Candy Crush just got a whole lot more competitive... (credit: Kotaku)
Last week, Apple placed it's iPhone as the mobile gaming phone when it announced that it will open up iOS 7 to standardised third-party game controllers.
It already looks like things are on a roll, as today, Kotaku acquired a blurry image showing a gamepad controller with Logitec's gaming logo on it.
While no official products have been announced, this image shows what looks to be a Lightning connector and dimensions that would fit an iPhone 5. Kotaku, at least, is vouching for its authenticity.
One of Apple's key strengths and driving points is the amount of "iAccessories" that are available for its iPhones and iPads, and Apple's announcement last week will undoubtedly have accessory and peripheral makers speeding to get products to market.
Apple is game
Apple's push into the mobile gaming world isn't exactly new, and while there have been third-party, attachable controllers available previously, this is the first time Apple has moved to give game and peripheral developers specific design guidelines.
The idea behind the standardisation is that it will allow you to buy any one controller and have it work with any game on your iOS 7 device.
Apple made iOS 7 available in beta to developers last week on Monday during WWDC, and told developers that controllers should be an optional extra, not a requirement of games, meaning that games should still be playable through the touchscreen.
Create virtually any look for your Android home screens with the right tools (credit: MyColorScreen)
One of Android's benefits (or weaknesses, depending on your perspective) is the ease with which you can tweak various aspects of the software, including apps, settings, widgets, home and lock screens and icons.
You can get under the hood of the operating system in a way that just isn't possible on Apple devices without resorting to jailbreaking, and with the right tools to hand, you can put together a home screen that looks completely different from anyone else's.
If you're eager to try your hand at transforming the appearance of your Android phone or tablet's home screens, we've pulled together everything you need to know - cut out the unnecessary clutter and focus on the apps, widgets and information that you really do want to see front and centre.
All of the customisations here can be made without rooting your phone or tablet, though even more tweaks are possible if you do. Here's our ultimate guide to customising your Android device's home screen.
Installing a launcher is the first step in transforming the look of your home screen, and most come with tutorials.
These alternative tools jump into action whenever you hit the Home button, replacing the standard launcher with layouts of their own.
They can change icon sizes, screen layouts and app drawers, as well as show or hide elements like the Google search widget and the notification bar.
Whenever you install a new launcher from Google Play, you'll be given the option to use it as the default. Switch back to the original launcher and your customisations are undone in one fell swoop.
Apex Launcher and Nova Launcher are two of the most popular and most comprehensive launchers in town, and both apps have limited free versions available if you want to test them out before paying any money. You'll need Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or later to run either of these tools, but both apps are regularly updated and come with a dizzying array of features and options.
SSLauncher is another popular choice and eschews the grid-based layout favoured by Apex and Nova to give you full pixel-by-pixel control over your widgets and icons. It's compatible with Android 2.2 and above as well, so it's suitable for older handsets.
Other launchers worthy of your consideration include ADW.Launcher, Go Launcher EX and Lightning Launcher. Which one will work best for you depends on your device and exactly what you want to achieve.
2. Build shortcuts and widgets
You can just use a launcher on its own to modify the look of your home screens, changing the size of icons and widgets and hiding any elements (such as the dock) that you don't want to see. If you're happy to go a few steps further, though, you can start building your own widgets and icons to your exact requirements, or load in packs and themes created by other users.
Ultimate Custom Widget (UCCW) is the go-to tool here, enabling you to combine images and text with hotspots that lead to an app or setting when tapped.
You can create a custom icon for Gmail, or set the entire home screen to launch Facebook. UCCW can take some getting used to, but play around with the interface and you'll soon get the hang of it. You can drop in the time and date, your current location, the battery status and more besides.
You'll find many themes on MyColorScreen and other sites that come with .uzip files that can be opened up and modified in UCCW, and you can transfer them over to your phone and tablet with an app such as Dropbox or via a good old-fashioned USB cable.
Other tools that will come in handy include Desktop VisualizeR, which gives you free reign to create shortcuts and icons of your own design, and WidgetLocker, which provides a stack of options for modifying the lock screen. Simple Text is one of several apps that can convert your app icons into text instead, while Missed It! is a great choice for customising notification alerts.
