Before we begin, can we say: you can now shoot HD video, edit the clips into a slick movie with titles, transitions and a soundtrack, and publish it to the internet… on a phone. Amazing.

It's a shame then, that this Apple iMovie app, technically only available for the iPhone 4 (though some have hacked it to run on previous models), is so basic.

It reminds us of iLife '08; the revamped iMovie app was commendably fast and easy to use, but it wasn't until an enriched version appeared in iLife '09 that it became sufficiently capable for all but the simplest movie projects.

And we suspect that this will be the case with this app; what we have here is a great basic movie-editing engine, but it will only become compelling with future updates.

Limited scope

You can import video clips and still photos from your camera roll, or shoot directly into the app, and then arrange them on a timeline. Tap a clip to bring up handles that you can use to trim it, and double-tap to bring up the option of adding a title and removing the audio from a clip.

Clips can be rearranged on the timeline, and you can add a soundtrack from your iPod library (copyright nightmare!). You can apply one of the themes with some cool transitions.

Finished projects can be exported to your camera roll from where you can upload to YouTube, for example.

Frustratingly, even though the videos are in 720p, they get downsampled to 568x320 pixels when published.

There's no option to split a clip – though you could import it twice and trim – and while soundtrack audio ducks when clips contain audio, there's no control over levels, fading or looping.

Also, it has a baffling interface; many reviews on the App Store criticise it for lacking features that are actually present…

While there are plenty of internet radio apps for the iPhone, you'd be hard pressed to find one as fully featured as TuneIn Radio.

Yet despite its bells and whistles, the interface doesn't feel cluttered – in fact it's very Apple-like, showing a logo for the station with a mirrored reflection which, when tapped, reveals artwork for your currently playing artist.

It also makes it easy to browse stations by genre, bookmark your favourites, visit artist station for the current artist on LastFM or buy their music on iTunes. In addition, you can pause live streams for 30 minutes, rewind and fast forward, or record any station you like to listen to it later.

You can set a station to wake you up in the morning, or you can get it to play in the background while you use other apps.

TuneIn Radio gets around Apple's current multitasking ban by opening the stream in the Safari browser, which means you can't use Safari to browse while doing this. But the app does contain its own basic web browser.

TuneIn Radio makes use of the Radio Time directory, with over 30,000 stations. At the same time it makes it easy to find the better stations. It also knows your location and can find local radio stations with ease.

Playback on Wi-Fi, EDGE and 3G was flawless. At 59p, Internet Radio Box is cheaper and has almost as many features, but we prefer TuneIn Radio's slicker interface.

Let's face it, Sky Sports is pretty expensive. A subscription to just Sky Sports 1 is £26.50 per month, rising to £35.50 if you take the full sports package. Add ESPN and it's another £9.

With Sky Mobile TV News and Sport for iPhone, Sky has made all of Sky's Sports channels (Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, Xtra and News) plus ESPN, At the Races and Sky News, available to watch on Apple's device. And you don't even have to be a Sky Sports subscriber at home – all you pay is £6 per month subscription.

But you can only watch when you have a Wi-Fi network in range. The latter is almost certainly a restriction placed by O2 – something we saw with Sling Media's iPhone app. Compared to a regular Sky Sports subscription, the app is cheaper.

Obviously you don't have the channel choice – this is just news and sport, and unless you have an Apple Component AV cable, you're limited to the small screen. But you do get all the live Premiership and Football League games from Sky and ESPN, live international and domestic cricket, La Liga, Serie A, live US Open tennis and much, much more.

There's no on-demand like Sky Player – this is just live – but for £6 per month, it's undeniably very good value. The electronic programme guide is well put together – you can see what's on now and next, and by hitting the arrow next to the listing, you can browse what's on in the next 12 hours.

When you're watching, quality is incredible – much better than we expected. We tested the app on a Virgin 50Mb and a BT 8Mb connection, as well as using The Cloud at Paddington station.

On no occasion did we ever experience any buffering. Quite remarkable, really. You can even pause – as with Sky+ – and rewind the action back 30 seconds.

People pay good money for a Slingbox, a piece of dedicated hardware that sits at home and lets you stream TV over the internet to a computer or smartphone. Now, you can use your Mac to do the same thing with the Elgato EyeTV iPhone app.

Add any TV tuner to your Mac that uses Elgato's fantastic EyeTV application, then add this app on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can watch live TV – with the app picking up the programme names from the EPG data held in EyeTV on your Mac – and play, pause and rewind it.

You can do it on the same local network or even over the web. A Back-to- My-Mac-like service lets you easily find your home computer over the internet, though only a few routers can make the connection fully automatically. But, with a little port forwarding with our test Netgear router, we were all set.

