed a loyal fanbase, and it’s just been given a major overhaul as well as an Apple Watch companion app.

On your wrist it’s really very simple: it enables you to move around the audio, change the volume or move between episodes.

On the iPhone the main app has been completely rebuilt with a brand-new playback engine to significantly boost speed and responsiveness, and the player screen now incorporates AirPlay controls for easier streaming to compatible hardware.

It’s a very good app, and there are extra features if you go for the optional Castro Plus subscription, including getting rid of silent sections, mixing stereo down to mono, episode limits to prevent your device from downloading entire volumes of podcasts, and automatic start positions to skip past standard intros and other pre-content content.

You can set these preferences on a per-podcast basis, which is a really useful option for power podcast users. You can try Castro Plus for a week before deciding whether to get it, and it’s available as a quarterly or yearly sub.

Audible

You may know Audible already: it’s the Amazon-owned audiobook service that enables you to devour books on the move, in bed or anywhere else you can get comfortable. The catalog is vast, books are often narrated by very big names and the overall quality is very high. And now, you can use it without taking your phone with you thanks to its Apple Watch app.

The app is compatible with every Apple Watch made so far and enables you to transfer audiobooks to your Watch, provided of course that you have enough available storage.

It’s important to note that Audible doesn’t stream to your watch: you need to sync your audiobook(s) from your iPhone, which can take a while over the Watch’s desperately slow connection. But once the book has been transferred you can play, pause, fast forward and rewind. You could listen via the Watch’s speaker but we wouldn’t recommend it; Audible is best experienced on a decent pair of wireless headphones.

We think the Audible Watch app is best suited to environments where you don’t want to have your phone: the gym is the one that springs immediately to mind: we can’t be the only people who’d rather listen to a book than pumping techno on a treadmill.

Best Apple Watch apps for photo and video

GoPro

  • GoPro
  • Free + in-app purchases

The GoPro app used to be called Capture, but its new name suits it better: after all, what else would you call the companion app for GoPro cameras? Like most camera apps for the Apple Watch, the bits you can do on your wrist are fairly limited. It’s really just a viewfinder and remote control, which is perfectly useful if hardly revolutionary.

The main iPhone app is more ambitious. It features Quikstories, which automatically turns your GoPro footage into a finished video complete with effects and background music. You can view the images and video you’ve captured on your camera, trim videos down and share to social media or via text or email.

One nice feature is the ability to overlay data such as GPS paths and locations on top of your footage. You can even detail the G-force you felt when you were doing whatever extreme thing you’ve been recording. There’s also video stabilization for Fusion cameras and the ability to turn 360-degree photos into videos.

It’s pretty good, but make sure your camera is compatible. The app is currently limited to Fusion, HERO6, HERO5, HERO4, HERO Session, HERO+ LCD and HERO+ cameras.

Camera Plus

While using Apple’s Watch as a remote control or viewfinder can be handy - we can’t be the only ones who use it to see what’s on top of cupboards or to read the meters when there’s loads of stuff between them and us - the app has always felt as if it could do more. That’s where Camera Plus comes in.

As an iPhone/iPad app it’s an interesting and fun alternative to the iOS 11 default, with a useful feature that enables you to control the camera on one iOS device with the Camera Plus app on another. It adds an extra function to the Watch too.

The Apple Watch bit is obviously a lot less ambitious, but it’s still useful. As with the Apple app, you can remote control the iPhone or iPad camera, turn the flash on or off, use a countdown timer and switch between the front and rear cameras. But where the Apple app offers the ability to turn Live Photos on or off, Camera Plus gives you the option to switch between photo and video.

The main iOS app is clearly the driver here, with some fun and useful features including flexible flash levels for better exposure and the aforementioned iOS-to-iOS remote control. But the Watch app is a handy, or perhaps wristy, companion.

HomeCam for HomeKit

You can probably guess what this one does from the title: it’s an app for cameras that use Apple’s HomeKit. The app is a remote viewer that enables you to check multiple cameras simultaneously, and if your hardware supports features such as temperature and air quality monitoring you can then take action by invoking other HomeKit devices such as connected air conditioners or heating.

It can also combine data from multiple devices together, so for example you could overlay temperature data over a live camera feed, and it’s fully compatible with the new Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12, which enables you to create automated actions. You can also use it to control HomeKit features such as the lighting in a room, and you can add a Today widget for even faster access from your lock screen.

The main action happens in the iPhone and iPad app, largely because of screen real estate: the Watch has many good features, but a giant screen isn’t one of them. That means the Watch app shows a single-camera view. 

It can use your Watch’s microphone and speaker as an intercom (again, if your camera hardware supports audio), but it’s best suited for quick camera checking when your iPhone isn’t handy.

FiLMiC Pro

  • FiLMiC Pro
  • $14.99/£14.99/AU$22.99 plus in-app purchases

Here’s an odd one: FiLMiC Pro has a distinctly average App Store rating of 2.3 out of 5 at time of writing, and yet the developers’ shelves are groaning under the weight of the app’s many awards from reputable websites and publications who say that for video, it’s the best thing since bread came sliced. What’s going on?

The short answer is that when you have hardly any reviews, one or two disgruntled users can send your rating down the drain. That’s clearly what’s happening here.

Negatives first. FiLMiC Pro costs more money than many apps, and it can kill your phone battery in prolonged use. But it’s an incredibly powerful iOS camera app used by film-makers, journalists and hobbyists alike. Pair it with a decent editor and your iPhone is a pro-level film studio.

The Watch app is really just a remote for the main event. You can record, pause and resume your recording and see what the phone camera’s pointing at, and you can play back what you’ve just recorded. It’s not really different from Apple’s own camera Watch app. 

But the app it connects to is a powerhouse: people complaining about the price tag should really be marveling that it’s possible to get something so good for so little money.

Best Apple Watch apps for notes, passwords and making life easier

Google Keep

You may remember in 2017, when Google pulled its various Apple Watch apps. But now, it seems Google is back in the wristy business. This month the Google Keep app was updated with a new feature: support for the Apple Watch.

Google Keep is essentially Apple’s Reminders for people who prefer Google’s way of doing things, and like Reminders it uses the cloud to sync with desktop and online versions of the app. You can use it to create, edit and share notes and to-do lists, to include photos and audio in notes and in a clever touch, to record voice memos and have Google automatically turn those memos into editable, searchable text.

That feature is included in the Apple Watch app, but you can’t use your Watch to edit existing notes – although you can create new ones either via your voice, via scribbling or by entering emoji. You can also archive or prioritize notes by using Force Touch.

The app keeps things simple by showing you the ten most recent notes, and while you can do dictation there’s no Siri integration. There isn’t a Watch face complication either. Here’s hoping that Google adds such features in later versions – assuming, of course, it doesn’t decide to stop supporting the Apple Watch in the future.

OmniFocus 3

The Omni Group is well-known and well-loved for its productivity apps, and version 3 of OmniFocus is available not just for iPhone and iPad but for the Apple Watch too. It’s an extraordinarily useful project and task management app, but while it’s very powerful it’s also very easy to use.

It also manages to pack a lot of information into the screen of your Apple Watch with good use of icons, numbers and bulleted lists. You can display a quick overview as a complication in the Utility Watch face, or call up the app directly to get an instant picture of what you need to care about now and in the immediate future.

The standard and pro versions of the app are free trials, and you can then unlock Standard for $39.99/£38.99/AU$62.99. That gives you almost everything OmniFocus can do, but if you want to add customization options you can go Pro for $59.99/$54.99/AU$89.99 (if you go for Standard first and want to upgrade later, that’s $19.99/£19.99/AU$30.99).

The customization enables you to create custom filters to create a custom perspective on your project, and you can reorder the Today’s Forecast to give you the information you want exactly as you want it.

Calendars 5

You may know Readdle already: it’s the developer behind the superb Spark email app, as well as the popular and useful PDF Expert. Calendars 5 has been around for a while, but the Apple Watch support only arrived in December 2018. As we’ve come to expect from Readdle apps it’s well-designed and useful without unnecessary gimmicks or eye candy.

The app works as a Watch face complication and as a dedicated app. It also supports Siri, so you can ask it to tell you what you’ve got scheduled or create a new item with just your voice. The app works with both iCloud and Google calendars for easy syncing, and it works both online and offline.

The iPhone app is great too, with natural language input and support for the kinds of things you need a calendar app to do such as complex recurring events (for example, a class that runs every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday), custom alerts and event invitations.

The app also includes a good task manager that enables you to track and clear your various to-do and task lists. It’s good on the iPad, too, where it takes full advantage of the big screen to give you a birds-eye view of your week or month.

Ecobee

Smart home technology and the Apple Watch go together like cheese and biscuits or winter and horrific energy bills. Being able to control your smart home without having to find your phone, iPad or remote is a great time-saver and particularly good when you don’t want to move.

We’ve seen good smart home apps from the likes of Philips’s Hue, and now Ecobee is getting in on the act. The latest iteration of its iPhone app adds Apple Watch functionality, and while there aren’t any complications for ultra-fast access, they’re apparently on the to-do list.

As you’d expect the app is designed solely for Ecobee hardware: it’s not cross-platform with support for other people’s smart home hardware, so you can’t use it to replace multiple apps from other providers.

The Watch app takes a familiar approach with large icons showing numerical information where appropriate, so for example if you set the heating to 72 degrees, you’ll see the number 72 in the heating temperature icon. You can adjust temperature, fan speeds and lighting from within the app, and if you’re out and about you can switch the thermostat from Home mode to away mode or just turn the lights off to frighten your family.

HomeRun for HomeKit

HomeRun doesn’t do much, but what it does do it does very well. It’s a companion for Apple’s HomeKit framework, which enables you to control various smart home devices, and it addresses one of the key problems with Apple’s own Home app: Home is a bit of a mess, cramming lots of stuff on screen and making what should be really quite simple rather confusing.

HomeRun takes a different approach. Its interface uses icons rather than text, so for example if you want to change a smart thermostat you could choose to have buttons showing a thermometer: a blue one for colder and an orange one for warmer. And it focuses solely on scenes, with up to 12 scene icons shown on your Watch at once. Effectively it’s a bunch of toggles: turn this on or off, turn that up or down, make that louder or quieter.

It’s simple to use and just as simple to configure, with the iPhone app making it easy to create the scenes you want on your wrist. You can also create Apple Watch complications, so for example you might put an on/off toggle in the corner of one of your Watch faces for quick control of something.

Fantastical 2

Getting Fantastical 2 up and running on your watch can be time consuming, but it’s worth it: one of the very best iPhone calendar apps around develops even more powers when you add its app to your watch.

You can also add it as a complication, which means you’ll see details of your schedule right there in the watch face.

To actually make it work you’ll need to install Fantastical to your watch and then open the iPhone app, not the Apple Watch one. This is where you specify what information should be sent to the watch, and the options are extensive.

You can choose from events, calendars, reminders and lists, include a map of the event location, show end times and specify how reminders should appear, and you can even specify what should happen if you tap on the Fantastical 2 complication on your watch face.

It’s that kind of thought and attention to detail that makes us love the app so much.

The best thing about Fantastical 2, though, is that it understands you. Force Touch the app, tap on Add Event and Siri starts listening.

It knows what you mean by “lunch with Dave”, automatically putting the appointment at 12 noon, and it knows that if you say “to-do get dinner on the way home” you’re adding an item to a to-do list. Siri’s voice recognition performs brilliantly when it’s limited to such a specific set of instructions.

SimpleCommands

This is an intriguing one. SimpleCommands enables you to connect your Apple Watch to various other devices – LIFX lights, TP-link switches, Wink doors, Nest thermometers, Netatmo home automation and so on – and soon, services such as Spotify, Lyft, IFTTT, Todoist and Twitter.

Once you’ve established a connection, you can then control that connection via your iPhone or Watch (you need to set them up in the iPhone app first). Your Watch then becomes what the developer calls a listener.

All you then need to do to make something happen is tell the listener what to do. The main benefit is that to paraphrase Radiohead, everything’s in its right place: whether it’s your aircon or your lighting system, it’s all done from a single app on your wrist.

Brilliant, right? Well, potentially. The list of coming soon connections is longer than the list of currently supported ones, and early adopters say it’s a bit flaky: we’re still in version one-point-something territory, so you should expect bugs.

But if you’re fed up having to use different apps to control every different digital thing in your life, this could be the thing to make your digital life much more comfortable.

IFTTT

If This Then That, IFTTT for short, may be one of the most useful things on the internet. As the name suggests, it enables you to create scenarios where if this happens, it does that. And the ‘that’ can include all kinds of things, with a selection of connectors for software and hardware alike.