3. Put it all together
Use a launcher to change the settings and framework of your home screens, then a widget tool such as UCCW to create your own designs to put into this framework, and you're just about done. Whether you want to go ultra-minimal, or would like to cram as much as you can into one screen, these tools are flexible enough to adapt.
Credit: MyColorScreen
Plenty of pre-made icons and themes can be found on Google Play, as well as other sites such as MyColorScreen and DeviantArt.
To give you a few of examples to get started with, we'd recommend the cheap Minimal UI icon pack, which works with most launchers, the free Power Toggles pack to replace the standard widget set for options such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and Beautiful Widgets Free for some eye-catching clock and weather graphics.
Can TechRadar's official top phone convince Gary to leave iOS forever?
Hello. My name's Gary, and I have given Apple a lot of money. I've owned first, second and fourth generation iPads and the iPad mini, and between us my wife and I have owned every iPhone.
I've amassed an enormous library of apps and a few accessories, and I'm perfectly happy with all of it - most of the time. But there's a little voice that nags. Are iOS devices really the best devices for me?
Until fairly recently, the answer was yes: before Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Android won on the customisation front and lost on hardware, apps and media.
However, that's changed: Android phones have topped our Best phones in the world list for some time now, and devices such as Google's Nexus 10 are genuinely good - and aggressively priced - bits of kit.
So is the grass now greener on the Google side? If it is, will it cost me a fortune to change platforms? There's only one way to find out. Lock up the Apples!
Hardware and software
The brief is simple: swap my iOS devices for Android ones and get on with my life. I've swapped them for an HTC One, our current favourite phone, and a Google Nexus 7, and I'll use them for all the things I normally use iOS for.
I have mixed feelings about the Nexus 7. It's well made and represents excellent value for money, but coming to it from an iPad mini feels like a massive downgrade. Where the iPad mini feels like a small tablet, the Nexus feels like a really big and heavy phone - and its proportions don't really work in landscape orientation, which is how I prefer to hold my tablets.
The Nexus feels small, especially in landscape mode
The screen isn't as nice, text is sometimes blurry in the browser and the device feels rather underpowered: there's a noticeable lag between tapping something and the Nexus responding.
It feels surly, heaving a silicon sigh as if it doesn't really approve of my choices, and in some apps, such as Twitter, choppy scrolling gave me motion sickness. I grabbed a Nexus 4 to see if it's similarly afflicted and it isn't, so perhaps it's worth waiting for the imminent second generation tablet.
Shooting black dogs is hard, but the HTC copes admirably
I've got no reservations about the HTC One, though: I'm completely sold. The latest Sense UI is really nice, the large size doesn't feel any odder than the iPhone 5 and the screen is superb for text, photos and videos.
Performance is silky smooth, the multi-shot camera is great (although I think the iPhone takes better photos in daylight) and - hurrah! - the headphone output is much, much louder than the latest iPhone, which doesn't adequately power my stupidly expensive headphones. At last I can hear quiet acoustic tracks on the bus.
It's not a bad-looking beast either. It's much prettier and more desirable than a Samsung Galaxy, and its finish doesn't look like it'll suffer from the terrible scarring my iPhone 5's anodised aluminium back managed to pick up, despite being ensconced inside a protective case.
This happened inside a protective case. The HTC's back isn't as scratch-prone
The HTC's micro USB port means it won't play nice with my car charger or speaker dock. Replacing those would set me back around £40 all-in, since both the charger and dock are currently cheapies. I'd also need to replace my Apple TV box with an Android-compatible streamer such as the WD TV Play, which would set me back around £70.
I didn't particularly like Android Gingerbread or Honeycomb, but Android Jelly Bean is great - especially in its HTC-infused flavour, although stock Jelly Bean is friendly enough too. I particularly like multiple accounts on tablets, data sharing between apps, the Music app, notifications and the easy access to key settings such as Bluetooth and Airplane mode - something that iOS 7 has adopted.
