Hill Climb Racing by Fingersoft

1. Pick a vehicle.

2. Pick a stage.

3. Buy some upgrades.

4. Snap yo neck!  Nice air time, btw.

Pros:

• Fun and simple to play, though my 5 year old has trouble understanding the mechanics of braking and keeping the vehicle level.
• Simple controls!  Brake and Gas.
• Lots of vehicles.
• Lots of upgrades.

Cons:

• Blurry outlines on high res devices.
  
  
  

Google Now by Google

The Google Now widget
on a Sony Xperia
SL with SmartLauncher.

The main screen.

Pros:

• Clean and simple interface.  Cards appear automatically with information to assist you.  There is no way I have found to force cards open.
• Regular local weather updates.
• Local bus schedules.  I know it works, because a local bus schedule appeared while I was in Newmarket, however I tested this today at a small bus stop on the Main Highway in Ellerslie and no schedule appeared.
• Movie times.  I happened to be near the Rialto in Newmarket and the movie play times appeared in Google Now.
• Activity summary displays the distance travalled over previous months.  This appeared automatically for me at the start of each month.  How do I manually get it to show if I want to revisit it?
• Transit times to previously used destinations appear when you want them.
• Searching a flight results in updates appearing when the flight time approaches and for the duration of the flight.  Updates include possible delays.  This saved me from sitting around at the airport recently when I was notified a flight was running an hour late.
• Articles based on news searches begin to appear after time.  I have only had one article appear so far and it was a review of an Android smart watch.  Was it really an article I wanted to read or targetted marketing?

Cons:

• Do not expect to spend all day configuring this to perfection.  There is not much to it.  Cards show up automatically and you do not have much control when or how they do.
• You cannot create a reminder to have a time AND a location - it is one or the other.  It would be great to have a reminder appear at a certain time with button for directions to the location.
• The widget appears blank sometimes.  When it does, I cannot find the hotspot on the widget to open Google Now.
• If you have the Google Now icon on your home screen, the notification counter piles up; 5 weather updates show as 5 notifications instead of 1.
• Sport teams are limited to major US sports.  There are no All Blacks or Team Oracle to select from.