Hooray! Instagram for Android!

Boy, was I ever happy to see the message that Instagram was available for Android phones yesterday!

My first photo ever was of this awesome Iz toy I have on my desk in my office at school, because I had to take a picture the INSTANT the program was installed on my phone!

A friend of mine asked me what was so special about Instagram. There are other cool apps that let you apply filters to photos that you take on your cell phone. I really like the pictures that I get from Retro Camera:

But with this app, you choose the filter (by choosing the camera type) BEFORE you take the picture. Although the interface LOOKS really cool, I can never remember which camera gives which effect. And, when I want to share a photo on Facebook or Twitter, I have to do it one at a time, and often times those uploads don’t work. So, it takes too long to whip out the phone, take the pic with the effect you’re looking for and then sharing the picture with friends.

I also think Paper Camera is totally cool:

There’s a fair amount of manipulation you can do, but the effects are quite striking and change the image drastically, something I’m not always after. And social sharing happens one at a time, so I’d have to write the comment twice to post it to both Facebook and Twitter.

So, Instagram functionally just works better. You take the picture and then get to slide through the different filter effects and see how they affect the picture. Social sharing is so much easier, you can choose to upload to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr all at one go, and everything goes so quickly! If it’s easy and fun, I’m much more likely to stop a sec and record something pretty, like all these flowers in bloom in my front yard:

Now, this being said, those are the only four options you get. Instagram has pretty classic iOS capabilities: you don’t have that many options, but the options that do work, work awesomely! (Where as in the PC-world, we’ve got lots and lots of options…but there are often times more steps to get those options working). So since I love sharing pictures on both Facebook and Twitter, Instagram really fits into how I like to share pictures!

Another cool thing about Instagram is that it has it’s own layer of social interactions built right into the app, so if you’re an Instagram fan, you can follow me there, my username is (big surprise) CandiedFabrics!