The app itself has a setup process that doesn’t really seem necessary, and that ran us in circles for a while, but we eventually got it working. You then finally get a screen of featured offers, with categories in tabs along the top, so you can choose to look for restaurant deals, drinks deals, retail, days out and others. You can then arrange the list of offers below either by proximity to you, by popularity, or in alphabetical order.

While the list of discounts won’t blow you away, it does offer some smart savings, and at places you wouldn’t necessarily expect – we were pleasantly surprised to see the little independent gastropub around the corner from us offering buy-one-get-one-free main courses.

It did cause some performance issues on our BlackBerry Curve 9360, and as we said, was a bit of a pain to get working in the first place, but this a thoroughly recommended app.

Buy this app: Download the vouchercloud app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

The slider itself was perfectly responsive, and sits on top of whatever screen you were last in, meaning that it doesn’t stop you seeing things like your notifications. It also works on non-touch devices, because you can press the Esc key twice to unlock.

Our only real complaint is that it doesn’t have more customisation options, such as having more than one slider to unlock to certain apps, for instance. Still, if you’re looking for a slide-to-unlock solution for BlackBerry, this is the one to go for.

Buy this app: Download the SpeedLock app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

This app brings all of that faithfully to your BlackBerry, so if you want to play Hearts on the go, it’s worth the money straight out. That’s not to say it’s perfect, though. In particular, it’s awfully easy to choose the wrong card on touchscreen devices. It can be avoided with more careful and slow selection, but we often found ourselves getting too casual and ruining games. There’s also no multiplayer, which is the biggest oversight.

Buy this app: Download the Hearts app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

You can download playlists or albums to your device, so that they’re available to listen to when you don’t have a good internet connection available, and you can also add your own music files into the app, making it a mixture of your own music and everything Deezer has. And the library on offer from Deezer is great, matching the likes of Spotify. The search function can be a bit frustrating, dividing results into Track, Artist and Album, so you’ll have to keep an eye on what section you’re in or it might be harder than necessary to find what you want.

There are charts for every music category available, as well as recommendations for new stuff that’s just been made available. The menu here features a few elements that a bit fiddly to control on a touchscreen because of their small size, but you can always use the trackpad if you need to.

The audio quality is great, the app works well and the music library is good. Deezer is a great option for BlackBerry-owning music lovers.

Buy this app: Download the Deezer app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Essentially, in Crazy Diver you are a diver, and you dive off a cliff and have to perform a given number of somersaults in the air while landing in the water at a given angle. The only buttons are one for jumping initially, and one for tucking in and starting to perform a somersault. The longer you hold the second button, the faster the diver spins, and the harder it is to stop him spinning once you’ve got him to the right angle.

Every time you successfully complete a dive, you’re give a new, higher jump, with a different angle to hit the water and a different number of somersaults to do. You get three attempts at each dive, and when you fail, your efforts are totted up into a score.

It’s simple, it plays well and it’s free, so we recommend it, but a lack of variation means you might not keep going back to it.

Buy this app: Download Crazy Diving now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Basically, you start a new game and you’re played a clip of a song with three possible answers on screen. A points ticker is counting down at the bottom, and the faster you choose the correct answer, the more points you get. Choose wrong and you just get to move on to the next question. At the end, you’re given a total score for all questions combined.

Despite our gripe about it being a little easy, it all works fine. A set of 30 songs to try the app out are included in the free download, with packs of 50 songs available for £1 each, which are divided into groups such as ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and ‘Songs from the ’90s’. We think a few more songs in each pack would be nice, or you’ll know them all off by heart too quickly.

It’s a bit easy, it’s a bit miserly with the questions, but it’s a really well-made music quiz that will definitely keep you occupied for a short time at least.

Buy this app: Download Beat the Intro now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Photo Studio packs in a lot of popular effects and frame styles, but also more useful tools. Red-eye reduction, cropping and rotating, resizing, saturation adjustment, hue tweaking, contrast adjustment and brightness are all packed in.

For the most part, the tools are simple and easy to use. There are issues with the interface, though – the Hue slider, for example, only gives you a numerical value, and no colour information to match it. So you just sort of slide away, hit the button and see what happens. It’s not what we’d call precision editing.

