Camera360 is a Retro photo app available for the Android platform (you can check it out on the Android Market here). It’s also available for iPhone as Camera360 Ultimate, making it one of the few photo apps that’s available for both platforms.
The new version 2.0 update was released recently for iPhone and it’s a huge step backwards on iOS. If this update is anything close to parity with the Android version, I feel sorry for our Droidographer counterparts.
Camera360 Ultimate is a photo app for iPhone with a few dozen one click filters. The effects are good but not great. They are uneditable, although you can easily reapply effects from within the app’s lightbox, which is always a good feature. The app supports full resolution on an iPhone 4S and also saves a ton of EXIF data, which you can now easily view from within the app.
This update of Camera360 gets some great new features including live effects preview and VolumeShot hardware shutter release. They are offset by what is lost in this update. Removed from this update is a lot of the functionality which made previous versions of the app a lot easier to use.
Half of the apps settings are gone. There is now no way to turn off automatically saving of the image to the camera roll. This is a problem because the app now automatically saves images to the camera roll at 1224×1632 pixels — 2 megapixels, about the same resolution as the original iPhone. With this new update, there’s no way to stop or change this. To save full resolution images, users now have to go through several additional steps involving saving the image from the app’s lightbox. Clunky.
The new viewfinder has a permanent row of effects which obscures the bottom portion of the viewfinder. In previous versions, the effects screen flew away and was easily hidden. Now, the app forces you to compose a full frame image using a square frame viewfinder.
The new live preview is nice and fast. As advertised, the app is significantly faster at processing images. But the improvements don’t make up for the inconveniences that the new interface and lack of functionality brings. Taking what was good about the previous versions and improving upon them would’ve been much better than trying to reinvent the app.
Camera360 is probably a great app for Android because there are far fewer photo apps in the Android Market than the thousands in the App Store. For iPhone, however, there are thousands of photo apps and many of them do many of them create Retro, LOMO, and other photo effects with a much less frustrating interface than this one.
Current users of Camera360 Ultimate for iPhone may want to stick with the 1.4 update. It’s just better despite the slower processing speeds. It has a better user interface and a larger viewfinder. It’s a better experience to shoot with. New converts from the Droid OS may want to avoid Camera360 Ultimate on iPhone. Version 2.0 takes the functionality of the app back a few steps. The “improvements” of the update now make it a pretty frustrating photo app to use.
Camera360 Ultimate is $0.99 in the App Store. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch (4th generation), iPad 2 Wi-Fi, and iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
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Here’s all that’s new in Version 2.0:
New Features:
1.Faster, photo Processing is 50 times faster than before with new image processing engine.
2.Newly add Realtime Preview function (only for iOS 4.2.1 and up).
3.Newly add shoot by volume button function, makes shoot much easier(Only for iOS 5.0 and up).
4.Newly add Grouping by Date function to photos, you can preview photos grouped by date.
5.Newly add Check function to photo details.
6.Newly add description of icons to show their function apparently.
Improvements:
1.Auto-save to System Album is available with iOS 4.2.1 and up.
2.Optimize the fluency and stability.
3.Fix some bugs, and it is more wonderful for users.
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