For example, you can automatically change your thermostat based on the weather forecast, or send someone a message when you’re near the shops, or backup your photo collection to a cloud storage site at a particular time or when a particular event occurs. It’s absolutely brilliant, and the main iPhone app enables you control more than 600 different apps as well as smart home devices such as Hue lights and Nest thermostats.

As you’d expect the Watch app doesn’t do everything. What it does do is provide quick access to IFTTT functions you’ve already installed or created on your phone, so for example you might post a quick tweet or turn your smart lights on or off.

That simplicity is no bad thing, because of course the whole ethos of IFTTT is to reduce the amount of effort you use to communicate with your various bits of technology.

1Password

  • 1Password
  • $3.99/£3.49/AU$5.99 monthly subscription

A reliable and secure password manager is a must-have in these days of security breaches and hacks, and 1Password is one of the best. And it turns out that it’s also one of the best password managers you can use on your Apple Watch.

Our favorite apps don’t just port entire iPhone apps across. They think about what you’re actually likely to need on your wrist, and do that instead. In the case of 1Password that means you choose the pieces of information you want available on your Watch, so for example you might want details of a few logins, one credit card and a couple of notes, or perhaps the PIN codes for everyday locks.

If you’ve ever frantically scrolled through an iPhone app or contacts list to try and find the PIN for a bank card you don’t use very often, the appeal should be obvious.

Where 1Password gets particularly clever is in its support for team and family accounts, so you can share sets of information with everybody who needs it. And if a site you use has been compromised, 1Password will alert you to change your password. It’s great stuff, and comes with a glowing recommendation from Apple.

Drafts

On the face of it, and by face we mean Apple Watch face, Drafts doesn’t seem to offer much for six quidbucks: it enables you to dictate text and save it for later. But it turns out that it does an awful lot...it just does it in a really simple way.

On the iPhone, Drafts is designed to make it easy to capture ideas, thoughts, to-dos or anything else.

It has an email-style interface for easy navigation and it enables you to send your Drafts to a whole bunch of other apps and services: email, message, apps in your Share sheet, social media and so on.

It supports Markdown for easy formatting, and it hooks into the iMessage app to provide stored “snippets” of text and/or emoji for instant replies.

Bringing Drafts to the Watch makes it even faster. Tap on the microphone icon to capture and it does just that - but it also enables you to add to existing drafts using either your voice or the Scribble input, which means it’s brilliant for those moments when you think of something really clever to write or something you’d missed from your to-do list. It’s the kind of app you’ll quickly learn to love.

Hours

  • Hours
  • Free / in-app purchases

Many of us need to track the time we spend on specific tasks, but the team behind Hours rightly point out the three big pitfalls of time tracking: we forget to start tracking in the first place, forget to stop when we change tasks, or just forget to stop the timer(s) altogether. Hours hopes to address that by making it really, really easy to start and stop and switch.

The iPhone app is a very beautiful thing, with a visual timeline that makes it easy to see what you’ve been up to. The Watch interface is much simpler, but just as effective: you can see the list of tasks with a timer icon for each, and if you tap on a task you can add a verbal note as well as starting or stopping the timer.

There’s a Complication for instant access, and the app will prompt you from time to time to see if you want to keep the selected timer running.

The standard version is free and ideal for self-employed or freelance types, but the $7.99/£5.99/AU$12.99 upgrade to Pro adds multi-device synchronization, web access, reporting and data visualizations, team creation and management, and online backup, which means it’s a great team tool too.

Just Press Record

One of the most useful things about the Apple Watch is that it enables you to do things without having to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Just Press Record brings that handiness to voice recording, enabling you to capture bright ideas, rambling monologues or memos when you’re out and about.

The interface is just a big red button with a picture of a microphone on it, and as you might expect you tap it to start recording. The phone app can transcribe your recording to turn it into text - which means your recordings become searchable by keyword - and it recognises formatting commands such as “new paragraph” and “comma”.

To use it is to feel like you’re living in the future: we remember when dictation and transcription required a powerful PC and endless patience, and now you get much better results with a watch. Isn’t technology brilliant?

In addition to its recording and transcription features, the app syncs automatically via iCloud, so you can access it on all your devices - including macOS, for which there’s a separate app - and it uses the Watch’s own local storage so that you can record even if your phone isn’t currently connected.

Evernote

Organize your life better with Evernote, the brilliant note-taking app which saves photos, text, recipes, bookmarks, voice notes and more. On Apple Watch you can set reminders and check off tasks easily enough.

You can dictate new notes for those brilliant ideas you mustn't forget just by tapping the Plus button or Force Touching the screen. The Watch app can search existing notes using voice – though this wasn't as reliable as I'd have liked. Even so, if you're an Evernote fan it brings an extra level of convenience.

OneNote

If there’s one thing the App Store isn’t short of, it’s note-taking apps. But it’s worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsoft’s cloud, it’s a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.

We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services it’s completely free. Microsoft hopes you’ll like it so much you’ll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.

Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.

And that’s pretty much all it does - and that’s all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. We’d much rather have speed and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles.

Owaves

Owaves is an interesting app: it’s a 24-hour day planner that’s designed for people who want to focus on their physical and mental health. That means scheduling and prioritizing me-time and play time as well as work time, a kind of Getting Things Done for the mindfulness generation.

Owaves is based around what it describes as the five key ingredients for a happy life: sleep, nutrition, exercise, relaxation and social interactions. You can still schedule work things, chores and day to day admin, but they’re not the sole focus as you’ll find in other planning apps. The idea is to make room in your life for your life.

The bulk of the action - scheduling events, seeing your entire schedule and so on - happens on your iPhone, and the Watch app has been designed as a companion rather than a replacement: it tells you what’s coming up rather than trying to replicate the main app’s functions.

You can add it as a watch face complication, which is particularly good on the Modular watch face: if you make it the main complication in the center it’s got room to tell you not just what you’ve scheduled now but also what you’ve got happening afterwards.

Voice in a Can

Voice in a Can is famous, or perhaps infamous: it hit the headlines because it brings Amazon’s Alexa to the Apple Watch, something neither Amazon nor Apple have decided to do so far. That’s an interesting idea, because in our experience Alexa is much more reliable than Siri on our various devices: she’s much better at recognizing our commands and doing what we want. However, while the idea’s interesting the execution isn’t great.

The app works, but there are some important restrictions. You can’t use it to control your music, play podcasts or make calls, and only some flash briefings work. If your watch goes into standby mode it drops the Alexa connection. The developers recommend extending the timeout period for apps on your Watch, which is effectively admitting that it just doesn’t work quickly enough.

Until or unless Amazon or Apple offer Alexa support this is the only way to have Alexa on your wrist, and the app is a handy way of controlling smart home devices if you’re committed more to Amazon than to Apple. However it’s very limited, very much a side project for the developer and more of a proof of concept than an app you’re going to use for everyday Alexa stuff.

Knock

  • Knock
  • $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99

Passwords are essential, but they’re also rubbish. The ones you can remember are easy to guess, the ones that are hard to guess are equally hard to remember, and if you do passwords properly it can be a pain to enter complicated strings of text and characters when you’re in a hurry.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could prove your identity to your Mac with your Watch? That’s exactly what Knock does.

Knock is a simple idea brilliantly executed. Provided your Mac is of relatively recent vintage - an Air from 2011 or better, a MacBook Pro or iMac from late 2012, a 2013 or later Mac Pro and so on - you can use Knock to automatically unlock your Mac or Macs by tapping the Apple Watch app.

It’s connecting via Bluetooth Low Energy - hence the reliance on relatively recent Macs; older ones don’t have Bluetooth LE - which uses tiny amounts of energy, so you don’t need to worry about the app killing your Watch’s battery any more than usual, and it works instantly if your Mac isn’t in sleep mode.

It may seem quite pricey for such a simple app, but think about how much time you spend locking and unlocking your Macs in a year.

Note that you may not need this if you have a recent Mac running macOS Sierra, as there’s a similar feature built in, but Knock is compatible with slightly older Macs too.

Authy

Passwords aren’t good enough anymore. The easy ones are too easy to crack, and the hard ones keep getting compromised when big-name firms get hacked and all their customer data gets compromised. 

You can make your various online services much more secure with two-factor authentication, which adds an extra level of security to everything, and that’s what Authy offers.

The big benefit of Authy is that it isn’t insecure like SMS is, so you can be sure that your two-factor authentication code isn’t going to be intercepted and used by the bad guys. 

Authy is compatible with Google Authenticator, so any service that accepts the Google tool will accept it – so you can use it not just with Google but with Microsoft and Amazon accounts too. There’s a growing number of Authy-supporting websites as well.

As ever, the bulk of the work happens on the iPhone app, with the Watch component simply providing access to the time-limited tokens so that you can enter the appropriate code into the site you want to access. That’s not a weakness: the whole point of two-factor authentication is to make life harder for the criminals without making it more annoying for you.

Find Near Me

Guess what this does. Go on, guess. Yep: it finds things near you. Sadly that doesn’t mean the TV remote, your keys or the gaming controller – whoever finds a way of doing that which doesn’t involve sticking Bluetooth tags to everything will become a trillionaire – but it does mean cash machines, bars and coffee shops. The only in-app purchase is $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 to remove adverts from the iPhone app.

It works exactly like you’d expect. First, you choose the category of thing you want to find. Then, you scroll through the results. And to finish, you tap the one you want to find out more about. From there you can then be guided on foot, in the car or on your bike.

The app makes extensive use of Google Maps, and that means it’s only as good as the Google Maps data: some users report inaccuracies such as long-shut businesses. If you’re wondering why you can’t just use Google Maps and cut out the middleman, it’s because Google canned its Apple Watch app last year: if you want Google Maps on your wrist, you need a third-party app that hooks into it. Like this one.

Deliveries

Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something you’re really excited about? Yes: there’s missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.

It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.

It’s unnecessary for the odd package, but it’s useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if you’re in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.

On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of what’s in and what’s incoming, so for example it’ll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.

There’s a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developer’s own cloud sync service.

Clicker

We’ve described the iPhone as the Very Hungry Caterpillar of tech, munching its way through entire product categories as stand-alone devices become iOS apps. We’re often delighted by the simplest things, and Clicker is one of those things. 

It’s a replacement for those hand-held clickers people use to count things, and it’s appropriate for counting people, days, laps, drinks or anything else you might want to quantify. 

To use it, just tap on the screen and tap again when you want another click. Haptic feedback means you don’t need to look at the watch, and you don’t need to have the clicker display all day: when you’re ready for a new click you can pull it up from its Complication. You can record up to 2,147,483,647 taps.

And that’s pretty much it: there are only two other options: subtract, to remove a mistaken click, and reset, to start again.

It’s hardly a must-have but it’s actually very handy, so for example we’ve seen users tracking how often they smoke during the day or how many glasses of water they’ve had. We wouldn’t recommend using it for counting sheep, though - or at least, not on the first-generation Apple Watch, whose battery isn’t really up to working nights.

Stocard

One of the things we hoped Apple’s Wallet/Passbook app would deliver was an end to purses and wallets full of loyalty cards: our purse is so packed with the damn things that if we sit down with it in a back pocket one of our buttocks is a good six inches higher than the other. Wallet hasn’t quite changed that yet, but Stocard has a pretty good try.

Stocard enables you to scan and store your loyalty cards (and some other cards such as some membership cards; generally speaking if it has a barcode or QR code on it, Stocard can probably digitize it), and then access them from your iPhone or Apple Watch when you’re at the checkout.

Whether it works or not depends on the store infrastructure: until recently the self-scanners in Tesco didn’t like it, but now that they’ve been upgraded they scan happily. The cards are automatically added to your Apple Wallet as well as kept inside the Stocard app.

The main benefit for you is convenience, as not only does Stocard reduce the amount of cards you have to carry without forcing you to miss out on loyalty points, but it also provides you with details of relevant special offers as you shop.

Best Apple Watch apps for email, chat and messaging

Chirp for Twitter

You’d think Twitter’s brevity and the Apple Watch’s usefulness would be a match made in Heaven, but Twitter isn’t interested in maintaining an official Watch app and our favourite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetbot, is very limited on the Apple Watch. Enter Chirp, which promises to bring all the features you need to your Watch - and unusually, it does so without playing second fiddle to an iPhone app. Chirp was designed purely as a Watch app.

Chirp delivers on its promises: it does an excellent job of bringing Twitter to your wrist, with the ability to see tweets as well as their popularity in terms of likes and retweets. You can browse Twitter trends, see embedded photos, retweet or like other people’s posts, and you can actually interact with others.

