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Like a fake profile photo on Facebook, the description of this game is rather stretching the truth. “Elements of augmented reality” actually mean that you play the game on top of an overlay that is simply what your camera can see at the time. So it’ll probably be your lap, your desk or the train seat in front of you. Hardly a great start, but as a simple maze game, MazeBall3D doesn’t particularly disappoint – because it doesn’t promise too much. Again, describing it as 3D is a bit of over-promise; it’s like there’s 2D with a tiny bit of added perspective. The great thing is that many levels are available. Your goal is to find the path from the start to the finish point and pass the ball through it. There are three sizes of mazes (small, medium and large) you can play with, while every time you play the maze is randomly generated – so you might never play the game the same way twice. We liked the simple gameplay – and we liked it even more that you can instantly choose if the game has sound – hen it starts, you can activate sound or enter silent mode. Not the most exceptional game for Bada, but certainly worth a pop.

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It was awesomely fun stuff at first, but it got a little wearing after about five times. It also got more than a little pointless – actually, there was no point to it at all  – and the app soon disappeared from the “most downloaded” charts. But here it is – back from the dead for Bada. Except it’s not. Here the low-rent beer has been replaced by cola. Tepid, generic cola. Presumably to appeal to people who think drinking is bad.

Indeed, it’s such a worn-down reworking of the original app and it offers so little that we can’t possibly say anything else about it than – download only if you’re sure it will impress. And even then think twice. We’re guessing very few of you will bother.

Download this app: Drink Cola for Samsung Bada

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First thing’s first, there are two versions of this app in the Samsung Apps store – the free trial may seem like an OK idea to get a feel for the game, but it’s incredibly short and comments like “really really bad. do not download” on the bottom should be enough to put you off.  Instead, we’re looking at the paid-for version, but it’s a mere £1.

As with many underrated Bada games there are excellent visuals, while the dual-stick controls make gameplay interesting – as with other such games though, we found our fingers often slipped off the controls as we were trying to shoot the zombies. After all, that’s basically what you have to do in this game. It’s actually quite compelling stuff, with special items and weapons. If you fight longer, you get stronger. Or, at least, that’s the idea. The game will appeal more to novice mobile gamers, but there is enough here for those more advanced to find a few minutes worth of fun at the very least.

Download this app: Zombie Slaughter for Samsung Bada

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But it’s the life-organisation bit that this Bada app helps with the most. It’s a handy little widget that pops up a task list on your Bada home screen. So you can see what you’ve got left to accomplish and what you’ve sorted out already.

ToDo Checklist is quite flexible too; you can add as many items as you like and check them off when they’re done or you can remove them from the list one by one or all at once – useful for a shopping list, for example. We’re not the biggest fans of widgets, but it works quite well here – primarily as you can just quickly access it on your home screen as and when it’s needed rather than having to keep one app open all the time.

Download this app: ToDo Checklist for Samsung Bada

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Unfortunately that’s the only half of the name that means anything; there’s no smoke and certainly no kind of fire. Indeed, this app lacks any kind of interesting touch that it really is a waste of time, unless red is the colour that underlines your entire life and work. It has, however, now been made free. It seems that the developer didn’t get any takers at eleven quid. Who’d have thought? Indeed, there’s so little to this app that we would recommend you don’t even bother continuing to read this review. But you’ve finished it anyway. Well done to you.

Downlaod this app: Red Smoke for Samsung Bada

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The great thing about it is that you’re really able to get views of the earth that are quite stunning – and all from your Bada handset! You can watch the sunny side of the Earth with a zodiac ring or the orbiting Moon, see the current Moon phase and Sun declination angle. You can see all this as they are at the current moment, or change the date or time to whenever you’d like.

There is a more practical side of the app too – you’re able to see the sunset and sunrise data for a given location on Earth, while there’s also detailed information on all the celestial bodies in the Solar System. This really is quite a revelation as an app and is perfect for budding astronomers or those just fascinated by our unique place in our solar system.

Download this app: Planet Clock for Samsung Bada

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You certainly wouldn’t come up with the thuggishly-named Turn Em. Indeed, the designers of this game seem to have put more thought into the name than the game itself. But we wouldn’t blame them for that. Why? Because this game is so deliciously simple yet so, so, so addictive. You’re given two minutes to accomplish each level.

So it’s a race against the clock. And you’re also given a playing grid of what is, essentially, bits of pipe that should fit together. The objective is easy – just connect up the pipe so you can flow the water from one end of the grid to the other. There are a few annoyances to get around – such as the overlapping bits of pipe but hey, we only said the objective was easy, not the game itself. There are 50 levels to play and, if you’re like us, you’ll suddenly find the clock has moved on quite a way since you last looked at it.

