You probably know Cat or Caterpillar as the guys in yellow and black, makers of construction equipment and those boots the cool kids were wearing for a little while. Now you can add smartphones to that list, thanks to the Cat B15.

Actually, the phone is made by Bullitt Mobile, a licensee of Cat, and this isn't its first smartphone rodeo . Its already made a couple of phones under the Cat name, and it launched the Cat B15 at MWC 2013 in Barcelona. This rugged device has been available in Europe for a little while, and is making its North American debut at a pre-show event for CTIA 2013.

Rubber outside, Jelly Bean inside

The Cat B15 has a rubber and aluminum shell with a sweet Android 4.1: Jelly Bean center. It's built to make calls and survive falls; with just a 5-megapixel camera and dual-core 1GHz processor, it's not designed for much else.

As we mentioned, the Cat B15 has been available in Europe for a while now, and can actually be purchased as an unlocked device directly from Cat for $349/£300. Representatives showing the device couldn't name the U.S. carriers that will carry it.

No 4G here, sadly

However, we'll tell you that the Cat B15 is a GSM phone, so therefore AT&T and T-Mobile are your likely candidates. No dice with GSM carriers Sprint and Verizon. It's also 3G only, so forget about up-to-date data speeds.

Like a lot of rubberized and ruggedized phones, such as the Kyocera Torque, the Cat B15 looks like a phone in a heavy rubber case. Phones like this are bulky by nature, but it does seem like Cat has slimmed down the B15 as much as possible.

Looks like a handsome screwdriver

The B15 is just shy of 5-inches, with a width of 2.7-inches and .58-inches of thickness. It also feels pretty good, and doesn't weigh too much, just 5.9 oz. Its rubber body casing and aluminum sides give it the look of a toolbox or an eye-catching screwdriver.

The display is a 4-inch 480 x 800 screen resolution. But get this: it's designed to detect and stand up to wet finger, because the Cat B15 is waterproof at a depth of up to 1 meter, for thirty minutes. We actually had the chance to wet our digits and give the phone a swipe, and it did indeed work. Frequent snorkelers, we may have your next phone here.

The manufacturer also claims the B15 is "impervious to dust," which is likely thanks to all the rubber seals fitted in each and every port. The headphone jack seals up, as does the micro-USB charging port.

Treat it like a rented phone

It's also rated for a drop of up to six feet, which should be more than enough to survive a tumble from your hand to the floor. Cat representatives on hand were eager to drop the phone and prove this claim.

Getting back to the build, one of the things we like least about a smartphone case is how it makes the buttons difficult to push. Luckily, the B15's yellow rubber buttons weren't too bad. They didn't press as easy as an iPhone 5's unlock button, but they didn't take too much effort, either.

It opens up, no mallet required

You wouldn't think it, but the B15 actually has an open body design. It takes some doing, but you can unlatch the back and open it up to reveal a 2000 mAh battery and microSD slot. There's only 4GB of on board storage, so it's a good thing you can add an additional 32GB.

Of course, this isn't really a media centric or image snapping phone. The camera is only 5-mp and the processor is low-end, but flipping across menus and diving into the app drawer, the B15 was no slouch. We didn't detect any stuttering, and the browser opened with acceptable speed.

We'd guess that's Jelly Bean at work, as the B15 runs a version that's darn close to stock. We noticed just one toolbar that smacked of manufacturer meddling.

Early Verdict

When a brand like Cat enters the smartphone game, it's tempting to look at it as selling a name, not a phone. Cat has parleyed its black and yellow good looks and blue collar street cred into clothes, boots, watches and more. Its even appeared at London Fashion Week.

We won't know if Cat is a smartphone dilettante until we have the B15 in for a full review, but there's a good chance the phone could prove it's worth, and frankly, phones like this could use a little style. We've all seen far too many hideously shattered iPhones and over-the-top protective cases. If someone could sell a tougher phone to that crowd, not just construction workers, they'd be doing the world a favor.

Ultimately though, the B15 seems like a budget phone in a well-constructed case. It's 3G only, has a weak processor and camera, and the display is none to sharp. The battery is a bit small at 2000 mAh, which is worrying on a phone that should be reliable above all else.

However, the close to stock Android OS intrigues us, and we have to admit, we're charmed by the phone's sturdiness, and the eagerness of Cat reps to beat it up for us. Keep your eye out for our full review, and an update whenever we get some carrier info.

Introduction

Although the Canon EOS Rebel T4i (Canon EOS 650D in the UK) was the first DSLR to have a touchscreen, Canon sensibly decided that the touch controls should be in addition to rather than instead of the button and dial controls.

This helped widen the camera's appeal, making it attractive to novices upgrading from a touchscreen smartphone or compact camera, as well as enthusiast photographers. As a result, according to Canon, the camera has sold very well.

Nevertheless after less than a year, the brand has decided to replace the Canon EOS Rebel T4i with the Canon EOS Rebel T5i, also known as the Canon EOS 700D. It sits alongside the Rebel T3i (UK version Canon EOS 600D) at the very top of Canon's "consumer" lineup, just below the Canon EOS 60D that starts its "enthusiast" range.

However, the new camera only makes a few upgrades on the model it replaces.

The vast majority of the Canon EOS Rebel T5i's specification is the same as the Rebel T4i's. For example, the 18 million pixel APS-C sized sensor and the 14-point Digic 5 processor are the same. It also has the same hybrid autofocus system with nine-point, all-cross type phase detection points.

As before, the sensor has pixels that are used for the phase detection part of the hybrid autofocusing system that is available when using Live View mode or shooting HD videos.

When the Hybrid AF is in action, it uses the central pixels to inform the phase detection part and get the subject close to sharp - from then, the contrast detection steps in to get it into full focus. This means that you can use the camera handheld. Canon claims that the performance of this system when one of the new STM lenses is mounted has been improved.

Like the Rebel T4i, the Rebel T5i can shoot at 5fps, and the sensitivity can be set in the native range ISO 100-12800, which can be expanded to ISO 25,600 if necessary. This makes it a pretty versatile camera, capable of shooting in a wide range of situations.

One of the biggest changes brought with the new camera is that the impact of the Creative Filters (Grainy Black and White, Soft Focus, Fish-Eye, Art Bold, Water Painting, Toy Camera and Miniature Effect) can be previewed on the screen when shooting in Live View mode - just as you can with the Canon EOS Rebel SL1 (known as the Canon EOS 100D in the UK) and the Canon EOS M.

However, these are still a JPEG-only option, so you can't have a "clean" raw file recorded with the JPEG. If you want an unfiltered image as well as one with the effect on, you need to apply the filter post-capture using the Canon EOS Rebel T5i's post-processing options.

Alternatively, the Rebel T5i has the usual array of Picture Styles (Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome) as well as Auto, in which the camera selects what it calculates to be the appropriate option automatically, plus it can apply three user-defined styles.

All of the preset options can be adjusted to taste and can be used when shooting raw as well as JPEG files.

The Canon EOS Rebel T5i has also been designed to have a more expensive feel, with a textured coating and a 360-degree mode dial added. The latter means it can be twisted all the way around, rather than reaching a point where it stops and has to be twisted back again.

The Canon EOS Rebel T5i/Canon EOS 700D has a full asking price of US$749 / £619.99 / AU$849 body only or US$899.99 / £749.99 / AU$999 with the new 18-55 STM lens.

This means that it goes head to head with the 24 million pixel Nikon D5200, which was announced at the end of 2012.

Build and handling

Canon has clearly used the same mold for the EOS Rebel T5i as it did for the EOS Rebel T4i, since the two camera bodies look almost identical, with the only visible difference being a change to the mode dial.

The icons on the Canon EOS Rebel T5i's dial are raised rather than just painted and it's edged with a finer texture. This higher-quality dial can also be rotated through 360 degrees, so you don't have to turn it backwards and forwards to reach the options you want.

Rubbing a finger over the two cameras also reveals that they have a slightly different texture, with the Canon EOS Rebel T5i feeling a little coarser - in a good way. The rubberized coatings over the finger and thumb-grips remain the same and give good purchase.

While it lacks the robustness of Canon's professional-level DSLRs, the Canon EOS Rebel T5i feels well made, with no movement detectable at any of the joints. The articulating joint that attaches the LCD screen and enables it to be rotated around for viewing from very high or low angles, or from in front of the camera, has a high quality feel.

The Canon EOS Rebel T5i has the same control and menu layout as the Canon EOS Rebel T4i that it replaces. As before the menu is spread across 11 tabbed screens in stills mode, including a My menu option to which you can assign up to six features for quick access - we find it helpful to use this to reach the Mirror lock-up, Highlight tone priority, Auto Lighting Optimizer and Flash control options.

The menu can be navigated and options selected via the touchscreen or the button and dial controls.

There's also a Quick menu that you can activate either by pressing the physical Q button or by touching the Q icon on the LCD screen. This gives a quick route to the mostly commonly needed camera settings.

If the Feature Guide is activated via Set-up Menu 3, touching an on-screen icon once brings up an explanation of the feature, while a second touch displays its available options. A single touch is all that is required if the Feature Guide is deactivated.

As on the Canon EOS Rebel T4i, the power switch has a third option that's used to activate Movie mode. Once this has been done, the button on the back of the camera that starts Live View in stills mode becomes the movie record button.

Although the Canon EOS Rebel T5i has all the button and dial controls that we expect from a camera at this level, it is also possible to control the camera via the 3-inch 1,040,000-dot touchscreen. This is very responsive, and once you start using the touch controls you find that you use them more and more because they are so intuitive.

It's great to be able to swipe across the camera's screen to scroll through images and then pinch to zoom in to inspect details. It's just a shame that Canon has buried the rating control in the menu.

We found that the vari-angle screen provides a good, clear view with lots of detail visible even in quite bright light, making it very useful when composing images at ground level or above head-height.

The touch-shutter facility, which enables the AF to be set and the shutter tripped with a touch of a finger on the screen, is particularly helpful in these situations.

However, the screen inevitably gets covered in fingerprints and these obscure the view, so it's a good idea to carry a decent lens cloth with you so you can give it a wipe now and then.

Because it's a DSLR rather than a compact system camera, the Canon EOS Rebel T5i has an optical viewfinder. While this only covers 95% of the frame and carries the risk of including a few extra elements along the edges of images, it is bright and pleasant to use.

As usual these days, when given the choice we would opt to compose images in the LCD when focusing manually, because the enlarged view makes it easier to be precise with the focus point.

Performance

Given that they have the same sensor, it's not surprising to discover that the Canon EOS Rebel T5i can resolve the same amount of detail as the Canon EOS Rebel T4i (UK version Canon EOS 650D), and that the two cameras' image quality is very similar.

Noise is well controlled throughout the sensitivity range, although as you'd expect, images taken using the upper ISO values have some coloured speckling visible. It's interesting that our lab tests reveal that the Rebel T5i produces slightly noisier images than the Rebel T4i at the lower to mid sensitivity settings. Canon has probably made this change to the image processing to bring out a bit more detail.

The Canon Rebel T5i can produce high-quality images direct from the camera with plenty of detail and pleasant, natural colors, but as usual the best results are produced from raw files that are carefully processed.

Examining our images at 100% on the screen indicates that the camera's default sharpening is a little on the high side, and more natural images are created by turning the in-camera Sharpness value down.

As is Canon's way, the white balance tends to lean a little towards warm tones, but this isn't dramatic and it usually results in more attractive images.

However, Canon's evaluative metering system continues to give mixed performance. In some situations it is superb, but in high contrast conditions you need to be alert to the brightness of the subject under the active AF point, since this can skew the result.

Bright subjects can trick the camera into under exposure, while dark ones can lead to over exposed images. This is an issue throughout the Canon DSLR range, but it seems especially strange in models that the company is aiming at novice photographers (as well as enthusiasts), such as the Canon EOS Rebel SL1 (Canon EOS 100D in the UK) and Canon EOS Rebel T5i.

While most users want the subject to be correctly exposed, few will be happy with a wildly over exposed landscape because the focus point is in shadow.

With a dynamic range of almost 12EV at ISO 200 and ISO 400, it's clear that the Canon EOS Rebel T5i is capable of recording a wide range of tones. However, these are compressed in the JPEG files to create a higher contrast image with more punch. Unlike the results for signal to noise ratio, our dynamic range measurements for the Canon Rebel T5i match those from the Canon Rebel T4i almost exactly.

Our tests confirm that Canon has improved the performance of the hybrid focusing system that's available in Live View and video mode.

We found that the Canon EOS Rebel T5i is appreciably quicker to achieve focus with one of the STM lenses mounted than the Canon EOS Rebel T4i. Nevertheless, the focusing still isn't really fast enough to be used with a moving subject.

When you use the viewfinder to compose images, the Canon Rebel T5i reverts to the more standard phase detection autofocus system. This works well, with each cross-type point finding its target quickly and accurately even in quite low light and with low contrast subjects.

The only down side is that with "just" nine AF points it's often necessary to focus the lens and then recompose the image, because there isn't a point directly over the subject.

Canon's STM lenses really come into their own when shooting video, and the new 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM kit lens's focusing is very quiet and smooth when Movie Servo AF is enabled.

It's so smooth, in fact, that sometimes it's hard to tell that the focus is slowly being adjusted. The end result, however, is very high quality footage with no sound of the focusing system in action.

While post-processed raw files generally create better monochrome images, it's very helpful to have an idea of how the final images will look. It's also fun trying to get shots just right in-camera. The Canon Rebel T5i's Monochrome Picture Style produces some excellent results, with subtle toning being possible. In many cases the images are print-ready.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Canon EOS Rebel T5i, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 100 the Canon EOS Rebel T5i is capable of resolving up to around 22 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 16 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Noise and dynamic range

We shoot a specially designed chart in carefully controlled conditions and the resulting images are analysed using DXO Analyzer software to generate the data to produce the graphs below.

A high signal to noise ratio (SNR) indicates a cleaner and better quality image.

For more more details on how to interpret our test data, check out our full explanation of our noise and dynamic range tests.

Here we compare the Canon EOS Rebel T5i with the Nikon D3200, Canon EOS Rebel T4i, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

JPEG signal to noise ratio

At the lower sensitivity settings the Canon Rebel T5i has a slightly lower signal to noise ratio (SNR) than the Rebel T4i it replaces indicating that it produces JPEGs with a little more noise. This is probably to reveal a little more detail. Beyond ISO 1600 the Rebel T5i's SNR is a very close match for the Rebel T4i's and both are beaten by the Nikon D3200, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

Raw signal to noise ratio

As with the JPEG files, after conversion to TIFF the raw files from the Canon Rebel T5i have a lower SNR than the Rebel T4i's files up to around ISO 3200. With the exception of the lower sensitivity settings, the Rebel T5i beats the Sony Alpha 58, but it a fairly close match for the Nikon D3200 and Nikon D5200.

JPEG dynamic range

While it doesn't match the Sony Alpha 58, Nikon D5200 or Nikon D3200 for JPEG dynamic range it seems likely that Canon has done this deliberately to produce higher contrast images that look print-ready.

Raw dynamic range

The Rebel T5i's raw file (after conversion to TIFF) dynamic range is a very close match for the Rebel T4i's - hardly surprising given that they have the same sensor and processing engine. The highest dynamic range is achieved at ISO 200 and ISO 400 (from where it more-or-less matches those of the Nikon D3200 and Sony Alpha 58). The Nikon D5200's raw files (after conversion to TIFF) have the widest dynamic range at any sensitivity setting indicating that it can capture the widest range of tones ina single shot.

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

Using an extension tube has restricted depth of field, but there's lots of detail in the sharp areas of this shot, taken in early morning light. An extra 1/3EV exposure was dialed in to get this accurate result.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The vari-angle screen makes it easy to compose images from awkward angles like this. It's also helpful to be able to set the AF point, and even trip the shutter, with a touch of the finger on the screen.

Click here to see the full resolution image

This toned shot was created in-camera at the capture stage using the Monochrome Picture Style. Helpfully, it's possible to shoot raw images at the same time so there's a clean file to work on as well if you want.

Click here to see the full resolution image

We had to increase the exposure by 2/3EV over that suggested by the evaluative metering to get this image. It could still benefit from a little post-capture brightening, but the skin tones are spot-on.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The camera has got the color and exposure just right here and there's lots of detail visible, so the end result has plenty of impact.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Colors are nice and vibrant but not excessively saturated when the Standard Picture Style is used.

Sensitivity and noise images

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Verdict

The Canon EOS Rebel T5i is a superb camera that combines some of the best aspects of modern digital camera technology. It has a good sensor capable of recording lots of detail, a comprehensive feature set and a responsive vari-angle touchscreen that provides a quicker method of controlling the camera than buttons and dials - for those who want to use it.

It is an excellent choice of camera for anyone wanting to take their photography more seriously, shoot from creative angles or start recording videos. However, it is only a minor improvement on the Canon EOS Rebel T4i, and owners of this slightly older camera need feel no compulsion to upgrade.

That said, the hybrid focus system is significantly better; it's more sensitive and quicker to respond when the shutter release is depressed. It still isn't fast enough for use with moving subjects, though.

However, when Movie Servo AF is enabled and an STM lens is mounted, the Canon EOS Rebel T5i brings subjects smoothly and silently into focus to produce high-quality video footage, with no hunting in good light.

When shooting with the camera held to the eye, the Canon Rebel T5i reverts to the more standard phase detection AF system, which is fast, efficient and useful when shooting a range a range of subjects, including sport and action.

We liked

Because the Canon EOS Rebel T5i has the full complement of button and dial controls as well as the touchscreen, photographers can choose how they wish to use it.

The vari-angle screen comes into its own when shooting landscape, macro or still life images, and you have time to consider the composition and ensure the point of focus is exactly where you want it. It's also extremely helpful when shooting video clips.

We disliked

The main source of complaint about the Canon EOS Rebel T5i is that it's only a very minor upgrade on the Canon EOS Rebel T4i, and that it uses the familiar 18MP APS-C format sensor. While this may seem like a strange move for Canon, why should a company wait to make improvements to an existing model?