You can post your own thoughts or reply to other people’s tweets, and the most recent update added support for sending Direct Messages and for viewing lists. Some of these features are restricted to the paid-for Pro version, but it’s a very cheap in-app purchase and the main app is free to use so you can try it before you decide whether you need the pro features.

Telegram

Oh, the drama: Telegram 5 initially dropped its Apple Watch companion app, but now it’s back! Back! BACK!

The reason for this is that Telegram 5 has been rebuilt from the ground up to make it faster and more efficient; the Watch update simply wasn’t ready in time.

Telegram is a secure instant messaging service that works on iPhone, iPad and once again, Apple Watch. It enables you to group chat with up to 30,000 people, which is more than enough for most of us, and unlike other messaging services it’s really good at sharing things like documents, zip files and other useful things.

It’s both free and ad-free, and if you’re worried about privacy you can take part in Secret Chats where messages self-destruct after a specified time. As with all private apps that doesn’t stop somebody taking a screenshot, taking a photo or duplicating content in some other way, but the end-to-end encryption does mean you can be confident that others aren’t listening in.

Telegram’s main selling point is its efficiency. It’s designed to do its job with the minimum amount of data transfer necessary, something that’s important in places with poor network coverage or for people with metered data connections, and it’s also designed to operate with the minimum load on your battery.

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger on Apple Watch got a late start, but it finally lets you respond to those pressing messages to friends and family without opening up the sioled-off app on your phone or website on a computer.

You can initiate and reply with a thumbs up (which I see as kind of curt and rude) or dictate a reply. Sending Facebook's ugly smiley face or your current location can be done with the press of one or two taps too. No, there's still no WhatsApps for Apple Watch, but this is the next best thing from Facebook.

Tweetbot 4

If you aren’t already familiar with Tweetbot 4, it’s the best Mac and iOS Twitter client bar none. This is why it can charge $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 for an iOS app and people gladly pay it, and it’s worth checking out on the Apple Watch too.

Tweetbot doesn’t unleash the Twitter firehose onto your wrist - we can’t think of anything guaranteed to kill your battery more quickly - but it does give you exactly the information you need when you aren’t looking at your phone.

The developers have rightly assumed that if you have your phone to hand you won’t be using the watch instead, so they’ve concentrated on making an app for when you can’t or don’t want to pull your phone out of your pocket or purse. And that’s clever.

Its Activity pane shows you what’s happening in your feed, so if somebody’s followed you or replied to you or tweeted you then you’ll see it in Activity. Tapping on the item opens the appropriate tweet or user page, and with tweets you’ll see icons for a quick reply, a retweet or a like.

If you push into the screen using Force Touch you get an offer to create a new tweet, and both it and the reply option use Siri for dictation, because on-watch typing would be frankly horrible - and you can dictate a direct message or follow/unfollow accounts from the app too.

Outlook

Microsoft earned well-deserved death stares from many Watch users when it bought and retired the excellent Sunrise Calendar iOS app, but its Outlook app is worth adding to your wrist.

It’s from the new, interesting Microsoft, not the staid bore of old: it works well, looks great and won’t crash your watch.

Outlook is a combined email and calendar app that connects to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, and its main claim to fame is the focused inbox: instead of showing you everything emailed, it shows the most important stuff only and learns by watching your swipes.

It’s particularly good in a corporate environment, where its talents cope admirably with endless meeting requests, time changes and backside-covering email traffic, enabling you to prioritize things that matter and forget about things that don’t.

That doesn’t mean it’s only for corporate types, though. Outlook is a really, really good email app and boasts a useful Complication that enables you to see what’s next on your schedule from the main Apple Watch display. If you have a busy life, a busy inbox or both it’s a very useful app to have on your arm.

Spark

There’s no shortage of apps promising to make email fun again, and Spark is one of our favorites: on our Mac and on our iPhone it does a superb job of showing us what we want and hiding what we don’t.

The Apple Watch app is as well thought-out as its siblings, with the ability to use Messages-style quick replies as well as emoji and dictation. It’s quite possible to reply to most everyday emails without reaching for your iPhone, although the option to Handoff is there if a message is too long to bother scrolling through on your wrist.

The main selling point for Spark is its Smart Inbox, which groups messages from multiple accounts into personal, notification and newsletter categories. It then displays how many unread messages you have for each category in the Watch app’s home screen.

You can pin messages for quick access, and you can snooze them to hide them for a specified period of time. We find ourselves using that last one a lot: messages we can’t process properly on our wrists are quickly snoozed so they’ll resurface when we’re back at our Macs. If you have to handle a lot of email Spark is a massive time saver.

Twitterrific

There are lots of reasons to love Twitter, but there are lots of reasons to find it annoying too. Promoted tweets filling your timeline, people talking about subjects you couldn’t care less about, people retweeting people you couldn’t care less about, Piers Morgan… wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Twitter without all of those things? Don’t look to the official app for that any time soon. Go for Twitterrific instead.

Now in its fifth incarnation, Twitterrific on iOS is a superb Twitter tool. The Watch features require a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 in-app purchase to work fully, and they’re worth paying for: you can track your stats, be notified about direct messages, favorites, new followers and other action, use Handoff to start replies on your phone, compose tweets via dictation and block idiots instantly.

We’d recommend keeping notifications to an absolute minimum unless you only follow a few people - Twitter can be incredibly noisy when you follow and/or are followed by lots of people - but the Watch app is a great way of staying on top of Twitter while you’re out and about. It also reduces the risk of picking up your phone and thinking “while I’m here I’ll just check…” and losing hours to trivia.

Canary Mail

Canary Mail is a first: it’s the first third-party email app to use the Apple Watch 3’s 4G/LTE connection so you can access your email without lugging your iPhone around.

The feature is officially in beta but if you’re in the market for a new email app it’s a compelling reason to consider Canary over other iPhone email clients. The Watch support delivers short extracts of emails and the ability to quickly reply via scribbling or voice dictation.

The main iPhone app is very good indeed, supporting all the main email providers (including iCloud and, if IMAP’s enabled on the server, Exchange) and enabling you to use PGP, to use natural language search and to bulk-delete irrelevant or spammy emails. It offers email templates for frequently used messages, easy unsubscribing and integration with cloud storage, to-do and calendar services, and the none-more-black interface looks particularly good on the iPhone X’s OLED display.

It’s worth keeping an eye on the price if you’re considering Canary: it’s gone from being offered as a free trial for a few days with in-app purchases to $4.99/£4.99, and then to the current price of $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99.

Best Apple Watch games

Pokemon Go

Pokémon Go isn’t a new app, and its Apple Watch companion app isn’t exactly brilliant, as it needs the iPhone to be nearby in order to be useful. But that’s about to change with a new future called Adventure Sync. It’s a way of earning candy and hatching eggs in the Pokémon Go app without actually using the iPhone app.

Adventure Sync works by taking the Apple Health data your phone and watch generate and using that in the game. That means if you just go for a walk or a run wearing your Apple Watch, the distance you travel is recorded and then the Pokémon Go app can get that information to hatch more eggs and earn more candy. Nintendo promises a weekly activity summary, rewards for achieving specific milestones and ongoing progress monitoring, and you can opt in at any time.

The Watch app remains a companion app rather than an alternative to the iPhone app – it’s more of an information app than something you play – but it’s good to see a bit of lateral thinking when it comes to smartwatches. Using their data is much more interesting than trying to cram an entire iPhone app into a watch.

Tamagotchi Classic

Readers of a certain age will remember Tamagotchi, the infuriatingly addictive electronic pets that took over the world in the late 1990s with their incessant demands for care and attention.

And now they’re back! Back! BACK! And this time, they’re on your wrist - which is fitting, because Tamagotchi is apparently a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and watch. If you’ve never used your watch to raise a virtual pet, here’s your chance.

This app is the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e Gen1, and it uses the Apple Watch in several ways: when your Tamagotchi wants your attention it’ll pop up on your wrist, you can monitor your Tamagotchi’s health, and you can carry out care actions - such as feeding it a meal or making it go to the toilet.

There are two modes to choose from: toy mode, which recreates the originals, and App Mode, which adds special colors. The app also enables you to put multiple Tamagotchi into a gallery, where you can then take pictures of them, and save said digital snaps to your Camera Roll.

It’s spectacularly pointless, of course, but it’s also pretty cute and faithful to the original toys - so it’s an app for rose-tinted spectacle wearers as well as for people who’ve never encountered Tamagotchi before.

Best Apple Watch apps for education and learning

Daily Dictionary

Daily Dictionary is a great example of the kind of apps that really work on your wrist: rather than blast you with notifications or try to cram tons of things into that relatively tiny screen, it delivers a little nugget of information that you might otherwise miss.

That nugget, of course, is a word. Every day, Daily Dictionary comes up with a new word. That can appear in your Apple Watch face’s complication, or as a push notification, or you can call the app directly. The complication is well designed, as it also includes today’s date, so you don’t need to have as separate date complication, enabling you to use your limited complication space for something else.

The word selection is practical rather than esoteric. The aim is to provide you with words you’ll actually use, so there’s no jargon or scientific terms you’re unlikely to use in your everyday conversations or writing. And the app enables you to see recent updates to catch up on any words you might have missed.

The core app is free, although a small purchase of just £2.99/$2.99/AU$4.49 a year unlocks the ability to customize the Apple Watch display.

Babbel

Sometimes the best way to learn new things is to have fun, and that’s particularly true of languages: we can’t remember a taught word of the languages we rote-learned in school, but we can remember all the swear words and rude ones our peers snickered about on the bus home.

Babbel takes a more mature, but no less effective, approach to language learning, using data from the check-in service Foursquare to tell you about nearby words you need to find and translate on its Watch app. For example: you might learn the foreign word for a type of drink when you’re at a coffee shop.

The main iPhone app is more formal but still concentrates on real-world language, so you’re more likely to learn how to ask if somebody’s married or if they want some wine than tell them that your aunt’s pen is in the garden.

It’s proven to be effective and has more than a million subscribers, making it one of the most popular language learning tools around.

Just watch out for those in-app purchases, though: each language pack costs money, but some cost a lot more than others.

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is one of the big brands in language learning, and its various apps have won shelves full of awards for its combination of effective teaching and user-friendly app design. The Apple Watch counterpart to its main iPhone app is a good example of how the Watch can be used to supplement more fully featured apps: it’s tailored to the kinds of environments where the Apple Watch is the perfect device for a quick practice.

Rosetta Stone is all about real-life situations: ordering in restaurants, choosing things in shops, saying hello to people and so on. The Watch is ideally placed to practice that, and it’s set out with sensible categories and simple and fast navigation to get you to the bit you need, with audio examples of how to do it.

The main thing to watch out for here is the price: while the app itself is free, it’s useless without a language subscription. There are 24 languages to choose from and they start at $109.99/£93.99/AU$159.99 per year per language, with bundles for languages such as Spanish and French offering 5 levels for $199.99/£199.99/AU$319.99. Think of the app as a demo for the Rosetta Stone service rather than a stand-alone app.

Best Apple Watch apps for news and sports

BBC News

Of course, bigger screens such as phones and, you know, TVs are best for expansive looks at the news, so the Watch's little face is reserved for headlines and photos with BBC News. These appear in Glances and tapping on one takes you to a very slightly fuller version, and lets you access the other headlines.

You can create a personalised news list on the iPhone and these show up in the Watch app, too. Ideal for snacking on headlines and letting you follow up with the main story elsewhere. 

NHL

  • NHL
  • Free (in-app purchases)

NHL isn’t just for American hockey fans, its app is one of the few legal ways to watch NHL games in the rest of the world.

The official NHL app has been given an extensive update for the 2018/2019 season, including the addition of Apple Watch support to display scoreboards and summaries and to notify you of the most exciting happenings. Sensibly there’s also an option to turn off notifications if you can’t tune in live and don’t want to spoil your viewing later.

The main iPhone/iPad app is very comprehensive, offering highlights, radio broadcasts and video streams as well as tons of in-game information. For US fans actually visiting the games, it even shows you where to get food and drink in the arena. In a nice touch you can also customize the app to reflect your favorite team’s colors.

High quality sports apps don’t tend to come cheap, and NHL is no exception: if you want to access the NHL.tv video you’ll pay £17.99/AU$27.49 per month to access the content from outside the US or $24.99 if you’re a US customer. We’re hoping the latest update crushes some of the bugs that seem to have plagued earlier versions of the app. There’s nothing worse than an app that freezes just before something really exciting happens.

