Lovebots app review

You can’t argue with robots. Well, you can, but it might end badly for humanity. We’ve had a fascination with all things android (note lower-case ‘a’) for nearly a century, right back to the earliest science fiction.

And while sci-fi has often focused on the potential mayhem and bloodshed that could result from robots running riot, we’d prefer to think of them as harmless. For now, anyway.

LoveBots is very much an app for fellow robot lovers, as the name makes clear, to recapture the era of robot kits, when different parts could be swapped in and out to make the ultimate robo-toy.

Here, that means choosing heads, eyes, mouths, antennae, bodies, arms, legs, hips and accessories, with 1.3 million possible combinations. You can drag and pinch each bit to make it the size you want, before giving your bot a suitably sci-fi name (like Dave).

It’s all very tactile, and great fun. So who’s it for? Well, the main use for this app is as a distraction for children, who will love making their own robots and then saving the pictures to show off or email. They might need a bit of help with the interface at first, but after that will love it.

The app also claims a more tenuous use to create avatars for adults’ social networking profiles, letting you upload your bot to Facebook or Twitter as your representation to the world. We’ll politely suggest that this may be a somewhat niche use.

Even so, LoveBots is one of the most fun iPad apps we’ve seen, particularly for children. It’s creative, and works beautifully with the touchscreen interface. The iPhone version is good too, obviously, but this is an app that really deserves a bigger screen. Happily, it’s Universal, so you pay once and get both.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Platform iPhone

Price £1.79

Developer WhiteWall Studios