One downside to controlling the camera via the touchscreen is that the LCD is quickly covered in fingerprints and greasy smears, which make the images hard to see in bright light.

It's a shame that Canon hasn't made the ratings option easier to access when reviewing images, nor included Wi-Fi technology to enable wireless control over the camera for wildlife photography, as well as cable-free image transfer.

Nikon stuck with its 12MP sensors for a long time, but it has now progressed onto 24MP sensors, which have been widely well received. Canon seems to be stuck at 18MP for its APS-C format DSLRs, and although the image quality is very good, some may argue that it is a little behind the times.

Our lab tests also reveal that the Canon Rebel T5i lags behind the Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58 for dynamic range and signal to noise ratio.

Final verdict

The Canon EOS Rebel T5i is a very capable and versatile camera that produces high quality images. It has a comprehensive feature set and affords all the control expected by enthusiast photographers while providing automatic hand-holding options for less experienced users.

It produces images that are of very similar quality to those from the Canon Rebel T4i, although our tests reveal that they are a little noisier.

The Rebel T5i once again highlights the benefits of shooting raw images rather than JPEGs as being able to tailor the noise reduction and sharpening to the specific conditions produces higher quality results.

While some may scoff at the vari-angle touchscreen, we say don't knock it until you've tried it. It's extremely responsive and it promotes creativity. We are becoming increasingly used to touchscreen control on a range of other devices, so it seems odd that Nikon hasn't yet employed the technology in a DSLR.

Introduction

Office 2013 gets the Windows 8 treatment, with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as new features in every application. So while the main thing you'll notice is the new look, there are some really interesting features under the hood.

Office is also going to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. Check out our Office 365 review.

As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at home or in a business or which applications are included.

Buying Office 2013

Even if you decide you want to buy a pay-for-it-once-and-keep-it copy of Office 2013 in a box, you won't find a DVD inside – just a product key to unlock the software you download. (Buyers in "developing countries with limited internet access" can still get a DVD, but that's not an option in the UK or US.)

If you prefer to pay an annual subscription to get extra features, Office 365 editions let you download the Office 2013 applications onto multiple PCs (or share them with your family).

For home users, there are four options. Buy the boxed software and you can put it on one PC. Office Home and Student 2013 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote costs £109.99/$139.99; Office Home and Business 2013 adds Outlook and costs £219.99/$219.99. Office Professional 2013 has the full set of programs for £389.99/$399.99; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.

Then there's the new subscription version that Microsoft released this week, Office 365 Home Premium, which costs you $99.99 a year for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.

That's good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac – and Mac users get the current version of Office for Mac until a new release comes along in the future). And when the next version of Office comes out, you'll get it on the same subscription.

All five people get an extra 20GB of storage on SkyDrive to keep documents on and 60 free Skype world calling minutes a month (which can be calls to a landline or a mobile and from your PC or from a smartphone with Skype installed).

You can download the Office programs temporarily on another PC if you're away from your usual PC (even if it already has another version of Office installed). So if you have a document on a USB drive or on SkyDrive that you need to edit on another PC, and using the Office Web Apps from SkyDrive doesn't provide of the features you need (like seeing revision marks in a tracked document you're collaborating on), you can use Office on Demand to get the full version of Word in just a few minutes.

You manage all this from the revamped Office.com and there's a link to your account there in the ribbon of all the Office applications. (To activate the Skype minutes you have to link your account to the Microsoft account you're using for Office 365, which can be done on the Office.com site.)

You also get a list of your recently edited documents, which helps when using Office on Demand to give it a fresh edit.

If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) it's possible to get Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.

Also, as you might expect, Office 2013 and Office on Demand only run on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.

Office for business

Although Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like a great deal for a small business, it's not licensed for commercial use (Like the Windows RT versions of Office 2013) unless you already have an Office business licence. Instead, you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions, available from February 27.

These will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, which are already available to run on your own servers. It's taking some time for Microsoft to upgrade Office 365 to run these new server versions, which explains the later availability (there are a number of issues in SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on). We've tried these out with the Office 2013 applications (and we looked at SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here.

Office 365 Small Business Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync. The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to five PCs or Macs at once (again, you can use Office on Demand to download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you get regular updates and new features).

You can host online meetings with audio and HD video conferencing in Lync and run a public website on SharePoint, plus you get Exchange with a 25GB mailbox for each user and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint.

That gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB for each user, but you can choose how the storage is allocated between users and you can control how they use it – like forcing them to encrypt confidential documents.

Office 365 ProPlus (short for Professional Plus), is aimed at midsize businesses (10-250 employees) and includes the same desktop Office software as Small Business Premium. But it also has tools for business intelligence, consistency checking to Excel and automated deployment, as well as more options for the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services.

Office 365 Enterprise has the full Office 2013 set of features in the desktop software and SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services, like archiving, legal hold, Data Loss Prevention and rights management to protect confidential information.

If you're looking for five or more copies of Office 2013 and you don't want the Office 365 services at all, you can buy Office Standard 2013 (with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Publisher, the Office Web Apps and limited Lync, SharePoint and rights management services) or Office Professional Plus 2013 (with the full range of desktop Office programs and server features) through volume licensing.

We've already looked at the final (RTM) version of the Office 2013 applications. Now we've been able to try out the Office 365 Home Premium service with the new Office.com site, where you can download some of the new Office apps (although the apps for Outlook won't work until you have Exchange 2013).

Installing Office 2013

With any of the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2013, you don't have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office (or even about uninstalling previous versions of Office, apart from Outlook). Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office, the programs stream from the cloud.

This is a much improved version of the click-to-run virtualisation that Microsoft has used for the Office trial versions for a few years, which enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you download them. You don't have to wait for the full download; you can use the first features as soon as they download and if you click on a tool that hasn't yet downloaded, the installer will get that next.

The streaming happens quickly enough that the slideshow of new features you can watch while the other applications install is actually running in PowerPoint (and you don't have to watch it unless you want to).

You do have to pick a few options like the language to use for Office, the design you want to see in the ribbon and whether you want to send Microsoft anonymous telemetry about how you use Office. You can also fill in your Microsoft account details, which Office uses to sync settings like recent documents from SkyDrive, email accounts, custom AutoCorrect entries, the list of your Office Apps and the buttons you add to the Quick Access Toolbars.

It might seem odd to sign in with your Microsoft account on the Office.com site and then get asked for it during installation, but this is how you share the subscription; use the account that's paying for the licence to log in to Office.com, start the download, then sign in with the account of the person who will be using Office on each PC.

It's all very simple and very well thought out. This is your personal version of Office, on any PC, a lot faster. If you've downloaded the Customer Preview of Office 2013 you've tried this already. (The traditional Office desktop installer uses similar technology so the installation is faster there as well.)

Office 365 Home Premium adds several more designs that you can use to decorate the Office ribbon, including doodled circles, lunchbox sandwiches, pens and pencils, cartoon fish and spring leaves. It's a little odd, but there's something for most tastes (including a blank ribbon).

Once the programs are installed you can also choose from three Office themes (click your account picture at the top of the screen and choose Account Settings or open File > Account. The default white gives you the clean look you might have seen in the Customer Preview or in Office RT; pale Ggrey adds a light tint to the ribbon and other panes and dark grey is a high contrast colour scheme that puts a mid grey on the ribbon and panes and replaces most of the accent colours in each application with a very dark grey.

If you're not a fan of the new Windows 8 look, experiment with the themes to see if an alternative changes your mind.

Word 2013

Office 2013 takes the clean, unadorned principles of what used to be called Metro design and applies Office 2013 takes the clean principles of the Microsoft Design Language and applies them to desktop apps. This puts your documents centre stage, with tools such as the ribbon fading slightly into the background. The ribbon looks much more spacious but takes up no more space on screen.

Office 2013 is also designed to showcase Windows 8 and the touch features (the same is true of the Windows RT versions). Even the desktop apps are ready for touch. Press the Touch Mode button that Office automatically puts on the quick address toolbar if your PC has a touchscreen and the layout of the interface changes, with bigger buttons and more space to touch them without pressing the wrong thing.

In the final version of Office 2013 this is a big improvement on the version you may have tried in the Customer Preview. Instead of a fiddly and confusing little round button it's a clear pointing finge. Tapping it brings up a mini menu explaining the differences – on big icons that you can easily press with your finger.

It's not perfect but it makes Office 2013 far more touch friendly but not too big and chunky to be efficient when you use mouse and keyboard.

These are several improvements to the ribbon compared to Office 2010. Word has a new Design tab on the ribbon, which is a more logical place for the formatting and page background tools previously found on the Page Layout tab.

If you've seen the preview of Office 2013, the final version of the ribbon has some other subtle changes, making some of the tool icons clearer and crisper. The icons for the individual programs have also been redesigned to look better on the tiles of the Windows 8 Start screen.

The layout features are far better than in Word 2010; you can now embed videos directly into Word documents, or search your Facebook and Flickr accounts for photos to place in documents without having to save them first. These are both well designed, easy to use tools.

Getting your pictures in the right place is much easier with the new alignment guides that appear as you drag objects around (so you can see when the object is in the centre of the page or lined up with another element), and the layout options tool that appears so you can set text wrap.

The alignment guides make it much easier to tweak Word Art quickly, instead of spending hours adjusting spacing and sizes if the default Word Art layout doesn't fit what you want to show.

The improved layout options may be why the new PDF reflow feature works so well. This opens PDF files as if they're Word files – converting the layout so you get a Word document that looks like the original PDF, complete with fonts, layout, images, tables, charts and page numbers and making it all editable. This is fast (for a two-page file it takes only a few seconds longer than opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader) and remarkably accurate.

One option, Read Mode, removes most of the Word interface, reflowing documents to fit on screen with thumb-friendly buttons either side of the page. You can choose wide or narrow columns and set the page colour to sepia or even white on black. Tap on pictures, videos and charts to pop them out of the page in a larger window, or collapse sections you're not interested in (you can do that in page layout view as well).

But cleaning up the interface also means losing some useful tools; the handle that you can drag in Word to divide the document window into two scrolling panes (so you can see two separate sections of your document on screen at once) disappears, relegated to a button on the View ribbon so it takes twice as many clicks to get the split view.

Maybe you won't need it as often with the handles that enable you to collapse sections of your document under their headings or the vastly improved Navigation pane that turns document headings into a handy outline (you can even drag sections around in the pane). But when you do it shouldn't be more work than it used to be.

Also, the AutoCorrect features have disappeared from the menu when you right-click a spelling mistake; you have to go all the way into Word's huge Options dialogue to add corrections you want to use. Handy tip: if you're one of the handful of people who add their own AutoCorrect entries, pin the AutoCorrect dialogue to the Quick Access Toolbar on the ribbon.

Office 2013 seems to be designed for widescreen tablets: for example, task panes are back. In what feels like a flashback to Windows XP, dialogues such as spell check sit at the side of your screen rather than floating over the document and obscuring a few lines.

Install a dictionary app from the Store on Office.com and you get definitions and synonyms for words below the spelling suggestions. This is useful, but is it worth that much screen space? On a high resolution screen on a 16:9 tablet, these panes at the side work well; on an older notebook your screen starts to feel cramped.

Thankfully, you can undock the Spelling dialogue and drag it around (and Office remembers your preference), but the default is for Office applications to spread out on screen and get comfortable rather than to cram in all the information and functions you're used to in the same small space. The newer your PC, the more you will like this.

The new interface is great on a touch-friendly widescreen tablet with the 1366 resolution you need for Windows 8 and space to spare (and even better at the 1920 resolution of a high end notebook), but it's a step backwards for working on multiple documents on a low resolution notebook or desktop.

Snap two windows open side by side and press F7 to start the spell check. In Word 2013, on a 12-inch 1024 x 768 screen, the 5-inch snapped window sacrifices 1.75 inches of space to the spelling task pane. Add the navigation pane and you see only a thin strip of your document in between. Do the same thing on an 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 tablet and you won't find much to complain about.

Mostly the space is very well used. If you collaborate on documents with others, using tracked changes and comments, the improvements to these are extremely welcome and can save you hours of frustration. Instead of turning the page into a sea of red strikeouts and blue underlines to show deleted and inserted text, there's a new Simple Markup view that shows you the final version of the document with a line in the margin to show where there are edits.

Click it to see the details of those changes (which turns on the old All Markup view); click it again to hide the changes and keep reading. A speech bubble shows where there are comments to read; click to open a floating comment view that you can drag around the page, or switch to All Markup and see the comments in a wide margin at the edge of the document.

You can finally leave a reply to a comment rather than just leaving a comment nearby, and you can mark a comment as dealt with. This greys out the comment so it's not distracting, but it's still there if you need to refer back to it later.

If you're collaborating on a large document, Word 2013 (on a high resolution screen) is hands down the best way to do it, especially as having your document on SkyDrive or SharePoint means multiple people can edit it at the same time (they can't change the paragraph you're working on and you don't see their changes until you save when they're highlighted in green, so the page won't ever change without you knowing about it.)

Excel 2013

Excel gets the same interface changes as the rest of Office and some of the same features (the dialogue for inserting images from the web that's also in Word and PowerPoint and the apps for Office gallery, but not Word's new comment interface). And like Word, Excel offers more help for using existing features as well as some very powerful new ones.

Select a range of cells with numbers and the Quick Analysis tool pops up next to the selection with a gallery of conditional formatting, the charts that show the most information from that specific data, formulas, table formats and in-cell sparklines. Hover over an option and you see it either in your data (for formulas such as average or heat map formatting that highlights the highest and lowest figures) or in a pop-up for charts.

The categories are always the same, but the suggested charts change to match the information you're showing – with your live data previewed in the chart and an explanation of why a Clustered Column and Line chart or a Stacked view fits your data best. If the data is complex enough to analyse with a PivotTable, it can build a PivotTable model automatically.

This Chart Advisor comes from Microsoft Research and a prototype appeared on the Office Labs, but it's much more useful to have it integrated with the other analysis tools in Excel.

It's a baby version of the intelligence built into analysis tools such as Tableau – it doesn't go as far as suggesting colour palettes for example – but it makes complex tools such as Pivot Tables (possibly the most powerful and least used feature in Excel) far more accessible, and helps to get the chart right first time.

If you do need to edit a chart, the contextual tools that pop up make it faster and easier; you can preview different designs and checkboxes add and remove chart elements or sections of data interactively. This takes something you've always been able to do in Excel - if you had unlimited patience and unerring accuracy at right-clicking on just the right spot in the chart – and makes it easy and engaging.

Change the data that a chart is based on and the chart doesn't just update, it animates to show the change happening. If the new figures are significantly bigger, first the rest of the chart shrinks, then the new bars grow on screen. Update a single figure and the line moves up or down to its new position, so you can't miss the impact.

Even as you move between cells or add a figure that changes a formula, there are subtle animations to draw your eye to what's changed or to where the cursor has moved.

It's not enough to be annoying, because the animation is less animated close to the change. Click a cell and the highlight appears to fly into place, leading your eye there; change or delete a figure that changes a calculation and the result rolls over to show the new figure.

This makes it much harder to change or delete information that changes your results without noticing that it makes a difference. It's simple but makes Office feel alive and responsive, and conveys useful information.

Even error messages are more useful; drag a cell across the worksheet when you only meant to click somewhere else and Excel gives you a truly informative warning that there's already data in that cell. It shouldn't be a breakthrough, but in the past Excel has been more prone to bald refusals to save or confusingly cryptic errors – this is, mostly, a new and friendlier Excel.

If you want to dig further into your data, there are several new tools, including a Timeline slicer that organises data by date so you can filter down to a specific period or jump through figures month by month to see the differences.

There's a new add-in to look for errors and inconsistencies between worksheets and Power View – which used to be a Silverlight-based web tool for exploring and visualising data that you could use with SharePoint or save as PowerPoints – is now in Excel where it belongs. It's not relegated to a separate window; when you insert a Power View you get a new tab and the tools for pivoting and filtering data, plus simple layout options.

Of course the first problem is getting data into Excel. If you're trying to paste it in from a badly formatted report or an online credit card statement, the new Flash Fill feature is vastly easier than trying to work out how to split data into columns in just the right place.

Paste in the messy data, then start typing the piece of information you want to extract, such as the date or the name of the company you made the payment to (without the unwanted details such as the business number or foreign currency). It feels very good.

After you type a couple of examples, Flash Fill uses them as a template and works out the right pattern – and fills in all the other entries for you. You can extract multiple patterns from the data, so you can get the date, the business name and the amount, all by typing a couple of examples.

Again, this is a feature from Microsoft Research using machine learning. It's the kind of artificial intelligence that websites such as Tripit use to scrape information out of emails and web pages. It's enormously powerful, and it's blissfully simple to use. And it's not often you can say that about Excel.

PowerPoint 2013

The uncluttered new interface works very well in PowerPoint; again the tools fade into the background so you can concentrate on your document.

Like all the Office 2013 applications, when you open PowerPoint you don't go straight to a blank document; instead you get what's almost a welcome page with a list of recent documents and thumbnails for templates and themes (and a blank document if that's what you want).

You can search the library of free templates on the Office site from here. The results come up in what Microsoft used to call the 'backstage' view – the full-screen File menu – and you can preview the layout, filter the results by various categories and keyboards, or even look at the templates for other Office applications.

Many of the templates have multiple colour themes to choose from; whichever one you pick to start with you can switch to the other variants later. As with the rest of Office 2013, a lot of the new templates are optimised for widescreen aspect ratios, like the 16:9 tablets Microsoft hopes you'll buy to use Windows 8.

If you're going back to a document you've worked on, before both PowerPoint and Word make it faster to pick up where you left off; just click the pop-up window to jump to the last slide or page you were working on. This really works when you use Office (or SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps) on multiple PCs (or on your PC and your Surface) and you can start from where you were working on a different machine.

For layout, PowerPoint has the same tools as Word for inserting online images and videos. These are much easier to use than the PowerPoint 2010 video options; a single friendly dialogue enables you to search YouTube or Bing for videos, browse your SkyDrive and local system for video files or paste in the embed code from a video's web page.

