Instagram for Android Review

April 4, 2012 John Reyvaldi Review

After months of speculation and rumors, the wait is finally over. The world’s famous photo editing app, Instagram, is now available for Android folks! Previously, the app was rumored to make it’s debut at SXSW Conference, but both of us knew that it didn’t happen. Now, you can download the app for free at Google Play. Of course you have to pay some money to get rid of all that limitation and gain for more filters.

This app is currently sized at 17MB, so you might want to check how much space that you’ve got left in your device. Please note that Instagram for Android is only work on Android handset that running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread or above. If you already use Instagram before using an iPhone, you can also login into this Android version using your previous account. All features look similar to the iOS version, which make us feel like home.

However, Instagram for Android will works differently for each handsets. On the Galaxy Nexus, you have to tap on the Camera/Share button that sit on the center of the Android’s App tool bar. It will make you prompted into a image capture screen. From here, you can choose to view your existing images/photos in the gallery, switch to web camera, enable/disable flashlight, and cancel the camera function.

On the other hand, the Instagram experience is quite different on Galaxy Blaze 4G. When we try to launch the camera, the phone ask if we want to capture new image or edit the existing one from the Gallery. Then we decided to pick the capture new image option and we are automatically prompted to the Blaze 4G’s nature camera apps, which now added with some new Instagram feature.

But it’s not like that the apps work smoothly for every android handsets. In our LG Marquee, the app was crashed when try to capture an image using the Instagram camera. So, we are forced to take picture using LG’s default camera, crop it, and edit it later using Instagram effect. We hope that developer team will deal with this soon and come out with new update.

However, Instagram for Android missing some features that currently exist in the iOS version. You can’t preview the filter before you take a shot. Not to mention that you won’t be able to make certain part of your image blur, which actually a cool features since you should be able to make your photos looks out of focus and add some depth on it.

Instagram for Android contains lot of filters. The moment after you take your image, you can choose various range of effect, which quite similar to iOS version. The only difference we notice is the presence of X-Pro filter on Android. It is little bit darker than the X-Pro II filter on iOS. When you’re done with messing around with your image, you can immediately share it to your friends or relatives since Instagram is fully integrated to Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. It is good enough for a first release app, but we think that additional support for Google+ will be a nice touch.

Please note that Instagram is not the only Android photography app that packed with the most filters or have the ability to share pictures. You can grab another third party app like Camera 360 or Magic Hour. If you need more information about this topic, you can read our article about 5 Must Have Apps for Android Photography. You should be able to find lot of useful information there.

Well, that’s all our impression of Instagram for Android folks. If you think that we miss something from our explanation, feel free to use the comment box below. We will appreciate any kind of feedback and suggestion from our readers. See you on the other articles folks!

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