The effects are generally quite quick to apply, even on older hardware, and they look pretty good. We’d prefer it if you could adjust the degree to which they’re applied, but there’s still plenty to play around with. There’s a a kind of drawer on the left of screen with categories of effects, to make them easy to browse. Some are locked in this free version, but the PRO version of the app has one effects pack and one frames pack unlocked.

This is a generally well-designed and efficient photo editing tool, but some occasional interface confusion holds it back slightly.

Buy this app: Download Photo Studio now

The results of your search are listed by restaurant, with available booking times listed underneath, the distance from your current location, and a price bracket. You can also view a map to see exactly where the listed restaurants are.

It all worked fairly well for us, but the problem was a severe lack of options. Testing in a small city, we only got about six results, almost all of which were gastropubs. When it comes down to it, no matter how easy the app is to use (and OpenTable is very easy to use), if it doesn’t have a good range of restaurants, it’s helpfulness is limited.

Buy this app: Download the OpenTable app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

The theory here is fine, and when it’s kept to things that result in simple round numbers, it’s easy to choose the answers from three options and keep track of your scores. Play more and your kids will get better and better. This Lite version is ad-supported, but you can pay to remove the ads (they aren’t that well-targeted, though – do a lot of kids show an interest in Auto Trader?).

The problem with Moo Math Lite is that some of the answers are wrong. It though the correct answer for five divided by two was two. It also asked us what three divided by zero was. Funnily enough, we got that one wrong, since there is no answer.

Basically, this is an to help kids learn maths that can’t do maths. Do not use this to teach your kids maths.

Buy this app: Download Moo Math Lite now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Open the app and you’re shown a list of all the competitions it covers. Essentially, it’s the top leagues from the bigger footballing countries (and many not-so-big ones), as well as the Champions’ League, Europa League and (later) Euro 2012.

Tap on the league you want and you’re shown the current table standings, with points, matches played, wins/draws/losses and goals scored/conceded all displayed. Being able to see a straight goal difference would be nice here, but it’s not a massive flaw.

Tap the matches tab at the top and you’re taken to a list of matches, included those already played, those in progress (with live scores) and those not started yet. You’re supposed to be able to see more information by selecting a match, but this wouldn’t work for us. You can refresh any of this, including the table, at any time.

It’s a smart app, simply presented. We tend to think football apps should always have a favourite option, so you can get straight to the match you care about, but for a free way to see the scores at a glance, Koora works well.

Buy this app: Download the Koora app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Ah, no, hold on. Yes, it’s exactly like Fruit Ninja. Our mistake.

But Fruit Ninja isn’t available on BlackBerry, so we’ll have to make do with this for now. And, actually, it’s not bad. Angry Pigs is an Angry Birds imitator from the same developer, and it’s awful. But Fruits and Ninja is quite responsive, smooth to play, and almost as addictive as the original.

Classic Mode just throws up fruit and bombs, and charges you with getting a high score. Zen Mode gets rid of the bombs and adds a 90-second time limit. Arcade Mode keeps the time limit, but throws up bombs that reduce the time instead of instantly killing you, as well as power ups such as a score doubler or freezing the fruit.

Though Fruits and Ninja might be ‘inspired’ by another game, for touchscreen BlackBerry owners it’s a good way to pass a bit of time, and it’s a good price (though we wonder if the original developer sees any of it…), though it can be frustratingly slow to load.

Buy this app: Download the Fruits and Ninja app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

The service also includes backups of your address book, browser bookmarks, calendar entries and Wi-Fi profiles, and actually even displays your phone’s current battery state and signal level, which serves to give you some warning as to why you might lose contact with the device (ie, its battery has run out). It’s no problem to have more than one device set up on BlackBerry Protect – you just choose which one you want to interact with using a drop-down menu.

Though some features of services like this are hampered by your phone’s ability to connect to the internet, or get a good enough GPS lock to give its location, we found that it all worked well for us when tested. Considering how simple it is to set up and the great security it provides, if you’ve got a BlackBerry on a non-enterprise contract and aren’t using BB Protect, you should fix that now.

