Week in Tech: iPhone 6, iOS 8 and Moto 360 all get the TechRadar verdict

What's big, has everybody talking and will cause a great deal of joy and sadness on Friday morning? No, not the Scottish independence referendum: we mean the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which go on sale Friday - but not to many of the people who ordered theirs from Phones 4u, which went into administration this week after everybody else's pre-orders had already sold out.

This week we discovered whether Apple still leads, or if others have taken its crown. Not only that, but we've got the latest Sony Xperia, a bunch of new Kindles, the Moto 360 and a date with Destiny.

Has Apple perfected the phone?

The iPhone 6 is bigger, better, sleeker and faster than ever before - but the days when Apple had the good smartphone market to itself have long gone. How does the iPhone 6 fare against Android's finest? Gareth Beavis knows, and he reckons it's "sensational, but not flawless."

The screen isn't full HD and, as we're sure you already know, it's awfully expensive - although not as expensive as the even bigger iPhone 6 Plus. The good Mr Beavis reckons you should make sure you really want one: it's designed for "a very particular client base." We think he means rich giants.

iOS: is 8 great?

New iPhones mean a new version of iOS, and the arrival of iOS 8 appears to have many iPhone 4S owners cursing Tim Cook as their PGEgaHJlZj0iaHR0cDovL2hvc3RpbmdraXRhLmNvbQ0iIHRhcmdldD0iX2JsYW5rIiByZWw9Im5vZm9sbG93Ij5zbWFydHBob25lcyA8L2E+slow to a crawl. On more recent devices, though, there's a lot to like - and Matt Swider can explain what, where and why. Not everything works yet (don't enable Cloud Drive until Yosemite ships if you want to keep syncing with your Mac) but there's lots of cool new stuff. We're particularly pleased about the third party keyboards.

Sony's premium push

Sony, it's safe to say, isn't doing very well at the moment. Its solution? Shift strategy and in mobiles, concentrate on the premium smartphone market. Sony's problem isn't so much the hardware - devices such as the new Xperia Z3 are great - as Sony's relationship with carriers, particularly those in the US and China.

Amazon's Kindle Kollection

You can tell Christmas is coming: Amazon's announced a whole bunch of new Kindles it hopes you'll buy for everybody you know. There's a new Kindle Fire for kids called the Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition, updated Kindle Fire HDs and Kindle Fire HDXes, and a new higher resolution ebook reader called the Kindle Voyage.

Moto 360-uh-oh

Matt Swider has spent a week with Motorola's Moto 360 smartwatch, and that time has exposed a fatal flaw: its battery life is terrible, which means that after a long day it's not much more useful than a sundial. It does look quite nice, though.

A date with Destiny

This week Bungie's Destiny broke records: its launch is the most successful of any new gaming franchise, which is a corporate way of saying it's sold a bajillion copies. Unlike Bungie's Halo franchise it's available on PS4 too, and that encouraged us to revisit our PS4 review to see how it looks now there are lots of decent games and streaming services for Sony's console. It's still the most powerful console in the world, and now it's starting to deliver on its promises [].

Google 2.0

The Scots aren't the only people who want to change the world this week. Google wants to change the world too, and CEO Larry Page has set up a special Google 2.0 task force to solve issues such as, er, making Google more accessible to kids. Thankfully Google 2.0's other plans are more ambitious: they're designing cities of the future, more efficient airports and better forms of security. Google's Calico still beats them on ambition, though: it's trying to cure death.

Galactic revelations

And finally, Samsung has confirmed the release date for the Galaxy Note 4. The phablet will go on sale in the UK on October 10 and in the US on October 17, with pre-orders now open. You can see what we thought of the phone in our Galaxy Note 4 hands on review.

• Check out our best iPhone 6 deals

We played with the worst apps in the world, so you don't have to

There are now over 1,300,000 apps on the iOS App Store; the Google Play Store is home to around the same number of Android apps right now. What we're trying to say is - there are a lot of apps out there, and unsurprisingly, a lot of them are crap.

We're sure you've stumbled on some stinkers yourself, but we hope you've not come across any as bad of these. You see, at TechRadar we're making it our mission to scour the underbelly of both app stores to find the truly terrible, the truly disgusting, and the truly WTF, all in the name of technology.

Each week we'll be nominating an app that deserves the crown of "worst of the worst", with an aim to complete a list of the ten truly most terrible apps we've ever seen.

So let us begin our dangerous journey through the bowels of humanity's ideas. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

1. Pet Baby

iOS
Price: Free

Here's how I imagine the meeting at Trashicon HQ happened the day the idea for Pet Baby was born.

"Hey guys, people like sharing pictures of their pets. I think I've spotted what they call a 'market opportunity'."

"You sure have, Jerry. But our app budget is focused on babies right now. Babies are funny, remember?!"

"But wait, why don't we combine the two?"