Is there an app gap?
Over and above the obvious apps - web browser, weather, music, email and camera - I regularly use TomTom Europe, Paprika, Flickr, Fantastical, NextBuses, Zite, Netflix, Feedly, eBay, Dropbox, Evernote, my bank's app, Facebook, Tweetbot, GarageBand and a guitar tuner app.
Most of those apps - or very similar equivalents in the case of NextBuses and Tweetbot - are in Google Play for little or no money. Re-buying the TomTom app would cost £36.99, but I think Google's own navigation is good enough for my everyday needs.
With few exceptions, your favourite big-hitting apps are in both stores
The only everyday app I couldn't find an equivalent for is Fantastical: there are lots of calendar apps, but I couldn't find any offering the natural language processing that I've really come to love.
I did encounter problems with music creation apps. Apple doesn't make an Android version of GarageBand, and while there are decent Android music apps, it falls some way behind iOS - so for example music apps I use occasionally, such as Animoog and SoundPrism, aren't available on Android. Listening to music is covered, though: Google Play does what iTunes Match does, for free.
Zoodles' Kid Mode, bundled on the HTC One, is a boon for parents
There's another problem. My daughter. The last time I counted she had over 80 apps, and some of her favourites once again aren't in Play: the Toca Boca apps she loves are missing, as are many of the book apps.
The apps that are there generally cost money because we try to avoid ones based around in-app purchases, so I'm looking at £2 or £3 per app (assuming I want to re-buy the ones she already has). Realistically to replace the must-have apps I'm looking at around £30-£50.
Money, money, money
Let's talk a bit more about money. Matching specs and contracts with my existing Apple kit would mean buying a £159 Nexus 7 16GB, a £389 Nexus 10 32GB and a £69.99 HTC One. The HTC One is a pound per month cheaper on Orange than my iPhone 5 is, so over two years that's a saving of £24, which brings the phone upgrade cost to £45.99 (provided, of course, that I'm out of contract - otherwise I'd have to pay to buy myself out of my existing airtime contract, or buy the HTC One SIM-free).
Buying new kit would cost me a total of £593.99, but I can make that back by trading in my old iOS stuff. Assuming no recycler shenanigans, I'd net around £261 for my iPad 4, £147 for my iPad mini and £262 for my iPhone 5. That's £670, so I'd be up by £76.01.
Switching from iTunes Match to Google Play Music saves money
Replacing iTunes Match with Google Play Music would save me another £20, and if I used multiple accounts to share the Nexus 10 with my daughter I could save a further £159 by not buying a Nexus 7.
There are other costs too, of course. Replacing my speaker dock and car charger would cost around £40, and swapping the Apple TV for the WD TV Play would cost £70.
We're fans of the TomTom sat nav app, but Google's own navigation is good too
I'll go for the lowball estimate for re-buying my daughter's apps - £30 - and stick with Google's own navigation instead of spending money on TomTom again. That gives me a subtotal of £141, so moving entirely to Android would cost me £44.99. Or if I didn't bother with a smaller tablet, I'd actually save £114 by switching.
So would I do it?
Nope.
To jump or not to jump
The music apps are a deal-breaker for me, but that isn't going to be the case for most people. However, music isn't my only reason for staying put. There's a great deal to like about Android, and the HTC One definitely gave me phone envy, but I felt that a move would be change for change's sake, not for any real benefit.
Were I coming to this with a blank slate I suspect it'd be a very different story, though. I can easily imagine choosing an HTC One (or a Nexus 4 if I were buying SIM-free) over an iPhone 5, and it would then make sense to get a Nexus 10 instead of an iPad 4.
HTC Sense is lovely, enabling you to display friends' status updates or tweets
Before Android 4.0 I wouldn't even have considered Android over iOS, especially on tablets. The operating system wasn't particularly pleasant, the available hardware was horrible and there was a significant apps gap.
Now, though, choosing between platforms is largely about aesthetics, not practicalities. While Android Jelly Bean wasn't quite sweet enough for me, I could well be tempted by some Key Lime Pie.