It's as simple as searching, previewing and selecting the video you want and it's easy to add frames, effects and corrections – even to online videos.

This is one place where putting controls into task panes works much better than having an on-screen dialogue box, even on an older, low resolution PC. It's much easier to work with the border styles, layout effects, positioning options and video correction tools in a task pane than in a dialogue with 12 tabs that sits right on top of the video you're trying to edit.

There are also 'quick' formatting tools that appear next to selected objects, much like the Quick Analysis tool in Excel, putting the tools you need the most next to the object you're working on.

For positioning, PowerPoint not only has the new green alignment guides that show when you have an object at the edge or centre of a slide. It also has extra 'smart guides' that show when you're aligned with other graphics, and when objects are evenly spaced across the page – these are in addition to the alignment guides on smart art shapes, which now show both horizontal and vertical alignment instead of just one at a time.

You can set your own guidelines on master slides; for example if you have an image in the background of certain slides that you want to line up with.

There are new transitions, like Crush, Fracture and Origami, for a total of 48 different ways to get from one slide to another. There are no new shapes to place in presentations, but you can combine two shapes into one – cutting one out of the other, breaking them up into pieces, turning the space between them into a shape or just gluing them together. That enables you to create new shapes far more precisely than trying to draw them out.

Finally, there's an eyedropper tool for selecting colours from existing objects (although only within the same presentation, not in other applications or even other PowerPoint windows).

PowerPoint gets Word's friendly comments as well, complete with replies; again, this makes good use of a widescreen resolution. That's especially useful now the PowerPoint web app lets you have two people working on a presentation, in the web app and the desktop version of PowerPoint at the same time.

When it's time to give your presentation, the presenter tools have some great new features, such as a thumbnail grid for reviewing all your slides that only you can see. You can pinch to zoom in and out of this, and it's handy for jumping ahead to a later slide without clicking through one at a time.

You can also zoom in on a specific slide in the presentation if the audience needs to see fine detail.

It's possible to see a preview of the next slide, and your presenter notes, which might stop people cramming pages of text onto a single slide and then reading it all out loud very slowly (we can only hope).

You also get a counter for elapsed time for the current slide and the whole presentation, plus the current time, and tools for drawing on the slides or showing a fake laser pointer to highlight things. And you don't have to have a second monitor or projector connected to see the presenter tools, so you can practice running through the presentation complete with your tools.

Again, these are designed to work well on a tablet so you could hold it in your hand and drive your presentation by touch instead of crouching over the keyboard.

Outlook 2013

Outlook uses the clean Windows 8 look to make your inbox look less cluttered without putting much less information on screen. That makes room for tools that let you work right where you are.

Reply to an email using the button at the top of the message and you're typing in the main Outlook window, above the message you were reading. You can pop it out into a separate window if you need to, but this is a clean way of working.

If you click away from your reply it's automatically saved into the draft folder and the mail you were replying to gets an orange Draft label on it (making that stand out against the rest of the interface is one reason for the signature colour of Outlook changing from orange to blue). We also like the option to change the zoom for the message you're reading to fit more of it on screen.

Touch mode in Outlook 2013 gets the same mini-menu as in the other apps but the touch option also puts a bar of five frequent commands (reply, delete, move to folder, flag and mark as unread)about where your thumb will be if you're holding a tablet in both hands in landscape. There are some attractive 'touches', such as using pinch-to-zoom in the Outlook calendar to zoom between day, week and month views.

In all the desktop Office 2013 apps finger right-click works better than anywhere else in the Windows 8 desktop.

If you're writing an email or editing an appointment, press and hold and instead of a context menu you get a finger-sized bar of handy commands. This includes the useful options from the mini Office bar such as bold and bullet points and adds Cut, Copy and Paste right where your finger already is.

In Outlook 2013 you also get a finger-friendly menu of commands for dealing with your inbox when you press and hold on the list of messages: tap in a field where you can type and the keyboard opens automatically so you don't have to press the little keyboard button on the taskbar.

Even more helpfully, when you have a keyboard attached to your tablet you can use your finger to put the cursor in the right pale without having the screen covered by a touch keyboard you don't need.

Fans of Windows Phone will be pleased to see the All and Unread buttons in the inbox; you can quickly jump between all your messages and just the ones you need to deal with.

This makes it much faster to get through email messages because every time you reply to, delete or just finish reading one, you're where you need to be to handle the next message without scrolling and selecting.

With all these handy tools you can probably keep the ribbon in Outlook minimised a lot of the time, making room for even more messages on screen. If so, you get one extra button that's always visible; click it to write email, make a new appointment, create a new contact or set up a new task depending on whether you're in mail, calendar, people or task views.

The new look is also a great design for the address book. Iimages from social networks are automatically used for a thumbnail view and you can see and edit contact details without having to open a separate window.

Like Windows Phone, Outlook automatically links together any contacts it believes are the same person, and adds their details from LinkedIn, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and any other social networks you connect to Outlook.

You can make links yourself, once you find the Link Contacts button on the menu that appears when you click the three dots at the side of the popup contact pane. Windows Store apps in Windows 8 have made this Windows Phone convention more familiar, but if you've not used either you might not realise it's a menu.

Once you do find the menu, this is a great way of getting Outlook to clean up all the duplicates that accumulate in your address book over the years, as well as seeing social network updates next to all the other details you have about people.

If colleagues are sharing their calendars with you, you can also see whether they're currently free (and for how long) and Lync is integrated so you can start a video or IM conversation anywhere you see someone's name.

You can swap between the mail, calendar, people and task windows (and the seldom used notes, folders and shortcuts) using text labels rather than the space-wasting buttons in Outlook 2010, but the new Peeks mean that often you won't need to do so.

Hover your mouse over the word 'Calendar' and you get a pop-up preview of today's appointments and tasks; click a day to see what you'll be doing. Hover over People to see frequent and favourite contacts and over Tasks for your to-do list and flagged emails.

This is just as convenient as having the details in the calendar bar on the right of the window all the time but less distracting. You can pin them back there if you want, but it's not as useful as it was in Outlook 2010 because you can no longer drag mails onto the calendar to create appointments on specific days. This is frustrating because it was a very useful feature.

The Suggest Replacement is a free Outlook app that will add a button to create an appointment automatically from the details in an email, but it only works if you have Exchange 2013.

If you do make it all the way into the Calendar you'll see a three-day weather forecast at the top of the screen (as long as you're online – it's not cached for later in case it gets out of date).

In many places the new interface is a big improvement. but Outlook is where the chunky Windows 8 notifications are the most intrusive. You get one for every new mail and they stack from the top-right of the screen down, rather than staying in the same place.

If you open Outlook after a long flight e, your screen fills up with multiple notifications. And while they fade away on their own, we didn't find a way to dismiss all of them at once, so you have the choice of waiting, playing whack-a-mole or remembering to tell Windows 8 to turn off notifications for an hour before you re-open Outlook.

Even more annoyingly, you can no longer delete a message or accept an invitation directly from the pop-up notification. This is another place where Office 2013 values clarity over productivity.

You can at least dismiss multiple alarms at once; these pop up in the familiar alarm window even on Windows 8, rather than as notifications.

Something that you'll welcome on tablets is the way the defaults when you set up an Exchange account are slightly different. You still get cached mode (so Outlook keeps copies of your mail from the server in a .OST file) but the default is to only download the last 12 months' worth of mail.

There's a slider in account settings to control that, and you can still have all your mail. If you don't, then you see another Windows Phone feature; when you do a search there's a link to search on the server if you haven't found what you're looking for.

On Windows 8, if you use your tethered phone or a mobile broadband dongle to get online, Outlook recognises you're using a metered connection and it doesn't send and receive email automatically to save your bandwidth. Click the notification at the top of the screen if you do want to connect and get your messages.

Outlook metred.png

Outlook 2013 warns you when you're on an expensive connection

It's a shame that Outlook 2013 loses a couple of useful features for the sake of the new interface because otherwise it's a great blend of the principles of Windows 8 design and the power of the desktop.

OneNote 2013, Access 2013 and Publisher 2013

OneNote 2013

OneNote 2013 is the best hidden secret in Office, a note taking application that's easy to use, organised like a paper notebook and crammed with features.

You can link notes to the original document, or a meeting from your Outlook calendar (handy to get the agenda or job titles and the correct spelling for everyone's names), or send information from any file or web page into OneNote. Insert an image and optical character recognition picks up any text in it automatically.

You can take audio and video recordings of meetings and have your written or typed notes time synced to them (a feature that's sadly missing in the Windows RT version).

OneNote now enables you to embed even more information – embed Excel and Visio files and you can see the live content in your notebook. The table tools are much better than in previous versions, and you can turn a table into an embedded Excel spreadsheet to get more formula options.

All the Office 2013 applications have the Touch Mode button; the core apps (but not Publisher or Access) also have a Full Screen Mode button next to the minimise and maximise buttons.

Instead of just hiding the ribbon, status bar and most of the rest of the interface to enable you to concentrate on your document (as it did in the Customer Preview), this now brings up another mini-menu letting you choose between hiding the ribbon, only showing the ribbon tabs or showing the full ribbon. This duplicates the little arrow on the ribbon that collapses the commands, but it's easier to find if you don't already know how the ribbon works.

OneNote has an even more extreme view that hides everything but the notebook picker (and the button to get the rest of the interface back), leaving you the full page to take notes on - ideal on a tablet. Click the arrow at the top of the page and your note expands to fill the screen or see the normal interface.

There are some new ways of presenting tools that can get irritating. OneNote's handy screen clipping, Send to OneNote and quick note features are combined into an odd pop-up window that showcases these useful options but proves intrusive once you know what they are and how to get to them, and the pop-up doesn't even close properly.

It also commandeers the Windows-N shortcut for making a new quick note (renamed from side note because it's not really at the side of the screen and hasn't been for several versions), so you have to press Windows-N N. Thankfully Windows-S still works for clipping information from anywhere on screen into your notes.

It's hard to show new users an important feature without irritating experienced users by getting in their way, and you can turn off the popup. But the detailed options for choosing where different types of information go when you send them to OneNote are very welcome; you can set default folders and other options for email, web pages and other sources individually.

OneNote was the first application to sync between PCs, onto SkyDrive and the OneNote web app and to a wide range of smartphones. That now includes Windows RT; what's rather confusingly called OneNote for Windows 8 is a free WinRT version of OneNote.

This has a large proportion of the OneNote tools, and even more touch features, although it only opens notebooks you keep on SkyDrive.

Select text in the OneNote WinRT app with your finger and you get the new radial menu - the finger equivalent of the mini Office bar that fades into view when you select text with a mouse, and even easier to use than the finger-sized version you get in the Office 2103 desktop apps.

You can tap to choose a pen colour, then swipe round to pick the shade you want. Tap to change text size and swipe round to pick how large you make it.

There's an undo button and a button to apply tags. This puts the most useful OneNote features quite literally at your fingertips, with the radial menu appearing on the right of the screen, where your thumb is if you're holding a widescreen tablet in both hands (as you might notice, Microsoft has definite views about how most people will hold tablets).

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like Windows RT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like WinRT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

Access 2013

Access continues its journey to being less a database and more a database app development tool. It has the same clean new interface as the rest of Office and that carries through to the applications you can build and the controls you put in them.

You can still create both desktop and web apps as well as SharePoint lists, but web apps now run on SharePoint or Office 365 and now look like WinRT applications, complete with an app bar and other navigation options.

Publisher 2013

Publisher gets the same tool for inserting pictures from online services as Word and PowerPoint (but not videos, even if you're creating a web publication), and the same task panes and formatting tools, as well as the rest of the new interface.

It even has Touch Mode, which is probably more useful for checking publications than laying them out. Oddly for a DTP package, it's one of the last applications to keep the small floating spell check dialogue.

Replacing and switching images is far easier than in previous versions. Publisher now puts new images you insert in a column in the scratch area rather than dumping them all on the page. Drag an image from the scratch area or elsewhere in the layout until it's over an existing image and a pink highlight appears around the existing image; let go and the new image appears there instead.

If you want to use an image as a full page background you can just right-click and choose Apply To Background (as a fill or a tile). There are also lots of new formatting options for images and text.

We like the new 'photo printing' option that saves each page of your document as a JPEG; ideal if you want to use a photo book printing service to create an album as a keepsake using your own layout.

Publisher already had features ranging from a full set of alignment guides to support for OpenType stylistic alternates to 'building blocks' for creating common objects such as pull quotes, banners, calendars, adverts and more. These new features may not be major but they're certainly welcome and this is a powerful DTP package that's easy to use.

Verdict

With a new version of Office, the first question that always springs to mind is whether there is anything new that Microsoft can add to a mature and powerful productivity package.

Word is a product with 20 years of features and being able to insert videos and online images is more a matter of catching up with the times than a major new feature. But PDF Flow and the massive improvements in tracking changes and comments in documents are hugely useful and if you have a touchscreen PC, this is by far the best version of Office to use on it.

All of the key Office applications get new features that are well implemented and equally well worth having.

Also, with the switch to subscription pricing, the days of asking 'is it worth upgrading for this feature, no matter how useful?' are over. When new features come along, you'll just get them for the same price. But you won't be able to skip a year if you're happy with what you have, so do the sums on what Office costs you long term.

We liked

Office 2013 is about more than a new interface. From little touches such as animating calculations as they change to new tools that help you get the Excel chart that shows what's important in your data, from in-place replies in Outlook to change tracking and commenting in Word that doesn't make your document look like a battlefield, the desktop apps get worthy new features.

We like the new tools for designing presentations in PowerPoint. We like the new presenter tools even more. Whether you create presentations or just sit through them, PowerPoint 2013 should make your life better.

If you switch PCs often, you'll love the fast streaming install and seeing your recent documents on every PC. And we're looking forward to getting more new features through Office 365 instead of waiting three years for neat new features that you might want without paying for an upgrade (or spend the time updating every PC in the office).

We disliked

Sometimes cleaning up for the Windows 8 look means dumbing down. Advanced features such as Split View and Autocorrect are now harder to use, which is a step backwards not forwards, and strangely at odds with the clear and simple way other powerful features such as Pivot Charts are exposed.

The newer your PC and the higher your screen resolution the more you will like the new interface. If you have an older PC with a low resolution screen, you'll have to minimise more of the interface to see the same amount of your document.

Final verdict

If you look at a list of the new features in Office 2013, you might not see any one feature you can't live without, but after even a few days of using the new applications there are plenty that you'll miss. This is another big advance in usability, combined with some extremely clever new tools.

Performance is excellent and the Office 2013 programs are slick and smooth in use.

There are features for power users, especially in Excel and PowerPoint, and there are others that either make it easier to use the power of existing tools or give you whole new ways to complete tasks without being an expert.

While this isn't a perfect touch version of Office, the improved Touch Mode is extremely usable on any decent touchscreen PC. What's missing is a version of Outlook for Windows RT users (and there's nothing for iPad users).

Mostly Office 2013 gets the right balance between streamlining and oversimplifying; there are some places where we miss specific power user options, but the sheer usability and ease of use will give the vast majority of uses a much better experience.

The great thing about a subscription service is that you won't have to wait as long to get updates and improvements; they won't change the fundamentals but you will keep getting more options the longer you pay for Office 2013.

Introduction

Full form factor laptops have died a death in the last few months as the new focus of Windows 8 has put the emphasis on portability and hybrids. If it doesn't turn into a tablet, manufacturers don't really want to know, but that's not much use for people who want power, performance and comfort - and that's where the Samsung Ativ Book 8 comes in. It was previously known as the Series 7 Chronos

This model is an update to Samsung's premium 15.6-inch performance laptop, which adds a touchscreen to the existing sleek, brushed metal body. It's for anyone who needs true computing power, for running multiple programs and being creative, but who still wants to take advantage of all Windows 8's super new touchscreen features.

It's truly a laptop first, unlike other touchscreen alternatives such as the HP Envy x2 or Samsung Ativ Smart PC, which have the innards of a laptop but the form of a tablet. If you're looking for a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and a large screen, the Samsung Ativ Book 8 (model number NP780Z5E) is for you.

The expansive display is great for Windows 8, offering a generous portion of your apps at the Start screen, with any press of the Windows key. Having such a big screen means you're able to use more of Windows 8's features, such as the window snapping, so you can use two apps side-by-side.

However, the setup highlights the interesting decision made by Acer to switch the trackpad and keyboard on its Aspire R7. The result is that the Samsung asks you to use its keyboard and mouse by placing the device in front of you, and it's awkward to raise your hands across the screen 'zombie-style' to use the touchscreen. The traditional clamshell design of the laptop means it's hard to use in a touchscreen format, and the immobility of the screen is a drawback of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

A top-of-the-range machine with stunning performance and a super-thin chassis isn't likely to come cheap, and you'll need fairly deep pockets to afford the Samsung Series 7 Chronos. At £1,199/US$1,299 this is a serious outlay, and you're paying for the blistering performance.

The irony is that you actually pay twice - firstly with the price tag and then with the added weight, and this means you need to ask yourself a serious question - do you need this power, or would you rather have something to slip into your bag more easily?

To help you make this decision, let's review the Samsung Series 7 Chronos in depth.

Specifications

So what's under the hood of this Korean-made beast? Well, the specs are impressive indeed. Firstly, there's an Intel Core i7 3635QM processor chip, which is one of the fastest you'll find out there, clocked at an impressive 2.4GHz. This will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and is perfect for power-hungry users who want to edit video, images and run rich websites all at the same time.

Back that up with the 8GB of RAM that comes as standard and you have one nifty laptop.

Intel Core processors are so powerful they can take care of most tasks all on their own, but Samsung has added an AMD Radeon HD 8800M dedicated graphics chip inside too, which does its fair share of work.

With dedicated graphics - something you'd never find on a laptop-tablet hybrid - you can run games and HD movies much faster, but the chip can take some of the load off the processor too. You'll find the whole system more responsive, and that's immediately evident on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

Samsung has added a Full HD 1920 x 1080 panel to the Chronos, which on full brightness is eye-searingly bright. It's got a glossy coating that aids swiping with your finger, but it's incredibly shiny, which could be problematic in bright conditions when working outside or near big office windows.

