Our 5 favourite new Windows Phone apps of the week

Short on apps? Short on time? Sounds like a job for the professionals! In the absence of officially certified-and-diploma’d app-discoverers, though, don’t worry—you’re in safe hands with us! We’ve neglected all other duties this week in our hunt to bring you the best five new and updated apps of the past seven days, and let us assure you, these will soothe your troubled, lonely smartphones. With further ado, then, we bring you….

App title: myTube

What is it? a YouTube app for Windows Phones

Why we love it? With Microsoft and Google still working hard to get an official YouTube app together, a host of alternatives keep springing up, and we’re particularly fond of this one. The latest version, brought out this week, fixes a couple of bugs cause by Google’s API changes last week, but the most interesting change on the interface level is auto-play for playlists – if you queue up a list of tracks, set it going, and then leave the app, the list will keep playing through in the background without you having to pop back to the app each time to skip to the next track. Sweet!

Who it’s perfect for: video and music lovers

App title: Fresh Paint

What is it? A painting app

Why we love it? It’s simple, but it’s cute—it looks great and it’s easy to use, so what’s not to love? Pick the style and thickness of your brush, your favourite colour paint, and get creating. The textured results look almost three-dimensional and the colour-blending is excellent—Jackson Pollock, eat your heart out! You xan also snap a photo and colour it in. The kids will love it, but we’ll wager that any adults prone to doodling will be pretty entranced too. This update opens the app up to lower-memory phones so that the 512MB crew can now play with the 1GB crew. Suits us…

Who it’s perfect for: artists

App title: Track My Life

What is it? An app that tracks your comings and goings

Why we love it? Okay, it sounds a little creepy, but it’s actually kind of fascinating. It runs in the background (it uses hardly any power) and when you launch it, it tells you where you’ve been that day and how far you’ve travelled.  Clock ‘log’ and you get your daily breakdown—places where you’ve hung out and how many kms you’ve traversed. You can add details and photos to the places you’ve visited to make it into a mini-diary. Buy the full app to unlock all the country and place info the app holds so that your record is more complete. We like the statistical vibe of this one; it’s a more compelling read than it sounds…

Who it’s perfect for: travellers, statisticians and diarists

App title: 6tag 

What is it? An Instagram app for Windows Phones

Why we love it? Take pictures, add filters and share: we all love Instagram! This particular app, though, is quite nifty, and in the battle for best unofficial Instagram app for Windows Phones, it’s a definite contender. Why? It’s got video upload support, that’s why. The easy-to-use interface is familiar from the developer’s previous work (see 6sec, which we’ve featured before), and the photo-editing features are snazzy—tilt-shift is still one of our favourites, and we’re also a fan of the geotagging. A pretty brilliant package and all for the princely sum of zero dollars.

Who it’s perfect for: photographers

 

App title: Battery Pro+

What is it? A tool that details your phone’s battery usage

Why we love it? There’s quite a few battery-logging apps out there, but this is a pretty one and it’s powered by Nokia, so we’ve got a soft spot… Launch the app to see the percentage of battery remaining, how long you’ve got left and what network activity you’ve got turned on. Touch those icons and you’re brought straight to your network, wifi or bluetooth settings in case you need to switch the function off. That’s about the lot, so it’s basic, but it does its job well and we’re happy with that. Sweet and to the point!

Who it’s perfect for: power conscious smartphone users

We think this is a cracking selection of five fantastic apps, but is are there any new or updated apps you think deserve some love, too? If so, let us know down below.