Improve core areas of your cognition with Elevate, a smart training app for your brain
Price: Free
Subscription: $40/£39 per year
Version: 5.7
Size: 249 MB
Developer: Elevate, Inc.
Platform: iPhone/iPad
Update! It’s been a while since we last looked at the award-winning Elevate. The app earned itself a perfect score when we last reviewed it, but has Elevate continued to improve or has it turned into an App Store relic?
So what’s new? There’s really only one way to improve an app like Elevate, and that’s through adding new content. The good news is that the team behind Elevate has done just that. Not only do we have brand new games, like Commas – where the aim is to correctly identify where the comma in a sentence should go – but pre-existing games have also been spruced up. For instance, more than 400 new questions have been added to the likes of Adjective Recall, Agility, and Memory. This is crucial for regular users of the app, who’ll quickly learn the answers to sets of questions. Beyond that, Elevate has added new achievements, which should give you an extra dose of motivation when training your brain, and more general bug fixes have reached the app.
Revised rating: Because of all that, Elevate deserves to hold onto its perfect score. It’s a top-notch brain training app that’s worth the cash. ★★★★★
—–
Our original review, written in August 2018, is presented in its entirety below.
Elevate is an award-winning app for keeping your brain fit, active, and alert. It uses research-based games to train up different areas of your cognition, like reading or memory, and allows you to track your progress over time. If you’re looking to give your brain a regular workout, Elevate is undoubtedly one of the best apps out there.
After signing-up for Elevate’s 14-day free trial (more on that later), the app performs an initial assessment of your cognitive abilities; areas including focus, memory, processing, math, precision, and comprehension are assessed, and a tailored training program is then generated for you.
You can also choose which areas you’d like to develop
This training program consists of a series of games users can play throughout the day. These games are designed to improve different areas of your cognition and are based on extensive research from the fields of neuroscience and cognitive learning.
Elevate will ask you a series of questions in order to determine your skill level across a number of different areas
The app itself is incredibly slick: games are well-designed and animated nicely, and the app guides users around from task to task. You don’t need to be an iOS expert to use Elevate — the developers have worked hard to make this an accessible app.
You can follow Elevate’s training program, or users also have the option of choosing specific games to practice. Elevate has a huge range of different brain training activities, which is one of the reasons why we rate it as the best brain training app out there. In this respect, users are less likely to get bored with their training, since a really good level of variance is on offer.
You’re given a rating after each activity
Your own performance, assessed across four areas (writing, speaking, reading, and math) can be monitored using a dedicated interface, and an average result is provided and updated following each training task. Of course, these scores will improve the more you train with Elevate, and as such this interface adds a nice incentive to keep on working out using the app.
The app is nicely animated and actually quite fun to use
In terms of cost, all of this polish doesn’t come cheap. Elevate is free to try for 14 days, but after this, a yearly subscription of $40/£30 is required. However, it’s hard to quibble with the price: a tremendous about of work and refinement has clearly gone into this app, which has continued to receive regular updates since its release.
So, to give your brain a calculated workout, take Elevate for a spin. It can be yours free of charge for 14 days, after which you’ll be billed for an annual subscription. If you decide Elevate isn’t for you, don’t forget to cancel your subscription before you’re billed.