When a stunning vista takes your breath away, your natural reaction, after drinking it in for a few moments, is to want to take the memory away with you to look back on. But a regular photo often fails to capture the scene in all its glory - nothing like actually being there.

Microsoft's free Photosynth iPhone app goes some way to rectifying this by helping you capture a full panorama of the view.

Now, while there are plenty of apps out there that do a competent job at stitching photos together, Photosynth is in another league entirely. Not only does it help you capture shots that are suitable for stitching, but it combines them pretty much flawlessly - even our discerning colleagues over on sister publication Digital Camera Magazine were impressed.

When you've snapped and it has stitched, you can pan around the view from within the app and upload it to Microsoft's Photosynth.net service. Each vista also gets exported to your Camera Roll, though not as a pannable image.

While we tested it on the iPhone 3GS, Photosynth struggled because of the lack of a gyroscope in this model - it really needs an iPhone 4 or latest-gen iPod touch.

We can't recommend this highly enough, it's quite simply a must-have app. Thanks, Microsoft!

With its GPS and built-in Maps app, the iPhone’s the perfect tool for discovering what’s around you. But when you search the aforementioned app for, say, ‘Chinese restaurants’, it searches the Google database only.

Localscope goes further by enabling you to search the Google, Bing, Foursquare, Twitter and Wikimapia services. While none on their own are perfect (our local takeaway was either missing or in the wrong place on each and every service), being able to access several databases from a single app means you’ve got a much greater chance of finding what you’re after.

There’s a standard list of things you’re likely to want to find – banks, cafés and so on – and you can add your own searches and mark these as favourites, so they’re just a few taps away.

As well as listing the search results, we really like how the app tells you how far away each one is, updates the distance in real time as you walk, and points you in the direction of each entry.

We also love the way you can easily tap through from the app to get directions to a given listing from your current location. Alternatively, there’s a map view or an augmented reality mode, the latter of which is perhaps cooler than it is useful.

One of the iPad's oddest omissions is multi-user support. Apple may want everyone in the family to have their own iPad, but at £500, that's simply not going to be the case for most of us. Switch lets you keep your browsing to yourself, with everyone who uses the iPad getting their own user account and password.

This protects your bookmarks, history and access to your system, making it that much easier to 'browse your favourite sites' in peace. Thinly veiled innuendos aside though, this does have genuine uses for the whole family.

Clear your browsing history to avoid spoiling surprise presents. Keep multiple sets of bookmarks, and switch between home and work without being reminded about your in-tray. There's even a guest user account, which gets wiped automatically when people have finished using it.

Don't worry about compatibility either – it's a WebKit browser, so should perform almost exactly like the built-in version of Safari.

To make the most of Switch, you have to use it almost exclusively. In a family setting, this probably means disabling Safari and giving Switch its place on the Home screen. This can cause some issues (none of them Switch's fault) with opening links and files in other apps, like Mail, but they're a small price to pay for privacy.

You can always reactivate it temporarily and then switch it back off when handing the iPad back to the kids/parents. Even if you're the device's only user, the segmentation is handy and doesn't demand you enter a password for each account.

The iPad and iPhone both offer Push notifications, but not every application or web service has been upgraded to use them. Boxcar acts as an intermediary, letting you know as soon as anything happens, whether it's on Twitter or RSS, Facebook, Foursquare, Reddit, Google Buzz or more. And it does it very well.

The real problem isn't with the Boxcar app itself, but with Apple's handling of Push notifications. They're incredibly disruptive, taking you away from whatever you were doing and completely taking over, to the point that getting more of them is likely to be the last thing you want.

It's one thing to take out your iPhone and see at a glance that you have a new message, but the same thing popping up in the middle of a movie or game is just annoying.

What makes it even more of a problem is that while Boxcar will alert you to updates from multiple services, its badge can only show you how many alerts you have waiting, not whether they're important. Both of these things render it less than useful, although it does an excellent job if you don't mind the downsides of Push notification.

It is, of course, only a stopgap measure, as more and more applications take the job over directly.

For the iPhone, Boxcar is still a handy tool. On the iPad, however, you're probably best off avoiding it. Whatever you do though, don't ask for Push notifications on something like #wikileaks, or just fighting your way to the screen that lets you turn it off will become a nightmarish odyssey in its own right.

Pulse has been around for a while on iPad and iPhone, but as is often the case, poor Android felt left out. Luckily, no longer.

It may not have the same hype as media darling Flipboard, but Pulse is an excellent way of getting a more visual look at your daily news feeds.

Every channel you subscribe to (some are preset, while others can be made by choosing a feed from Google Reader) is displayed as a line of icons based on prominent images in the post, with the title overlaid. To browse through theses you simply drag your finger. To read one, you tap it. It's that easy.

What makes it work so well is the fluidity of the controls, and the way you can see new content at a glance. Open up the application, take a quick skim down, and you don't even have to read the titles to see that there's something new.

There's a good selection of preset feeds available, split by category, as well as the ability to search for particular sites, or 'bump' phones with another Pulse user to copy their feeds to your phone for your later perusal.

As is typical for this type of product, it's not a research tool in the same way as Google Reader itself, but it's still a great way to see exactly what's going on, especially first thing in the morning or during quick breaks.

If you feel inspired to post links to Twitter or Facebook, that's possible, or you can send a link and a very brief quote via any other application you have installed on your phone.