Overall, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos's build quality is superb, especially considering there's so much power harnessed into such a sleek design. The brushed metal oozes class and the laptop opens to reveal an equally metallic chassis, complete with a spacious keyboard and expansive colour-coded trackpad. It's an Aston Martin that's vintage in its design yet fearsome in its execution.

Like a classic sports car, it's also heavy, and at 2.5kg (5.4lbs), it's not that portable. You wouldn't want it in your bag all day, and its weight harks back to laptops of old, which were bulky and cumbersome. The sleek lines and thin design makes the weight surprising, and this will be the main turn-off for prospective buyers.

By combining great multi-touch features and brilliant accuracy, the trackpad is a triumph, and while we often criticise laptops for low travel keys, the sheer spaciousness of the keyboard makes typing a pleasure.

Because this machine evidently isn't designed to be mobile, the connections on offer are more generous than its tablet companions. You get Ethernet, which is music to the ears of regular hotel room hoppers, plus HDMI and four USB ports. There's also VGA and an SD card slot to finish off a sublime port performance.

Performance

Benchmarks
Cinebench: 16259
3D Mark: Ice: 44064, Cloud Gate: 5679, Fire: 661
Battery score: 327 minutes

We ran our usual benchmark tests on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos and found double the power of the top Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid here, along with processor performance that rivals the latest gaming laptops.

Combine that with a fantastic performance in our graphics tests and one can see that Samsung has created a formidable machine.

Some of the latest laptop devices such as the HP Spectre XT, which is similarly priced and pitched, were blown out of the water by the Samsung Series 7 Chronos, and the score of over 16,000 in Cinebench is a reflection of its sheer power.

The only machines we've seen managing this level of score are gaming behemoths and slabs of thick plastic from Medion. To have this kind of power in a machine that looks this good is a pleasant surprise.

Graphics power was also impressive, and it delivered roughly double the power of laptops that use Intel's graphics chip, the 4000 HD. This is essential for users who have designs on heavy video editing or gaming, and you'll see the latest titles handed with aplomb on this mature and grown up device.

While we wouldn't class this as an out and out gaming laptop, for those who consider impeccable frame rates on the highest settings a benchmark for greatness, those who'd like to play games such as the new Sim City, or even BioShock Infinite, should be able to manage a decent experience with the settings turned down.

However, this only really applies to the top-of-the-range Samsung Series 7 Chronos model, and if you're looking to save a couple of hundred pounds or dollars by plumping for the Core i5 model, you would need to revise these expectations.

Despite its weight, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is cunningly disguised as a hipster's stylish companion, and we certainly wouldn't be ashamed to pull this machine out in our local Starbucks.

However, as well as requiring a strong back it will also need plenty of battery to last the day - something not usually associated with gaming level laptops.

With all that power, battery life was shorter than average, but we still managed a decent five hours of movie watching in our real-life tests, which involve looping a high-definition video until it dies.

It's a good result from a laptop that's designed for the desk rather than the road, and it opens up the possibility of working in cafe, watching movies while traveling or just enjoying using your laptop in the garden.

Verdict

While the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is a beautiful laptop, the PC is dying. Unless you're regularly pushing your device to its limits, most users will be happy with the performance offered by Microsoft Surface Pro or the HP Envy x2. They still have Intel Core power, and when compared with this hefty price tag, you could still afford to have a big screen and a full-sized wireless keyboard set up on your desk.

The days of the full-form clamshell laptop being the only choice for people who want a marriage of work and play have passed, and unless you need every ounce of processing power, more versatile Windows 8 machines are available in your price range, and are worthy alternatives.

We liked

The immense power of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is genuinely impressive, and it offers near gaming-level performance in a machine that you could carry in a bag and use day to day. With the top of the range processor and dedicated graphics card considered, the slim lines and sleek brushed metal finish are to be applauded.

The upgraded screen is another highlight, and the expansive panel works brilliantly in Windows 8. The deep colours and detailed, pin-sharp visuals make this a truly premium laptop, and add to that the responsive and accurate touchscreen capability and you have a stunning high-end laptop.

This is one of the stand-out laptops you'll see this year, marrying top-notch design with fantastic usability.

We disliked

As a laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best you'll find, but our gripes come from a general view of where computing is going, and how you should spend your £1,200/US$1,300. There's stacks of power here, but portability is limited, and this is an issue for many buyers. Most people will happily get by on half the amount of power here, and that means Ultrabooks such as the Dell XPS 13 or Asus Zenbook could be better options, financially speaking.

Next, there's design. The Samsung Series 7 Chronos makes few allowances for the touchscreen user, and while form factors are starting to change across the computing world, this is very much stuck in 2011. Hybrid devices and tablets are making in-roads, especially backed by Windows 8, but aside from touch - which we believe most users will shun in favour of the familiar trackpad - the Samsung Series 7 Chronos does little to embrace the new computing experience.

If you're looking for a home laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is as good as it gets, but in a year's time the traditional desk-bound clamshell will seem very old fashioned.

Final verdict

The Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best Windows laptops money can buy, but in this changing world of computing, we urge you as a buyer to consider whether your needs would be served better with a lighter, more mobile machine with less emphasis on huge power.

If you're looking for a fantastic laptop today, however, this superb machine comes highly recommended.

The huge roar the Titanosaurus Rex makes when it boots up was probably not a deliberate play on the name of this latest DinoPC, but it will make you think some beast has inhabited your new machine and will probably scare off any mammal in earshot. Yes, we've got another big, pricey rig here with Nvidia's ultra-desirable GTX Titan taking care of the pixel-pushing duties.

Last month we saw the excellent Scan 3XS Z77 Vengeance Titan become the benchmark PC for every other Titan-based machine that was to follow it. The Computer Planet machine it was up against simply couldn't compete with the smart choice of components, the aggressive pricing or the top warranty Scan offers.

So, how can this DinoPC compete against something like that? Well, the simple fact is, it can't. The Titanosaurus Rex does tick all the necessary component boxes, and has a fantastically ridiculous name, too: it's got a hefty overclock on its i7 3770K, a decent mobo, quick memory, a mid-sized SSD, lots of data storage space, water-cooling and a very sexy chassis.

The component choice isn't flawless though: DinoPC has opted to go for RAM rated at 2,400MHz, but has halved the amount that either the other Titan machines from last month offered or, indeed, the Wired2Fire Titanosaurus Rex.

It's also opted to add in some relatively pointless extras, including a Blu-ray drive and a pricey motherboard, too.

A hefty price tag

All those definitely add in to the luxury, high-end rig aesthetic, but are practically irrelevant for a machine whose main reason for being is to throw polygons around at high-resolutions and high speeds.

Where the Scan machine did so well was to choose a price-point and stick to it. The Titanosaurus Rex is another £300 (about AU$460, US$455) more expensive than the 3XS rig, and none of that cash has gone in to making this machine perform better where it counts. And since Scan took the choice to make a slight overclock to the Titan card, this DinoPC actually performs worse in-game.

Benchmarks

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index score: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 9.37
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 9.43
DIABLO PHANTOM: 9.22

DirectX 11 gaming performance
DIRT Showdown: FPS: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 64
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 74
DIABLO PHANTOM: 46

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Max Payne 3: FPS: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 43
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 47
DIABLO PHANTOM: 30

That beefy price tag also means its £700 (about AU$1,080, US$1,065) dearer than the Wired2Fire Diablo Phantom. And while it is faster, there's nothing about it beyond the build quality that makes it worth that price premium. The GTX 680 in the Diablo Phantom is a great GPU, and at £1,600 (about AU$2,460, $US2,430), it's a quality PC at a decent price.

Verdict

There are a few concerns over the setup of the DinoPC Titanosaurus Rex. Remember that roar we mentioned? When you buy a rig of this price - especially one that promises a premium experience - you don't want it to sound like a Harrier jumpjet.

DinoPC has plumbed in the Corsair CPU cooler but minus the controlling software, so the twin fans sit at 100 per cent all the time. It's simply not an experience that suits the high price tag.

Up to the £1,000 (AU$1,530, US$1,500) mark, there's are a huge variety of different specs you can throw into a PC and still come out with a decent gaming rig. Just look at the Daw Computers machine and the Vibox Power FX.

Above that price point though, things stagnate very quickly. From here until the crazy-priced machines with their hex-core Sandy Bridge Extreme and octo-core Xeons, it's all about the Core i7 3770K and whatever overclock the SI can squeeze out of it - and, of course, the Z77 motherboard.

This Wired2Fire machine comes slap-bang in between the lower-end machines, like the Daw and Vibox rigs, and the top-tier Titan machines that are starting to pop up everywhere. But when you compare it with those £2,000+ (about AU$3,000+, US$3,000+) rigs, the only real difference you'll see is in the choice of graphics card that's been used.

At the £1,600 (about AU$2,460, US$2,430) Wired2Fire is targeting with the Diablo Phantom, you're moving away from the cheaper machines that will usually sacrifice some general niceties for top CPU and GPU combos and are getting a full gaming PC with all the benefits you'd expect from a premium rig.

That means that as well as the ubiquitously overclocked 3770K, you've got a quality Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, a huge amount of quick Corsair Vengeance system memory and lots of data storage, as well as two Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSDs.

The Diablo Phantom has taken the odd step of using a RAID array to give the SandForce-powered Kingston HyperX 3K drives a bit of a speed boost. But the extra boost from RAID is negligible when you start to include the problems of incompressible data handling you get with SandForce.

Rough edges

The NZXT Phantom chassis that Wired2Fire has used in this build is visually striking but somewhat disappointing. It looks pretty funky from a distance, but when you get up close you can see the plastic of the orange detailing hasn't been finished that well. However, it does run much quieter than the DinoPC Titanosaurus Rex.

Benchmarks

CPU encoding performance
X264 v4.0: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 51.44
TITANSAURUS REX: 51.61

DirectX 11 tessellation performance
Heaven 4.0: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 23.7
TITANSAURUS REX: 35.2

DirectX 11 1080p gaming performance
Crysis 3: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 50
TITANSAURUS REX: 66

Unfortunately, the active cooling doesn't seem to be sufficient for the chip to run stably at the 4.7GHz it came clocked at out of the box. We managed an initial successful run of Cinebench, but further runs fell over and even once we'd taken it down a notch to 4.6GHz (which is what all our benchmarks were run at afterwards), the X264 test struggled to complete.

Verdict

Once it's running, this is a decent rig, and although it's not quite in the same league as the Titans, it's not far off - especially when you consider it's substantially cheaper than the DinoPC and can still happily knock around 2,560 x 1,600 gaming.

Only at Google IO in techy-savvy San Francisco could a Google Glass wearer walk the streets relatively unnoticed. A limited number of these new wearable computing devices have been among the public for months now, and they generally elicit double takes and curious stares.

There were plenty of those lucky Glass owners among the IO crowd, as well as Google reps standing by to demonstrate the technology. At the conference, we had the opportunity to try on Glass, and unbox one of the kits passed out to select developers.

The fitting

Just like a normal pair of glasses, Google Glass needs just a bit of adjustment to be worn properly. It mainly comes down to the nose pads, which make sure that Glass' titanium band runs slightly above the eye line, like a sunshade or visor.

That way, the rectangular screen, which looks something like a prism, sits just above the eye. Using the screen requires you to look up slightly, which helps to keep your field of vision unobstructed.

The striking thing about this new tech is that even though you're wearing it, it does a good job of getting out of the way when not in use. Glass' display quickly goes dim, like an idle smartphone. Still, even when it is in use, it's easy to see the world around you.

Wearing Glass for the first time, we were struck by how light and unobtrusive it was. Lighter than a pair of normal spectacles, we imagine it would be easy to forget you were wearing them, if not for all the stares.

Turning on Glass

Glass is initially activated with a power button found on the inside portion. When you wear it, this switch is not easily accessible, so turning it fully on or off is done only when they are removed.

Glass goes to sleep when not in use, and you can wake it by simply nodding up. This isn't just to save power, but to keep your field of vision clear when you don't need any info. Google reps said that Glass' battery would last all day with "average use." Just like a smartphone, it has micro-USB for charging, and lots of video recording will wear it down before the day is out.

'Ok, Glass'

The Google Glass interface is a lot like Google Now, which is found on any Android Jelly Bean smartphone. From the main screen, saying "Ok, Glass," gets the device's attention, so to speak, and prompts Glass to show you available commands.

There are also Google Now cards - screens of information related to recent searches. They're pretty minimalist, white text on a black background, sometimes with a single image. We swiped through nearby restaurants, email chains and recently captured pictures and videos. This is done using a touchpad built into the right side of the headset. You can also tap to make selections.

An extension of your smartphone

While Glass has its own hard drive (ours had 12GB available), Wi-Fi connection, GPS, and processor (no specifics on the core), all working from Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, it works best as an extension of your smartphone.

It can pair with an Android phone using Bluetooth, which allows it to make calls as well as send and receive text messages. In that way it felt more like the ultimate hands-free device than a wearable computer.

It also suffers a similar stigma to the Bluetooth earpiece, in that it's distracting, and a bit goofy looking. Basically, you're like something out of Star Trek. Whether that's Geordi La Forge or a Borg drone is in the eye of the beholder. The irony is that it's technology designed for subtly that ends up speaking volumes.

It talks back

Speaking of speaking, Google Glass can actually talk to you. There's a little speaker that sits over your right ear. Google reps described it as a bone-vibrating speaker, like something Snake would use behind enemy lines in Metal Gear Solid. Really though, it struck us just your average speaker, and was completely audible to someone standing within earshot, providing the room wasn't too loud.

We asked Glass who the president of the United States was, and it responded with a snippet of Barack Obama's biography. We had trouble hearing it over the din of the show floor, but moving to a back room, it was perfectly audible, and spoke in the sort of lady robot voice of Google Now.

Not Mission: Impossible material

The Google rep guiding our demo joked that Glass would make terrible surveillance technology, and that's by design. Google is actively trying to reduce the voyeur factor by making it rather obvious when Glass is engaged. The screen emits a glow when in use, and spoken commands like "take a picture" make sure those around you are clued in to what you're doing.

You also have to look up to read the screen, so broken eye contact will be a dead giveaway. Your friends will know when you're checking football scores instead of listening to them.

It was also far less like augmented reality than we'd imagined. Putting it on, we thought we see an HUD of some sort, like in a first-person shooter video game. Really though, we felt more like a multitasking administrator than Robocop on patrol for creeps. Even the GPS function just gives you a top down view, with a blue arrow representing your location, just like Google Maps on your phone.

Relatively app-less

The version of Google Glass on demo at IO was a prototype, an early developer or "explorer" version, as Google likes to call them. Given that, there wasn't a whole lot of functionality available to it.

Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times and a few more have apps on the way, but until then, Glass feels more like raw potential than an actual tool.

• Read more: 7 Google Glass apps we can't wait to use.

The interface is also pretty unintuitive, especially the touchpad part. Since only one "card" is visible at a time, you're stuck swiping through them all until you find what you want. We found it easier to just ask Glass to find something again, rather than swipe around for previously accessed information.

Early verdict

Is Glass cool and entirely novel? Yes, it certainly is. Is it a device that will change the life of, or even just prove useful to, the average consumer? That's doubtful.

Glass as we tried it felt like something that would be useful to folks in specialized roles. A surgeon, an engineer, a warehouse foremen or a certain type of viral video filmmaker will likely find a lot of compelling things to do with Glass.

As for the average person, it's a bit of a paradox. We can think of a dozen times where we've been cooking, cleaning or driving and would've loved to have had hands-free, subtle access to Google's wealth of information. But to do so, we've got to wear a piece of headgear that's distracting to those around us.

We also wondered how Google plans to curate the apps that become avaialable for Glass. We've heard about plans for apps that will allow wearers to snap pictures with a wink, which seems to go against Google's plan to keep Glass behavior obvious to those around you.

Google Glass is expected to arrive for public consumption in 2014. When it does arrive, it may change lives, but most likely not your life, or the lives of those around you.

Introduction

Updated: Our iOS 6 review has been overhauled to include the iOS 6.1 software updates.

On the surface, it might not look like much has changed with iOS 6 and the subsequent minor iOS 6.1 updates. However, Apple has added a number of new features over iOS 5, along with continuing in its mission to eradicate Google from the system by default. Apple's YouTube app has gone (Google has since released its own on to the App Store) and Maps now runs with Apple power rather than Google juice.

Elsewhere, the OS is more social (Facebook now joining Twitter in being baked in), Siri's been improved, and countless tweaks (some fairly major from a usability standpoint) are in evidence in the likes of Mail, Safari, Phone and the iOS stores.

Oh, and Apple finally added a clock app to the iPad, which resulted in a legal spat with the Swiss railway network service. It seems not only Samsung is in the photocopying business.

iOS 6 ditches support entirely for the original iPad, but is nonetheless compatible with a surprisingly wide range of devices; iPhones back to the 3GS are supported, as are both the fourth- and fifth-generation iPod touch.

However, the older the kit, the less of iOS 6 you actually get. Some of the big features - Siri, turn-by-turn navigation, panoramic photos and FaceTime over 3G - aren't available for the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4.

The iPhone 3GS doesn't even get Safari's offline Reading List feature, and Siri's not available for the iPad 2.

So is it worth the upgrade? We've installed iOS 6 (and iOS 6.1) across multiple iOS devices to find out. Our test kit is an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S, an iPod touch (fourth-generation), an iPhone 5, an iPad 2, and a new iPad (courtesy of Vodafone).

There are more new features than you'd think, even when you don't get all the new features.

The iOS 6 interface

A common criticism of iOS is that Apple never radically updates it. Tech pundits in particular often use words like 'tired' and 'dated' to describe the operating system, suggesting it would be better if you could weld Android-like widgets to it, or if every home screen icon was more akin to a hyperactive child begging for attention, as per Live Tiles on Windows 8.

iOS 6 is typically Apple in being purely iterative. You get the familiar grid of icons on each home screen, and the screens can be swiped between.