Buy this app: Download the BlackBerry Protect app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

This is basically a game of Snake, much like you’ll remember from mobile phone gaming of old. You have a snake, you guide it to food, and your snake gets longer as you eat. Leaves are worth one point, cherries are worth three, stars make you invincible for a limited time, and put multiple foodstuff on the map, and there’s a teleporter. Hit a wall or yourself when you’re not invincible and it’s game over.

The colourful retro design of the game is pretty funky, and as a free time waster it serves its purpose well enough. However, it’s not fun for very long, and has problems in that it often sends and receives information wirelessly while the game is playing, and this usually freezes the game, stuttering back to life afterwards, with the snake in a more advanced position. More than once, we had the game freeze on us, then declare game over before the screen had come back to life.

Buy this app: Download Angry worm now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

It’s just Angry Birds! Instead of pigs stealing birds’ eggs, wolves have stolen the pigs’ house. It’s actually kind of a cute little turnaround of the story, but the charm doesn’t last past the first introductory images. Everything about it is nearly identical to Angry Birds, except for the overall quality. The wolves are dotted throughout levels and you fire your pigs from a catapult to kill them and clear the level. Even the level designed is massively ‘inspired’ by Angry Birds – they’re not quite identical, but are so close that it makes no odds.

Destroy extra parts of the level and have more birds left and you score more points. Score enough points and you get three stars. There are some levels now, and more are promised in an update. IT’S ANGRY BIRDS, OKAY, WE GET IT.

Look, there’s no real Angry Birds for BlackBerry phones, so there’s something to be said for having a substitute. But the framerate is poor, the physics are dodgy, the sound is all over the place (and the music continues after you close the app, driving you mental) and it’s slow to load. There are good games available in the App World. Don’t play a poor substitute of one that isn’t there.

Buy this app: Download Angry Pigs now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Jigsaw Plus provides just about everything you need. It’s got a bank of images to use, or you can use one of your own, and you can adjust the difficulty before you start playing by choosing how many pieces the picture is broken up into. Obviously, the complicatedness of picture itself can contribute to the difficulty, but it’s nice to be able to tweak how much of a challenge you feel like taking on.

Though it works with touchscreen input, we found Jigsaw Plus to be most at home when using the trackpad, even on a Torch or Curve 9360. Because of the way selecting pieces works, we found ourselves often selecting and swapping things accidentally when all we wanted to do was move the selection square out of the way. You don’t have this problem with the trackpad.

The interface can seem a little confusing too, we must admit, but these are all minor, and are things you quickly get used to. It’s a simple old way of having fun, but we enjoyed Jigsaw Plus, and you can’t say fairer than that.

Buy this app: Download Jigsaw Plus now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Within each of these categories, there are different ways to search. For example, when finding a movie, you can browse by movies that are nearby or by cinema. The former caters to those who know there are films out they want to see, but don’t mind where, while the latter is for those who only want to go to their local cinema, but aren’t sure what’s on. Beyond that, you can also see the list of top 10 films, or browse by genre or title. This is how browsing works in most of the categories, and it’s a pretty friction-free way of finding something good.

However, Poynt just feels unfinished to us. We don’t really blame it that some stuff is missing – it’s only as good as the databases that power it, after all – but when we looked for events local to us, it didn’t show up anything remotely nearby. In fact, it tried to send us all over the country. The other services were better, but it would have been nice to find some events close by.

In the movies section, you can see a film’s Rotten Tomatoes score, but when you go to read a review straight from the app, there’s only one source. When that source disagrees with the average your presented, the whole thing seems disjointed. Similarly, there’s no link to restaurant reviews from that section. You can find a restaurant, but don’t you want to know if it’s any good or not? Poynt can’t help.

There’s no doubt Poynt can be useful, but we think it could and should be a lot more useful than it is now.

Buy this app: Download the Poynt app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

So, we should probably clear this question up right away: this isn’t Instagram for BlackBerry. Unlike the hugely popular iPhone app, IntaPhoto isn’t its own social network. Though it makes itself appear like a self-contained network by displaying photos uploaded from InstaPhoto on its main screen, it actually relies on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr for sharing.

