27 BEST Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 apps

Netflix (Free, requires £5.99 per month subscription) – Netflix is the company your broadband provider has on its dartboard, because the streaming television and video service is proving so popular that it’s demolishing their bandwidth. With series such as Breaking Bad, Dexter and The Killing, not to mention Netflix’s homemade hits such as Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, and a huge catalogue of movies, there’s always something worth watching. The app streams video in Full HD, and resumes from exactly where you left off – on your Windows 8 PC, or any of the countless other devices the service supports. It also offers user profiles, so you can keep grown-ups viewing separate from the kids’ movies. Although don’t be surprised to see The Muppets Movie or Toy Story 3 in dad’s playlist either.

Vevo (Free) – Vevo is the MTV for the app generation. If you’re of a certain vintage and just about to stop reading there: don’t. Yes, Vevo has plenty of One Direction and Katy Perry on its homepage, but dig deeper and there’s plenty of great music videos for fans of all genres and ages, including some classic live performances from the archives. Vevo is based around mixes: search for a song or artist, and it will run an automatically curated playlist based around your selection until you tell it stop. Alternatively, you can create your own bespoke playlists. Ads are interspersed between songs to pay the rent, but then MTV wasn’t a charity, either.

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Outcoldplayer (£1.99) – The curiously named outcoldplayer is a client for the excellent Google Play Music service. For the uninitiated, Google Play Music allows you to store up to 20,000 songs from your own music collection on Google’s servers, so those songs, albums and playlists can be streamed to any device. And it doesn’t cost a bean, either. The £1.99 fee for the outcoldplayer app buys you an attractively designed, tablet-friendly front-end for your music collection, complete with album covers and artist photos (where available). Search is nice and snappy, and you can start random Radio mixes based on the tune/artist you’re listening to, which is a good way of unearthing hidden gems in your collection.

VLC (Free) – A touchscreen Windows 8 version of VLC is finally available and it does everything you’d expect. It is ideal for video and music playback and works with just about any file format you can throw at it. VLC is also good for managing and browsing your media library and the tiled interface makes finding things a breeze. Unlike the slightly dated Desktop version of VLC the Windows 8 app is bright, fresh and looks great.

Edjing (Free) – If you’ve never walked past a DJ’s stand and pictured yourself spinning the wheels of steel you’re dead from the soul down. Edjing lets you scratch and mix your own music collection from a tablet’s touchscreen, proving that – even with all this app’s automatic sync toys and effects – it’s not as easy as it looks. Naturally, this app works best with dance music, rather than Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits, with virtual buttons to help you skip beats, distort the sound, and tweak the treble, amongst many other effects. A good number of those audio toys are only open to those who cough up for an in-app purchase, which was down from £60 to £5.49 at the time of writing, which is still good value for the amount of fun this will give you at parties.