Unfortunately there's no built-in support for services like ReadItLater or Delicious/Pinboard so far.

When the first video hit the net, people thought WordLens was a joke. Instant, real-time translation via the iPhone. Just hold it up to a sign and not only will it tell you what it says (in English or another supported language), it replaces the text on what you’re looking at, like a Babel Fish for your eyes.

In practice, it’s not quite that good. The letters flicker around as it adjusts to the movements of your hand, and there’s not much intelligence in what it gives you.

Still, it’s a brilliant application, and one that’s perfect for getting at least a rough idea of what you’re looking at without you having to type in a single word. When it’s finished its calculations, you can pause the recognition system, making it easy to read a translation without it changing its mind or losing whatever it was you shot.

The freely downloadable version doesn’t use translation as a demo though, instead reversing the words you point your iPhone at. Even that is damn impressive, though.

If you want to use it as intended, only Spanish is supported and requires a $10 in-app purchase. More language options are due soon, starting with European ones and then moving further afield. We see it being particularly interesting when it can handle symbol-based languages like Chinese and Japanese, especially for tourist purposes, when you can’t simply look something up in your dictionary.

We hope there’ll be more work on the recognition part too, making it as good as it was in those video demos. Not too good though, or the developers risk being burned for witchcraft.

This is what touchscreen gaming is all about. Cut the Rope is everything we love about the iPad – fantastic graphics, incredible personality, and touchscreen controls that genuinely make you feel part of the game.

Cutting ropes with a slice of a finger, popping balloons with a tap, and in later levels, dragging elements around with wheels and latches somehow never feels old.

Every level has the same basic objective – to feed the candy to a monster (the adorable Om Nom) while also collecting three stars – but the amount of imagination put into the obstacles, together with constant drip-feed of new stuff, stops it becoming dull.

The only slight problem is that the level of precision required can occasionally confuse the game, typically resulting in you popping a bubble rather than cutting the rope that's holding it down. The short levels stop this getting too frustrating, though – even in a worst-case scenario, you only have to replay 10 seconds worth of a level.

Cut the Rope sits in the perfect middle ground of action and strategy, with some levels acting as puzzles, others speed-reaction challenges, and most sitting somewhere in the middle, where pulling off a three-star victory requires wits, skill and sometimes a little luck, too.

If not for the fact that we've now finished all of Cut the Rope's levels, most of them to three-star level, we'd still be playing it now. It easily beats Angry Birds, Air Control and every other game we've played on the iPad so far. All we need now are some more levels to get our teeth into…

As is often the case with Gameloft's releases, Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus HD is somewhat reminiscent of an existing console title with a similar name. But you won't hear us complaining, because this is the best first-person shooter available on the App Store.

Players expecting an experience on the same level as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be disappointed. Clearly a game that fits into 450MB will come up short somewhere, but although shortcuts have, necessarily, been taken, it's amazing just how complete an experience Black Pegasus delivers.

Criticisms are few, but it would be remiss not to point out the occasionally poor enemy AI, the uninspiring scripting and the patchy difficulty.

Otherwise, MC2 is a superb achievement. Taking place across three major campaigns and in a wealth of exotic locations (desert towns, jungles, snowy wastes and an oil rig, among others) players get to control several different characters in a number of roles.

There are solo missions where it's just you versus the bad guys, but some challenges have your buddies providing backup.

It's thrilling stuff, made more exciting by some well-designed environments, responsive controls and an extremely accessible online multiplayer system.

Championship Manager 2011 boasts all the football leagues of England, Scotland, Spain, France and Italy, although for licensing reasons, not everything looks as it should in the English Premier League.

While the game is easy to pick up thanks to a well-designed interface, there's a lot of management to be done if you dig deep enough.

On a basic level you'll need to read email alerts, accept or decline bids for your players, decide on your squad and choose formations for the matches themselves. And it's perfectly possible to breeze through a season doing just this – you won't get promoted, but you can enjoy a casual experience.

To really enjoy the game, you have to get a little more involved. Consult your coach and decide on training regimes, rest injured players, have one-to-ones with individual players, select tactics – you can even emulate the playing style of a classic European team from the past.

Press conferences are also great fun, as you choose which journalist to speak to and attempt to answer questions in ways that will please them and the fanbase.

Matches are played out on a top-down representation of the pitch, with stats rising and falling followed by animated highlights featuring little dots for players. It's functional, but we need a little more atmosphere frankly.

Oddly, there's no sound in any part of the game whatsoever. Still, this is the best of its type on the iPhone.

Knowing what a pub's like can be tricky – sometimes the best places are hidden in back streets or have a shabby exterior that doesn't do justice to the great pies.

So an app that will find good pubs around you is a wonderful tool. Using a colour-coded system (which is a tad baffling at first: red for recommended pubs, yellow for reader recommendations and blue for others) the app lists the pubs closest to your current location.

Red-coded ones have a review of atmosphere, ales and food, plus details of live music and the like. If you're after something in particular – be that award-winning wines or child-friendly watering holes – filter your results accordingly.

You can search by location, and we liked the facility to find pubs close to Tube stations. There's also a map view, which colour-codes the location markers, but this only shows the pubs in your search results. We can see why this was done, but we'd have liked to be able to browse further afield.

Its doesn't list every pub in the country, but we're told the next version will add 10,000 pubs to the existing 25,000, as well as the ability to leave your own reviews. It's also not always as quick and responsive as we'd have liked.