borrowed from ustwo.co.uk

I have a major love for smartphones, in particular Android smartphones (but I'm very much into all sorts of gadgets and will give anything a chance) and I often look and try random applications that show up in the market.

The other day Rando (by ustwo) popped up, and I opened up to find it was an anonymous photo sharing application, you send an image to a random person, you receive a random image back. Awesome! I think this is a great idea and think it could lead to creativity (especially since the image is a circle crop).

I decided to go for a quick walk and fire off a bunch of images, nothing too special just some outdoors stuff on or around a bike path.

Taking a picture screen

A little while after I took a whole bunch of photos, they started getting delivered to all sorts of random places, and then I began receiving images, also from a wide variety of locations. Though some seem to have no location attached to the message.

Notifications sometimes show locations

Now I imagined the pictures I would receive would be a little lack luster, and that is OK, mine were also not the best quality, but what I actually received was rather disappointing. Let me share with you now the collection of shots I received.

So two legs, one cat, one dog, some dirty laundry, piggy bank, shoe logo, computer screen, CD artwork... etc..etc. Wow! Can't say I'm completely shocked but I can say I was disappointed.  I was really hoping some creativity would show up in at least one photo to give me a glimmer of hope that this app was even remotely worth my time because I really like the concept.

Unfortunately, it is not. I made one more attempt and received a picture of a pillow that had a Sailor Moon print on it. Ugh, frustrating. This application would be extremely awesome had they allowed people to join a group interest so that you can kinda give and get similar themes. Even better, if my Google + circles could privately send within a circle, I could only imagine I'd be wanting to take photos using this program all day. Unfortunately, at the moment it is just far too unrewarding for me personally.


If you'd like to try out the app, it is available on both Android and iOS

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rando/id588683021?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ustwo.rando

I'm going to keep this short and sweet, and just show off a few quick images from the first two days of my ownership of the new Samsung Galaxy Note 2.  The camera system has a ton of great features including anti-shake (which actually works well) while obviously having the ability to use many different Apps that are out there.

Anyways, I could go in depth and dig real deep into mobile photography, but its been done a thousand times, so instead some straight out of camera shots from the new Note 2 and then a few edited.

Example of a picture without and with Steady Shot

As you can see, the feature works very well. I imagine it will help some people save some photos.

Straight out of the camera shots. (resized)

And the photos edit up really well here I think!

And one shot into the sun, to show it doesn't have the same problem as the iPhone 5

As you see mobile phones totally hold their own, they aren't replacements for your DSLR, but damn they're getting closer to killing off point and shoot cameras. What I will say is I am getting more and more confident with every smartphone that I purchase that the camera will not let me down when I'm in a pinch and need a camera.

Want to see more mobile stuff? Let me know!