Quality over the web is dependent on your home broadband's upload speed, or whether you're on 3G, though if you own a Turbo.264 HD – Elgato's video encoding dongle – it can switch bitrates on the fly to give you the best quality as your bandwidth changes. (Live TV streaming requires a Core 2 Duo, but we had some success with a 1.5GHz Core Solo with a Turbo.264 HD attached.)

You can watch recordings you've made through EyeTV on the Mac, and go through the schedules to mark future programmes for recording remotely. Sadly, there's no way to search.

The app works well, though your experience of watching live TV and recordings remotely could be spoiled if your upload speeds aren't generous.

For scheduling and watching recordings, it's great, but we used TVCatchup for live TV wherever we were.

• Read TechRadar's Elgato EyeTV DTT Deluxe review

There are countless painting apps on the App Store, but Gotow Layers is special.

It's not just that its surprisingly decent natural media brushes produce some genuinely good results, aided by a slider to control opacity and an eyedropper to suck up colour.

As the name suggests, it's the fact that you can add up to five layers, and even export your creations as layered PSDs, which makes this app stand out.

You can even choose a photo as a layer; just use the eyedropper and you can cheat at creating decent stabs at art.

The square canvas and fixed pixel dimensions can feel a bit restrictive, and the limitations of the iPhone platform – a lack of pressure sensitivity, plus a small screen that necessitates controls having to be called up separately with a shake of the iPhone – can be irksome, but it's still a good app to satisfy those creative urges.

Spotify on iPhone: Overview

Going mobile has been a massive push for Spotify's music-streaming service, as exclusively revealed to TechRadar earlier this year, while a US launch isn't that far off. It's not being outrageous to suggest that taking Spotify onto mobile is make or break for the company.

The Spotify app is downloadable in both Apple's App Store (and a version is also available in the Android Market).

The headline feature of Spotify for iPhone is the ability to save playlists for offline playback, and it's this which might have caused Apple most concern during the approval process (though as you'll hear, this needs Wi-Fi). It will, however, assuage the concerns of those who continue to disparage the network coverage of O2, AT&T and others.

You'll need a Spotify Premium account to use the iPhone app, which may seem draconian, but someone needs to pay for all this stuff. So that's 99p per day, £10 a month or £120 a year.

Like the Last.fm app, Spotify for iPhone also means you can listen to music over-the-air via Wi-Fi or 3G but naturally Spotify's ability to search and stream any track in its library is absolutely key. The Radio function isn't present in the Spotify iPhone app like it is on the desktop, while there's also no Play Queue or way to save previous searches.

Unlike the iPod app that can run in the background, Spotify on iPhone suffers the same problem that Last.fm has - it's only single-tasking and so when you're listening to tunes, the rest of your iPhone is dead to you.

Despite the early stage of the software, the Spotify app is fast and responsive and, like the desktop software, streams tracks within seconds.

So let's get on with it. Spotify on iPhone. As soon as we logged into the app, we were presented with a list of playlists – there are three main tabs, Playlists, Search and More and we'll separate our hands-on into those three areas.

Spotify on iPhone: Playlists

Playlists

Adding a new playlist to Spotify on the PC almost instantly added it to our iPhone list, too. Completely dynamic and very responsive.

The updating was similarly superb for adding new tracks to the playlists. All are kept in sync rather nicely.

Clicking Offline playlists at the top of the screen takes you through to this screen, enabling you to select which playlist to take offline (note the warning message saying they need Wi-Fi to download, so you can't download a batch of tracks over 3G).

Then going back to the main playlist screen, you can see them queuing to download.

After enabling Wi-Fi, the tracks start to download automatically. We'd be very, very interested to know in what format the tracks are downloaded and stored, while the number of tracks you can download may be limited we guess – perhaps even by Apple.

Clicking on the specific playlist takes you to this screen, where you can shuffle or play a specific track, as well as edit the list.

Switching on Airplane Mode turns the app blue, with non-synched playlists greyed out and synched ones available to play.

Here's Bruce playing offline. Oh, and if you quit the app when it's playing (probably because you want to do something else temporarily) it will start playing from where you left off.

Spotify on iPhone: Search

Search

Taking things back online, let's search for a track. Wi-Fi off, though, so we could see it working over a typically poor O2 data connection. Songs were pretty slow to load over Edge, and we had to give them time to load as they lurched and paused quite badly.

However, when on 3G, there was no problem and very little inter-track latency. Sound quality is also excellent.

