JoyEye is a camera app for Nokia S60 phones that makes some rather bold claims about turning your phone into a LOMO camera. LOMO is a cult brand of camera that was originally made and sold in the Soviet Union. LOMO’s are famed for their slightly-shonky image quality which, when used creatively can bring some quite pleasing effects to a photo. We decided to put JoyEye Lite to the test exactly what the app offers the budding phone-photographer….

In a digital age, Lomography is a steadfastly analogue artform, but JoyEye Lite claims to be able to get you a bit of that magic on your digital phone camera. You can check out some LOMO examples for yourself.

And it doesn’t, not really. What it does do – and fairly well – is let you take photos using a variety of filters of the kind you might get with your LOMO – sepia tone, kaleidoscope effects, four-frame ‘action’ shots and several more.

There are a couple of ways to get your filter on with JoyEye. You can either launch the app directly – which will also give you quick access to JoyEye’s social networking features – or you can just start using the camera as normal, at which point a JoyEye menu will pop up allowing you to activate the filters and effects.

Interface-wise, the app could be a little clearer. Different categories of filter are selected with the left-right axis of the D-pad, while up-down selects individual filters from a set of icons. I say ‘icons’, they are really just white squares with either poorly-drawn shapes or scrolling letters spelling out what they are meant to do. Once you have them figured out it is fine, but there is little help available until you do.

The filters all work in real time (distorting the image you are looking at even before you take the shot) or can be applied retrospectively to any picture in your Image Gallery.

As is near compulsory nowadays, JoyEye comes with a suite of Social Networking features and will happily let you share your pics via Facebook, Twitter, etc. as wel as via JoyEye’s own microblogging service. To use this side of JoyEye you will need to sign up with the JoyEye website. I would recommend doing this via your phone – the web version of the sign up stops being in English after the first page and switches to what I think is Cantonese.

All in all, JoyEye Lite doesn’t quite deliver on its promises, but is is a simple – and free – way of adding some fun filters to your mobile’s camera app as well as a quick way of sharing pics with others.

Details
Size: 0.81 MB
Price: Free
Download: JoyEye Lite

Check out our Nokia Apps: JoyEye Lite Review image gallery: