Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, announced something at SXSW yesterday that many of you guys have been waiting for since … hell, since the beginning of time. Instagram is finally coming to Android. When? There’s no exact date, all we know is that it’s going to be “very soon”. Here’s where things get interesting though. When asked about the Android app, Kevin said: “In some ways, it’s better than our iOS app. It’s crazy.” What exactly does that mean? Again, we have absolutely no idea. We also have no idea why Instagram is so damn popular. People love making their photos look like they were taken in the 70s and then stored in a shoe box that barely escaped being destroyed in a house fire. Instead of trying to be creative during the actual photo taking process, people are now being “creative” by fiddling with sliders and tapping on various buttons. If these same people spent half the amount of time they spend playing with Instagram on learning some actual photograph then maybe Instagram wouldn’t need to exist anymore?
Anyway, we don’t want to spoil this for the people who actually care about pretending to be vintage. To those who want to go ultra retro though, may we recommend that you pick up a film camera and start thinking carefully about what to take pictures of since you only have 24 or 36 photos in your roll. And then for the retro + hipster crowd there’s always Lomography, but that’s a whole other topic of discussion.
The bigger question now is what’s going to be the best Android camera phone for 2012? The year old Galaxy S II still hasn’t been toppled in terms of image quality. Here’s hoping the HTC One X has something to say about that, and more importantly the as yet to be announced Galaxy S III.