Download this app: Turn Em for Samsung Bada

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The app provides a virtual turntable where you can scratch a variety of sound loops and songs. The design of the app is actually really good and you can load up various samples and use the section of vinyl on your screen to scratch it up. Better still, you can also load up MP3, WAV or OGG files from your phone’s memory so you really can play around with your favourite tunes. A slider changes the RPM of the track, while another sorts the volume.

You can also mix in samples along with a track you’ve loaded from the phone’s memory card. It’s all pretty clever stuff and, while we’re no DJ experts, the feedback on the app at Samsung Apps is pretty positive. As well as the flexibility of the app, the best thing is the way that it works – it does what it’s supposed to do without a hitch.

Download this app: DJ Scatch for Samsung Bada

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The app is essentially a colouring book for 2011, in which kids can have a wonderful and colour-filled interaction with your Samsung Bada handset. They’ll be able to colour in a variety of pictures within the application as well as create their own masterpieces.

There are various outlines to colour, under the categories of animals, flags, toys as well as a special surprise zone, where you get something to colour in that’s either an animal, a flag or a toy. And then there’s blank paper too. Like the [INSERT BIG NAME TOY HERE] you can also shake to erase your painting. The controls are really easy to get to grips with and really rather flexible – choose a colour, thickness and from either a brush or pencil. And when you’re done you can save your creation for later viewing too. It’s a great little app.

Download this app: Color It for Samsung Bada

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Unlike Tetris where you have shapes coming from the top of the screen, here you need to shoot bubbles at the rows of similar bubbles at the top of the screen. What’s the point of that, you may ask.

Well there are three different colours of bubbles and you must group the correct coloured bubbles together. This, as you may well suspect, is a lot easier said than done. Group together three or more bubbles of the same colour and these will fall off the play area and be eliminated.

But the challenge doesn’t stop there – the rows of existing bubbles gradually move down towards you – and naturally, when it gets down too far, it’s the end of the game. Your job is to make that not happen of course. Easier said than done from our experience though it’s a testament to the game that every time you’re eliminated you want to go back and have another go immediately. Really rather addictive.

Download this app: Hubbly Bubbly 2 for Samsung Bada

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The bare fact is that it’s a horrendously poor app.

Usually when we see reader comments that are particularly critical of an app we take them with a pinch of salt because, usually, they’re extremely inaccurate. And this time our attitude was no different. Somebody has written: “this app has big problems. The phone omits terrible squeaking sounds when this app is operating. I would appreciate this app to be fixed, since theoretically it can get really useful.”

Every word of that comment is bang on, we just couldn’t have said it better ourselves. When you attempt to actually use the megaphone, the app sends out a horribly high-pitched tone of the like you have never heard before. Theoretically it could get useful. Or rather ‘useful’ is actually the only off-target word our unwitting correspondent has written. Theoretically it could get fun.  But before that can happen there is a lot of work to be done here.

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When it’s sitting on your home screen it shows you the top wallpaper images available, while you can search for more right from the widget. Tapping the top 10 pics and top 10 vids buttons at the bottom of the screen will take you to a full-screen version of the widget where you can browse through a longer list of available images and videos.

You can also tell the app how often it should be refreshing – manually, every 12 or 24 hours or just once a week – to keep tabs on your bandwidth use.  However, we would say that pictures and video don’t exactly constitute themes as such – where are the custom icons and the like? So, content-wise, things could be improved. But the app itself is no bad penny.

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Sounds simple? Well it is, but it’s also great fun, especially because making a wrong move means you have to think hard about how to undo it. Because the cars can only move forward and back on the grid, this creates other challenges – there might be plenty of free space, for example, but if your car is blocked in you can’t move into it. A road on one side of the grid is the exit where you need to drive your car away from the level.

There are 15 different levels, while you gain points for completing the level and so on. You can also change the colours of the cars on the grid should you wish. Despite it’s simple approach, it’s really worth downloading and great to play when you have a few minutes to spare.

Download this app: UnJam for Samsung Bada

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There are three game modes, two of which provide a certain challenge. Elimination, where you need to score as many conversions in a row as possible – miss and you’re out; countdown, score as many conversions as you can before time runs out – successful kicks add to your time and then there’s a practice mode too.  It’s playable enough and in fact, we only have one objection. And that is that the turf always looks crisp and the sky is blue. It was NEVER like this when we played rugby at school. Or when we see it on the TV for that matter.

A fuller rugby game, Rugby Nations 2010, is available for £3 from Samsung Apps. If you want to have a go with that, there’s a trial version inside the Rugby Kicks game.

