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.

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.

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.

The Camera app that comes on the iPhone by default is, frankly, a bit rubbish. Oh, the camera's fine, and the app can take some decent shots, but it doesn't offer you much creative control. This is where Camera+ excels.

The app has two parts: one for taking photos and one for editing them. The 'taking' bit is deceptively simple; by default, it overlays a Rule of Thirds grid to help you compose better shots, and you can activate an anti-vibration mode that, when triggered, automatically takes a photo only when the camera is held still.

Better still, while the default Camera app enables you to touch on an area to set both focus and exposure, Camera+ lets you touch with two fingers to set the focus and exposure points independently.

Flash modes are supported, and you can even turn the flash just to 'on', transforming your iPhone into a handy torch.

The range of effects you can apply in the editing mode is broad and split into three categories for easy navigation. Better still, the effects are actually of a very high quality (let's not forget, this is on a smartphone).

We'd still like proper manual control or even just an opacity slider, though. Soon after we'd reviewed Camera+ it mysteriously disappeared from the App Store. A quick investigation revealed that it had fallen foul of some of Apple's more indiosyncratic App Store policies, despite having previously been accepted.

A hidden feature enabled you to use the iPhone's volume buttons as a camera shutter button. This facility could be activated simply by visiting a website.

We expect that the app will be back on the Store by the time you're reading this – after the hidden feature has been removed completely, of course.

Competent document readers aren't hard to come by on the iPad – GoodReader, for example – but few let you annotate PDFs on the fly in the quick and efficient manner associated with OS X Leopard's Preview. iAnnotate claims to do just that.

Fire it up and an uncluttered tabbed interface enables you to work on multiple PDFs at once.

A variety of handy tips drop down to get you started, pointing out a range of easy PDF transfer options, such as transfers via email, iTunes sync, or web-based browsing directly to PDF links.

Dropbox integration is also well realised, while syncing of large libraries via the free desktop companion app is a quick and simple solution. With a few files imported, you can keyword-search your catalogue and keep it organised using new, read, unread and annotated tabs.

Open up a PDF and a neat customisable overlay provides page view and navigation buttons, as well as tools to highlight and underline text, save bookmarks, add notes and create free-form drawings, all of which are integrated into the document. Clicking on the page offers further markup options, including the fabled copy and paste.

Collating your notes is simplified by the facility to separately export marked-up text and annotations via email, while VGA dock connector support means you can even display your PDFs on an external projector and annotate in front of an audience.

However, if the content is sensitive, app-wide password-protection is also at your disposal. The developers at Aji have responded to user feedback generated from the first release and have made mobile integrated PDF editing a joy to undertake.

As such, this latest version of iAnnotate could well tip the balance in favour of making the iPad an essential companion for students and research professionals alike.

While Camera+ has a few effects that do a credible job of giving your photos the low-fi hipster look, if you're really going to go for it then you're going to need to call in the big guns. In this case, Hipstamatic.

The app is dedicated to the fun of recreating plastic toy cameras of the past. You can mix and match between a wide range of lenses, flash effects and film stock – a few are included, though you can buy more inside the app itself – to create low-fi photos that look terrific.

For the £1.19 entry price you get the base model, the Hipstamatic 150, which includes the John S, Jimmy and Kaimal Lenses, as well as Blanko Ina's 1969, and Kodot Verichrome film and two standard flashes. Extra lenses, films and flashses start at 59p a pop.

Awesome interface

The interface Hipstamatic uses is well worth a mention, since it's lovely. Rather than choosing from a boring list of options, you swap lenses by swiping your finger horizontally over the actual lense of the camera (shown in the picture above). Tapping on the lens itself will give you information about the type of effects it can generate and some tips on its use.

The same swiping process works for your film and flash choices as well. All the photos you take can be previewed in the app, but appear at full size in your Photos app.

The hipster aesthetic and mindset might get to you after a while – the processing time for pictures seems artificially long, just for show, and you can't edit normal photos that you've already taken (although an update to the app is planned that will allow this), but there's no doubt it's a lovely, fun idea.

All the pictures you take have a artistic, quirky and fun character.

The idea of keeping a proper diary has tremendous appeal; those of us who blog, know the joy of wandering through old posts, wallowing in the nostalgia of past highs and lows, and learning from our mistakes. It all takes effort, though.

Momento is a brilliant little idea, allying the idea of a traditional journal with modern notions of metadata and social networks, and wrapping it all up in a smart interface for a device that you carry with you everywhere.

You can input diary entries easily, even retrospectively, and each entry can have a slew of metadata associated with it, such as a rating, people tagged from your contacts database, places, pictures and more.

You can browse your events in a list, though frustratingly you can't go directly from one day to the next without tapping back to the overview then back in again to another day. You must use the calendar view, or drill down by place, people or tags.

Social genius

The brilliance, though, is that it hooks into four social networks too, automatically pulling in tweets, Facebook statuses, pictures posted to Flickr and a note of what tracks you've 'loved' on Last.fm. It'll happily go for days without being opened, and then comb back through the activity on these accounts and suck in the updates that have been made in the intervening period.

A system of icons and numbers beside each day's entry shows you what sources have been pulled in that day. Momento is making good use of Flickr's API to pull in the picture itself not just a notification that you posted something.

It's not so smart as to parse in pictures posted on Twitter to popular services such as Twitpic in the body of tweets, and indeed doesn't even make any links tappable.

Still, a terrific idea, well implemented.