There are lots of races and race types to take part in to give Asphalt 7 the depth to last a very long time, but add to that the fact that you can play online and against mates and you’ve got one of the best game releases of the year. If that wasn’t enough, the cars on offer are amazingly stylised with option to customise and upgrade them. With some stunning cars to work hard to unlock there’s a genuine incentive to play the game into the tarmac on top of the sheer fun of it.

Produced by Gameloft, it’s the culmination of years working on a race engine for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and if you compare it to some of their earlier releases like GT Racing Motor Academy in 2010, it’s a significant step forward. The steering function on Asphalt 7 Heat thanks to the tilt and turn controls is very easy to work with and adds to the sheer playability of the game.

The only real negative is that the drift function has an extremity that would benefit from being taken down a notch or two, but the Nitro Boost function adds a lot of compensation for this, especially when the midnight-blue surrounding of the Adrenaline boost kicks in.

There are a lot of stunning tracks to race on, ranging from New York, London, New Orleans, the Alps, Rio, Paris, Moscow, Miami, LA, Hawaii, Cuba, Tokyo, Shanghai and the lava flow of Reykjavik.

Despite its brilliantly reasonable price tag, Asphalt 7 Heat stacks up well against any racing game contenders, whether they’re on the PS3, PSP or XBox 360. The best racer on the iPod Touch and iPhone to date! And one of the first to make the tilt and turn technology of the device work well.

Asphalt 7 Heat review: 4.7/5

However, the reality is that it only really comes to life when it is combined with a sketch mat and pen, so that you can actually sketch straight onto the screen. Without one it makes drawing anything with your finger or mouse pretty tough, as the pic I knocked up on Sketch Book Express with my finger and track-pad shows.

With the addition of the sketch mat and pen though, you unlock a whole new realm of creativity, giving you the opportunity to design some incredibly complex drawings with much more freedom than with paper based sketch skills, because of the ability to define layers, undo mistakes and move portions of the image around with ease.

The Sketch Book Express app is free right now at the Mac app store, but it also has a more professional older brother in Sketch Book Pro, but at £44.99 you might want to try out your skills on the express version before you turn pro. Although you’ve only got to take a look at the video of the Iron Man sketch video to see what you can achieve.

Sketchbook Express app review: 4.1/5

Some of the cooler features include being able to crop your photography directly on you iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, changing the tint, adding rainbow, pop-art, black & white and vintage effects, as well as being able to straighten, rotate & flip images.

For shots that you’ve got a touch of the shakes, you can sharpen them up a little to cut down on the fuzz and for others that are slightly overexposed, you can tone down the exposure level to make bad shots look better.

However, by far the most fun is layering the effects to create your own results. Rainbow, sketch and soft black and white is a pretty cool combo (see Belle du Bois below), but there is a lot that you can do on the Adobe Photoshop Express app.

4.5/5

Here are a couple of my efforts, along with the Rainbow Tube Torn Ad Space above:

The launch of Apple’s iPad recently may not have been met with much love from us here at Tuppence Magazine, but it’s release has also sparked the release of Apple’s iBooks, which is far more exciting. Along with Apple iPhone & iPod Touch gaming, it is probably one the the best new developments from the fruity genii.

The reality is that reading a real book is probably one of the coolest things in life for me, so while I can see what it is that makes iBooks so good, it’ll never replace the real thing. That said, I have downloaded it to my iPhone, and for very good reason… iBook has hundreds of amazing books in its library for free. Classics novels like Don Quixote, Wind in the Willows, Around the World in Eighty Days and A Tale of Two Cities can all be downloaded and read for free, and that’s just a tiny selection of the full free library.

So, apart from the amazing free books, what else does the iBook have to make it worth adding to your current reading habit. Firstly, and brilliantly, it’s backlit, so if you want to stay up and read, while your Russian mail order bride wants to turn off the lights & get her beauty sleep, you’ve now got a compromise.

Secondly, on an iPhone or iPod Touch you should be able to angle it on the most tightly packed of tubes to still be able to read, without the worry of having your book crushed in the mayhem. It’s also something that you’ll probably have with you all the time, so if you’re left in the waiting room at the dentist for ages and you’ve forgotten your new soft porn steamer, Alice in Underland, you can always turn on your iBooks for salvation.

The library function is pretty cool, allowing you to have loads n loads of books waiting in the wings for you to read whenever you want. There’s a bookmark thing too, so you’ll never lose your place, even if you go for weeks without turning a page. You can also reduce and increase the size of the font, so if your cataracts are playing up then you won’t need to go all squinty eyed to get through a chapter.

On a down side, though, the iBooks software can be a little slow, but I expect they’ll fix this in a few months once they’ve sent around a couple of app updates.

Overall, Apple’s iBooks is well worth downloading. It’s free and it comes with a whole raft of great free books. While it’ll never replace the real thing, it’s definitely got a place as a pocket book shelf.

Apple iBooks review: 3.9/5

The beauty of it is that it costs just £0.69 from the Apple apps store, so while it’s not reasonable as free games, it is a marginal fraction of the cost of console games, and it can be played anywhere on your iPhone or iPod touch.

The concept is build around the story of a group of nasty piggies that have run away with the birds’ eggs, thus making them angry beyond belief. In retaliation, the birds rally the troops and begin a quest to smash up the piggies to retrieve the eggs.

Think Worms meets Animal Farm and you wouldn’t be far from the mark. Essentially, you fire different types of birds using a slingshot at the piggies to advance through the levels, destroying their fortifications and breaking through their armoured helmets. Controls are touch screen grab and release, so a monkey could easily get into it.

While the game is frustratingly difficult at time, it doesn’t actually take ages to complete overall, however, the developers, Rovio Mobile, have added golden egg quests and star challenges to increase the longevity of the game.

Angry Birds review: 3.7/5