Basically, you open the app, select a photo from your library (or take a new one, though that photo doesn’t immediately open in InstaPhoto – you’ll have to find it by going back and digging through the menus), and then crop it to a square before applying one of any number of filters.

The filters are previewed in real-time, which can be pretty slow on older devices. Once you choose one, you get the uploading options, including being able to add a message.

Instead of going through all that, there’s also a quick upload app that you also get with InstaPhoto. It lets you apply a default effect and choose which social networks to instantly share to.

The effects themselves are hit and miss (as they are in all apps of this kind), but many of them are quite good. There’s no granularity to control them, but the variety means you should be able to find something suitable.

It’s a good app, and a good attempt at doing Instagram without having to create a social network.

Buy this app: Download InstaPhoto now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

There are some great Twitter apps besides Twitter’s own, most of which tend to take a concept and run with it. Tweetbot on iPhone is all about interaction and design, for example. TweetCaster is packed with clever features compared to really make it worth a look.

BBM integration is the big thing – this is the only app that lets you share tweets with friends over BlackBerry’s IM service, so if Twitter and BBM are your chat platforms of choice (chatforms? Is that a thing?), TweetCaster will be right up your alley.

It’s also got a feature called Zip It, which enables you to ‘mute’ a person, trend or keyword for a period of time – one of the most-requested features we tend to see for Twitter clients.

Beyond that, you’ve got the ability to post to both Twitter and Facebook, manage multiple accounts, easily see trends and get recommended new people to follow, use Twitlonger for longer messages, and the list goes on.

The interface is fairly clear, though there a few options that are hidden behind the Menu key that probably could just be fitted somewhere on the main screens. However, once you get used to it, you’ll breezing through tweets easily, with all the functionality you could ask. The only small issue is that it can get a little unresponsive at time on handsets that aren’t top of the line.

This free version is ad-supported, which is a little annoying on Bold or Curve devices, but is less intrusive on Torch models. There’s also a paid-for version, however.

Buy this app: Download TweetCaster now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

BlackBerry phones – particularly those with a keyboard – might not be the first devices to spring to mind when you think of ereaders, but users spend half their time reading emails, so why not extend that into reading a book?

Well, because reading long-form writing on a small LCD screen isn’t very pleasant, we suppose. But there’s no reason you can’t use it for a quick read here and there. Kobo is an ereader and ebook store app, and one that’s worth exploring if you want to get some books on your device.

When you’re reading, you can change the font size and choice of font easily, using the standard BlackBerry options you get in other reading apps. As usual, text is clear on the BackBerry’s screen, so it’s only really size and brightness you need to contend with.

The Kobo store has a decent range of books, and you can browse by category, search for something, or use the Discover section to look through various lists, including Most Popular. There’s a range of free books, but it’s not what you’d call a treasure trove. That goes for the store as a whole – there’s lots here, inevitably, but it ain’t exactly the Kindle store.

The prices are fairly standard (and are given in dollars), making this a decent app overall, but it’s definitely worth checking out the Kindle for BlackBerry beta.

Buy this app: Download the Kobo app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

The Goal Mobile app really feels like it should come with an introduction from David Mitchell’s Sky Sports advert parody announcer. “Do you like FOOTBALL, all day, all the time, kick-offs, teams and GOALS? It’s football EVERY second of EVERY day, from EVERY league. You’ll breathe in so much FOOTBALL you’ll potentially SUFFOCATE, but that will be fine, because FOOTBALL,” it seems to scream at you.

Which, for football fans, is excellent! There’s latest news, transfer news and rumours, live scores, tables and team pages. There’s even a Twitter section to keep up with the Goal.com account and contributors. The menu takes up a fair bit of space at the top of the screen on Bold and Curve devices, but won’t be such an intrusion on Torch handsets.

Everything’s laid out pretty simply, making it easy to find your way around. Under each main menu option are secondary options, enabling you to switch between, say, the Premier League table and the Champions League group standings. Well, they would, if most of the European cup information showed up – it didn’t for us.