Best Apple Watch apps for math and money

Calzy 3

We’ve raved about the excellent PCalc calculator app, but Calzy is a worthy rival. The latest version, version 3, is a significant redesign that’s been optimized for iOS 11.

The most obvious difference is that the operators – plus, minus and so on – are on the same screen as the numbers, and that means it’s much faster to carry out multiple calculations, provided your fingers are fairly accurate: more buttons means a smaller tap area for each one.

It also shows you the running total as you go along, so for example if you’re doing a calculation where it’s this plus that times whatever you’ll see the results as you tap. It’s not as comprehensive as PCalc, but if all you need is a straightforward calculator on your wrist it’s a good bit cheaper.

The main iPhone app, as you might expect, does a lot more than the Watch app. It has light and dark themes, a customizable keypad, Handoff support and even a searchable history of every calculation you’ve made. It also offers currency rounding to keep numbers to two decimal places, and you can tap and hold to edit part of a formula if you realize you’ve made a mistake halfway through.

PCalc

  • PCalc
  • $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99

The apps we tend to love the most are the ones that solve real-world problems, and PCalc falls into that category. Yes, it's a fantastically useful calculator and scientific calculator, but much more importantly it prevents fisticuffs in restaurants.

That's because of its handy bill splitter. Simply tell it how much the bill comes to, how many people are paying and how big a tip you want to leave, and the Watch app calculates how much each person should hand over. It supports watchOS 3's Scribble feature too, so you don't need to dictate or tap on a tiny keypad if you've downed that second bottle of wine. Alternatively you can use the Digital Crown to enter the figure in the tip calculator.

That's not all the Watch app can do, though. It includes a converter for distances and other measurements, and if you Force Touch the app you'll see a Send To iPhone icon as well as the clear and undo buttons.

And on the iPhone the main app is a great tool for serious calculating (and quick sums: there's a mini-calculator if you Force Touch the app icon). It's not the cheapest calculator app, but it's worth the money.

Pennies

Pennies was a recent Apple Editor’s Choice, for good reason: it’s a very simple and effective budgeting app that allows you to get on top of your spending without having to spend too much time doing so.

You can set weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, one-off and custom budgets, track in multiple currencies - great for holidays or business travel - and on the Watch, all you need to do is record how much you’ve spent against a particular budget, so for example if you have a shopping budget you’d tap it, tap Spend, and then enter the total.

The app then recalculates the amount you’ve got left, and if you wish you can have it displayed as a permanent Complication on the Watch face.

Pennies isn’t interested in what you’ve bought; just what budget it should be allocated to. As the developer puts it, “it’s all about keeping things easy and flexible so you can get on with having fun, spending what you want, and saving money at the end of the month.”

If like us you find personal finance a mix of tedium and terror, Pennies might be the app that helps you take control of your cash.

XE Currency

Currency converters abound on the iPhone and XE Currency is one of the best. While the Watch version doesn't have the calculator feature found on the phone, it's a clear chart of how many euros, Argentine pesos or Australian dollars a British pound buys.

You can add more currencies on the phone version – whatever's there is replicated on the Watch. A button at the base of the screen lets the iPhone app control the refresh rates, so you can avoid roaming charges.

Best Apple Watch apps for travel, weather and going out

Citymapper

Citymapper is the pre-eminent public transport app, so no wonder it's an Apple Watch essential. It tells you how to get around selected cities including London, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona and New York.

As well as bus, train and subway times and directions, the Watch app even offers cycling routes and bike hire details such as London's rentable bikes. Once you've set up the journey on the phone, step-by-step notifications will appear on the Watch screen.

You can start journeys to home or previously saved destinations right from the Watch, and it will even help you find your way to nearby bus stops and train stations. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Transit

Transit is mainly for American users, but its city coverage extends to more than 50 non-US cities including London and Paris too. It’s a public transport app, and it works on a simple and largely accurate assumption: when you use the app, you’re in a hurry.

That means instant information for departures on nearby routes and a Take Me Home button that tells you how to get home as quickly and simply as possible. In a single screen it offers directions, details of the station, the next three departures and the number of the service.

Public transport tends to bring out the best in designers - think the simple genius of the London Underground map or the colorful signage on the New York subway - and that’s definitely the case here.

Transit makes excellent use of color and typography to provide all the information you need in a very effective way.

It may only shave a few seconds off your travel time, but if you’ve ever harbored dark thoughts when someone at the gate in front of you is wasting time you’ll know that for commuters, every single second counts. If you spend a lot of time traveling, you’ll save a lot of time with Transit.

Microsoft Translator

You know you’re living in interesting times when one of the best apps for an Apple device comes from Microsoft. But Translator is superb.

We refer to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy in another entry, and Microsoft Translator is the closest we’ve come to its Babel Fish - a fish you stuck in your ear to translate the universe’s many languages.

Translator sits on your wrist rather than in your ear canal, but it does much the same thing. Speak into your watch and you’ll see the translation, and it remembers recent translations on Watch or phone so you can find them again easily. You can also pin translations for instant access to essential words or phrases.

It gets even better if you use it on your phone, because it can translate in real time as you message somebody. You’ll see your typing with the translation in the same bubble, and it can even handle simplified Chinese and Arabic script.

The amount of thought that’s gone into Translator is obvious. Want to translate a sign? Point your camera at it. Want to have a conversation in a language you don’t speak? The phone display splits with your words facing you and the translation facing them.

Night Sky

Night Sky is one of those gee-whiz apps that you use to show off your iPhone, and the introduction of a complication to let you know if the International Space Station was overhead was cute in a geeky way.

But the arrival of watchOS 4 has given the developers plenty of new toys to play with, and that means Night Sky is now one of those gee-whiz apps you use to show off your Apple Watch.

With this version of the app, your Watch now gets the same Sky Tracking features as the iPhone app has: you can now raise your wrist and identify the stars, planets and constellations around you.

There’s a time travel feature too, so you can track how the various heavenly bodies will move. It’s enormously clever and very impressive, and the main iPhone app isn’t bad either, as its Sky View knows of 115,000 celestial objects and enables you to increase or decrease light pollution, explore animated 3D models and customize notifications.

If you sign up for the $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 monthly premium subscription you get access to worldwide sky tours that you can save for future use - for example if you’re planning to visit a particular location in the near future.

Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare’s mission has changed somewhat over the years: what started off based around location check-ins and “king of the castle” bragging had to change when Facebook promptly copied the idea.

Robbed of its raison d’être, these days Foursquare has separated the check-ins from the venue recommendations. Foursquare City Guide’s job is to find decent bars and restaurants wherever you are in the world (if you still want to be the mayor of wherever, that’s the companion app, Foursquare Swarm).

The main interface of City Guide has five tappable areas: Search, Favorites, Food, Coffee and Nightlife.

Tapping on the appropriate option takes you to a list of venues, but instead of just filtering by distance the app also filters by Foursquare user ratings - so a rating of 9.5 that’s 500m away will appear below a 9.7 that’s 100m further.

The list gives you the name, price bracket, average rating and distance for each venue, and if you tap on a venue you’ll see reviews, photos, maps and other key information. The big selling point here is Foursquare’s global reach: it’s a really good app for travellers who don’t want to spend their time in the hotel bar or eating in faceless chain restaurants.

Uber

Calling an Uber isn't too difficult, unless of course your hands are full or running down last-second tasks. That's me right before I leave for a flight.

Often times, I'm packing my suitcase with last second gadgets and taking out the trash so it doesn't take on another lifeform by sitting there for a week. The Apple Watch makes it easier to hail the 21st century taxi.

The Uber Apple Watch app is not only simple to use, it lets you see vital information, like the time the driver will take to get there and the car he or she drives, complete with a picture (when they have one). 

ETA - Arrive on time

Like Citymapper, ETA will help you get somewhere. The title refers to its front-and-centre information. You add a location on the iPhone and save it. Then it'll give you timings for driving, walking or taking public transport.

Some watch faces allow it as a complication, where it'll show the time it'll take to your top saved route. It knows what traffic is like so allows extra time for a drive in rush hour, say. On the Watch app you tap the chosen saved destination and it'll take you through to Maps for directions.

Similarly, for public transport directions in select cities Maps will provide the directions.

iTranslate

This powerful translation app works in 90 languages. It's free but for full Watch use you'll need the $6.99/£6.99/AU$10.99 in-app purchase which offers voice recognition and unlimited translations.

A Watch complication means you can tap on the screen to start translating straight away and if you'll let it, iTranslate will use your location to figure out what language it should be translating to or from.

It also responds to Time Travel so by winding the Digital Crown you can see phrases which change such as "Good afternoon" which is replaced by "Good evening" as you scroll forward.

Dark Sky Weather

Dark Sky is the first app we put on any new Apple device, and the Apple Watch is no exception. In fact, we think Dark Sky is at its most useful when you’re wearing it on your wrist.

What Dark Sky does seems very simple, but is actually very clever. It tells you what the weather’s going to do - not in a vague sense, but as in telling you that it’s going to bucket down in ten minutes and that the storm won’t stop for an hour.

That means it’s the perfect app for anybody who’s thinking about going outside for any reason, or who’s already outside and really ought to be getting inside in a big hurry.

In more dramatic climates it alerts of dangerous weather such as storms, and you can set it to notify you of specific kinds of weather that you select in the companion iPhone app.

We use it to decide if now is a good time to walk the dog, if it’s time to get the kids back to the car or if we really shouldn’t be going out dressed like that; you might use it when you’re hiking or biking, or doing any other activity that could be affected by changes in the weather.

If you used Dark Sky in the early days of the Apple Watch and found it painfully slow and unresponsive, give it another go: the current version runs on the watch, not on the phone, and the difference in performance really is dramatic.

Yahoo Weather

Dark Sky and CARROT Weather get all the reviews, but Yahoo’s weather app is a lovely thing on the Apple Watch.

It takes the same colorful, minimalist approach as the iPhone/iPad app, with screens showing trend lines for temperature, precipitation and wind speed, along with sunrise and sunset times and where the sun is right now, whether it’s going to rain and what the temperature highs and lows will be.

You don’t get the right-now weather warnings of Dark Sky or the sass of CARROT, just a clear, easy to understand and really well-presented set of predictions.

It’s not all sunshine and flowers, though. The host app is pretty big - 137MB, which is on the large side for a weather app, given that the UK Met Office app is 80MB and Dark Sky 20.8MB - and the accuracy of the weather forecasts seems to depend on where you live.

US users seem very happy with it, but UK users say it’s a little pessimistic: while it rains a lot in Britain, it doesn’t rain quite as often as Yahoo Weather says it will.

Then again, it’s better to warn of rain and be pleasantly surprised than to predict good weather when the skies are about to open.

Circa

  • Circa
  • $3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

It’s not a surprise that the Apple Watch attracts a lot of apps built around the idea of time, but few of them are as simple and as useful as Circa. It’s designed for global travellers or people whose life involves communicating with people around the world, and answers a simple and important question: is this a good time?

It may be a simple question, but it’s often a tough question to answer. If you’ve ever tried to find a time for a virtual meeting that works not just for you and your local colleagues but for colleagues halfway across the world you’ll know how much of a pain in the neck it can be.

Are they EST or PST? Are they behind us or ahead of us? Circa remembers these things so you don’t have to, offering crystal clear guides to when people are going to be available and when they should be in their bed.

It’s a niche app, but many of the very best Apple Watch apps are: it’s simple, beautifully designed and does exactly what it sets out to do. If you need this kind of thing, this is exactly what you need.

TripIt - Travel Organizer

Whether you’re a road warrior or an occasional holidayer, keeping track of the various aspects of your trip can be a pain. TripIt solves that by pulling all your travel-related documentation together.

All you need to do is send your travel confirmation emails - flights, hotels, car hire - to TripIt and the app will automatically organize them and tell you the information you need when you need it.

If you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo mail you can get TripIt to monitor your mailbox automatically, which makes things even easier. If you’re in the US, it even tells you when it’s time to head for the airport.

The phone app stores your itinerary and key documents, and the Watch app lets you know what’s important right now - so if you’re about to board a flight you’ll see the flight number and departure time, if you’re checking in you’ll see a booking reference and so on.

Things get really clever with the Pro subscription ($48.99/£38.99/AU$77.99), which adds live flight notifications, seat tracking and alternative flight finding should your plans change.

That’s probably unnecessary for most people, though: the free version of the app includes all the essentials you need for any kind of travel.