Download this app: Rugby Kicking for Samsung Bada

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Only when we reviewed this app, the graph was broken – a known bug which the developers were working to fix. The only couple of purposes we could really see for this are – firstly getting an accurate GPS reading of your current location and, secondly, getting the angle the phone is currently at so you can check out the level of a tabletop or, er, something else. Otherwise, this is verging on chocolate teapot territory, and you know how messy that all gets.

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It’s interactive, so anybody can create their own audio comments on destinations and tie them to that location – this is all done automatically using the GPS chip inside your Samsung Bada handset. Indeed, Toozla can be taken everywhere – it works wherever a GPS signal and internet coverage are available.

Toozla says it provides more than a million audio stories in 8 languages. Now, we didn’t find it incredibly effective in the locations we tried it, probably because people hadn’t been there before. Indeed, its strength is its biggest limitation. While there’s great merit in wanting to croudsource audio comments from a community, who is actually going to do that in practice?

We think Toozla is a great idea in theory, but actually it falls short in terms of how the service comes across on the handset.

Download this app: Toozla for Samsung Bada

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Mr Dork is an arcade app. And, as the app’s description says, it’s suitable for all ages. There are 10 games here for you to play, although nine of them are more minor affairs to test reactions and memory – they’re also more varied than the main game.

In the main adventure game the objective is to help Mr Dork escape from 77 challenging levels. 77! They are contained within three separate worlds. The main objective is to find a route for Mr Dork’s escape and help him to get past the obstacles in his way – such as pencils and other nasty objects. The gameplay is quite innovative – you need to draw lines on the screen, which Mr Dork can then use to escape – you can also make him jump too.

We actually quite like this little game, it’s fun and is a great example of what can be done on Bada.

Download this app: Mr Dork for Samsung Bada

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What is certain is that there’s no magic about this app. It takes a standard picture from your photo library and gives you the option to customise it. But when it says ‘customise’, it actually means that you can embellish a picture with a frame. Or, in many cases that we tried, make it look like a terrible postcard from a tacky English seaside resort.

You know, next to the ones that try and be rude but actually just seem smutty and left over from the 1960s.

If that wasn’t enough, you can also store your masterpieces as the image next to any of your contacts or, naturally, send your amazing creations to your friends – we’re sure they’ll be really very pleased.

OK, so we’ll calm down now. It is a bit of fun, but we’re a bit tired of every Bada app proclaiming itself to be doing something innovative when, in fact, it’s doing anything but.

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Uno is, of course, the classic game. New players will find things extremely easy to pick up in this version, while you simply drag and drop cards using your finger on the screen as you compete to be the first to get rid of all your cards.

You can play the game on your own, but you’ll surely prefer to play with others and you can play with a group of up to four in several different multiplayer modes although we have to say we’re not huge fans of passing the phone around to play games like this.

You can also customise the game rules and discover new ways to play like “UNO 7-0”, “UNO Challenge”, “Jump In” and others. There’s also Tournament Mode where you can progress through increasingly difficult challenges to collect prizes and unlock colourful themes too.  It’s certainly worth its usual price of £1.50 and if you find the app at the right time, this might even have dropped to £1.

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Yep, you heard us right. Stickers.

Apparently it makes your picture “much more funny”. We’d probably plump for “much more crap” though – stickers are categorised and enable you to apply things such as a speech bubble that says “sorry” or “thank you” or “hi” while you can also add weather or “feeling” stickers too.

What’s most amazing is how limited it is. For an app where the selling point is stickers, you kind of feel that you’ve been rather punched in the spuds by downloading it even though it’s free.

Still, the other, more standard, effects in StickerCamera2 are OK, such as ToyCam and FishEye. And there’s even the ability to take a picture with your voice, though we couldn’t get that to work. Hopefully we’ll never see this app again. Sadly I think we’ll see several more like it.

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You can also find out how strong your wireless signal is, too. There are also other useful diagnostics features such as the ability to save the data off as a file to your phone, email it or even send it to another device using Bluetooth. If you enable it, the app will also use the GPS chip inside your handset to work out the geographic location of where a particular network’s signal is strongest or where you where last time a signal was received. WiFiDiscover is certainly useful for checking out wireless networking problems.

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What’s annoying about Samsung Apps is that, even if you liked the app, there’s no way to upgrade within the app itself anyway.

Anyway, according to the app’s bumph, it’s a “Speech Dialog System that provides natural human interface for users to communicate seamlessly with mobile devices.” So voice commands then. And while there doesn’t seem to be too much wrong with the basic voice technology in our UK English version of the app – it found the contact we wanted to dial rapidly – when we asked the app to call the number it simply didn’t.

There is a setting to try and improve accuracy, but we don’t think that’s the problem. It just didn’t work properly on our Samsung Wave. Think we’ll stick to using our expensive touchscreen in future.

Download this app: Cyberon Voice Commander for Samsung Bada

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