Double-clicking the Home button reveals the multitasking tray, which also houses media controls, the rotation lock and an AirPlay button. Swipe left from the first home screen and you access Spotlight, Apple's system-wide search.

So far, so iOS 5, and that level of familiarity will either be warming or maddening, depending on your persuasion. Regardless, it's definitely very usable, even if configuration options on offer are few in number and rapid-sorting settings are non-existent.

However, there have been some small adjustments. The status bar now changes colour on a per-app basis, in an attempt to blend in. This is more visually appealing but muddies the water when it comes to alerts that were once made in part through a change in colour of said status bar.

Better amendments are the new audio controls on the Lock screen and Spotlight search results now displaying the name of an app's containing folder. Apple's penchant for cropping text labels remains frustrating, though, and is increasingly common throughout the OS.

iOS 6 Maps

We feared the worst: with Apple giving Google Maps data the boot in favour of its own, we half expected an app that was just great in America and utterly useless in the UK. We were wrong, but that's not to say Maps is without its issues - and people have since its launch taken to the web to express their displeasure at the new app.

The app uses data from TomTom, including free live traffic information - something you have to pay extra for in TomTom's own iPhone app. The UK maps are generally very good, offering turn-by-turn navigation that Siri can read aloud if you wish.

Most of the app's problems appear to stem from a lack of maturity compared to Google's offering, combined with some missing features. Results based on imprecise locations are frequently poor.

'Stansted' in Google Maps gave us London Stansted Airport during testing; in Maps, a village in Kent. 'Luton' in Maps gave us a village in Devon whereas Google Maps more sensibly defaulted to the large town near London. These problems are endemic, although locations are generally found correctly when you enter more information, such as a post code.

Local search is also extremely variable. Restaurant reviews from Yelp are integrated but are typically sparse or unavailable entirely if you live in a rural area.

Business locations are peppered with errors, such as occasional American spellings (for example, "Exhibition Center") and mapping glitches, such as the one that identified our local Italian restaurant as a Sainsbury's supermarket 15 miles away.

The experience smacks of a lack of testing, and it's not good enough for a feature Apple boasted was best-in-class rather than a beta that required a ton of crowdsourcing for errors.

There were other aspects of Google Maps we missed. Apple's offering fails to distinguish between road types. In Google Maps, you enjoy blue motorways, green major routes, orange A roads, and yellow B roads; in Apple's world, major routes are orange and everything else is white. For visual route planning and at-a-glance sanity checks regarding your current location, this can be a blow.

The Maps app also doesn't have Street View, but the iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 and recent iPads get Flyover View's 3D models of cities. When they're available they're often superb, but they're not widely available yet: for example, London's there, but most other major UK cities aren't.

Also, although Apple makes a good effort to display cities in 3D, some buildings and monuments occasionally look like they've been left in the sun too long and have melted. From a purely navigational standpoint, they're also less generally useful than Street View.

Another missing aspect is public transport, for which you now need an app - Apple offers no replacement whatsoever.

Where Maps does work nicely is as an affordable alternative to expensive turn-by-turn car navigation apps or hardware. With an iPhone securely mounted on the dashboard, you get a very nice experience, with clear directions and fast rerouting if you miss a turn.

It's not perfect - tiny interface elements mean you'll need to take the phone out of any cradle to adjust anything - but we found the accuracy fine on a number of car journeys. These included ones where we specifically tried to get lost, in areas with many recent road changes, some including obscure Scottish roundabout systems. We also reckon the in-car experience pips that of Google Maps, although Google's app is superior as a navigation aid when on foot.

It's worth noting that Maps isn't a standalone app but an underlying system for iOS, and so it also affects apps such as Find My Friends. However, despite our grumbles about the visual display of the maps, we're not so fussed when we're checking whether someone's on time for a meeting as opposed to travelling to such a meeting ourselves.

Siri, Phone, FaceTime and Do Not Disturb

iOS Siri

It's still in beta, but Siri has been massively improved in iOS 6, especially for UK customers: at last Siri can do local searches, so you're not just limited to a subset of the US version's features.

If you liked Siri but found its limitations infuriating in iOS 5, you'll nonetheless perhaps find yourself increasingly using the feature in iOS 6.

Siri can now give you driving directions, tell you what time films are on and whether they're any good, find your friends, provide football scores and launch apps, and it integrates with services including Wolfram Alpha, Facebook and Twitter.

There's also Eyes Free for integration with in-car audio and voice control systems, something Apple is liaising with car manufacturers about.

Apple is rather keen on Siri, not just for answering questions but also for dictating text. We've found computer dictation patchy over the years, but it's genuinely impressive in iOS 6 - especially on the new iPad, where thankfully you don't need to hold the tablet next to your face for it to hear you.

iOS 6 Phone app and FaceTime

iOS 6's Phone app has some welcome improvements. Previously, you were restricted to answering or declining the call, sending the device to voicemail. Now, you can swipe upwards when a call comes in, enabling you to set a reminder to call the person back, or to send a text response.

Reminders can be time-based or location-based, so for example you can set a reminder that kicks in when you get home. The pre-defined text messages are pretty basic but they do the job, and it's also possible to send a custom message instead. Depending on your setup and connectivity, the response will be sent via SMS or iMessage.

FaceTime's also been given a boost: you can finally use it over 3G, provided you have the right hardware (iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S) and the right calling plan. For the most part, UK carriers do not differentiate between FaceTime and Facebook, but check your plan carefully before using or relying on the feature.

iOS 6 Do Not Disturb

The Do Not Disturb feature is one of the best additions to iOS 6. The basic idea is providing a block of time during which the device when locked silences all calls and alerts.

Additional options enable you to allow calls from your 'Favorites' in the Contacts app, or some other user-defined group; additionally, you can allow a call through should someone phone more than once.

Bar yet another date-oriented Apple screw-up at the dawn of 2013, where Do Not Disturb refused to disengage automatically for a week, the feature has worked flawlessly during the time we've been running iOS 6.

Our one complaint is that the schedule needs more granular options. Right now, you can merely set a time period during which you don't want to be disturbed, but it would be useful to have the option to set alternative hours for, at the very least, weekends and public holidays.

Safari and Mail

iOS 6 Safari

Aside from the speed boosts you'd expect from a refreshed browser, Safari for iOS 6 brings with it a number of updates, two of which centre around iCloud.

The rather poor and half-hearted Reading List feature, which saves web pages for you to read later, now works offline. This is a major improvement, although because Safari pulls down the entire document, saving it takes longer than sending a web page to the likes of Instapaper or Pocket. However, Reading List content syncing across iCloud now makes it a potential alternative to a bespoke read-it-later app or service.

Another great new feature is iCloud tabs. Once activated, this enables you to see open tabs on other devices using the same iCloud ID, including Macs running the latest version of Safari.

There are also a couple of interface changes: tap-holding the back button now brings up the history list, and the iPhone and iPod touch now have a full-screen mode, although it's only available in landscape orientation.

iOS 6 Mail

Mail's updates in iOS 6 are relatively small but are nonetheless very welcome. First and foremost, Apple brings its VIP feature to iOS. This enables you to define certain people you communicate with as VIPs and have their emails arrive in the VIP inbox. Ultimately, it's a pre-defined smart mailbox, but it's handy if you're drowning in email and don't want to miss crucial messages from specific people.

Elsewhere, Apple now enables you to insert photos into emails and has included pull-to-refresh with a cute gloopy refresh icon. Additionally, you can now set signatures on a per-account basis, rather than being forced to use the same one for all of them.

Camera and PhotoStream

iOS 6 Camera

We suspect the strength of the iOS app ecosystem is what propelled the iPhone to become the most popular camera on many photography social networks (including Flickr), but the default Camera app has always been a decent option, especially when it gained an optional grid.

In iOS 6, Apple's added a Panorama mode. You hold your device in portrait orientation and slowly sweep horizontally across the scene you wish to capture (if you're going too quickly for the device, you'll be told to slow down). This being an Apple feature, it doesn't provide you with any further options whatsoever.

Fortunately, the automated panorama stitching the Camera app does is generally excellent, to the point we happily ditched third-party apps of this type from our devices.

iOS 6 Photo Stream

Photo Stream was one of those typically Apple technologies: great when it worked, maddeningly frustrating when it didn't, and with almost no options to fine-tune it.

Previously, Photo Stream provided access to your most recent 1,000 photos and/or screen grabs, and that was it. These would be synchronised across devices and computers using the same Apple ID.

With iOS 6, it's now possible to remove images from Photo Stream, and you can now also share custom Photo Streams with other people, or with the public at large via a website on iCloud.com. Any custom Photo Stream can be left as it was when first set up or later updated whenever you like, and those you invite to it can leave comments.

Disappointingly, this is only a shared service in the sense of you sharing your images with others, not you all sharing together. If Apple adds some kind of group Photo Stream, this could be a killer feature; right now, it's certainly a nice-to-have for an ad-hoc share of a few holiday snaps, but hardly something that will worry Flickr or Facebook.

New and updated apps: Passbook, Clock and more

In iOS 6, there are also new apps and a few overhauled ones:

iOS 6 Passbook

We like the idea behind Passbook. Apple describes it as a place that can house boarding passes, store coupons and loyalty cards, tickets, and more.

It's also location-aware, meaning that if the iPhone knows you're in a store, Passbook should root out the relevant card (assuming Apple Maps doesn't think you're oddly lurking in a fire station, say, rather than your local coffee house).

The big problem, though, is the current poor support for the system. Only a handful of UK apps exist, such as Starbucks, a few airlines and iHotel.

Passbook could be a killer feature, but we wonder whether it'll ultimately become another Ping and be quietly killed.

iOS 6 iPad clock

There's always been a strange disparity between Apple devices when it comes to default apps, with the iPad having fewer of them. Bizarrely, even a calculator and clock weren't included with Apple's tablet, presumably because someone somewhere decided nobody would need to calculate things or set alarms and timers on the larger device.

With iOS 6, Apple includes a clock that makes reasonable use of the extra space available over an iPhone display. You get the usual Timer and Stopwatch tabs, an Alarm tab with a nicely designed grid, and a World Clock tab with a map. The map shows the locations of your defined cities along with current weather conditions. Bar Apple's swiping of the Swiss railway network service's clock design, there's nothing to grumble about here.

iOS 6 App Store, iTunes and iBooks

All of Apple's stores on iOS have had a major overhaul, which has sped them up and also showcased Apple's obsession with horizontal bands of content that you can swipe.

There are also some usability boosts, such as iTunes enabling you to access recent previews, and you being able to install multiple apps rather than being punted to the home screen after each one. New apps are pleasingly also given a 'New' badge, so you can easily spot them.

But Apple's often the kind of company to punch itself in the head shortly after delivering a knock-out blow, and these store redesigns are no exception. Too often, item names are truncated to the point where you have to tap into each item to differentiate it from another.

Worse, search results now come in the form of cards that make browsing large lists a horrible chore. With these stores, discoverability on iOS has taken a step backwards, particularly for apps and games.

Updated privacy and settings

iOS 6 privacy and Guided Access

Privacy settings get an overhaul in iOS 6. The Privacy section of Settings gives you a list of items that apps request permission to use: location services, contacts, calendars, and so on. For each, you can revoke access using a slider.

This is also the case with the now fairly deeply integrated social networks, Twitter and Facebook. It's perhaps arguable that the typical user still won't find these options, but Privacy appearing at the top level in Settings and being so straightforwardly designed is a decision that should be applauded.

Also in the realm of permissions and privacy (but also with education ramifications) is Guided Access. Buried in the Accessibility section of General within Settings, the feature when toggled enables you to disable touch, motion and portions of the screen.

A triple-click on the Home button brings up the straightforward interface for defining these features, and Guided Access can also be secured by a four-digit passcode.

iOS 6 Lost Mode

Another somewhat privacy-oriented change in iOS 6 is Lost Mode. This is an extension of Find My iPhone, and once triggered via iCloud.com or the Find My iPhone app it locks down a device in a more useful manner than before.

Rather than just playing an alert and sending a message, it enables you to send a phone number that whoever's got your device can use to call you back on. It's only a subtle change, but one that will perhaps increase the likelihood of you getting a lost iPhone back, assuming your message is a touch more polite than "I'm coming for you, thief!"

iOS 6 useful tweaks

Elsewhere, Apple's made a number of smaller tweaks that make the system more customisable or usable. In the Music app (which has also had an interface overhaul), you can now delete individual tracks and download single items from iTunes Match.

The Share sheet is now a clear and usable grid of icons, and in Notification Center you can add Share widgets for Twitter and/or Facebook. In Settings, the Bluetooth toggle is now on the top level - we'd like it on a home screen somehow, but this is a start.

And in the General > Cellular section within Settings, you can toggle whether cellular data is used for iCloud documents, iTunes, FaceTime, Passbook updates and Reading List. These might all be small things, but each makes a difference and they combine to improve the OS and justify Apple's belief in iteration rather than regular and unnecessary overhauls.

Verdict

The big question about any OS upgrade is, will installing it make you glad you did?

The answer for iOS 6 is yes, but some users answer yes more emphatically than others.

For example, if you've got an iPhone 3GS the upgrade is really just a collection of minor improvements, whereas if you've got an iPhone 4S you're invited to the whole iOS party.

We liked

The two biggest changes to iOS 6 are Maps and Siri. It's easy to jeer at the former, and Maps certainly has its problems, but it is an excellent choice for in-car turn-by-turn. Siri continues to improve and is now heading towards becoming an essential component of iOS rather than a gimmick.

Do Not Disturb, despite its lack of scheduling granularity, is a triumph. Apple certainly didn't get there first with this feature, but we're sure glad the company got there eventually.

Elsewhere, we liked that Apple's continuing to work with strong foundations and, generally, improving things. Relatively minor updates to Mail, Safari, Camera, Photo Stream, Phone, Share sheets, Find My iPhone and privacy all add up to a big improvement overall.

We disliked

There's no getting away from iOS 6's differences across devices. In some cases, hardware limitations must be to blame, but some feature cuts appear arbitrary and driven by Apple wanting users to upgrade. For example, the iPhone 4's inability to make FaceTime calls over 3G is baffling, considering it works with Wi-Fi.

Elsewhere, Maps isn't good enough in all use cases, and it really should have been, while Passbook is a nice app that has poor support, and some of Apple's design decisions have been questionable. We can put up with the status bar changing colour, but the awkward search and cropped names in all iOS stores are bad to the point of putting you off searching for and buying things.

Final verdict

We could say the same about iOS 6 as we did about iOS 5: it "has been trailed for so long that the element of surprise went ages ago, but there's enough here to make your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch feel shiny and new all over again."

iOS 6 is rather like the iPhone 5 or OS X Mountain Lion - the refinement of something that already works extremely well. Apple isn't overhauling things for the sake of it but, in the main, making the iOS experience gradually better. That in itself is something other companies would do well to emulate.

Introduction and design

With a cutting-edge camera, a super-slim design and the ability to withstand life's knocks and bumps (and Android Jelly Bean to boot) the Xperia Z is a phone that's got us fired up about Sony Mobile again.

Earlier handsets such as the Sony Xperia S and Sony Xperia T were extremely promising from a brand striking out on its own - but it's with the Xperia Z that Sony is really banking on making a cataclysmic dent in the makeup of the smartphone market.

The Android Jelly Bean-toting (albeit only 4.1) Sony Xperia Z comes with some of the best specs on the market - and it's one of the most eagerly awaited handsets of recent months. Launched before the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4, Sony clearly hoped to steal an early march on its competitors.

And it's got the power to match up: a quad-core 1.5GHz Snaprdragon Krait processor, 13MP camera, 16GB storage (expandable, woohoo!), 2GB RAM, water and dust-resistant, 1080p HD screen with Bravia Engine, LTE, to name a few. You couldn't make this stuff up - this is the company that had a part in the Satio, after all.

As soon as we took our review unit out of the box, we were mesmerised. This feels and looks like a premium, high quality product. Sony is one of the few manufacturers that can take what is, effectively, a plain black square and make it into something beautiful. Manufactured from piano black, high gloss glass both front and black, it could have come from the same stable as the Google Nexus 4.

Though maybe we are overestimating it, viewing the Sony Xperia Z through geek-tinted goggles - because while we were blown away, others came out with the line that Sony will be hoping doesn't cross too many punters' lips: "looks like every other smartphone out there though, doesn't it?"

One thing the Sony Xperia Z certainly does have in common with every other smartphone out there is the fact that it is a pure magnet for fingerprints. You'll struggle to keep it clean all day long without either surgical gloves or a can of Mr Sheen in your bag.

As is fast becoming the norm, you can expect to pick the Sony Xperia Z up in white too. On top of that, O2 in the UK is exclusively offering a purple variant.

If you're coming from something like a Samsung Galaxy S3, it'll feel similar, if a little larger, in terms of size: the Sony Xperia Z rocks in at 139 x 71 x 7.9mm/5.47 x 2.79 x 0.31 inches, so there's little room for anything else in your hands.

Coming from something smaller like, say, an iPhone 5, you'll certainly notice the difference. But it's amazing how quickly you'll adapt.

At 146g/5.15oz, it's by no means the lightest handset out there - but the Sony Xperia Z exudes a heftiness that belies a quality device. It's on a par with Apple's offering when it comes to the thickness.

The ports are spread out with the headphone jack up top, the SIM slot and volume rocker on the right - either side of a silver standby button - while both the microSD and charging ports are on the left, alongside contacts for accessories. A watertight port covers each.

The front of the Sony Xperia Z is minimalist - showing off only a Sony logo and front-facing camera. The rear is a little busier, with various tech info printed on it, plus the Sony Xperia logo, an NFC badge, camera light and the all-important lens. That back is stuck fast - as is becoming the custom, you'll have no luck if you want to remove the battery.

Turn it on, and you're not disappointed. Coming from the blackness, the 5-inch screen springs into life. Whether or not you'll like it is down to personal choice.

Some who've used the Sony Xperia Z describe the screen as a disappointment because Sony has gone for TFT - albeit with 1080 x 1920 pixels, giving a pixel density of 441ppi, which would explain why it looks a bit washed out. If you've come from a Super AMOLED screen you'll definitely feel the difference.