CARROT Weather

We’ve mentioned CARROT Weather before: it’s our go-to app when we want the weather forecast delivered by a hyper-intelligent artificial entity that wishes we were dead. In this massive update the app becomes even more horrible, and we mean that in a good way.

There are complications for your Apple Watch face as well as a completely misanthropic Watch app with all the weather information you could possibly need, displayed silently or spoken aloud depending on your preferences.

We particularly like the way you can specify just how horrible CARROT is to you, along with its political leanings. And on the accompanying iPhone app there’s a really fun feature that uses Apple’s ARKit to bring the forecast into augmented reality.

The developers are upfront about their pricing: if you want to use Weather Underground data instead of the default Dark Sky and take advantage of its radar pictures too, those features cost the devs extra money so you’ll need to pay another $9.99/£8.99/AU$14.49 per year for the Ultrapremium Club in-app purchase.

There’s also a cheaper Premium Club ($3.99/£3.49/AU$5.49pa) that enables you to customize the complications, to receive weather alerts and to have background data updates. It’s worth it.

Best Apple Watch apps for food and drink

Just Eat

Proving that you should never underestimate our basic laziness, Just Eat created an app for people who couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to call for a takeaway. Now, it’s added an app for people who can’t be bothered reaching for their iPhone to open the Just Eat app.

One day historians may look back on this as one of the key steps in the downfall of western civilisation. Then again, easy pizza!

The Just Eat app is UK-only - if you’re in the US, try the Domino’s Apple Watch app instead - and it enables you to choose, order and pay for takeaways from the comfort of your wrist thanks to Apple Pay integration.

You can also choose to collect instead of having the meal delivered, but let’s be honest: if you can’t be bothered getting your phone you’re hardly going to want to go outside to collect your food - although if you’re driving it’s handy to order a pickup with a few taps.

The main iPhone/iPad app is much more attractive and informative, but when it comes to ordering regulars from your favorite local takeaways it doesn’t get much easier than having Just Eat on your wrist.

Yelp

You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in our favorite apps: they tend to approach their mission by asking what useful things the watch can do rather than trying to cram an entire phone app into that tiny screen, irrespective of whether that’s sane or useful. Yelp is a great example of an app that gets it right.

When you open it you’ll see just four icons: Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea, and Hot & New. Tapping on the one you’re interested in then shows you a list sorted by distance, with the all-important star ratings and average cost listed on top of a photograph. Tap again and you’ll get the opening hours and a map, and of course you can read the reviews too - that’s what Yelp is all about.

It’s particularly good for the kind of venues and experiences popular among bright young things in big cities, (the most committed Yelpers), but the database is truly enormous and doesn’t turn into tumbleweed whenever you venture into the countryside. Yelp’s app is very good for finding places in unfamiliar towns, or unfamiliar places in towns you know very well.
 

Chipotle

I sometimes wear my messy Chipotle burritos while scarfing down the healthy-ish Mexican platters, but I'm also purposely wearing Chipotle on my wrist to send order to the store via my Apple Watch.

While it's not the most groundbreak app, I can create a one-tap order with the Chipotle Apple Watch app and have my meal ready to go while I'm on the treadmill at the gym next door. It's as efficient as it is calorie rich. The best part is, I get the skip the always massive line.

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Over 10 billion malware attacks detected in 2018

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 09:00 AM PDT

New research from SonicWall has revealed that a record high of 10.52bn malware attacks occurred in 2018 indicating an escalation in the volume of cyberattacks as well as new targeted threat tactics used by cybercriminals.

The firm's 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report provides an in-depth look at threat intelligence obtained from its more than one million sensors around the world.

Following vulnerabilities such as Spoiler, PortSmash, Foreshadow, Meltdown and Spectre that can lead to side-channel attacks, Sonic Wall's threat researchers have deemed processor vulnerabilities a growing concern for both software and hardware technologies.

The company's Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) also identified 74,290 new attack variants in 2019 that are so new, unique and complex that they were without a signature at the time of discovery and included detection of multiple side-channel attacks.

Non-standard ports and trusted files

As network defenses have become more sophisticated, so has the anonymity of attacks that now include the targeting of non-standard ports to ensure payloads are concealed upon delivery. By studying over 700m malware attacks, SonicWall research revealed that 19.2 percent of malware attacks used non-standard ports which represents a year-over-year increase of 8.7 percent.

Organizations of all sizes and across all industries depend on trusted file types such as Microsoft Office files and PDFs. However, now cybercriminals are leveraging these trusted files to circumvent traditional firewalls and single-engine sandboxes to deliver malware.

SonicWall's multi-engine sandbox service discovered threats in over 47,000 PDFs and almost 51,000 Office files in 2018. This presents a growing problem as most antivirus software cannot identify and mitigate the hidden malware contained in these files.

President and CEO of SonicWall, Bill Conner provided further insight on the report's findings, saying:

“Cyber perpetrators are not letting up in their relentless pursuit to illegally obtain data, valuable information and intellectual property. We must be unyielding in this cyber arms race. Sharing vital threat information with our customers and partners provides them a tactical advantage. But it’s also important to arm those at the forefront of this battle with this intelligence, promote global awareness of the threat landscape and continue to facilitate important dialogue around today’s most prevalent cyber threats.” 

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Best Asus laptops 2019: the top Asus laptops we've tested

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:56 AM PDT

Asus is one of the best known and beloved laptop makers in the world, and its pedigree increases every single year. The Taiwanese manufacturer has been hard at work, steadily releasing brilliant laptops one after the other (not to mention the best PCs, components and smartphones) for years now.

From budget Asus laptops and Chromebooks to absolute behemoths of gaming laptops and some of the best Ultrabooks on the market, the best Asus laptops cover a wide range of budgets and use cases – and they all look good while doing it. 

That’s why we here at TechRadar decided to gather up the best Asus laptops on the market right now. If you’re looking for an Asus laptop, then let our signature laptop expertise help you find the perfect one for you. 

best asus laptop

Image credit: TechRadar

If you're looking for the very best all-round Asus laptop, then the Asus ZenBook 3 is the one to get. This is an exceptionally light Asus laptop, measuring less than half an inch thick, and weighing only two pounds. Asus's ZenBook range of ultra-thin laptops have shown the world how you can make gorgeously-designed thin and light laptops, while still packing them with powerful components. It's a pricey laptop, but if you're after the very best of what Asus has to offer, the ZenBook 3 is a fantastic choice.

Read the full review: Asus ZenBook 3

Best Asus laptop

 Image credit: TechRadar 

Asus has struck gold with its new refresh of its ZenBook Flip S 2-in-1 laptop, with the Asus ZenBook Flip S UX370. Asus has shown its competitors how you can make a truly impressive 2-in-1 laptop that doesn't feel like a compromise in any way. Not only is the Asus ZenBook Flip S UX370 one of the best, if not the best, convertible laptops money can buy right now, it's one of the best Asus laptops in general. Asus has packed this laptop with a new Kaby Lake R 8th-generation processor, plenty of RAM and a super-fast PCIe SSD in certain models. Plus, its 2-in-1 design means you can use it as both a laptop and a tablet.

Read the full review: Asus ZenBook Flip S UX370

Best Asus laptop

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The Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 is not only the best Asus gaming laptop in the world right now, but it's the best gaming laptop of 2019 – period. This is because Asus has packed in a 6-core Intel processor, and the latest RTX 2080 graphics from Nvidia. However, not only does this make it one of the most powerful gaming laptops ever made, Asus has also managed to keep the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 impressively thin and light. Most gaming laptops are big chunky affairs due to their high power components, but Asus has pulled off some brilliant design magic to make the ROG Zephyrus S GX701 not much thicker or heavier than many standard laptops. It's incredibly expensive, though, but for the price you're getting an amazing machine, and one of the best Asus laptops ever made.

Read the full review: Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701

Best Asus laptop

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The best Asus laptops aren't just premium all-singing, all-dancing devices with huge price tags, as the excellent Asus Chromebook Flip C302 demonstrates. The Asus Chromebook Flip C302 brings a lot of what we love about Asus laptops to an affordable Chromebook that's ideal for day-to-day tasks and for students working on their homework. That means it's got excellent build quality, a fantastic design and packs some great hardware that makes it one of the best Chromebooks on sale in 2019, with an Intel Core processor, full 1080p display, touchscreen, backlit keyboard and USB-C port.

Read the full review: Asus Chromebook Flip

Best Asus laptop

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As we mentioned earlier in this buying guide to the best Asus laptops of 2019, Asus's ZenBook range are flagship laptops that offer plenty of power and thin and light designs. While many of them are expensive, it doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune on a great Asus ZenBook, which is why we've included the Asus ZenBook UX310 in this list of the best Asus laptops. With still-good 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake processors, a 178-degree viewing-angle QHD+ display, a USB-C port and an aluminum build, it’s still one of the best Ultrabooks out there, even after all this time.

 Read the full review: Asus ZenBook UX310

Best Asus laptop

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While the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 earlier on in this list is undoubtedly the best gaming laptop Asus has ever made, its high price means it just won't be for everyone. The good news is that there are a number of great Asus gaming laptops that are more affordable. The Asus ROG Strix GL502 is a great example that offers excellent performance at 1080p.

Read the full review: Asus ROG Strix GL502

Best Asus laptop

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One of the best things about Asus laptops is that there are premium laptops and powerful gaming devices, but Asus also does some brilliant budget and affordable laptops as well. The Asus VivoBook S15 is in our view the best budget Asus laptop that runs Windows 10. It comes with decent specs, including an Intel Core i7 processor, considering the price. Meanwhile, its 15-inch screen offers full 1080p for enjoying movies and TV shows on, and its a decent productivity tool as well.

 Read the hands on review: Asus VivoBook S15

Best Asus laptop

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If you're after a budget Asus laptop that can double as a tablet, then the Asus Transformer Mini is perfect. This tablet brings plenty of power and ports to the table – not to mention a fingerprint sensor, stylus and keyboard cover – all in the box. This is all topped off with a whopping 11 hours of battery life. Because of its cheap price and robust design, this is a brilliant Asus laptop for children and students, as it can be easily thrown in a bag and carried around without worry.

Read the full review: Asus Transformer Mini T102HA

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The best iPhone 8 Plus deals and UK contracts in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:55 AM PDT

Apple is the king of brilliant, yet expensive phones. With devices such as the iPhone XS Max and XR costing eye-watering prices, it can make sense to go back a models and pick yourself up one of Apple's older plus size models. 

This is where the iPhone 8 Plus deals come in. If you want one of the newest large screened Apple smartphones, but the price of the iPhone XS make you feel dizzy, then the 8 Plus will be the one for you.

So how are iPhone 8 Plus prices looking. On average, if you shop wisely (using our price comparison chart below) you'll save yourself around £300 if you go for this handset over the iPhone X. We've seen monthly tariffs as low as the £25 region if you're prepared to stick a wedge down upfront.

Still feeling a bit overwhelmed by these prices? Don't forget that iPhone 8 deals are also available if you'd prefer the smaller smartphone, along with the smaller prices. And you can save £10 on the upfront cost of any iPhone 8 Plus deal at Mobiles.co.uk by using the voucher code 10OFF at the checkout.

See also: iPhone X deals | iPhone 8 deals | iPhone XS Max | Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals | Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus deals | Best mobile phone deals | Best SIM only deals

The 5 best iPhone 8 Plus deals you can get in the UK right now:

iPhone 8 Plus price: how much does it cost?

A mighty £699. That's how much the 64GB iPhone 8 Plus will cost you in the UK according to the RRP. That might seem like a lot but that's one hundred pounds cheaper than when it first came out.

Need more memory? Then your only other option is spending an extra £150 and grabbing a £849 256GB iPhone 8 Plus. 

If you opt to buy the iPhone 8 Plus upfront without a contract you will save money in the long run, but of course £699 is a lot of money to pay. If you can afford it though it the way to go once you pair it with a cheap SIM only deal.

This is the iPhone you want if you can't quite afford the iPhone X or iPhone XS Max. It's got the larger battery, same powerful innards and strong camera. If you don't mind the poorer screen, it's a good option - and the screen is still a beaut. And we prefer it quite a lot more to the regular iPhone 8.

Read more in TechRadar's full iPhone 8 Plus review

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The best iPhone 6S deals and UK contracts in March 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:39 AM PDT

When it comes to Apple, there is a clear divide between its top of the line flagship devices with their massive price tags, and Apple's earlier, far more affordable devices with their mid-range specs - the iPhone 6S falls into the latter category.