*The room falls deadly silent. A single bead of sweat runs down Jerry's forehead. He's eyeing up his desk across the room, mentally packing up his belongings*

"Careful Jerry, that's the sort of thinking that'll get you a… PROMOTION."

*Everyone claps*

And thus, Pet Baby was born. An app that asks the question that's been on the collective lips of humanity since the dawn of man: "What would your pet look like… as a human baby?" Given that most babies look the same, the answer is probably 'just like every other baby ever', right?

WRONG. Your pet baby is a mutant child that will devour your soul.

You see, rather than making any effort whatsoever to morph your dog's face into some sort of funny canine-baby mashup, the app lazily hacks the two together with an opacity tool to create what can only be described as a pure evil.

But does the fun stop there? Oh no. No, once your rabid demon child has been conceived, you can expose your friends and family to the horror via Facebook and Twitter.

Just look at some of the beauties we came up with:

Then we tried it with some humans. That should work better, right? WRONG AGAIN.

And God forbid the app ever does produce anything looking mildly sentient, you can expect something like the following:

This app had zero reviews at the time of publishing.

Hands on: Dell Cast review

When it comes to enterprise mobility, the message coming out of Dell's recent Solutions Summit in Brussels was loud and clear: business users still aren't making the most of their tablets. Dell reckons this is partly down to the still widespread perception that tablets are companion devices to laptops and are meant for lightweight, rather than heavy-duty work.

The PC maker is hoping to change that with the launch of the Dell Cast, a media streaming device that is set to come to the UK following a stateside launch earlier this month. The hardware shares similarities with Google's Chromecast: both are small enough to easily slip into a pocket, connect using HDMI and and let you beam content being displayed on a mobile device to a larger display.

Small, but perfectly formed

There are, however, a few key differences that set them apart. Dell's product is aimed primarily at business users, costs more than twice as much ($80 versus the Chromecast's $34) and is currently more limited in terms of compatible devices.

Dell's Venue 8 Pro is supported

Where the Chromecast supports a wide range of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, the Dell Cast only works with the company's own Venue 7 and Venue 8 Android tablets, with support for Windows (including the Dell Venue 8 Pro), in addition to its upcoming Venue tablets, arriving later in the year.

Setup and operation

The Dell Cast takes just minutes to set up. It slots into a spare HDMI port, along with a micro-USB cable that goes into the TV or PC monitor to supply power. There's also a full-sized USB port, which allows you to connect a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi receiver for pairing a keyboard and mouse - or a wired peripheral.

Well-connected

Our demo was given on a Venue 8 Android tablet, which had the Dell Cast companion app pre-installed (it's available as a free download from the Google Play Store). You're presented with two modes after launching it: Productivity and Mirror.

A tale of two modes

Productivity mode maximises the Android user interface to fill the entire display, but instead of mirroring the screen, you get a Windows-like desktop mode complete with a taskbar along the bottom edge that shows which Android apps you have open.

A larger display brings media to life

It's in this mode that you can interact with screen contents with a cursor using a keyboard and mouse, clicking at icons and menu options as you would on a desktop. Operation is fluid, with apps opening and minimising in a second, web pages opening quickly and 1080p YouTube videos play without any stutter.

Desktop mode is attractive and smooth

A nice touch is the way that you still get Android-like features - from the Notification bar that can be dragged down from the top of the display to the way the lock screen comes on when you've been idle for a certain amount of time.

The lock screen works the same

Mirror mode offers a more classic screen-mirroring experience, blowing up the tablet screen's contents onto the larger display. Apps are once again maximised, but they're controlled by physically interacting with the tablet in your hand rather than using the keyboard and mouse. Whereas Productivity mode is more geared toward the individual, Mirror mode would be more useful for giving presentations or collaborating with others by passing the device around.

Mirror mode directly replicates your screen's contents

Mirror mode is equally as smooth as Productivity mode and produced hardly any stutter as we opened and closed Gmail, YouTube and other apps.

Unfortunately during our brief demo we didn't get chance to put it through its paces with anything more demanding, and it will be interested to find how it copes during more intensive use cases - such as editing large spreadsheets or multimedia in the cloud.

Verdict

The Dell Cast is certainly a more headache-free way of getting your tablet's contents onto a big screen than snaking cables under carpets and buying adapters, and Productivity mode goes a long way to reproducing the classic Windows desktop experience on Android. As such, it's a boon for anybody looking to work within cloud-based apps using a keyboard and mouse but wants to avoid using Windows 8.1.

On the down side, the fact that you need a (supported) Dell device limits the appeal somewhat, although our Dell representative said that extending the Dell Cast's compatibility to other Android tablets in the future is a possibility. It's also assumed that you'll have a spare Wi-Fi (or Bluetooth) receiver lying around, in addition to a keyboard and mouse.

There's limited appeal for regular users, who could pick up a Chromecast, which comes with mirroring functionality (but lacks keyboard and mouse support), for more than thalf the cost.