With smartphones projected to take over feature phones in the United States this year, there are a lot of people walking around with cameras in their pockets.
And so, an abundance of apps has launched recently to cater to all the smartphone owners who might want to snap a quick shot as they roam the city streets. It’s now easier to take, tweak, share and display photos than it ever was in the pre-app world. These are some of our favorites.
Snap and Share
Instagram and Picplz have virtually identical functionality for adding effects to photos and sharing them with friends. Both allow you to add filters after you take photos, share them to Facebook and Twitter, view popular photos from other users, and follow friends to see their photos from a news feed. Even the interfaces of the two apps are so similar that at first glance you might mistake them for each other.
The biggest difference between the two free photo sharing services is that PicPlz has an Android app while Instagram does not (neither has a BlackBerry app). Picplz also gives its users slightly more control of camera settings in its Android app than Instagram does in its iPhone app, and it recently added a “collection” feature that easily adds photos to a group file (Instagram accomplishes this function via hashtag).
If you’re an iPhone user and have the option to choose between the two (Android users, also check out Vignette), the best way to decide between them comes down to which network most of your friends use. You can scope out the situation on each app by connecting your Twitter and/or Facebook profiles to the photo app.
Hipstamatic, $1.99, is another similar...