We've had a fair few new iPhones since the 6S, we've had the 8's, iPhone X's and now the iPhone XS Max (bit of a mouthful really). The good news here is that these new releases have driven the prices of the iPhone 6S way, way down. Sub-£20 a month tariffs appear quite frequently now, so getting a great deal on Apple's 2015 flagship phone makes it a great budget option if you don't want to spend the earth on your new iPhone deal.

If you want more than the minimum of data, then check out our comparison chart below, or head straight down to our pick of the best tariffs on the web.

The 6S may be one of iPhone's older phones now, but it still features a lot of the features we have come to expect from flagships. It has improved battery life and 3D touch, where you can press a bit harder on the screen to get a different response.

See also: iPhone 8 deals | iPhone 7 deals | iPhone deals | iPhone SE deals | Samsung Galaxy S9 deals | Best mobile phone deals | iPhone 6S review

iphone 6S deals

iphone 6s deals

The top 5 best iPhone 6S deals in the UK this month:

We've gone all Top of the Pops to show you our favourite five iPhone 6S deals on the market right now - we'll give you a clue...they're much cheaper than the iPhone XS! Read about all of the best iPhone 6S deals here, including tariffs on EE, O2 and Vodafone.

iphone 6S deals

It may be very similar to its predecessor, but there's no denying that the iPhone 6s makes a fantastic alternative to the more expensive Apple devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone XR. The phone works fluidly at nearly every task and will cost you a lot less than Apple's current flagships. Low end cost with high end features 

Read TechRadar's full iPhone 6S review

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Seven Brits shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards 2019

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:27 AM PDT

The Sony World Photography Awards 2019 may still be a few weeks away, but seven British photographers already have something to celebrate, having been shortlisted across the competition's Professional and Student categories.

Six photographers have made the shortlist in the Professional segment of the competition, joining four others from outside the UK. All will now be in with a chance to not only win in their own individual category, but also be crowned as the overall Photographer of the Year 2019.

The nominees include four in the Landscape category, namely Edinburgh-based photographer Kieran Dodds, West-Yorkshire based academic and artist Yang Wang Preston, and photographers Catherine Hyland and Marco Kesseler from London.

Ramsgate-based artist Edward Thompson has been shortlisted for the Brief category, while another British photographer, 22-year-old student Joel Davies, has made the shortlist for the overall Student prize.

The news comes a month after the organizers revealed 10 winning images in the Open category. The awards consist of Professional, Open, Student, and Youth categories, and have attracted a total of 326,997 entries across from 195 countries and territories – a record number of entries for the competition. 

Prizes include $25,000 for the overall Professional winner, and €30,000 worth of Sony photography kit for the Student winner's institution.

All the winners will be revealed at a ceremony on April 17, and all shortlisted images will be exhibited following the awards ceremony at Somerset House in London until May 6 2019.

Head over to the World Press Photo site for more details.

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Get a free Sonos One when you pre-order a new Huawei P30 or P30 Pro deal

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:26 AM PDT

We're not quite sure when this came to be, but it almost seems customary for phone manufacturers to offer up some of the world's best technology for free when you pre-order a newly launched phone. Don't get us wrong, we love it and Huawei has reminded us of Just how great this can be with the offer of a FREE Sonos One speaker when you pre-order a P30 deal or P30 Pro deal.

Yes, here to outshine Samsung's recent phone launch, Huawei is not only dropping its brand new flagships, but also throwing in the best smart speaker on the market for no extra cost.

Combining the smarts of Amazon Alexa with the raw sound quality of Sonos, the Sonos One is about as good as speaker intelligence can get in our eyes. It has been sat at the number one spot of our best smart speakers list since its release and it is clear to see why.

A clean compact design, some of the best audio in a speaker this size, and built in Alexa all combine to make this a speaker you would proudly display in your house. Not to mention, by getting it with this pre-order you don't even have to pay for it - can't beat that kind of pricing!

So if you want the best of smart sound and the newest flagship on the market, head on over to our P30 deals or P30 Pro deals pages to see your options. 

  • Not bothered by free speakers or having the newest device? Check out the best mobile phone deals around

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Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order reveal will be livestreamed and promises 'a few surprises'

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:26 AM PDT

We already know that on April 13 we will get our first proper look at Respawn Entertainment's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as part of the annual Star Wars Celebration event in Chicago.

But luckily for fans that can't make the trek to the event, EA has announced the reveal will be livestreamed.

Check out EA's announcement tweet below:

When is the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order reveal?

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order will be revealed on April 13 at the annual Star Wars celebration in Chicago. 

The galaxy-wide premiere will see the head of Respawn Entertainment, Vince Zampella, and game director, Stig Asmussen, revealing the much-anticipated details of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order - with the event's description promising "a few surprises in store".

The event will be livestreamed on April 13 at 1:30pm CDT (6:30pm GMT, 11:30am PDT, 2:30pm EDT, 5:30 am AEDT on April 14). 

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Huawei Watch GT Active and Elegant are new looks for the company's smartwatch

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:25 AM PDT

Last year's Huawei Watch GT is soon set to be available in a variety of new colors and styles thanks to some redesigns announced alongside the Huawei P30 range of phones.

Two new types of design were announced, and the first is called the Huawei Watch GT Active.

This is exactly the same device as last year's smartwatch, but it now comes with a variety of new band colors including orange and dark green as well as a different design around the bezel.

Time for new looks

That's a standard 46mm version of the watch, but if you're after something a bit smaller there's also the Huawei Watch GT Elegant. This comes in a 42mm case and has a ceramic bezel rather than the metal one.

Almost everything is the same on this watch too, but it only comes with a week of estimated battery life, compared to the fortnight of charge expected from all other models.

So far we've seen Elegant versions of the watch shown off with a black or white design. There's also a chance the brand may have other looks on offer too.

The Watch GT Active is set to cost €249 (about £210, $280, AU$400) while the Watch GT Elegant is €229 (about £200, $260, AU$360). We don't yet know when these will be on sale, or where you'll be able to buy them.

The Huawei Watch GT offers some impressive battery life, a 1.39-inch AMOLED display and fitness tracking features. You can read our full Huawei Watch GT review, which we'll be sure to update with the new designs soon.

Huawei also used its P30 launch to unveil its first pair of "smart glasses" in partnership with Gentle Monster. Instead of featuring lots of smart tech, these seem to be more focused at being a stylish Bluetooth headset.

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Huawei P30 vs Galaxy S10 vs iPhone XS: which flagship phone fits your needs?

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:19 AM PDT

The Huawei P30 has been announced, and it’s the latest attempt by Huawei to take the Western smartphone market by storm – but is it good enough to take on the top offerings from Samsung and Apple?

Samsung recently launched the Samsung Galaxy S10, and Apple’s iPhone XS is still fairly new, and both have top-of-the-line specs and features – so they’ll prove tough competition for Huawei’s new contender. 

But which of the three flagships is the best for you? To help you decide we’ve compared the phones so you can see the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Design

The Samsung Galaxy S10, Huawei P30 and iPhone XS are made with a glass front and back and a metal frame – they feel like premium devices, with not a shred of plastic in sight.

The Samsung Galaxy S10 is slightly bigger at 149.9 x 70.4 x 7.8mm as opposed to the iPhone XS at 143.6 x 70.9 x 7.7mm, but the iPhone is actually 20g heavier at 177g. Between them is the Huawei P30 at 149.1 x 71.4 x 7.6mm and 165g – there's not a huge difference in size between the phones.


The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and iPhone XS have the same level of protection with IP68, which means they’re protected from dust and waterproof up to a depth of 1m – that’s the highest rating you can get in a smartphone, and it means they’ll all suit your needs. The Huawei P30 is a little less protected with IP53, which protects it from sprays of water and stops dust in the internals breaking the phone, but it’s definitely not as sturdy as its competitors.

Display

The iPhone XS has a slightly smaller screen than the Samsung Galaxy S10, as the Galaxy has a 6.1-inch display as opposed to the iPhone’s 5.8 inches, though both lose some of that real estate, with the punch-hole camera cut into the former’s display and the teardrop notch dropping down from the top of the latter’s.

The Huawei P30 has a little in common with both, as it has a 6.1-inch display like the Galaxy S10 but a teardrop notch like the iPhone XS. Its resolution is 2340 x 1080, a little weaker than the iPhone XS at 2436 x 1125 or Samsung Galaxy S10 with 3040 x 1440.

Both the Huawei P30 and iPhone XS use OLED screens, so they’re high quality, but Samsung uses its own AMOLED tech in the Galaxy S10 screen, and it has HDR10+ too to create a better dynamic range in colors and brightness.


The display on the Galaxy S10 is also curved, as opposed to being flat on the iPhone XS and Huawei P30, which could affect your viewing pleasure for better or worse depending on how you like it, but we didn’t feel it made much of a difference.

Battery

The iPhone XS has a battery that’s on the small end of the scale at 2,658mAh, it’s the smallest of the three phones, but we found it would last the day anyway. It does look small in comparison to the Samsung Galaxy S10’s 3,400mAh power pack – although when we subjected them to the same battery test, they lost the exact same amount of charge.

The Huawei P30 is a step up again at 3,650mAh, which is comfortably big for a phone battery – we’ll need to test it fully when we get our hands on the phone, but it will likely last at least a day of heavy use.

Charging is just as important as battery capacity, but in that regard the battery heavyweight Huawei P30 misses a trick, as it’s the only device of the trio that doesn’t support wireless charging. Since most phones nowadays do that’s quite a surprise, especially given that the Huawei P30 Pro does support it.

Camera

The iPhone XS has a dual-lens camera, consisting of a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto lens and a 12MP f/1.8 wide-angle lens, both of which have optical image stabilization (OIS), so it can take detailed close-up pictures as well as great wide shots.


When we tested the camera out we found it also took high-quality low-light pictures thanks to better light sensitivity than previous iPhones, and it created rich color tones in different settings.

The Samsung Galaxy S10 steps up from the iPhone XS in terms of camera number, as it has three on the back – a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto lens with OIS similar to the iPhone XS, and also a 12MP variable aperture lens which switches between f/1.5 and f/2.4, as well as a 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens. 

Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, so the Galaxy S10’s three camera setup doesn’t necessarily trump the iPhone XS with two, but we found the ultra-wide lens great for taking wider pictures and the phone’s scene optimizer ability great for taking pictures in a variety of settings.

The Huawei P30 matches the S10’s three-camera setup, though the specs and roles of the lenses differ – there’s a 40MP f/1.6 SuperSpectrum camera, a 20MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one and an 8MP f/3.4 ‘periscope’ lens. 


The two selling points of the P30’s camera is that its SuperSpectrum snapper picks up RYYB instead of RGB light, to pick up more color in a shot, and the periscope lens can take pictures with up to 10x optical zoom. In our quick test we found this worked well, picking up details when zoomed that aren't noticeable in a wide shot.

On the front, the iPhone XS has a 7MP selfie cam while the Galaxy S10 beats that at 10MP – but both are blown out of the water by the Huawei P30’s 32MP snapper, which will take selfies at a resolution you’ll probably never need. 

Features

One of the biggest differences between the phones is that the iPhone XS runs iOS 12, while both the Huawei P30 and Samsung Galaxy S10 run Android 9 Pie – for some, having one of those operating systems is a sure sell. 

Operating system isn’t everything though, and processing power is important too. The Samsung Galaxy S10 runs on a Snapdragon 855 in the US and an Exynos 9820 elsewhere, while the Huawei P30 uses a Kirin 980 and the iPhone XS uses Apple’s own A12 Bionic. The phones have varying amounts of RAM too – the iPhone XS only has 4GB, but that increases for the P30 at 6GB and Samsung Galaxy S10 at 8GB.

One difference between the phones is that the iPhone XS unlocks using Face ID, but the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Huawei P30 use in-screen fingerprint scanners – if you have a preference, this may help you decide which phone you prefer.

Price

The Samsung Galaxy S10 and iPhone XS are both high-end devices – if you want a Galaxy S10 you’re looking at paying $899 / £799 / AU$1,349 for a 128GB phone and $1,149 / £999 / AU$1,699 for a 512GB model. 

That’s slightly cheaper than the iPhone XS, which will cost you $999 / £999 / AU$1,629 if you want a smaller capacity 64GB model, rising to $1,149 / £1,149 / AU$1,879 if you want 256GB and $1,349 / £1,349 / AU$2,199 for 512GB.

But for the real affordable device of the trio you’re looking at the Huawei P30, at £699 (roughly $790, AU$1,100), for its 128GB – which is an interesting price point given the larger P30 Pro is priced the same as the Galaxy S10 Plus.

