Moquu review [Windows Phone]

When Instagram and Pinterest was picked up by the Know Your Mobile app radar, we had a feeling both would become a bit of a hit in the UK. And that's been the case.

Since then, we haven't seen much else to pique our interest in such a way, until today. Moquu, which is already available on iOS, brings the wonders of animating photos and making comical GIFs to your Windows Phone device and that alone makes it highly compelling to anyone who enjoys a bit of internet stupidity.

But the way in which Moquu operates really helps with keeping you glued to the app. Once loaded up, you're presented with a grid you can toggle on and off. This is for you to line up your photos, and it proves especially useful because animations work best when movement between images is kept to a minimum.

With Windows Phone devices you get a physical camera button on all devices, which means the circular camera picture located at the bottom deals with your image total only, helping you keep track on how many frames you have left of the maximum of thirty.

That may seem like a limited number but it never feels that way in practice. Most of those animated cat GIFs you see everywhere require only a few frames before they loop over and they are perfectly effective. And if you are clever, you can end an animation where it started, creating a seamless transition that will look oddly hypnotic.

You don't have to use images taken on the fly. Your camera roll, saved pictures and any photo albums pulled in from Facebook will also be available to you when you press the smallish plus button in the top right. From here, you navigate to the image you want and add each one on a frame-by-frame basis.

This can take a little bit of time if you are going for a full 30 frame spectacular, but you would need to do the same in any sort of animation.

A benefit of using the latter method to add pictures means you can use Windows Phone's auto fix function to tidy up images or add in photos effects such as black and white filters. While this will add a bit of time to the proceedings, the images you take will be more readily available to you on your phone and the end animation will hopefully look a lot better. Considering presentation is everything, it's definitely worth the extra effort unless your going for humour. In which case, the stupidity will probably do the talking.

If you need to make any changes, a green arrow button can be pressed to delete images, relieving one extra frame to use. Alternatively, once a photo is processed by pressing the green tick, you can drag images around or remove them at the bottom of the screen. There's no obvious method for copying images, though, which seems like a missed opportunity.

Speaking of the process screen, pressing on the photo plays your animation at a speed of your choosing. The default is usually perfect for running an animation smoothly but a bit of flexibility is welcome.

Rather impressively, you can drag your finger upwards to go through the images forwards or swipe downwards to go backwards. It's a neat extra that shows the developer has gone the extra mile.