The only other real annoyance about the Goal Mobile app is that there isn’t a kind of ‘home’ screen where you can get information/news about your team in particular. This is standard on many other apps, but here you have to scroll right across to get to your team. It’s also lacking if you follow a team in anything other than the top league, but it’s still a good app for free.

Buy this app: Download the Goal Mobile app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

You know those apps that ask you for a million permissions before you can use them? And all for the same thing? And you’re just constantly pressing Allow or Deny, even if you give up and quit the app? And then you never use the app again, because it drove you mental. Auto Express is one of those (with no pun intended on the “drove” part).

If you are strong enough to battle through, you’ll find a list of car news. When we tried it, the newest stuff was a month old, despite the app being promoted in the App World. Still, it’s presented fairly well, at least until you click through into a news story.

There’s usually a nice photo of whatever car is being detailed, but the actual text looks pixelated, is is usually missing a space between a full stop and a new sentence. Granted, there are worse things an app can do, and at least it does function in the first place, but when an app’s entire raison d’être is to give you text news, having old news and dodgy text isn’t good enough.

Buy this app: Download the Auto Express app now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

Dark Galaxy continues the proud tradition of text- and pointer-based adventures, and in this case it’s space swashbuckling that’s achieved by upgrading your stats and clicking ‘Start Mission’ (though not literally – the buttons here are marked vague things like ‘Try’ and ‘Do’. Yoda would have told them it should only be the latter, but that’s a whole other space franchise).

Choose missions, buy new weapons with which to take on new missions, upgrade your faceless characters, battle other people online… you can do all of these exciting things without taking any particular part in it. Though theoretically there’s plenty to sink your teeth into, the fact that there’s an irritating wait for all new pages to load means you’ll quickly run out of patience.

This is a grindfest, pure and simple. Yes, it’s free, and so many people will find some fun from being told that they’ve successfully completed a mission when the chances were only 53%, but a lot of gamers will want to face the enemies that make up those odds themselves. We don’t begrudge stat lovers some fun here, but we don’t see much of it ourselves.

Buy this app: Download Dark Galaxy now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

If you’re the kind who likes to tweak photos on their phone before sharing them, A+ Photo Effects is definitely for you. If offers a range of tools, filters and effects, and many are impressively customisable. It’s no Photoshop, but the level of control is hugely impressive.

Open the app and you choose which photo to tweak, and then you’re given the main menu, with options to apply effects, zoom, undo, share, save and close at the bottom. Select the effects option and you can choose between Tools, Color, Distortion and Effects. When you select one, you’re given those adjustment options (if there are any – some are simpler), or you can choose from presets.

The main issue with the app is how slow the effects can be to apply on older devices. This is a result of how high quality they are, admittedly, but it could easily be 10 minutes for a custom motion blur on a Bold 9700. Obviously, newer devices handle this much better. But they really are excellent – the comic drawing in particular was brilliant.

At 99p, those with newer devices won’t be disappointed with this app at all, but those with anything older than a Bold 9780 may find themselves with some waiting to do.

Buy this app: Download A+ Picture Effects now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free

War is a terrible thing, but it makes good videogames. Life is funny that way. Of course, death and destruction still can make some people a little uncomfortable. What’s the solution to this dilemma? Why, to remove the visuals from war and make it all into a game of text and numbers, of course!

Forces of War is a bit like the Football Manager of strategy games. Well, without the cool matchday stuff — you know, the exciting part. It’s essentially akin to the early mobile MMOs of a few years ago. You get some equipment to start with, then you get a list of missions, and you choose which to do. You can gain more equipment by completing missions, as well as earn money. Spend that on more equipment, personnel and so on, and you can take part in harder missions, which will tax your resources more.

Not that you’ll really be able to tell. You’re given a likely of victory as a percentage before you start a mission, so risk management isn’t exactly hard, and it doesn’t quite feel like you’ve got total strategic control of the situation. But hey, you click on things, you get told you won a battle, you feel good. It worked stably and ran quickly. The interface is confusing and the tutorial/introduction is lacklustre, however.

Buy this app: Download Forces of War now

Best BlackBerry Apps | Best BlackBerry Apps: Free