That means for a handset with identical storage, the iPhone XS will cost you $200 / £350 / AU$500 more than the Samsung Galaxy S10, and the Huawei P30 is £100 (roughly $130, AU$185) more than the Galaxy S10 for the 128GB storage – but it's a little hard to compare since the three phones have no size in common. . Of course there are more features to a smartphone than storage, but that’s a big step up. 

Verdict

It’s hard to call one of the three phones ‘best’, especially as different people want phones for different purposes, but the new Huawei P30 is a strong contender, bringing a great battery, competent camera setup and premium feel at a relatively low price. 

That said, the Samsung Galaxy S10 has one of the best displays you can get in a smartphone right now, and its cameras are likely just as versatile as the P30’s. The iPhone XS is a popular choice too, and many people swear by the iOS 12 operating system it runs, as well as its sleek design.

So if you’re looking to buy a new flagship phone it’s up to you to decide your budget, and what features are important to you on your new handset.

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Huawei P30 Pro vs Galaxy S10 Plus vs iPhone XS Max: which large phone is right for you?

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:17 AM PDT

Huawei has announced its Huawei P30 range, and the largest device is the P30 Pro, Huawei’s competitor to the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and Apple’s iPhone XS Max.

Each of these phones has unique and powerful features, and different ways they outclass each other, but depending on your needs one might be a much better fit than the others.

That’s why we’ve put these three plus-sized handsets head-to-head, to help you decide which is best for you.

Design

As each device is the biggest in their respective ranges, you won’t be surprised to hear that they’re all large – but there isn’t a lot of difference size-wise between the three phones themselves. 

The iPhone XS Max, at 157.5 x 77.4 x 7.7mm and with a weight of 208g, is the biggest phone – but only just, as the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus measures 157.6 x 74.1 x 7.8mm, although there’s a bigger weight difference as the Galaxy S10 Plus weighs in at 175g. In comparison the Huawei P30 Pro measures in at 158 x 73.4 x 8.4mm so it's fatter but shorter than the other phones, and closer to the iPhone XS Max in weight at 192g.


In terms of materials, each phone is protected by a sturdy glass front and backs with metal frames, and they're all IP68, which means they're protected from dust and can be submerged to depths of up to 1 meter.

Display

The biggest phone of the bunch in terms of screen size is the iPhone XS Max with its 6.5-inch display, which tops the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus at 6.4 inches and the Huawei P30 Pro at 6.47 inches by just a fraction.

You’re going to lose some of this real estate for the camera though – both the iPhone XS Max and Huawei P30 Pro have a ‘teardrop’ notch that juts down from the top of the display, and the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus has a ‘punch-hole’ camera that’s cut out of the screen itself.

This close race between the three screens extends to the tech and resolution. The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus has a curved AMOLED display and it offers a Quad HD+ resolution, although its default setting is Full HD+. The Huawei P30 Pro has an OLED display which is Full HD+ too, and the iPhone XS Max also has an OLED screen with Apple’s Super Retina HD.  

With its AMOLED screen and QHD+ resolution, we found the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus had the most vivid colors and brightness, although that’s a subjective verdict and your experience with the phones could differ.

Battery

One of the perks of a bigger phone is having a bigger battery, and fittingly each phone has a power pack that would put its smaller siblings to shame. Of the trio, the iPhone XS Max has the lowest battery capacity at 3,174mAh, which goes up to 4,100mAh in the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and higher still for the Huawei P30 Pro with its 4,200mAh power pack.

A bigger battery doesn’t necessarily mean a longer battery life, but in our experience devices with batteries as big as the P30 Pro and S10 Plus will usually easily last a full day of use and end with a big chunk of battery left, although they’re unlikely to stretch to two full days. The iPhone XS Max should also last a day, but is unlikely to have as much juice left over.

Charging is important for your handset too, and each phone powers up in different ways. The iPhone XS Max supports both fast and wireless charging, although we found it the slowest to charge of the bunch.

The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus meanwhile supports faster charging than the iPhone XS Max, and has a ‘Wireless Power Share’ feature, which means you can charge other compatible devices using the S10 Plus, while the Huawei P30 Pro more or less matches the S10 Plus for fast and wireless charging speeds.

The battery life on the Galaxy S10 Plus and Huawei P30 Pro is similar, both in terms of capacity and charging speeds, so it’s hard to pick between the two – but if you don’t have long to charge your phone, or need to use it for ages without charging at all, the iPhone XS Max pales in comparison to its competitors.

Camera

With both the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and iPhone XS Max you’re getting exactly the same rear camera setup as their smaller siblings, the Galaxy S10 and iPhone XS.

The Galaxy S10 Plus has a 12MP variable aperture main sensor which can switch between f/1.5 and f/2.4, plus a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto lens and a 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens, while the iPhone XS Max has a 12MP f/2.4 telephoto lens like the Galaxy S10 Plus and a 12MP f/1.8 wide-angle lens.


The Huawei P30 Pro, however, is a step above the Huawei P30. It has a massive four-lens rear camera setup, consisting of a 40MP f/1.6 main sensor, which Huawei calls Super Spectrum as it picks up light better, a 20MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens, an 8MP f/3.4 ‘Periscope’ lens for 10x optical zoom, and a time-of-flight lens to help the camera measure depth for better bokeh shots.

Having more cameras doesn’t necessarily mean a phone is better for photography, and good pictures are so subjective that it’s really up to you to decide which device takes photos you prefer, but for a good example you can check out our iPhone XS review, our Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus review, and our hands-on Huawei P30 Pro review.

To the front the iPhone XS Max has a 7MP camera while the Huawei P30 Pro has a 32MP selfie cam and the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus actually has a dual-lens snapper, consisting of a 10MP main lens and an 8MP depth-measuring lens to take pictures with accurate bokeh.

Features

Under the hood the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus is powered by a Snapdragon 855 chipset in the US and an Exynos 9820 elsewhere, while the iPhone XS Max has an A12 Bionic chipset and the Huawei P30 Pro uses a Kirin 980.

It’s a little hard to compare the chipsets since they’re made by different companies, and therefore not directly comparable, but they’re all top-of-the-line processors that would beat the competition in a heartbeat.

There is a clear distinction in terms of RAM, as the iPhone XS has 4GB while the Huawei P30 Pro  and the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus have 8GB (or 12GB if you splash out for the largest S10 Plus), but RAM doesn’t always mean faster performance.


One major difference between the iPhone XS Max and the other two phones is that it runs iOS 12, while the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus and Huawei P30 Pro both run Android 9 Pie, although the P30 Pro and S10 Plus both have their own different user interfaces that run over the top of Android Pie. Operating system is a subjective way to differentiate between phones, but some people have their preferences, so it’s worth staying informed. 

Price

As the larger siblings of already high-end flagships, you can’t expect any of these devices to be cheap. If you really do want to splash out, the iPhone XS Max costs the most at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799 for a model with 64GB of storage, $1,249 / £1,249 / AU$2,049 for 256GB or $1,449 / £1,449 / AU$2,369 for 512GB.

If that’s a bit too much for you, the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus is a little cheaper. For 128GB of internal memory you’ll be paying $999 / £899 / AU$1,499, if you need 512GB of storage that’s $1,249 / £1,099 / AU$1,849, and if for some reason you want 1TB of storage and 12GB of RAM that’s $1,599 / £1,399 / AU$2,399 – the latter is seriously expensive, but you’re getting a lot of power for your money.

The Huawei P30 Pro costs exactly the same as the Galaxy S10 Plus in the UK, costing £899 for the 128GB version at £1,099 for 512GB, although it won't be available in the US and may cost different in Australia.

Verdict

Since the Huawei P30 Pro, Galaxy S10 Plus and iPhone XS Max all have various strengths and weaknesses, it’s not easy to say one is necessarily better for you, especially since the choice will be influenced by your opinion on phones – if you’re a die-hard iOS fan, the choice is easy for you.

The new Huawei P30 Pro has a powerful camera array, but you’re not going to have the best possible screen resolution. The Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus meanwhile has a great screen but you’re getting different internals depending on where you buy it in the world, and the iPhone XS is the most expensive device but it’s the only way you’ll be getting to use iOS 12.

None of these phones is necessarily better than any other, but depending on what you need one might be better for you than the others – but make sure to check out our full reviews of each if you’re still unsure which is best for you.

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Metro Exodus patch adds new ‘Game +’ mode and better support for GeForce RTX GPUs

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 08:13 AM PDT

Metro Exodus has just released a major update which adds a new game mode and makes a number of changes across all platforms, including better support for RTX graphics cards and DLSS on PC.

The so-called Ranger Update for Xbox One, PS4 and PC weighs in at around 6GB, and as mentioned it has introduced a ‘New Game +’ mode, which allows you to play through the game again after you’ve completed the campaign – except this time, you’ll have access to all weapons and attachments you unlocked in your previous run through.

Furthermore, this mode allows you to play with a load of variables to fully tailor the gameplay for your own “personal and uniquely challenging experience”, in the developer’s words. It also has its own fresh achievements and trophies to be won.

And as an added little bonus, you can also enable developer commentary in this mode, which scatters tapes around the game that you can find and play, in which members of the dev team discuss the level design in the areas where these nuggets are found.

Rays of hope

PC gamers who have bought one of Nvidia’s new RTX (Turing) GPUs will doubtless be pleased to hear that Metro Exodus now has better stability when ray tracing is enabled.

Furthermore, DLSS has been improved with the game. This is Nvidia’s frame-rate-boosting tech for RTX graphics cards which also peps up the visuals, and according to the patch notes, DLSS image quality is now better overall.

DualShock and Steam Controller support has now been added on the PC, as well, plus overall controller responsiveness has also been improved in Metro Exodus. That includes the addition of a fourth sensitivity preset, and improvements to aim assist to boot.

Xbox One players get mouse and keyboard support, too.

Naturally, there are the usual ton of bug fixes which have been applied, with a lot of crashing issues having been solved, and the developer promises a “big improvement” to overall stability in this update.

Head over here to read the full PC patch notes, which detail all the various minor tweaks and bug fixes that have been applied.

Metro Exodus got off to a very shaky start, particularly on PC, but fixes for GeForce RTX graphics cards and DLSS issues were quickly introduced, so hopefully these further smoothing-over measures should help to make the game much more playable with these Nvidia GPUs.

Via Wccftech

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Huawei P30 launch live blog: everything that happened at the Paris event

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 07:39 AM PDT

The Huawei P30 launch event is all done and dusted now, and you can see exactly what happened as we brought you all the action from the big event in France.

We were shown the new Huawei P30, the Huawei P30 Pro, the new Huawei FreeLace headphones and the Huawei Watch GT Active, alongside some 'smart' glasses that were really just a fancy Bluetooth headset.

There were also murmurs of a third handset - the Huawei P30 Lite but that never materialized during the long, busy event that saw at least one writer's fingers needing to be bathed in cold water, such was the speed they were typing at.

If you're curious, here's everything as it happened:

Huawei P30 launch event live blog

All times in Central European Time (CET)

15:37 - The Huawei P30 and P30 Pro are available from... today! And that concludes the press conference.

15.35 - Price time!

Huawei P30 6GB/128GB - €799

Huawei P30 Pro 8GB/128GB - €999

Huawei P30 Pro 8GB/256GB - €1,099

Huawei P30 Pro 8GB/512GB - €1,249

Huawei Freelace - €99

FreeBuds Lite - €119

Huawei Wath GT 42mm - €229
Huawei Wath GT 46mm - €249

Huawei 40W Power bank - €99

Eyewear - Price TBC, release date July 2019

15:28 - To be fair, they look pretty good - still NO DETAILS about how they are smart. Oh, Richard is coming back on stage to tell us... goodness talk about keeping us waiting.

There is no pin or button on the glasses, and they are IP67 water and dust resistant. Inside the arm there's a charging module, antenna, dual mic, chipset, speaker and battery.

They use beam-forming technologies and AI noise reduction to provide crisp, clear audio.

It's basically a Bluetooth headset fused to a pair of sunglasses. Talk about anti-climax.

Image Credit: Huawei

15:25 - Guess what... still waiting for actual detail other than "smart eyewear" which is all that's currently on the big screen. This better be worth the wait.

Apparently this is smart eyewear which will make us look more handsome. Hmm.

15:20 - Richard has ONE MORE THING. They look like sunglasses, but are actually smart eyewear.

It's not clear what they do just yet, we're currently watching a very odd video.

Huawei has partnered with eyewear maker Gentle Monster for its glasses, still waiting on actual details though...

15:14 - BUT WAIT. Here's another new product - the Huawei FreeLace wireless headphones with 4 hours playback from just a 5 minute charge, and up to 18 hours of playback on a single charge.