The Search is self-explanatory, while you can flick through the Tracks, Albums and Artists tabs when you have typed in your search term. Once you've found your album or track, you can add it to a playlist, shuffle it or play.

Here's the artist search tab.

As with the desktop app, navigating around can be a little tricky if you want to browse through albums. This was a little frustrating for us, but probably not so much for others.

Here's the main play screen and, below it, the information screen, enabling you to browse the album (useful if you'd just searched for a specific track) and add it to your playlist.

Presumably this would be where any buy links would be – that must be a plan for Spotify, but since it has a deal with 7Digital, we're not sure how that would (or, most likely, wouldn't) work out with Apple.

Oh and by the way, unlike the desktop version of Spotify, the iPhone app doesn't sync details of your played tracks to Last.fm.

Spotify on iPhone: The More tab and our verdict

More

Then there's the More tab. Not a lot to say about this one, but there are options for help, as well as to sign out and force the offline mode to switch on.

Our verdict

Spotify for iPhone is fast over 3G and great to use. We're sure it'll be a winner especially for the offline playlists. Better buffering over Edge would also be a huge bonus.

Remember that while the app will be free, you'll need a Premium Spotify account to use it.

£10 a month doesn't seem too bad, but most of us already pay a lot of cash for entertainment each month. £50 for Sky, £35 for your mobile, DVD sub and more. Is the extra cost justifiable when we all already have libraries full of music anyway?

The Spotify iPhone app certainly has have the potential to be a game changer, even if our gut feeling is that the usual Apple restriction - no multitasking - does restrict it so much that it's simply not convenient for many situations when you want to listen to music while doing something else with your iPhone.

Once upon a time, you had to physically be in the same room as a musician to hear music. Then you could take an album around with you on tape or CD.

Soon you could carry thousands of tracks on an iPod wherever you went. And now? Now, you can take nearly all the music in the world with you to listen to.

Spotify is now on the iPhone and it gives you access to a huge library of music from the major labels, plus a bunch of indies. (As with the Spotify app for Mac and Windows, the catalogue's not exhaustive, but it is immense.)

First, the bad news: though the app for the iPhone is free, you can't simply use it to stream music as you can on the desktop apps – we wish they'd let us pay for the iPhone app if it meant we could enjoy the ad-supported streams – and you'll need to be a premium member.

It costs £9.99 a month (£119.88 a year); the 99p day passes don't work here. The good news is that not only can you stream music from Spotify onto your iPhone, you can also cache up to 3,333 tracks locally.

It's a bit like downloading tracks – except you don't get to keep them – and it means you can listen to the playlists you or others have created even if you don't have a data connection.

The app itself is generally well-built, though there's currently no support to scrobble your listening to Last.fm.

Sadly, clicks on a connected headphone set try to control the iPod, not the playback in Spotify. Neither will the app play music in the background.

We've rated this app on the assumption that you're happy to consume your music on subscription, without ever actually owning it; if not, you already know that Spotify's not for you.

Hook up a SlingBox Solo or Pro to your home network and TV equipment, and it takes your TV signal, encodes it, and streams it over the internet. Install SlingPlayer Mobile on your iPhone or iPod touch to do the same.

SlingBoxes integrate with almost any hardware – Sky+, Apple TV, cables boxes – and can control them remotely. But the setup is expensive – £112 for a SlingBox Solo, plus this app and internet access – and you can only receive broadcasts over WiFi.

The quality is good and solid, but the interface is sparse to the point of confusing – you swipe to see more options – and channel-changing is sluggish.

While the programme guide in the Sky+ app doubles as a listings guide, it's not ideal if you only have terrestrial TV. It's time to put the queen of listings, the Radio Times, in the palm of your hand…

You can tell it what channels you have and preset them (although inclusion of regional variants would be welcome). Or you can scroll through by channel or time, read a description with RT ratings, and search for the show on Wikipedia, YouTube and iPlayer. You can even mark shows as favourites to create an à la carte schedule for yourself.

It's a little sluggish, and sometimes confusing, but it has a good help system, and you can build customised channel groups.

You've been able to remote record on your Sky+ box via a text message or the web for a while now; this new iPhone app, the Sky+ remote scheduler, lets you do the same from your iPhone.

It's a little ugly and lacks features, but it's quick and the TV guide, through which you can scroll or search, worked without a hitch. Once you've found a program you want to record, click on it, tap R and the instruction is sent to your Sky+ box.

The omission of any visual clue on the app to say that you've marked a programme for recording, as well as a lack of any other features to speak of, makes this seem like an early effort. The ability to add a series link would be greatly appreciated. Fingers crossed for version 2.0.