We're still fans - this is a razor sharp display from one of the world's premier screen manufacturers, although it doesn't have the wow factor of the HTC One's Super LCD 3 screen.

The only thing that lets it down is viewing angles - if you look at the Sony Xperia Z's screen, dead on, it's sharp enough. If you look at it from the side, it has a strange ability to look incredibly washed out. It's no huge problem - but it does mean the impressiveness of the screen is diminished compared to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4 or the HTC One.

One of the selling points of the Sony Xperia Z is that it is also water resistant. There's something slightly unnerving about taking a £529 phone and dropping it in the sink - but that's exactly what we did. And it worked absolutely fine.

Clearly, you'll need to make sure the ports are covered using those watertight protectors, that much goes without saying.

And here's some more good news: the price of the Sony Xperia Z is dropping quite quickly, already making it cheaper than the likes of the HTC One and in some worlds available for under the £30 contract mark for a half-decent whack of minutes.

While it's actually the same price as the comparable SIM-free 16GB iPhone 5, the cost is now closing in on the iPhone 4S on PAYG, so we can't help but feel the Xperia Z is finding its natural pricing level.

Interface

Sony may have broken free of Ericsson but it's clearly decided that the Sony Xperia brand is one worth keeping. And in line with that, some similarities remain other than the name.

It means that when you turn on the Sony Xperia Z, if you've used one before, you'll feel at home. Quite a clever move from Sony, which clearly doesn't want to alienate potential upgraders.

Thankfully, elements such as the shocking Timescape widget have been retired. Smaller, more obvious things like the clock widget stay.

The Sony Xperia Z ships with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Yes, it's not the most up-to-date handset as enthusiasts devour Android 4.2 on Nexus devices, but it's the next best thing, and Sony has promised an update shortly after launch.

For all the money and resources that Sony is pouring into getting this phone into the mainstream, the Sony Xperia Z won't be left sitting on the fringes here, allowing the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4 superior bragging rights.

Sony's take on Android is customised - but not too much compared to some phones we've seen before.

You get five home screens with no ability to add any more, though such is the Android way, you can always install your own launcher if you want and change that.

By default, you get shortcuts to apps Sony feels you'll treasure most - but again, you can move/delete/add to these as you see fit. One of Android's great strengths is its infinite customisability.

On top of that, Sony gives you its own widgets, such as Music Unlimited or links to its online stores. Most manufacturers do this - clearly, they want to draw you into their own ecosystems. But these can be moved or deleted too if they get in the way.

If you're wondering how you navigate, the answer is on-screen. Everything is done via the screen. Sony has bowed down to Google in this respect.

Where some OEMs will still include their own soft keys, the Sony Xperia Z eschews them for the standard Mountain View options of back, home and multitasking - on-screen buttons that appear and disappear as they are needed.

One thing you'll notice is that this is one speedy son-of-a-Sony. Naturally, with a quad-core 1.5GHz processor - and Android's Project Butter enhancement - we'd have expected it to be quick on all but the most extreme of tasks, so we found little here to induce complaint.

Zipping between home screens is a breeze, and we encountered absolutely no lag.

We're fans of Sony's 'Small Apps' integration. It's a simple idea - tap the multi-app button at the bottom-right of the screen and the Sony Xperia Z brings up not only your open apps but a selection of mini apps that you can launch on the screen in conjunction with what you're doing.

They're basically widgets that stay on-screen, rather than being tied to the home screen.

Sony gives you access to things such as a small note app or a countdown timer with a few options and the ability to download more from Google Play.

If developers buy into the idea, it could work out well, but we sadly don't think they will.

Due to the sheer number of Android variations, there's no financial incentive for developers to build things like this that will only work for one section of the market.

Android's excellent notification bar is here, enabling you to pull it down and view your latest messages and notifications.

Thanks to Jelly Bean, you can now pinch to expand notifications or swipe to clear individual ones. It's all very intuitive and nice to work with.

Sony's also furnished the Xperia Z with shortcuts to toggle settings such as those for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth - the kind of thing you take for granted when you have but rue when you lose.

You can also change themes from within the settings, which is a nice touch. It adjusts more than just the wallpaper and alters menu colours too.

That's one of those things you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it, but it's nice to play with. HTC does something similar with Sense, and we think it's great.

Apps are accessed via the app drawer, which you get into from the dock at the bottom of the home screen.

There's not much we can tell you about this if you've used an Android phone before - the apps sit there and can be reordered by alphabetical means or otherwise. Unfortunately, if you have OCD like us, this is the bit you may find yourself wincing at.

See, with the iPhone, you'll find your app icons presented uniformly. They're the same size and shape and it all looks very neat and tidy.

Yet with Android there are no restrictions, so you end up with app icons in all shapes, sizes and colours, and it can look like the inside of a child's toy chest. It's a shame because the Sony icons look beautiful, but as soon as you start adding your own shortcuts, your home screen may start to resemble a scrapbook instead.

If you're an Android fan, you'll pick it up easily. And if you're not, it's pretty intuitive, enabling you to delve in as much or as little as you like to change things or leave them as is.

We also have to give a quick heads up here to Google Now - first introduced in Jelly Bean 4.1 and all present.

It's supposed to help manage your life by telling you how long the journey home from work will take or what the weather's like. You can track parcels or view photos of local beauty spots.

It's a great idea in principle but it still all feels a little bit Beta.

Google Now is not a Siri-rip-off. Rather, it's Google's interpretation of a mobile assistant. We just can't help wondering how that interpretation was reached, at least until it starts to really offer you information that is tailored for your life, rather than sometimes accidentally waking you up to tell you that it's time to leave for a meeting on the other side of the world (a problem if you have a shared international calendar).

Contacts and calling

We have to hand it to Sony here for not making changes for change's sake - Android has a great contacts system and thankfully, Sony has recognised this by keeping it and giving it a mere cosmetic lick of paint.

Contacts download automatically when you first log in to the Sony Xperia Z. They come from your mandatory Gmail account, which is free to set up.

And for those who wince at the thought of being forced to have a Gmail account, you don't have to use it. But it is it an ideal way of backing up those numbers and addresses, should disaster strike.

Accessing said contacts is simple: you just tap the phone icon on the screen - which is also how you get into the dialler - or you can start to type the name of your contacts into the Google search widget on the home screen.

That's if you don't have a contact widget or shortcut installed on your home screen.

This is where you see one of Android's benefits over iOS, which still doesn't allow these sort of shenanigans without going around the houses.

Contacts are displayed beautifully with photos brought in from Facebook, Google or other sources, which is a real cosmetic plus.

Alas, Android doesn't bring them across in high res, so when you get a call, your contact can look rather pixelated, which ruins an otherwise beautiful appearance.

Putting new contact names into the Sony Xperia Z couldn't be easier. Just bring the keypad up, type in the number and hit 'Save.'

You can also add details ranging from their birthday to whom their spouse is.

Social networking isn't supported by default. This highlights the differences with an HTC handset, which tends to want you to sign into a million accounts on setup.

We can't complain too much about this, since we are glad to not to have to endure Timescape anymore.

And anyway, if you use Twitter, Facebook and others it's much nicer to be able to just sign into and use the networks that you - the user - wants to use.

It takes mere seconds to download official or third-party apps, and then you'll find you can hook everything up.

Calling a contact is as easy as tapping the person's name.

We found the performance on calls to be excellent. We sometimes lose track of the fact that a smartphone is a phone, and call quality can range from the brilliant to the unacceptable.

We had absolutely no issues with the Sony Xperia Z's call quality and found that not only did calls connect easily, but they stayed connected even in places where we'd expect them to drop.

One other thing we should mention here is something often not touched upon, but present here, and that's HD Voice. Many handsets support it these days, but it is network-dependent.

We can confirm, however, that it is a brilliant addition to the Sony Xperia Z.

It just makes it a far more pleasant experience when chatting to people - both for them and you.

Audio volume was loud enough for us when talking to buddies, and they reported no issues hearing us.

Again, this will be assisted by the HD Voice element, which helps with noise cancelling.

There is one, admittedly pathetic, point we'd like to raise: the edges of this phone are actually a little sharp and holding the phone close to your ear isn't a comfortable experience. Good that the sound boosting is actually pretty good, then, eh?

Messaging

Messaging is - and always has been - one of Android's strong points. So open is the system that you can download third-party apps such as WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on and they will integrate deeply into the OS - from Calendars to Contacts and Messages.

The beauty is that you can control, in many cases, what access is granted and where.

Apps don't tend to be closed off from each other as they do with Apple devices, and it makes for a much more different (some may say 'fluid') experience.

Android's standard messaging app - which handles SMS and MMS - is very competent, if not a little dull. Most Android manufacturers tend to take it and plonk it into their handsets - sometimes tweaking the odd colour here, or the odd setting there.

Sony has pretty much done that with the Sony Xperia Z, though it has added a few nice functions too.

When composing a new SMS, you can now doodle a little note or picture and then it'll send it as an MMS. Or you can send your location with a Google Maps attachment.

You can do this anyway by going into the Maps app and sending your location from most Android handsets, but it's just a little extra option on the Sony Xperia Z to be able to do it direct from the message app.

Other than that, it's pretty bog standard but does the job well.

Email is handled in two ways - Gmail and Email.

The beauty of using the dedicated Gmail app means that users who are really deeply integrated into the system can use some of its key features on the go as well as on their desktop.

We're talking features such as labels, archiving and advanced search facilities.

The search function really is fantastic compared to others we've seen, but we have to berate Google here for the fact that it still hasn't sorted out the displaying of HTML emails.

They just don't format for the phone's screen, which is pretty ridiculous considering this is Google's own app. Apple's iPhone Mail app has been able to do this since 2007, to put it into context.

You also are not given the ability to automatically download images in emails, which slows down the whole HTML email experience a little. Again, you can do this on iPhones. But Google just won't give here.

To be fair, this is of Google's doing, not Sony's. But this is a Sony Xperia Z running Android, and as such, it will be judged by people as a complete package. The two come hand in hand. Sorry, Sony. That's just how it is. Have a word with Mountain View if you don't like it.

Of course, lots of people don't use Gmail - and if that's you, you do get your own email app here.

It's the standard Android email programme - same as you get in stock Android handsets - but the Sony Xperia Z gives it a little lick of Sony's paint.

You'll find it supports the majority of IMAP/POP3/Exchange accounts and is actually very similar to the Gmail app in many ways.

Helpfully, you can set the account to push emails or poll periodically. This is great if you get a lot of work emails and don't want the Sony Xperia Z beeping constantly.

The Sony Xperia Z's keyboard is a contentious issue. We've heard some say it's a nightmare.

But we would go completely in the opposite direction and say that to some users it will be one of the best keyboards they've used. It is the same keyboard that Google gave us on the Nexus 4, again with a lick of Sony Xperia Z paint.

The first time we used it, it started up and asked us to configure some options. After that, we were off and away.

You can have the keyboard as a standard QWERTY, or add a few extra shortcut buttons too. Or go the other way and have it like a good old phone keyboard with T9 input.

The big thing here is swiping. You can slide between letters without taking your finger off the keyboard, which leads to words appearing in lightning speed.

It's highly intuitive and learns incredibly quickly. Predicted words appear with a choice for you to pick between those you want before committing.

Indeed, the only issue here is that the cursor can end up covering the word you try to select if it's not the one the Sony Xperia Z thinks you want, which can be annoying. It can also randomly flick the cursor around and cut words you're typing in half, or just get annoyed when you try to correct a predicted word.

• Best Android keyboards - 8 tried and tested to give you options

Of course, for those people it's not a problem, as Android has loads of options to let you customise your own keyboard - just head out to the Play Store and look at the likes of Swiftkey and more.

The only other gripe we had is the size of the screen. When it comes to typing messages, it just feels too big.

For people with big hands, it can feel a bit obstructive. For those of the daintier variety, it may seem enormous.

One-handed use is possible, but you just don't get a solid grip and we nearly dropped the Sony Xperia Z several times.

Yes, we have shatterproof glass (apparently), but we don't necessarily want to test that theory.

Google's voice dictation has also received a boost and now recognises more dialects than before. We love the way that words appear as you speak, rather than you having to wait until the end of your sentence and stop and wait.

Unfortunately, Siri still has the edge on actually matching words accurately, which is odd because Google has been offering voice recognition on its handsets since the Nexus One (even if you did have to feign an American accent to get anything done, and even then, it was on a wing and a prayer.)

Internet

Google Chrome is the default browser on the Sony Xperia Z - this follows a choice made by Google to ditch its stock Android browser and bring everything in line, which makes sense.

Prior to Jelly Bean, you had to download it as a separate app from Google Play.

The internet is where the Sony Xperia Z really shines. Not too big, not too small, pages look absolutely mind blowing on that ultra-sharp, bright and vivid display.

Chrome is a fast browser, the Sony Xperia Z is a fast phone and when you throw LTE into the mix, you realise just how powerful this baby is.

If you thought HSDPA+ on the Nexus 4 was fast, you'll be equally (and a bit more) blown away by what you see on the Sony Xperia Z. We loaded the Daily Mail site because it's a data-heavy, busy page rather than the fact that we love reading about Kim Kardashian (it's all lies).

Wi-Fi took four seconds to load it fully (though we could start seeing things after two seconds.) This was on a par with the Nexus 4.

But when we took it down to LTE, it got even faster. Almost instantly, it was all there and ready to go. It's an amazing feat and we couldn't see how it could be better.

Those who aren't keen on Chrome can always replace it as their default browser with something else - Firefox, Dolphin, Maxthon and Opera, to name a few, all provide credible alternatives - but we can't see a strong reason to switch unless you are massively anti-Google.

Or unless text reflow is a big deal, because by default, it didn't seem to work straight out of the box on the Sony Xperia Z.

Thankfully, tap to zoom does - but why only half a job, Google?

When it comes to bookmarks, we're massive fans of the Chrome way.

All of your desktop bookmarks are synchronised with your Google account (so long as you use Chrome on your desktop, of course) and appear on your handset.

Here is where we would also normally lament the lack of Flash. We've been doing this for years. Adobe has ceased Android support and Chrome never played with it on mobile devices.

We won't make a big deal of it, since Flash has clearly gone the way of Betamax and lost out to HTML5.

We'll just say we're sad to not have the option to view many of the sites that still use Flash and haven't/won't be updated for any reason. But que sera sera. It's becoming a less relevant gripe with each new Android handset.

Camera

Sony is one of the beasts when it comes to cameras, and some of its previous phones in conjunction with Ericsson were real belters. But it claims to have moved up a notch with the Sony Xperia Z and catapulted itself right to a premier spot. We're not convinced.

We must have a retro throwback here to the days of the Sharp GX30. A Megapixel camera! What sorcery was this, we wondered? Now, we get 2.2MP on the front snapper alone - which tends to be used for vanity purposes on Instagram, or for Skype action. Previously, this wouldn't have mattered, but with LTE support, sending higher quality video is much easier and much more of a reality. 2.2MP is therefore pretty appropriate.

And that's pretty much the poor relation here when you consider what's on the back - a whopping 13.1MP camera, shooting at 4128 x 3096 pixels and capable of some amazing images. Or you'd think so. Sadly, we would describe our results as average at best.

We'll get the primary niggle out of the way first - there's no camera shutter button. It's such a waste. We have that great standby button on the side, which you could easily mistake for a camera shoot button. But if you want one of those, you're out of luck.

You'll need to get the Sony Xperia ZL for that - and while Android phones don't generally have a shutter button, the fact it's on the Xperia Z's sibling (and Sony has got previous form here) means we're sad it's missing.

The quickest way of getting to the camera is to fire up the phone and swipe from the lock screen. That's one press and one swipe - it's not that much. But it's just a bit annoying not having the immediacy we'd hope for on such an otherwise brilliant device, and it's not the fastest camera to load either.

And to add to that, we found a few times that it didn't work due to some unexplained software glitch. It was solved with a reboot - but doing that means your window for taking the picture may have then passed.

Sony does negate this slightly by offering some quick launch options so that when the camera loads, you can choose to have it automatically launch and capture a photo or video, or just launch. Again, this had an annoying habit of not working until we'd rebooted the Sony Xperia Z.

When the camera does fire up, the screen is phenomenal. You really notice the richness of those colours and the refresh rate as you move the phone around is nothing short of astonishing. What's more, you don't have to manually change scene mode (unless you want to), with a pretty intelligent Superior Auto mode able to tell what you're trying to do. It worked spot on for us every time.

We like some of the other enhancements too, such as the smile options. Smile detection is so last year - so the Sony Xperia Z goes even further and enables you to choose between big smiles, average smiles or small smiles. Who knows how it'll cope with a big smile from a tiny mouth.

You're also able to change the capture mode to touching the screen (at the expense of tap to focus - though in fairness, the tap to focus is pretty hot) and have the camera upload photos to Sony's service automatically. Who needs Photo Stream? Android's just as capable.

And there are lots of scene modes to pick from. Nothing particularly new - from Panorama to Burst Mode - but all things we like to play with from time to time.

As for the actual camera, results unfortunately just didn't wow us. Photos tended to look better on the screen before they were actually shot, but then when transferred to a computer screen, they just looked cheap. Colours are presented well, but there seemed to be a lack of sharpness, and even mildly zoomed in, they came out more like something from a budget or mid-range handset.

Shutter speed is good, but not mind-blowing. Sony touts it as fast-capture and goes on about its Exmor RS sensor, which boasts high dynamic range (HDR) capabilities and is designed to reduce noise in low-light images. For your average Joe Bloggs, we'll just say this - photos are OK for a phone camera but you won't end up using them for anything more than casual use.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Indoor shots are passable - ambient light helps but they still look a little blurry when enlarged - although the low light capabilities of the new Exmor sensor really are impressive compared to the competition.

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Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

There are loads of different effects to play with. Most of them, you'll use once and forget about.

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The LED flash struggles to light up a small room in pitch black. It's best for directly shooting an object.

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A little side light helps, but even then, it's not ideal.

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Click here to see the full resolution image

We'd love to make excuses for the lens, but even in daylight, pictures are hardly sharp.