The buds are magnetic, and clip together around your neck when you're not using them. When you unclip them, they'll automatically re-connect to your phone.

We also say hello to the Huawei FreeBuds Lite, with 12 hours battery life (with battery case).

There's a new color for the Huawei Watch GT too, with a 46mm titanium case and 42mm ceramic bezel model with 1 week battery life. There's a new triathlon mode for the Watch GT which will arrive on watches via a software upgrade from today.

Image Credit: Huawei

15:13 - And Richard has finished talking us through all the new features of the P30 series, and we're getting treated to another promo video. Hopefully we'll get price and a release date once it's over.

15:10 - There are companion products for the P30 series too, including a garish pink glitter case, as well as more traditional flip and wallet cases plus a dive case which waterproofs the phone up to 10 meters.

There's also a new power bank, with a 12,000mAh battery inside and 40W SuperCharge technology - it can charge your PC as well as your phone.

Image Credit: Huawei

15:05 - You can press the power button for one second to launch Google Assistant at any time, and hold it down longer to switch off or restart the handset. 

There's support for Google's AR Core as well, providing richer augmented reality experiences and the phone comes with AR Measure, allowing you to accurately measure real-life objects.

There's also support with some running machines, which allows your run data to be automatically delivered to the P30.

The Huawei P30 can also act as a digital car key for seven Audi car models in over 20 countries (a subscription from Audi is required). More brands (including BMW) and models will be available in the future. You can also use the phone as your home and/or office key.

Image Credit: Huawei

15:00 - There's also Super Fast 40W SuperCharge, giving you 70% of life in 30 minutes. You also get fast 15W wireless charging, and the P30 series feature reverse wireless charging allowing you to charge other devices on the rear of the phone.

It's tech we've already seen in the Mate 20 Pro and Galaxy S10 series, but it's good to see it here too.

The P30 series arrive with Android 9 and EMUI on board, and we're being shown a promo video for EMUI which is telling us... very little. Richard says the new version of EMUI makes the phones more beautiful, but that may be a matter of opinion.

14:57 - I'm fully re-hydrated and Richard is back on stage to talk to us about performance. CPU performance is up 75%, GPU is up 46% and NPU is up 226% over the P20 Pro, and the P30 series offer "instant app launch" which Huawei claims is over 1 second faster than the iPhone XS Max.

The phones also have a dual-SIM card tray, with one space doubling as a NM storage card reader, allowing you to expand on the internal space inside the phone.

How are the audience doing you ask? Well the gentlemen next to me has just fallen asleep. Clearly didn't hydrate enough, did he.

14:52 - We're getting close to the end... of the camera segment and we're now looking at DXO Mark scores. The Galaxy S10 Plus, Mate 20 Pro and P20 Pro all scored 109, but the P30 Pro has scored 112.

Now Richard has welcomed professional photographer Erik Madigan Heck to the stage to talk about the P30 Pro, so, talk among yourselves for a few minutes. I'm going to have a sip of water.

14:48 - We're moving away from photography, but not the cameras, as we're now looking at video. As well as offering great low-light photos, it can also offer brighter low-light video recording and steadier video with dual OIS and AIS working together to reduce motion blur.

"Can you use the zoom on video?" I hear you scream. Well, there's good news as you can do just that - but not up to 50x by the looks of it, it appears to max out at 10x zoom.

The P30 Pro can also shoot dual-view video, using two of the cameras at the same time, giving you a close-up and distance shot at the same time. It's not overly clear why you'd use it, but it's there anyway.

14:45 - Want to know what we make of the new Huawei handsets? Well our hands on reviews are now live. Go check them out!

Meanwhile, we're back to Richard and we're still talking camera. Huawei has improved its portrait and macro modes on the P30 and P30 Pro as well, allowing you to capture more detail.

Both handsets come with a 32MP selfie camera, which Huawei claims will give you the best selfie. 

Image Credit: Huawei

14:40 - Now we're going to get a live demo on stage of long range and low-light photography with Kevin. Hi Kevin!

Kevin isn't just use a Huawei P30 Pro, he's also doing this demo with an iPhone XS Max and Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. Huawei really sticking it to the competition here.

Can you guess which phone comes out on top?

I'll give you a moment...

...

It's the Huawei P30 Pro, which can zoom much, much closer than the competition.

Next up a low-light shot, and the P30 Pro is almost witchcraft-like pulling light seemingly out of no-where, while the iPhone and Samsung fail to get anywhere close.

14:30 - The Huawei P30 Pro comes with AI HDR+, which should keep exposure levels even across your photo, with no dark or blown-out areas.

Huawei claims the P30 has best in class zooming performance with a 3x optical zoom and 5x hybrid zoom and 10x digital zoom.

The Huawei P30 Pro has the world's most powerful super zoom lens technology with a 5x optical, 10x hybrid and a staggering 50x digital zoom.

Again, the examples we're being shown (versus Samsung and Apple) look extremely impressive - but again we'll reserve final judgement for our full review.

Image Credit: Huawei

14:20 - We're now moving onto photography, with the Huawei P30 boasting a SuperSensing 40MP Lecia Triple Camera setup. 

The three cameras are a 8MP telephoto, 16MP ultra-wide, and 40MP wide-angle lens.

Image Credit: Huawei

However, the P30 Pro offers more, with four rear cameras. There's a 20MP ultra-wide, 40MP wide-angle, 8MP 5X telephoto and a ToF (time-of-flight) depth-sensing lens.

Image Credit: Huawei

The 40MP camera is the world's first to use RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) sensor (rather than the industry standard of RYGB), which Huawei claims will allow for 40% more light to be taken in, which should result in better low-light pictures.

The size of the sensor is also 125% larger than the one found in the iPhone XS Max and Galaxy S10 Plus, again allowing for more light to be sucked in to each shot, with a 25% low light performance increase over the P20 Pro.

On the P30 Pro, the main camera and the telephoto camera both have OIS (optical image stabilization), reducing motion blur and improve low light photography.

We've been shown an example image taken at 1 Lux (very dark), with the P30 Pro easily beating the Galaxy S10 Plus, iPhone XS Max and the P20 Pro. 

There's more example shots being shown, and unsurprisingly the P30 Pro is beating the competition hands down using the phone's "One Shot" mode. We'll see if it lives up to the claims in our review.

We're still going with the examples versus the iPhone and the Samsung, with the P30 Pro seemingly trouncing the competition in near darkness - the final image showing the P30 Pro can see "the galaxy better than the (Samsung) Galaxy)" in a night shot of the sky.

Image Credit: Huawei

14:15 - First we're taking a closer look at the design of the new handsets, and we're getting a video to introduce this part. Huawei says the design is "inspired by nature", which we're pretty sure Samsung used several years ago for the Galaxy S3.

There are ultra narrow bezels, with the P30 boasting a 6.1-inch FHD+ OLED, 19.5:9 display, while the P30 Pro has a 6.47-inch FHD+ curved OLED, 19.5:9 display. Thanks to the slim bezels, the handsets are narrower than the iPhone XR and XS Max respectively.

The P30 comes with a 3,650mAh battery, while the P30 Pro has a 4,200mAh power pack - again bigger than the iPhones Huawei is pitting the phones against.

There are no speaker grilles on the phone, with sound instead resonating through the display of the phone. Plus there's an in-screen fingerprint scanner which Huawei says, is up to 37% faster.

The Huawei P30 Pro is IP68 rated allowing it to survive short submersion in water, but the P30 is only IP57 rated meaning it's only splash proof.

THERE'S A NEW COLOR PEOPLE. It's called Amber Sunrise - it looks red, very red. There's also Pearl White and Black which, well, you can probably guess what they look like. Finally there's Aurora and Blue Crystal, which art blue-green and blue-white fades.

Image Credit: Huawei

14:10 - Yu says Huawei wants to bring the ultimate photography experience on a smartphone, with professional grade photos and video.

And here we are - the Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 Pro are official! Both have a small notch at the top of their displays, and there's plenty of cameras on the rear. Three on the P30 and four on the P30 Pro.

Image Credit: Huawei

14:05 - Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Group takes the stage. He claims Huawei is leading innovation for a better connected life, including advancements in photography, AI, battery, connectivity and interaction.

It wants to be a better community, and Yu is now talking about a few implementations of the firm's AI smarts. Track AI uses machine-learning to track movement in the eye, allowing doctors to access patient's eyes and work towards possible cures.

14:00 - Here we go! Bang on time. We're getting a fancy intro video to kick us off, full of color. That mergers into a talking head video, with a spokesperson from Telefonica telling us how good Huawei is at 5G and smartphones.

Now Vodafone is having its say, and it's expecting success with the foldable Mate X and the new P30 this year. And yup, Orange is also getting a chance to tell us how good Huawei, and the P30, is in this video.

It's a clear play in the light of global questions around the firm's security, especially from the US. 

13:53 - "Ladies and Gentlemen, the press conference will start in five minutes. Please take your seats." We're still two minutes ahead of schedule. Exciting.

13:48 - "Ladies and Gentlemen, the press conference will begin in 10 minutes. Please take your seats" booms out across the PA system. I make that two minutes ahead of schedule, Richard Yu must be desperate to get on stage and show off the latest phones!

"No Richard, not yet" says the flustered stage manager as they struggle to hold back an eager Yu from storming on stage.

"BUT I WANT TO SHOW THEM THE P30 NOWWWWWWWWWW" Yu squeals...

... Is how we assume it's going down backstage right now.

13:40 - The big focus today is going to be on camera, the tagline of the event is 'Rewrite the Rules of Photography'. It's what Huawei has mainly been teasing about the phone and rumors suggest the P30 and P30 Pro could boast mammoth zooms (likely digital, rather than optical).

13:20 - There's no questioning that we will see the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro today, with branding for the names seemingly everywhere - however there's still a chance Huawei will have something else to show us, with a new smartwatch the current front runner.

I've been told the press conference should run just a little over an hour, which means by 3pm CET (2pm GMT, 10am EST, 7am PST) we should know everything Huawei is launching today.

13:10 - We're now at the event in Paris, and I've even got my very own seat. It's now a little under an hour to go until everything kicks off.

11:25 - This is becoming commonplace for Huawei now. The company has already put adverts up around Paris of its Huawei P30 and Huawei P30 despite the fact neither have been announced yet.

That means journalists are arriving in Paris and spotting the advert, like the tweet below:

10:00 - We're just four hours from launch, and while you wait for Huawei's new flagship phones, why not revisit the handsets that are set to be replaced today.

09.15 - It's not just smartphones that Huawei is set to launch today though, with the firm teasing a new set of earbuds on Twitter. Called Freelace, the new buds will come in at leasr four colors, although little else is know about them at the moment.

We will, of course, bring you all the details on the new Huawei Freelace headphones as they're announced right here, in our live blog.

09:00 - Today's the day. We're in Paris, France for Huawei's first major launch event of the year, with the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro all but guaranteed to be the stars of the show. 

Both handsets have been subject to numerous leaks over the past few months - including from Huawei itself - and we've rounded up everything you need to know ahead of the launch event today.

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Huawei's new 'smart glasses' are just a Bluetooth headset with lenses

Posted: 26 Mar 2019 07:30 AM PDT

Huawei has partnered with Korean glasses brand Gentle Monster to create what it calls its first pair of "smart glasses".

Although Huawei referred to them as smart glasses on stage, it looks like these are instead designer eyewear that will also work as a Bluetooth headset for phone calls.

The company sees them as a competitor to Snapchat Spectacles, but it is focusing on style rather than functionality.

You'll have the choice of either sunglasses or normal lenses. To answer phone calls and more you'll be able to tap the side of the eyewear as there aren't any buttons. Each pair is also IP67 water and dust resistant.

The glasses come with dual microphones so you'll be able to have a phone call hands free. It also features AI noise reduction to ensure clear audio on your call.

There are speakers inside the glasses too, which Huawei claims won't have leaky sound as they're positioned to direct the call audio straight into your ears. It's currently unclear if you'll be able to use the glasses for listening to music.

Apart from these audio features, it's unclear what else you'll be able to do with the glasses. It doesn't seem like there is a camera within the glasses, like there is on smart glasses such as the Snapchat Spectacles.

There's NFC onboard, which is used for wireless charging within a specific Gentle Monster case.

We've yet to learn how much these will cost, but Huawei says the glasses are estimated to come at some point in July this year. 

Huawei hasn't shared where you'll be able to buy them, or the exact range of styles so you can expect to learn more in about that in the coming months.

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