1.0

Social gaming has taken over Facebook profiles and mobile gadgets. Now, while you wait for your friends to take their turn in other games you're playing, you can play a round of Word Crack. It tests your creativity and vocabulary at a relaxed pace. Replay value is high, and the price of $1.99, which you need to pay for an ad-free version, is not too much. However, the game might be a little too simplistic to keep you coming back and choosing this over other digital board games.

The app requires you to either sign up through Facebook … Read more

Sometimes, a text message with a winking smiley face just isn't enough. Itzme helps you convey your message a little better, but it's a little difficult to set up. The small payoff of sending voice messages isn't enough for all the hoops you have to jump through.

This app only works on Facebook accounts, so you and the person you're calling both have to have one. The app doesn't tell you which of your friends already have Itzme set up. The app not only requires you to log in through Facebook, but requires all sorts … Read more

The Tony Hawk series has been a perennial favorite of console gamers, but it's not readily available on Android devices. You can have an almost identical experience with Boardtastic Skateboarding, though. It has all the physics-defying moves, gorgeous skating environments, and customization of console games in a free app.

If nothing else, Boardtastic Skateboarding offers some of the most superb graphics you'll find in mobile gaming. It easily rivals PlayStation 2 or the Nintendo Wii. It is also just as easy to control your skater as it is on a console. The app lets you perform dozens of … Read more

We've taken a few videos using our iPhone's video-capture app, but we never thought we could use our iPhone to actually create a fun movie. That is, until we tried Lumify. While you probably won't win an Academy Award, this fun video-editing app will have you making your own short movies in no time at all.

To begin, Lumify asks for access to any videos and pictures on your iPhone's camera roll. Never made a movie? Don't worry; the app has three different screenplays that walk you through the process of adding scenes, music, and … Read more

Sometimes the only point of an app is to provide a few giggles. Face Juggler is just such an app. Its sole purpose is to swap out faces in a picture to score a few laughs, and, what can we say, it did its job well.

For such a simple premise, Face Juggler had a few instructions to get it to work well. Understandably, you have to take a photo with at least two faces in it. But you also have to make sure the faces are at similar angles. Luckily, we had an image on hand that we could … Read more

Although screen captures are something that Windows is capable of doing on its own, third-party screen capture utilities offer a lot more in the way of features. We've tried many of these utilities and have been quite impressed with some of their offerings. ScreenSnag is one of the less intuitive options that we've tried, but it does offer some useful features that make it worth the time it takes to learn.

ScreenSnag's interface is unlike anything we've seen before, and not necessarily in a good way. Its options are all contained within a series of gray … Read more

Though it never achieved Contra-like success, this game series ran for more than a decade and had a dozen titles. Now, you can have all the side-scrolling fun of Metal Slug on your Android gadget. It might not run smoothly on every gadget, but newer tablet and smartphone owners should have plenty of fun.

If you've ever played any of the arcade versions of the game, you'll feel right at home. If not, Metal Slug is a fairly typical scrolling shooter. You run through screen after screen, blasting away at aliens and tanks that threaten to take over … Read more

With so many free zip utilities, why would you want to pay for one that does much less than most of the others? We'll get to that in a moment, but first we'll note that Zip One Click Unzip is designed to make it as easy as possible for novices, technophobes, and infrequent users to zip and unzip files and folders. You merely have to double-click a zipped file or folder to unzip it, or select a file or folder from the program's ultra-simple interface to do the job. It's shareware that is free to try … Read more

Unlocking your phone FBI-style with a fingerprint seems like a neat idea, but it's harder than it looks. Fingerprint Lock Screen tries to play on that idea to prank your friends, but it doesn't even work very well at that. If you can even get past the ads to try to set the app up, it's buggy and can be easily worked around.

The app claims it can fool your friends into thinking your phone recognizes your fingerprint. How it's supposed to work is that you scan the image of your fingerprint and add your name … Read more