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Panorama mode comes as standard

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The shutter performs adequately, but this is no DSLR

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Bright sunlight can also prove a problem.

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And even the most perfect conditions leave a lot to be desired when you snap.

Video

The Sony Xperia Z's video capabilities are impressive (on paper), with that 13.1MP camera able to give Full HD 1080p recording at 30 frames per second.

For one thing, you're able to select scene modes from landscape, to beach, to party to sports and much more. There's even one for shooting videos of your food, called Gourmet. This is something we're used to seeing in still camera modes, but on videos, it's pretty rare and a great addition.

On top of that, Sony's HDR mode kicks in here to make your movies look better, and given the sheer level of processing going on we're really impressed with the results.

We tried the video stabilisation function and it coped admirably. You're also able to change things such as the focus mode and white balance, which just gives that extra level of usability.

There's not as much of a sharpness issue on video as there is with the still images, and you can see clearly that if something is out of focus, the camera is constantly trying to fix it as you move about.

You do have to be aware, too, that videos shot at Full HD will be absolutely massive. You'll struggle to send them via many email providers, and we ended up having to upload them to Dropbox and then forward people links to view stuff we'd shot. It all felt a little crude.

This is especially annoying when you consider that some phones will automatically resize videos for you or enable you to trim them once shot as par for the course.

Also, remember that if you're on a 4G plan, you'll eat through data like Pacman through those little dots just sending that photo of your Gran pulling a Christmas cracker then falling off her seat.

However, overall the Sony Xperia Z is definitely one of the top phones on the market for those that like to savour life's memories in more than just the odd snap. Once you get the footage off the phone, it's immense.

Media

"When it comes to media, the Sony Xperia Z really excels."

That's what we wanted to say when starting this section, and after fixing some foibles with Mac compatibility, we can really say that it does (see our 'Connectivity' section for info on Mac connection).

Getting music onto the phone with a PC, however, is a real cinch thanks to just being able to drag and drop your files onto the phone's internal memory (or memory card, if you're feeling all expandable).

The process is quick and the USB connection secure, although it's only version 2.0 - but you can connect that up to a big TV using an MHL lead if you so wish.

Google Music is the other option - especially if 16GB isn't enough for you and you don't want to bother with memory cards. But frankly, Sony, it's not great.

Long before the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad, in fact, before the letter 'i' was even invented, many of us were walking around with the market-leading Walkman. If you had auto-reverse, or an FM Radio on yours, you were posh.

It's been one of Sony's strongest - and latterly, neglected - brands, which became a bit of a victim of its own arrogance as it sat at the top of its game. In swooped Apple and ruined it all - although we're not suggesting that's the reason Mac support isn't forthcoming.

Now, Walkman is back in force on the Sony Xperia Z, which, once you do get music onto it, imparts upon you a beautiful experience. We will give that to Sony.

Tunes are presented fantastically with amazing album art, which looks so vibrant on that screen. What's more, you can also engage a visualiser, should you wish.

Music can be viewed by Artist or Album. You can even sign into Facebook and see what your friends are listening to and share musical choices here.

When you look at how Sony has made great use of that screen, it does make your realise just how much Apple really needs to pull its finger out to give a long-overdue makeover to the offering on its iOS devices, which looks very plain by comparison.

If you plan on listening to music through the loudspeaker (we use the word "loud" loosely), then you'll be in for a huge letdown. Not in a long time have we heard such pathetic audio quality from a phone speaker.

We honestly could say that listening to music through the speaker on our old Sony Ericsson K800i six years ago sounded better.

On the Sony Xperia Z, its single speaker, located at the bottom right, just sounded so unbearably tinny, we couldn't wait to turn Girls Aloud off. Maybe it's Sony's way of encouraging you to use the headphones instead. Or to stop you listening to Girls Aloud.

And when you do use headphones, you're in for a treat. The headphones provided are nothing special (though nearly all UK dealers and networks are offering a pair worth £299 free for early customers) but that's by the by.

The quality the Walkman app pushes through even the most pedestrian of headphone is great. In fact, we'd go so far as to pit it as one of the best sound experiences we've had on a mobile device.

The ClearAudio+ option makes for a fantastic audio experience, and you can even dig into the settings and change the ambience from, say, a studio to that of a nightclub, and guess what - it actually does it well.

Of course, there is a third way of listening to your music, and that is to stream it. Not to stream to your phone (though that is possible through Google's Play Music service, which is included) but to stream from your phone using a service called Throw, which is built into the Sony Xperia Z.

This is a form of DLNA, but we tested it from the Sony Xperia Z to a Samsung smart TV fully expecting it to not work on a non-Sony branded device. We were shocked at how quickly and painlessly it connected, and subsequently worked. Take some house points here, Sony.

Incidentally, Sony gives you a shortcut on the lock screen to control the music player. They're just basic controls such as play and pause, next and previous. But similar to the camera issue, it didn't work much of the time and required a reboot.

Playing video is a breeze, and with that screen, you really have little room to complain. Watching movies was painless and we had no issues with the major formats, with the exception of a .MOV file that kept on throwing up errors, despite working elsewhere.

For those who do a lot of commuting, this is an ideal handset, because the Sony Xperia Z is both the perfect size and weight to comfortably hold in the hand.

Again, if you're not using a PC, you may struggle to get movies on unless you can be bothered with a card reader. Or you can buy them direct from Google or Sony. Perhaps that's part of the whole grand plan.

Option three is YouTube - the fantastic native Google app is included and shows here, once again, why it's head and shoulders above the competition, and the sheer clarity of HD video on this screen (when it's something worth watching, like a movie trailer) had our friends agog at the power of the handset.

The addition of the Bravia Engine 2 here is is amazing though - the upscaling it can do to standard definition videos is jaw-dropping - providing you're watching sweeping panoramas or underwater scenes. Boring episodes of How I Met Your Mother will still look pretty much the same.

Anyway, videos are very carefully organised by Sony with the Movies app it has included, and the same goes for your photos. You can view them by source (Facebook, for example) or even where in the world they were shot, using geotag info.

What's more, Sony includes an inbuilt photo editing facility to give budding Instagrammers an extra little something to play with.

It's nice to see an Android manufacturer not be lazy and use the stock Google app, but go all out with its own. Again, hats off to Sony here.

As it has done for years, Sony treats us to an FM radio - and it's brilliant. We were expecting it to be a bit rubbish really, since over the years, with the advent of internet radio, FM options have seemed a little old fashioned and neglected.

Sony has given us something here that managed to cling on well to an FM signal, give us really loud audio (we often struggled to hear radio stations on our Samsung Galaxy S3) and even comes with cool visualisers. It's just cosmetic, but it's really nice to have here. Thanks Sony.

Battery life and connectivity

It's difficult to get an accurate battery life reading, because the Sony Xperia Z is not just a phone.

Gone are the days when we'd simply quote talk times, since you're more than likely to spend more time on the web or using apps than actually speaking to friends.

Sony itself claims you'll get up to 11 hours of talk time and 550 hours of standby time. Of course, that is in optimum conditions (and on 2G - which is two levels down from the norm these days, but there's nothing quite like massaging figures).

And while the battery is large at 2330mAh, we'd say those estimates are pretty optimistic.

Firstly, there is normal use - and then there is advanced normal use.

What we mean by the latter is that the Sony Xperia Z comes with advanced power saving capabilities, including Stamina mode.

This enables you to turn off data when the screen is disabled (with the exception of stuff such as WhatsApp or email, which can be exempted individually through an additional setting).

Anybody who has ever used the incredibly popular Juice Defender app on Android to wring as much potential life out of their device will be familiar with this.

We enabled Stamina Mode and got to work on the Sony Xperia Z. The results weren't bad at all. Sony's Stamina Mode is definitely a real step forward in battery life management.

After taking the Sony Xperia Z off charge at 8am on Sunday morning, we checked our emails and tweets (we'd exempted a few key apps in Stamina mode).

We listened to the FM radio for about 15 mins before switching to music for the next 40 mins played via the headphones. Then, we browsed the web intermittently for about 20 mins over Wi-Fi.

Over the course of the next few hours, a handful of Gmails were sent and received, six text messages, one 20 minute phone call, a four minute Skype call over 3G and some photo shooting were thrown into the mix.

By 4pm, we were down to 26%. We then left the Sony Xperia Z untouched and the power went down slowly, but we had only gone down to 14% by 7pm, although this would have been extended if we'd not exempted any apps.

Listening to music for an hour while on the way home killed it eventually.

We noticed that playing music uses up power like any other memory process - certainly a lot more than an iPhone does.

We thought that was good, bearing in mind many smartphones would struggle to make it through the day on that kind of usage.

You'll still need a USB cable or portable battery handy if you're really going to be hammering the Sony Xperia Z, but it's not a bad result. We've certainly seen far, far worse.

Should you take it out of Stamina mode, it goes without saying that you'll struggle to get results like those, but overall we were really impressed with the upgrade in battery life Stamina Mode offers. If you're thinking of taking a few days away without a charger and just need a phone with calling and text ability, you'll definitely get days' of use out of the Sony Xperia Z.

Connectivity

The Sony Xperia Z comes with pretty much every form of connectivity you could possibly want or need these days - and then some.

Wi-Fi is obviously all there - though we found it doesn't support 5GHz, only 2.4GHz. Nonetheless, speeds were fast and we were able to surf at lightning levels, if not as stable as on other phones with dual-channel bonding.

Bluetooth is naturally supported (Sony's former partner, Ericsson, was synonymous with the technology in the early days) as is HSDPA+/LTE (4G) and NFC. It's low-power Bluetooth as well, (version 4.0) which means that you'll be able to use this phone with all manner of sensors that come on the market. Basically it means the phone is future-proofed - consider this a good thing.

NFC is still at that stage where manufacturers are introducing it, but are unsure how to harness its potential or figure out how it can help them. Still, with the use of smart tags, it comes into its own.

The idea is that as soon as your phone goes near a particular smart tag, it'll complete a function you've determined. You have to have some contact - it's not like a Wi-Fi range where you have to be within x feet - but it's a quick swipe against the rear of the phone to the tag that takes all of a second.

It may be that doing this turns Wi-Fi on or off, it may send a goodnight text to your partner, pair with a Bluetooth speaker or set an alarm. It's super-lazy - but also super-clever.

Sony also includes an app called Xperia Link - the idea being that you install an app on your computer (Windows only, remember. Have we mentioned the lack of Mac support?!) and then you can use your phone's connection to surf the web on your computer. Yep, welcome back to 2001.

This would be great if it wasn't for the fact that you can simply turn the phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot far more easily, by going into the settings.

We've already mentioned DLNA and the Throw technology included in the Sony Xperia Z. There's also the ability to mirror your screen to the television, but despite having success with Throw, we couldn't get the mirroring to work on our Samsung TV.

It could be that this is only compatible with Sony televisions. After all, the Media Remote control app included is only for use with Sony devices. Hardly a massive surprise, but a shame that there isn't a universal solution included.

PC and Mac support

For connecting to your PC, you just use the micro USB cable and it instantly installs the necessary software. However, with Mac support, you'll need to use Sony Bridge, which can be a bit tricky to install.

When you plug the Xperia Z into a computer via USB, a message pops up on the screen of the phone, telling you it will install the relevant sync software on your machine. On a PC, it does it seamlessly, but on a Mac, it just then follows with an error message telling you it can't go any further.

We looked at the Xperia Z section of the Sony website and the support area and, at the time of writing, there was absolutely no mention of Sony Bridge for Mac. Indeed, had we not just searched using Google just now, we'd still be none the wiser.

Anyway, once Sony Bridge was installed, we could tell Sony had put some work into it. It looks different to how it fared under Sony Ericsson and has been given a nice lick of paint. But it's not without fault.

Things got off to a good start when it immediately recognised the Xperia Z was plugged in and was able to tell us how much memory was left. But it went downhill quickly. After looking like it was all about to sync iTunes playlists, it then told us we had 0KB of data being used and 0KB available. Only three reboots managed to fix this.

We then synchronised a short iTunes playlist and two albums from iPhoto. Even the following day, those songs were nowhere to be seen on the Walkman app (though they do appear on Google Music) and the photos did sync, but rather than syncing albums, they were all just thrown into one big visual pit and jumbled up.

We can see Sony has tried here – but it clearly needs more effort, from not just showing that Sony Bridge is available to actually making it do what it's supposed to properly. Considering Sony really hopes to entice iPhone users away, this should be top priority.

Maps and apps

To Sony's credit, it hasn't been lazy here. So often in the past, we've reviewed other Android handsets and the manufacturers have actually been quite tight in what they've included. Not the case on the Sony Xperia Z.

Of course, you get Google's standard suite of apps that come with all Android devices. That includes (though isn't limited to) the excellent Gmail app and the jewel in Android's crown: Google Maps.

The app so good, that it showed how bad Apple Maps was in comparison and then shot to the top of the download chart in the App Store on its release.

Thankfully, it's never been removed from Google (obviously), and has, for the last few years, given one of the best turn-by-turn navigation experiences on the market. Let's not forget this app is free - and it gives you so much more functionality and live information than you would ever get from many other paid for apps.

If you really don't like Google Maps though, you can take advantage of the free Wisepilot for Sony Xperia app. But we can't see why you EVER would.

Aside from this, Sony gives us some other bits and bobs such as a basic note-taking/doodle app and a trial for McAfee mobile security. Obviously, it's keen to get you spending your money there rather than with Google, so although you can buy through Google Play, there are various hints to get you towards its Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services.

We tried them both and, unfortunately, neither worked. The former took us to a web page where Sony admitted it knew there was a problem but was working on it; the latter just hung up immediately and didn't do a thing. A bit shoddy in our eyes, considering this is hardly a new service.

Perhaps Sony could spend more time on sorting things like this out and less time working on its Play Now service, which it's still flogging like a dead horse on handsets. That too is included on the Sony Xperia Z and is so old, we could swear we had it on the K700i many moons ago.

Office Suite is provided on the Sony Xperia Z free of charge - it's the free viewer version but it does the job admirably, and you can always download more expensive variants if you intend to use the Sony Xperia Z as your main document editing device.

We were also pleased to see a Sony Car app, which paid more than lip service to drivers. We tried it out and found it to be a great addition - offering large buttons and help for everything from navigation to music selections. You do feel, in some ways at least, that Sony has gone the extra mile here (see what we did there?).

And let's not forget that - this being an Android handset - there are hundreds of thousands of apps waiting for you to dive in and start downloading from Google Play.

This is one of our favourite things about getting a new smartphone to play with - it's like delving into a treasure trove. And with a screen like this, many of those treasures will positively glisten in front of your eyes.

Benchmarks

The Sony Xperia Z is a quad core phone powered by a Snapdragon Krait CPU, clocked at 1.5GHz. However, it seems that in raw speed terms it can't hold a candle to the likes of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, as the benchmarks below show:

Antutu

Peacekeeper

SunSpider

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

Sony's come out here with a very strong message: it's back and it means business. There's no hint of this being a niche Android phone, or by any means a cheap one. Sony wants the Xperia Z to be viewed as the handset of choice, the one that will knock Apple off its pedestal and be classed as the Android device.

It's done this through a design which is, frankly, beautiful. And specs which are, in some ways, unmatched.

It's cheaper than the rivals now, which is good as the higher expense was a real issue for us when the phone first came out.

We liked

The Sony Xperia Z has incredible specs - from that beautiful screen, to its breathtaking design and powerful innards, there is so much that Sony has got right here.

It has built on the strong heritage of the Walkman and given power users one of the things they often desperately crave - a good battery performance and top speeds.

The design is robust and fits very well in the hand - and despite the fact the 5-inch screen is whopping, the way its integrated into the chassis mitigates that issue well. And when you turn on the Full HD screen, well, the clarity is almost mind-melting.

We disliked

But there's always got to be a minus, and there are a few with the Sony Xperia Z. For example, the dust resistance is pretty much nothing more than words in our experience, and it does feel like a large, sharp slab in the hand.

And while the camera is OK, it's hardly mind-blowing. The price is finally more palatable, but still not the cheapest in the world - and we're annoyed about the trickiness of Mac support. Will it affect a large group of users? No - but that doesn't mean it should be neglected at all, given the increasing number of people using MacBooks for media purposes.

Final verdict

There is so much to love about the Sony Xperia Z - and while there are some annoyances, they pale in comparison. Yes, we think it's a bit shoddy that we encountered software bugs, but they are being slowly fixed, and they weren't bad enough that we had crashes or lost data.

The Sony Xperia Z has a strong design and finally represents an Android smartphone that can be used to show iPhone owners that they're not necessarily at the top of the heap anymore.

The price is somewhere approaching acceptable now - and rush out a software update to improve the camera and you have a really strong candidate for taking up your pocket space.

The only problem is, by the time that's happened, the competition from fellow Android manufacturers has grown even fiercer. For now, for those who want liquid protection, we recommend it heartily.

Introduction

After a number of delays and setbacks BlackBerry 10 finally arrived in January and BlackBerry's new mobile platform has already witnessed its major first update in its life cycle with BlackBerry 10.1 now available on all three BB10 devices.

We've explored the new version of the operating system and have updated our BlackBerry 10 review accordingly - you lucky, lucky people.

The BlackBerry Z10 kicked off the Canadian firm's renewed onslaught on the mobile market, but it has since been joined by the QWERTY keyboard toting BlackBerry Q10 and more recently the budget focused BlackBerry Q5.

While in the short term focus will be put on the devices it's the software the handsets are running that is really the key to BlackBerry's long term success, or ultimate demise.

The BlackBerry smartphone range has been in desperate need of a reboot for a while as the likes of iOS 6, Android Jelly Bean and Windows Phone 8 have outstripped the extremely outdated BB OS7 platform.

Whereas the other systems have witnessed incremental upgrades, BB 10 is a totally new offering – the BB OS7 base has been completely scrapped and the new platform rebuilt from the ground up.

BB10 sees the implementation of a whole new user interface, doing away with the familiar BlackBerry system we're all used to in favour of something that resembles the likes of Android and iOS, although with its own unique features thrown in for good measure.

