App Rush: best new smartphone applications

Sunrise Calendar

The march of apps aiming to replace Apple’s preloaded tools on your iPhone continues. Sunrise is a very slick calendar app designed to work with Google Calendar, Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter two are optional though) to keep you organised. It’s very intuitive to use. The fear, as with any app like this, is that a bigger technology company will quickly buy and mothball it. iPhone

Red Nose Day In Your Pocket

Comic Relief is gearing up for its UK comedy telethon on March 15, with this official app offering news, videos and mini-games to get viewers engaged before the event. Stephen Fry, Keith Lemon and Mary Berry all make appearances. iPhone

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Explore Shakespeare

This is part of Cambridge University Press’ series of digital Shakespeare plays, offering the full text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream along with an audio performance, photos of professional productions, glossary definitions, notes, word-clouds for each scene, theme-lines to navigate the key themes, and suggested activities. It sits alongside another new release for Twelfth Night. iPad

Motor World: Car Factory

Freemium game Motor World: Car Factory takes its visual cues from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, as you marshal a factory of pixelly people to build cars, upgrading your facilities as you go. There’s a CSR Racing-style mini-game where you race, and a genuine addiction factor I write this as someone who was playing it at 2am earlier this week. iPhone

Albumatic

Will the next big thing in mobile photo-sharing be collaborative albums with friends? Several startups are hoping so, with Albumatic the latest example. The idea: you and friends nearby take photos to be stored together in online albums, with other friends able to watch them in real-time as the pics flow in. iPhone

Haze

Yet another app hoping to consign an Apple app to your Junk folder. Haze is a weather app that strips out clutter to focus on temperature, rain chances, forecasts and windchills, all with a simple swipe-based interface. Oh, and pretty colours, which always helps. Well, it helps when the forecast is grey and wet, anyway. iPhone

Audiobooks from Audible

Amazon’s audiobooks service Audible has been available on iPhone for a while, but it’s now been ported to iPad which arguably is just as useful a device for listening to literature. As on iPhone, the app offers a catalogue of more than 80k audiobooks to download to the device. iPad

Wanderer: War Song

More fun for fans of the “well-tooled hero fights monsters several times bigger than him” school of combat games (see also: Infinity Blade). Developed using the Unreal Engine 3, the scenery and beasties look marvellous, while its promise that you can move freely during combat may appeal to gamers looking for a new, less-on-rails challenge. iPhone / iPad

Emma in Africa Book Puzzle

Another children’s app this, and just as well-crafted. Emma in Africa combines storytelling about a pre-school-aged explorer travelling in Africa with digital shape puzzles. If your children have been entranced by David Attenborough’s Africa TV series, Emma may be the perfect interactive follow-up. iPad

Sterling

I like the idea of Sterling, a “simple budget planner” app that gets you to input rough calculations about spending and saving, complete with a “What If?” feature that lets you mess around with figures when trying to plan ahead, without actually changing the real numbers. iPhone

A Troop is a Group of Monkeys

Yes, it is. Different to a pandemonium of parrots or an ostentation of peacocks, as you’ll know. Or will you? This marvellous children’s app aims to teach kids the plural nouns for various animals, aided by music and rhyme. Oh, and by the animals themselves, who have bags of character. Notes for teachers and parents are also included. iPad

ShowScoop Concerts

Yes, that band you’re going to see live sound good on record, but what if their gigs are shambolic? ShowScoop is a website (and now an app) trying to provide this information. It encourages gig-goers to rate bands on metrics like stage performance, crowd interaction and sound quality. It’s almost a Metacritic for live music. iPhone

Jackie Junko

This lovely app from developer Springy Thingy popped up in my App Store RSS feeds and stood out for its craft. It’s a storybook app for children based on boats and animals, with 15 pages of interactivity and animation for kids to play with. iPad

—Guardian News & Media Ltd