PLANET OF THE APPS: 2ND AUGUST

Tech-dude Stuart Dredge fills you in on the latest app news and reviews.

NEWS

RCRD LBL

Influential US blog now has an app (available in the UK too) which lets you play and download free songs from all manner of hipster artists, while also creating your own playlists and listening to mixes provided by artists and celebrities.

The Death App

This is pretty spooky but very clever at the same time. The Death App plots all recent car accidents and murders near your current location, so you can see what a dangerous place you live in (or not). The idea is to help house hunters scope out new towns, and also to warn drivers about accident blackspots. Really, though, it's just for death-obsessed paranoiacs who see murderers lurking round every corner.

Streetmuseum Londinium / Buildings

Streetmuseum Londinium is an augmented reality app about Roman London, where you wander around the map looking at artefacts, and watching videos overlaid on the real world of gladiators etc.

Meanwhile, Buildings is an iPhone and Android app about architecture - it has details of 40,000 buildings around the world, and serves up text, images and videos about them. So two apps that get you out and about looking at the real world.

REVIEWS

UberMusic / Panamp

UberMusic is for Android and Panamp is for iPhone, and both do the same thing - replace the music player app that comes with your phone with something 'whizzier'. UberMusic does it with customisable 'skins' (so you can change the look of the player to whatever you want), while Panamp does it with easier playlists and browsing your collection.

AtariTinyRiot

Tiny Riot is an app for letting off steam - you shake your phone and grimace while it makes a big noise. Now it's got an Atari Teenage Riot version, just to make it more noisy. And the camera records your shaking so you can upload your 'tiny riot' to twitter or Facebook. So there's a music angle, but also an interesting story behind it - it was made by Japanese developers who said they wanted to 'release our frustration with the uncertainty of post 3.11 Japan'.

CFG: Cosmo For Guys

Yes, Cosmopolitan has a new iPad app. For men. The idea being it serves up all the bits from Cosmo that they'd otherwise have to sneak a look at a female friend's copy to read. Promises 'eye-popping 3-D sex positions'.