BlackBerry 10 has merged homescreens, widgets, app lists and a unified inbox into one slick interface, offering up an easy-to-navigate user experience.

Lock screen

The first thing you're greeted with on BlackBerry 10 is the lock screen, which not only shows the time and date, but also notifications, unread messages and upcoming calendar events.

There's a button to launch the camera straight from the lock screen to grab a quick snap, just hold down on the icon for three of seconds.

It's slightly longer than we'd like and the simple slide action on some Android handsets is quicker.

To unlock a touchscreen BB 10 handset you need to slide your finger up the screen. As you do, the homescreen below will begin to appear, giving you a sneak peek of what's underneath.

What you can't do from the lockscreen is jump straight into a new message, email or other notification. Instead you' have to unlock the handset in the normal way and then slide into the BlackBerry Hub.

It's not a huge issue but it's something we'd like to see crop up in a future update as it will further enhance the fluidity of BB 10.

When viewing the lock screen you can drag down from the top of the display to show the night time clock mode - which has a lovely analogue clock face and a toggle for your alarm.

The black background and red highlights mean when you check the time in the middle of the night you won't be blinded by a bright display, which is always a bonus.

Homescreen

The main BlackBerry 10 homescreen is comprised of 'Active Frames', technically mini-applications, which give you an overview of information from a particular app and launch the full version when tapped.

BB10 will display up to eight of these active frames, showing your most recently used apps with the latest app appearing in the top-left position.

Only four of these panes can fit on the screen at one time, so you'll need to scroll down to see the rest – which all seems a little pointless, since you can just as quickly swipe sideways to access the app list and launch the app you want from there.

For those of you who may be concerned that these 'Active Frames' could be both data and battery-intensive, BlackBerry assures us that this is not the case, with the QNX core of BlackBerry 10 providing efficient power management, and the frames only downloading the minimum amount of data required for them to update.

To be fair we've seen pretty good battery life from both the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 during our in-depth review process, so we're inclined to believe BlackBerry's claims.

If you get fed up of seeing a particular frame then you can easily close it by hitting the small cross in the bottom right corner and if you close all the panes you'll be taken by default to the first page in the app list until you open another.

When you're in an app there's no back button on screen to help you exit. This brings us to another key feature of BB10, as it encourages you to use a gesture to quit applications by running your finger up from the bottom of the screen, returning you to the active frame view.

While this is easy to do on the Z10 and Q5 it's a little trickier with the Q10 which doesn't provide any additional space between the bottom of the display and its QWERTY keyboard.

Those who are already familiar with other smartphones will find the action pretty unnatural and it takes a while to get used to the new way of doing things on BlackBerry 10.

Interface

Swiping from right to left on the homescreen will take you to the app list, with 16 apps on the screen at any one time if you're using the fully touchscreen Z10, while the 3.1-inch display found on the Q10 and Q5 only manages to squeeze 12 on at a time.

If you have more than 16 (or 12) apps, additional pages are added and can be accessed by swiping the same way again, which is familiar territory for iOS and Android users.

You can manage your applications by creating folders, which will reduce the number of pages you need to sift through - which is especially useful on the smaller screened devices.

Hold down on an app any they'll begin to pulsate. Simple drag one on top of another to create a folder (sound familiar?), which you can then rename to some relevant.

There's also the option to uninstall apps in this throbbing view, with a small trash can icon appearing in the top right of each app icon - although stock apps such as contacts, browser and calendar cannot be removed. No huge surprise there.

There's a pleasant fading animation as you flick between pages, and you'll see the previous page of apps fade away to the side of the screen, to be replaced by the new page.

When you select an application from the list BlackBerry 10 doesn't automatically open it up. What you get instead is a short animation which sees BB10 zoom to the active frame page where the app appears and then enlargers to fill the screen.

It may be a nice visual effect but it has absolutely no practical advantage and all it does is slow you down, adding another second or so to the app's load time.

At the bottom of both the homescreen and app list you'll notice a shortcut bar, with quick links to the phone and camera applications, enabling you to quickly jump to these regularly used features.

These shortcuts cannot be changed which is a little annoying as we'd like the flexibility to be able to put our most used apps in this handy space.

If you're rocking the Z10 you also get a search link here which isn't available on the other handsets as search is conducted by simply tapping out what you want on the physical keyboard.

For those of you who are a fan of quick settings you'll be pleased to learn that BB 10 delievers in this department.

Slide down from the top of the screen when you're viewing the homescreen or app list and a bar will pop down - in a similar vein to the notification bar in Android - giving you toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, alarm and silent mode.

Tap the icon to turn a particular service on or off, or if you want to fine tune one tap it's name instead you'll be propelled to the relevant area of the settings menu.

A slight annoyance with BlackBerry 10 is the fact that you can only set one alarm, so unless you're good at getting up promptly or adept with the snooze button you may find yourself oversleeping if you're relying on a BB10 device.

This is something which should be able to be tweaked in a software update, but it hasn't arrived with BlackBerry 10.1, so the wait continues.

Something which did arrive with the BlackBerry 10.1 update is the ability to customise your notifications for various accounts.

The famous red notification LED is present on all three of BlackBerry's new handsets and you can now control this along with ringtones and vibration on an account by account basis, and even contact by contact.

We'd have liked it if the LED in question was multi-coloured so you can have it flash, for example blue for a Facebook update, red for a message and green for an email.

Peek and Flow

Peek and Flow are two core aspects that come heavily baked into BlackBerry 10 and they dictate the way you use the system.

Flow refers to the way the whole of BB 10 operates, as you glide between applications and screens with no hard navigation tools such as the back or home buttons that are found on rival handsets.

It's very different to any system we've experienced before, so it took us a few days to get our heads around the various gestures required to effectively use BB10.

At times we wished there was a simple back button below the screen, since it wasn't always clear how to return to the previous screen. But the more we used BlackBerry 10 the more we became used to the way it should be used.

Our concern here is that BB 10 requires a relatively steep learning curve for everyone, even those who have owned BlackBerry handsets in the past.

It becomes easier once you've played with BlackBerry 10 for a few days, but we fear customers may be turned off in-store when they preview a handset.

Onto Peek and this is a smart little gesture enabling you to check your latest notifications and messages without having to exit the current app you're using.

As you swipe up over the screen, BB10 will minimise the pane you're viewing and display notification icons down the left side.

This includes icons for new texts, emails, BBMs, social updates and missed calls, and if any of these pique your interest then continue your finger's motion to the right and the screen will slide over to reveal the BlackBerry Hub so you can see who the message is from.

If it's just a boring newsletter you can return to the app, video or game (which are automatically paused) you were viewing without having to go back to the app list and navigate to it. Unless it's the TechRadar newsletter, which you'll obviously want to read straight away.

This action can be sped up it you want to get straight to the Hub view, just start your finger to the left of the base of the screen and drag diagonally up, which will see the peek movement streamlined.

The whole BlackBerry 10 interface does appear to be very smooth with no sign of lag on any of the three handsets, which makes for a pleasing user experience – once you've worked out the various gestures required to get around, that is.

BlackBerry Hub, BBM and keyboard

BlackBerry Hub

The BlackBerry Hub is the universal inbox found on BlackBerry 10, and it pulls in all forms of communications from calls and texts to emails, BBMs and social updates.

A new addition to the Hub in the BlackBerry 10.1 update is pin to pin messaging, allowing you to communicate directly with other BlackBerry smartphones in a secure fashion.

Of course with so many accounts feeding into the handset, the more popular among us will be quickly inundated with notifications from various different channels, and this is where the Peek idea makes it easy to see when you've got anything new to look at.

To make the reams of messages easier to manage, tap the title in the bottom-left corner of the message centre to reveal a list of all the accounts you have linked up, and then select the one you're interested in – this will then populate the Hub with notifications from just that source.

There are also various options which can be selected for a particular message, hold down on the communication in question and a slim column of tools will pop up to the right for you to choose from, including reply, forward and delete.

If you're using the QWERTY keyboard toting BlackBerry Q5 or Q10 there are predefined shortcut keys to speed up the messaging process.

For example you can hit "R" to reply, "L" to reply all or "F" to forward the email you're currently viewing on screen.

You can start tapping out a text, email, tweet or Facebook post from the homescreen on the Q10 and Q5, as the BB10 integration has the smarts to detect what action you want.

While the BlackBerry Z10 cannot benefit from these shortcuts it has the advantage of packing a larger screen, allowing more content to be displayed at once resulting in much less scrolling for you.

The amount of scrolling on the Q5 and Q10 really bugged us at time as it's frustrating that you can only see four messages at a time.

Drag down from the top of the message centre and the BB10 Hub will automatically pull in your calendar events for that day in the top half of the screen, enabling you to quickly see what you've got on without having to launch the full calendar app.

It's an impressive setup and we reckon other platforms may be looking at the BlackBerry Hub with a little bit of envy.

It's not without its faults though and one of our biggest bug bears is its integration with the peek gesture.

If you read a message and then immediately exit the Hub without returning to the main overview next time you want to peek at your inbox you'll see the message you last read, instead of your new entries.

The way round this is to remember to hit back once you've read/replied to someone, but it feels like a bit of a waste of time and a little unintuitive.

BBM

BBM, or BlackBerry Messenger, has been a cornerstone of the BlackBerry experience for years, and it gets a revamp with BlackBerry 10.

The dedicated application has been given a lick of paint, with easier navigation and a new feature called BBM Video.

BBM Video joins up with BBM Voice, which launched recently on BB OS7, to bring both voice and video calls to the BBM application on BlackBerry 10.

The days of the BlackBerry bolt-ons on phone tariffs have been and gone, with all your BBM activity coming out of your data allowance if you're not connected to Wi-Fi. So you'll need to keep an eye on your data usage.

Adding contacts is easy and within the BBM app you have the choice of tapping in your friend's pin, or scanning their QR code.

You can send, receive and reply to BBMs from the BlackBerry Hub but if you want the full range of options you'll need to fire up the dedicated application.

BBM is set to roll out on iOS and Android this summer which makes it an even more attractive proposition as all your friends will be able to use no matter what phone they're rocking - apart from those suckers with a Windows Phone who aren't getting treated to the social messaging app.

Keyboard

Now all this messaging capability is nothing without an input method, and keyboards are arguably the thing BlackBerry handsets are most known for.

BlackBerry has spoken in length about how it has engineered its on-screen keyboard to bring users the experience they get on the physical version with the all-new touch offering.

Straight up, we can say the BB 10 keyboard on the Z10 is miles better than the pitiful attempt that adorned the Torch range of BlackBerry handsets, but it's not perfect.

The keyboard sports the silver frets that can be found on the Bold 9900, providing additional spacing between lines and allowing for better travel between keys.

These frets also act as the space for the next word prediction, and the more you type the more BB 10 learns and offers smarter suggestions.

We were able to type at a reasonable pace, but we found the next word prediction if anything slowed us down, since the font is too small to easily see, and we found our fingers were covering most of the suggestions anyway.

It's a different story over on the Q10 and Q5 where BlackBerry's prowess in physical keyboards are once again brought to the fore.

While there's no dynamic suggestions popping up above each key you do still get spell check and predictions on screen to aid your typing experience.

In the BlackBerry 10.1 update text manipulation has been greatly improved, making it a lot easier to highlight text on screen, leading to an easier way of editing your missives as well as copying and pasting.

BlackBerry is calling it Fine Cursor Control, and a blue circle will pop up on screen when you hold down on text, allowing you to place the cursor where you want, and also highlight various words and characters.

Camera, browser and more

Camera

BlackBerry is making a big song and dance about its BB 10 camera application as well, especially the 'Time Shift' feature, which enables you to select the perfect smile of your subject after taking the photo.

Fire up the camera app (from the lock screen if you so wish), select 'Time Shift' mode and snap your subject, and the app will then search for faces in the image.

Once a face is located in a photo, you can tap it and literally roll back time to find the point at which your friend had their eyes open and the perfect grin.

If there are multiple people in your snap, you can individually adjust each person, however during our demo we found 'Time Shift' struggled in lower lighting conditions – subjects' faces need to be illuminated well for the camera to detect their mugs.

'Time Shift' did take a couple of seconds after the photo was taken to detect faces and offer us the chance to tweak the image, but this could be down to the fact it's running on a development build of the BB10 software, and speed could be improved in the final product.

Of course the camera can take standard photos and record video alongside the 'Time Shift' function, which itself is an impressive function, but we wonder how much we'd actually use it day to day.

In terms of other features the BB10 camera app is pretty sparsely populated, offering you flash and aspect ratio toggles, the ability to switch between front and rear cameras and a handful of scenes and shooting modes.

A new shooting mode which arrived with BlackBerry 10.1 is HDR, although the lower-end BlackBerry Q5 hasn't been gifted this fancy camera tech with the feature appearing to be reserved for the higher end Z10 and Q10.

We found the auto-focus could be a little tardy at times which resulted us in missing a shot or blurring the image, but the ability to use the volume keys on each of the handsets as a shutter button is a welcome bonus.

Browser

The BlackBerry browser has also had a refresh for BB10, bringing it in line with the minimalist style of current offerings on other devices. The location of the URL bar at the bottom of the page is reminiscent of Internet Explorer on Windows Phone.

Even though Adobe has already ditched future support and upgrades of its Flash platform, BlackBerry has made sure it's built in support for the dying format in BB 10, enabling you to access all your favourite Flash-built sites and videos of Korean men dancing on invisible horses.

Sweep from left to right while in the browser and the Peek functionality comes into play again, this time showing various internet-centric options such as History, Bookmarks, New Tab and your currently opened tabs.

There's also a Reader mode built into the new browser, which lifts article text and images from a web page and displays it in a more manageable and easy to read format, stripping out fancy ads, menu bars and any other clutter that gets in the way of actually reading something.

Reader mode is especially useful on the Q10 and Q5, as their peculiar screen sizes don't work particularly well with regular sites, so having the ability to pull the text out by itself makes it a far more pleasing experience.

The key browser boon however is speed. We found that on all three BlackBerry 10 devices websites loaded in a blink of an eye and it's one of the quickest browsers - if not the quickest - currently on the market.

All three handsets come with 4G connectivity (although the Q5 will be available as 3G only in select markets) which boasts load times when you're out and about and of course Wi-Fi is fully supported as well.

Cascades

Then there's Cascades, a new navigation system cooked up by BlackBerry especially for BB10, enabling quick multitasking from within applications.

The example we've seen is in the messaging app - open an email and it will display full screen, but drag your finger from left to right and the message will slide with you, revealing the inbox below.

This means if you get a new message in the middle of reading an email, you can check who it's from without having to close the application – similar to the notification bar on Android and also now on iOS.

If you were to open an attachment from the email – a PDF document in the case of our demo – pulling to the side to view the Cascade will show the app's layers stacked up. It's a more visual paper trail, if you will.

It's certainly an intuitive feature that we found worked smoothly on the development handset – but it will be interesting to see how this feature is embedded into other applications and if it will have the same pleasing results.

BlackBerry World

Apps were a big talking point in the run up to the launch of BlackBerry 10, with BlackBerry assuring everyone that it had loads of developers creating applications especially for the platform.

BlackBerry World launched with over 70,000 applications in the store and within just a few months that has grown to 120,000 which is pretty impressive and big names like WhatsApp and Skype have finally made it on after being promised at launch.

While 120,000 doesn't sound like a lot when you compare it to the likes of Android and iOS which boast over 700,000 apps each, BlackBerry reckons it's the quality not quantity in BlackBerry World that makes all the difference.

It's good to see strong growth in the BB 10 app store, although it still has a long way to go and there are numerous high-profile absentees which will put a lot of consumers off.

BlackBerry Word itself isn't our favourite app store in terms of design and navigation, with a confusing list of various apps, music and videos on the main page making it difficult to digest all the information.

You can refine your search by categories, which goes some way to working out what's on offer, but there's no option to view just free apps, for example.

The way you go about updating applications has been improved in the BlackBerry 10.1 update, with a notification popping up in the BlackBerry Hub to alert you when a new upgrade is available.

Verdict

BlackBerry 10 is a solid smartphone operating system offering up all the functionality you'd expect, wrapped up in a package that does set it apart from the likes of Android and iOS.

It's not yet at the stage to challenge these two big players, but BB 10's firm foundations means it's more than capable of taking on Windows Phone 8 for the coveted third spot.

We liked

The BlackBerry Hub is an excellent messaging manager tool, giving you total control over all your accounts and it makes it quick and easy to respond to urgent things, while allowing you to ignore others without disrupting what you're currently doing.

We're also seriously impressed by the BlackBerry 10 which offers super some super fast surfing speeds which puts in on par with the best.

The gesture based interface provides an attractive and novel way of controlling the smartphone, but BB10 risks confuses customers as it requires users to operate their handset in a very different way.

We disliked

Applications will be a big sticking point for many, since most people will take the vast offering on Google Play or the Apple App Store over the undernourished BlackBerry World.

Of course it's still early doors for BlackBerry 10 and the app store has seen significant growth since its launch, but its late arrival to the market has seen rivals amass libraries which could be almost impossible to match.

It's great to see Skype and Whatsapp finally land on the BB 10 platform, but there's still many big name apps missing from the line up, and that could be its undoing.

While BB10 provides the Canadian firm with a good start it's still a work in progress and minor niggles which crop up around the operating system can jar at times, reminding you that this is still a fledgling offering.

Some areas of BlackBerry 10 appear to be lacking in terms of features, with budding photographers likely to be disappointed about the lack of options in the camera app, while the ability to set just one alarm is baffling and rather frustrating.

Final verdict

The way you navigate round BB10 is very different to its rivals, and it requires the user to spend a decent amount of time with it to fully understand its complexities.

Once you get to grips with BlackBerry 10 you'll find it's a quick and fluid user experience that enables you to get to the main features quickly without getting lost in various menus and settings.

The thing is, it just doesn't feel as complete an offering as iOS, Android or even Windows Phone, and we reckon BlackBerry 10 has a bit of an uphill struggle if it's to steal users away from those three.